Justfolk's photos

The still nearly full but waning moon tonight, over the mail-boxes at the bottom of our street.

A friend tells me her father used to call her bird-feeder a "hawk-feeder." This afternoon I noticed a junco hiding under the tree on our deck, stock-still. So I looked around for what he was frightened by. Sure enough, this sharp-shinned hawk was just six or eight metres away, sitting in the apple tree. Until I got too close, Sharpie wasn't bothered by me. He just kept looking around for a meal. When I did get in too close, he flew off next-door into another low tree. And then on his way. The junco came out from hiding.

I gave a couple of dozen nice self-capping beer bottles to an old student of mine and, by way of reciprocity, she dropped off a few of her homebrew to me (not in the bottles I gave her). This was the first I've opened and it's very nice. Labelled simply with a marker on the cap, it says BIPA 5.8%. Unlike me when I made beer, she is careful to note the specific gravity and knows precisely the alcoholic content; this Black IPA was 5.8%. Its bottle was a half-litre bottle that looks a little like lab bottles I have known. But it has a capping lip. Did I say it was very nice? It was delicious. And since she pays attention to specific gravity, she also bottles her beer knowing how much sugar is left, so it carbonates in a much more sophisticated way than my old beer -- I'd put a half spoonful of sugar in each bottle when capping it, and resultingly it had a thick scum of sedimentary yeast when you opened it. Hers is clear to the last drop. Mmmm.

Before starting supper, I stept outside the kitchen and saw this duckish day-moon through the trees, with gulls. It's about six hours less than three days from full.

I figure everyone is delighted by the arse-end of a male purple finch. Here you are.

We're getting several species of small finches almost every day, but none of the bigger grosbeaks. Here are a pine siskin (left, rear), three goldfinches, and a purple finch.

My neighbour's chimneys are well loved by local birds for the heat coming up on a cold day. It's around minus ten degrees (C -- uhh, that's about like sixteen F) today and the starlings are taking turns at the chimney tops. (And they aren't weighty enough to topple the loose bricks from this one.)

It was raining pretty hard this afternoon but the goldfinches were out in big numbers getting a few bites where they could.

I'm not always as careful as someone who's been using cameras for decades should probably be. But, on the other hand, I do take pleasure in examining the results of my mistakes and (like the face only a mother could love) finding something worthwhile. Uhhh, at least to me. So, I neglected to spot-meter the moon and instead got a 1.3-second exposure . Oh well. The squggles at lower left are the one-day-old moon, a thin sliver of a thing. And the squiggles at top are Jupiter, getting lower in the SW sky every night. I did take other pictures of the moon, but this was the only one in which I got Jupiter too. So I am left with it. Mother :: child.

The view out our dining-room window as a light snow falls tonight, looking over our neighbour's waggon-wheel and greenhouse, down to the further neighbours and the street below us.

Most of my childhood was spent in a house a couple of hundred metres from this one. When we moved into the neighbourhood in the summer of 1954, it was in a new housing subdivision, and this was our closest "original" neighbour. I remember it as an imposing, aristocratic estate, where the grand man who owned the farm behind it lived. I thought of him and his family as royalty, and indeed they sort-of were. The man who owned it by then, the son of the man who'd built it in the 1860s, was made Lieutenant-Governor in 1956, the Queen's very representative. When, decades later, I read about lords of manors, I thought of this man, who let no one cross his fence, but who let his big dogs wander around the whole neighborhood. I was different from most of his neighbors. I delivered the morning newspaper, a copy of which went to the door between the two gables, and another copy of which went to his hired man, Jim, inside the cow barn fifty metres beyond the house. Thus I got to step inside the big house from time to time, and inside the cow barn every morning, plus to collect my weekly money at Jim's house, an equally old but far less elegant house closer to the cow barn than to the big house. Over the decades since, I have often walked along the lane it is on (most of which is now just a footpath) and enjoyed the quiet of its well-treed, park-like setting. Over the decades -- indeed starting before I was born -- the family that owned the farm sold chunks of it for various institutional purposes. The house and the last of the land was sold 25 years or so ago to the University, just across the street. But, a few years ago, the University decided to sell it on to developers. The developers are about to knock down this manor house and replace it with three large apartment buildings. Oh well. I am old. I'm a dog barking but the trains move on. I went by today to take some pictures.

This is the first purple finch seen at our feeder this winter, here for breakfast this morning. But after a few bites, along with his goldie cousin, he was nearly stock still for five minutes as they slowly looked upwards around into the trees for a hawk I couldn't see. Apparently, they couldn't see it either. Eventually, an all-clear signal was given (and I couldn't hear that); the two flew off together.

We've started removing the bird feeders (there's an H5N1 outbreak near-by) but I'm still feeding some birds. Like the couple of flickers that live in the neighbourhood; this is the she. It is raining this afternoon and her feathers showed it when I took this picture a half-hour ago outside the kitchen window.

We walked down to the bottom of our street just before supper and could see the nearly-full Moon had not long before come over the hill. This was three hours before the fullness of the Full Moon, but it was 100% illuminated.

Last spring I was given three small tomato plants. Through the summer, none was very successful and, as they finished producing, I put them aside under the back deck. I got a couple of dozen small tomatoes in total. Around late November or early December, I noticed a new tomato had formed on one of the discarded plants. I left it in a window to dry out. Maybe there'll be seeds. But there certainly was a photograph to take,

We were married almost four years when I took this picture of my wife. I have another taken a few minutes before or after with her fists up pugilistically. :) Today, 38 years later, her hair-dresser asked for a picture of what her hair looked like years ago. So I looked for one and decided this might be it. But its scan was terrible -- one of the first negatives I scanned when I was learning how (about fifteen years ago). So I rescanned it this afternoon. The film was not an especially fast film, but it's pretty uhh lossy. I think it may have lost some details in the highlights over the years. Mind you, I was using my Minolta X370 with its (cheap) MD f/2.8 50mm lens, a lens I came to hate in later years for its lack of detail and contrast. Oh well. It's still a nice picture.

Usually this time of year, mid-January, we have other finches too, notably the purple ones, But only the goldfinches have been around here yet. And we've seen no pine siskins nor evening grosbeaks yet. I hear their migration is making its way and may show up any day. We do have lots of juncos, crows and bluejays. But no other finches. But we may by then have stopped feeding the birds. A local outbreak of bird flu (H5N1) among wild birds at some ponds and at a couple of small poultry farms has got the city and the provincial veterinary officials alarmed. There's a great controversy locally about which birds to stop feeding. We bird feeders are told that the small birds are okay to continue feeding, but not the pigeons. (Pigeons tend to mix with the ducks and geese etc at the ponds around town.) To my knowledge, once the pigeons find your feeder (and they've found ours), there's no way to dissuade them. So I'll let the feed run out. Too bad. This American goldfinch was outside our kitchen door this morning.

Unlike us retirees, the neigbours next-door are young, and go off to work each day. I think their Minnie goes out each morning and waits for them to return after work to get back in. This afternoon it was colder than usual and she was getting a little distressed, literally crawling the wall outside the door. Or crawling the door anyway. The neighbours got home a few minutes later.