Justfolk's photos

Goldfinch catching a few rays and singing to her friends.

We took the tree, the tree I have been calling our Short Days Tree, down today. The days are getting longer. Today, January 17th, at our latitude the day is a full thirty minutes longer than it was a month ago. Hooray for longer days! The boughs (and loose needles) on the floor go into my compost pile. The trunk will get eventually cut up and burnt in the fireplace.

In this town, real estate ads sometimes include the fact that a property has a view of Signal Hill. This spot, past the ad for gutter cleaning and the underground sewer pumping box, has such a view.

One of the amaryllises opening in the dining-room window this morning.

These two goldfinches are not showing much in the way of greening up yet, but some of their friends are.

Every neighbourhood should have a graveyard. They are friendly parks where it stays pretty quiet most of the time. I love our neighbourhood graveyard. I can look out the window at my right hand and see part of it no more than fifty metres away. But, unless I walk through a neighbour's yard, it takes five or six minutes to walk there. This is one of a half-dozen angels that hang about there. It was starting to get dark this afternoon when I took this picture but, through the patchy trees above, there was still light coming down from the sky.

The Short-Days Tree is still up and decorated, though it may not be so for much longer. I thought a self-portrait in one of the bulbs might be a good idea. ("Oh, those bulbs -- they add thirty pounds to you!") (They also make the living-room look three times as big as it is.)

When a friend and colleague, upon being celebrated for her retirement after many years of good works, exclaimed, "I won't be joining no choir. And I won't become a birder!" I stayed quiet. As much as I might have liked singing before the age of twelve, sixty years later I don't think I'd be much into it. But I was already becoming a birder. And I've continued. I started a Kitchen-Window Bird List a year or two ago and every day I look out the window thinking there may be another to add to the List. This morning, in my eighth year of retirement, and in my growing birderocity ("dotage" you ask?) (and still no choir), I saw a new bird, bringing that Kitchen-Window List to 49. I wasn't sure what it was, and it stayed well under a minute so I only barely got a photo. But I did get a rough one -- and sufficient for Better-Birders-Than-I to corroborate my guess: a Pine warbler.

The newest amaryllis was just opening up this morning. It's been spending its time staring at itself in the window.

Junco on our clothesline catching a few rays before the sun sets.

Yesterday was the celebration of "Old Christmas Day" and for most people locally it's the last night of Christmas. And we have friends who always celebrate with a party; we attended this year's incarnation last night. Coming back home there was lotsa fog so I perched the camera on someone's garbage bin and took a picture.

I always keep my camera handy for those fleeting shots of trucks' arses in traffic, or at stop lights as here. But I didn't like the mucky colours and tones of the original, so I reduced it to b&w. I like it better.

I like pictures that have something wrong with them. I know why this picture is like it is (hand-holding at a tenth or so of a second . . . ) and I like the result. A Northern flicker outside my window on a rainy morning.

Ever since nearly thirty years ago when I started learning how to digitally edit my photographs, I have had a kind of Artist Envy. And thus I have tended to overindulge in digital manipulation, at least for a while. Often I'll check out what overuse does in order to turn it all down and use a little bit of the effect. And, so, today I was trying to make the colour picture that this image came from look better. I took it this afternoon in a local park. I liked it but it needed something. In editing it, I used PSP's "Pencil Effect" to see what it could do. This is one result. It really is a pointless sort of effect, at least as I have used it here. I still like it. But I'd like it better if I could draw such a picture with my own hand holding a pencil.

It was a lovely day today for a walk and we took a path that used to be a railway track. It was sunny and a few degrees above freezing, so many people and their dogs were out.

I know: I've told the story of this plant before. But when its blooms are out, the story's worth telling again. :) My parents got married in the middle of "the War" (always said that way as if there'd be no more war, sigh). It was just before Christmas 1943: 81 years ago. My mother's maternal grandmother gave to her as a wedding present this Christmas cactus. Her grandmother said to her, sotto voce, "I'd never give this to your mother -- she'd kill it!" It was blooming at the time and my mother ensured that it bloomed every year at the time of her wedding anniversary. As her grandmother knew, my mother had a green thumb and so did, as they grew up, many of her children, my sibs. Growing up, we saw lots of flowers growing in old tin cans on windowsills around the house. As we children got older and moved out, most of us took a slip of this plant, and there are many children of it in the family diaspora. When my mother died, or rather, not long before that when she moved from her home to a care home, I was the one who inherited the mother plant. And for twenty-odd years, it has been blooming in my care as each old year turns into the new one, as the short, dark days get longer and brighter. And to commemorate brightly my parents' wedding anniversary. Thus this picture, this afternoon, on the second day of this new year, as the days start to get longer. (At least in this half of the world. . . .) Happy New Year to you.

A bit of the last light of the last day of the year on the Priest's Road, where we like to walk at the edge of Town. This was at the end of our walk, having come back the way we had gone. But it wasn't there when we started out an hour earlier.

One of our neighbours has made a Christmas tree out of what I think is a weeping birch. Or, maybe it is just a fake one. . . .