Justfolk's photos

When the local pair of flickers come to visit the suet, one will wait on the side for the other to eat. Very charming.

We've had, in our neighbourhood, some ups and downs of excitement during the past two years. Lately it is mostly pretty quiet. But all evening last night it was bang bang bang with fireworks. And just at midnight it became especially loud. A neighbour three or four doors up had a full array of them. This is what I could see from the kitchen door a few minutes after midnight.

A dwy of snow was moving around while we were walking in the park this afternoon.

In January 2004, 18 years ago now, my friend David gave me a bottle of his homemade red wine. He said at the time it wasn't very good: cook with it or put it away. I put it away. And I forgot about it. Yesterday, looking for something else in the basement, I noticed a drop of wine on the floor by three or four old bottles and discovered it had leaked from the now-deteriorating cork on his bottle. So I brought it up and re-bottled it with a clean bottle and newish cork. I was going to put it downstairs again but I tasted it first. Delicious! Dark like you'd expect being that old, and with a kind of sherry or port flavour. Full body, no astringency (that is, how I like red wine) and a sweetness that isn't really sweet at all. An excellent wine that I'll finish off in a day or two. Nice Christmas present.

I feel like a rich man when I make stock. This is most of the stock I made overnight from the bones and skin of yesterday's turkey. There's a third litre-tub, not quite full (plus lots of picked meat, boiled meat, and gravy). It was the smallest turkey I could buy, exactly ten pounds ( 4.54 kg). Now this gold is about to go in the vault.

The chair has been in my wife's family for at least sixty years. It's belonged to a chain of her relatives in that time, for the past twenty years to us. The Christmas tree awaits being brought in from outside the front door. The two boxes in the foreground have a tree stand and electric lights. Soon we should be festivised.

This morning the roof below our stairs window looked like this. Twelve hours later, it's got a thick covering of about ten cm of snow.

I cannot remember exactly when, but I think it was thirty years ago that I found a castaway Polaroid-type paper negative on the floor in the university I worked in. It was probably a result of these two students getting their ID cards made. I liked the look of the images (though I had no clue who the people were), and I taped the negative to my office wall where it stayed for many years. Being out in the light served it poorly. Today, I found it in the basement, where it had fallen out of a box I packed a few years ago when I retired. So I scanned it, reversed the tones and found this. These handsome twenty-year-olds are about fifty now. I still don't know who they are.

My mother's grandmother's Christmas cactus, given to my mother on her wedding day in December 1943, has started its annual lean into the sun to bloom again for the shortest days.

The very dark, warm weather yesterday with a stiff southerly wind, changed into cold, clear weather today with a stiff westerly. At breakfast time it was snowing. This fellow was one of the visitors.

I was up early this morning and saw this outside the kitchen window.

It's a lovely morning down below, but the wind is high up there with clouds scudding past the moon, now in its last quarter.

While we were walking this afternoon, a fog was rolling in and the sun was trying to beat it back. The fog won. But the sun bedazzled my camera.

Not only Jupiter, I've learned, is visible these days immediately after sunset, but so too are its moons. This picture was a little while after sunset today when the sky was still quite bright. The uncropt picture I took with my 150mm lens, is inset with an enlarged and sharpened piece showing Jupiter and its two visible moons. I hate to use anything that weighs me down and. although I was only two steps outside my kitchen door, I didn't want to bother with the tripod. So this was hand-held, literally, though my right arm *was* steadied against against the deck rail. :)

Just before sunset, a pair of flickers came by and, ignoring the fresh suet I have out, tucked into the holly berries at the bottom of the garden. This is the one less wary of being in the open.

The chickadees (an older friend of the family used to call them pitchipees) have been residents of our yard summer and winter as long as we've been here. They have been very happy to see that I'd put up the black sunflower seed feeder yesterday. And this morning, the four of them have been coming and going from the feeder.

I've been watching my neighbours' chimney from our back door for years. I was hoping this year they would repair it. They may yet before the weather gets much worse. But a southwest windstorm last night toppled a couple more bricks off, or into, it. Another storm will probably do more damage. Meantime, it looks lovely.

According to what I hear, the flesh of a yew berry is the only part of the yew that is not poisonous to human beings. I don't know about avian beings, but this chickadee and its partner have been picking them off the bush for a while. There are so few left, they have to go well into the bush to find them. Today being a warm day, they were happily at it. This one took the berry over to our apple tree to eat. After a few bites she (or he: I can't tell) lost it in the leaf litter down below.