Contemplating the rain, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Hiked through pouring rain in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park today. See here for more about this great resource of ours. I got in some good exercise but it sure was a chore. I have only my old wornout barn/hiking boots, which are no longer waterproof by any stretch of the imagination, so my feet were swimming. But they were warm--it was 44 degrees, pretty balmy and rising. And thankfully there was no wind to speak of. My new rainjacket from my Rolex Kentucky trip last year did a great job of keeping my upper half dry; I am so happy I bought it. But by the end of the nearly 3 hour hike I was really sick of rain and mud. Of course, while splashing through standing water or muck on the trail I kept telling myself, Hey! At least there's no ICE today! And then we ended up coming out on a major road for part of it, having gotten a little turned around--well, we often go from one trail to another and connect them up to make longer hikes, and that involves a little creativity at times--where we had to walk about a mile on the pavement alongside cars speeding by at over 45 mph. At that point I was starting to miss the nice soft mud... So obviously I don't have any spectacular photos of this particular hike, because I left my fancy camera at home. And then I didn't even want to bring out the (brand new) cell phone for fear of the slightest bit of dampness getting to it. Plastic bags are my friend.

I took this photo outside the Happy Days Lodge, which is closed except for special events in the park, like nature lectures or exhibits, etc. It is a statue of a Civilian Conservation Corps worker, to symbolize all of the CCC workers in the 1930's who helped to create the park and the buildings in it (although it was not a national park back then, not until the 1990's). I was standing under the roof overhang, trying to stay a little drier; but after our rest stop we took a group photo standing in front of the statue. I hope to get a copy of that later (I wasn't going to risk my phone), it's a cool statue. Edited later: Forgot to say that we also saw a herd of 6 does and fawns at one point, and while we were on the interminable stretch of road, some of our group saw a COYOTE running through the woods! But alas, I was farther back along the road and had no idea they'd sighted it until we talked later. Darn it--we have a lot of coyotes in the park, but I have never ever seen or heard one yet. One of these days...

Now I'm enjoying a leisurely Sunday, eating chicken noodle soup and messing around online before I go back to my book reading. Or tv watching. Or house cleaning. Can't decide what to do next. I'm betting that #3 will probably not win out, though... :-D

Charging to the finish line, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Today I had planned to spend an afternoon at Mira's house, playing outside in the nice deep snow (which is always even deeper at her house, being right in the Snow Belt)--but our schedules didn't work out (Nana had her overnight and she ended up staying there too long for me to have any time left). So I was a bit grumbly about this, having been looking forward to it, and having NOT gone out in the woods hiking as I would have otherwise done. I didn't want to tire myself out for snow angels and fort building and whatever we might do together. Ugh. But I had a nice bit of snow fun watching some of our horses frolicking in the white stuff.


I just happened to look out and see a couple in the paddock, in the 8 inches of snow! I can't always hear them when they're being put outside, and I can't see the side paddocks unless I go up to my window, so I was sorry that I missed the first two who went out, and that I only got a few minutes to photograph these three before they were taken back inside. That's the way it always goes for me here, despite sort of being the unofficial Farm Photographer, I have to grab candids when I happen to catch them out of their stalls. I've mentioned it to most of the boarders, everyone knows how I love to take photos of them outside doing things, but today's people didn't think to call me to tell me they were putting theirs out. It's nicest when I have a warning so that I can position myself in the best spots, and so that I am there to capture their initial moments of freedom: that's when they tear across the field and buck and jump and generally "get the wiggles out" as we used to say in storytime. (grin)


By the time I got there to see Cameo, Blaze and Jazz, they had their heads down grazing. Now, granted, it was still a different scene for me because they had to paw away snow to get to any grass, just like wild horses, but, they were pretty much run out and ready to go in.

I did get some shots of Blaze when he was moved from the grass (usually) paddock to the dirt paddock, sort of a holding area while the others were brought in one at a time. And I was there right before Stormy was set free, so I got a lot of him running around, even rolling!


This one is Cameo's nose whiskers covered in snow:


Anyway, so, these aren't all that great but it was fun watching them have fun, and to see them in the falling snow is always pretty.

Blue view, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Today we had another doozy of an ice storm. I'm getting tired of them already; two icestorms in two weeks is two icestorms too many. This photo is from a couple of weeks ago during the last storm, when I woke up to ice covering everything and had to excavate my car in the driveway (the blue light is the sunrise coming through--isn't it cool?). Today I had to do that in the dark, after work, and let me tell you when the pavement is entirely one very slick sheet of ice, it's awfully hard just getting TO your car across the parking lot, let alone having to stand at the car to chip ice off. Of course I put the heater on full blast, but that takes forever to warm up and melt ice. All evening as we had worked we had patrons coming into the library (those who dared) talking about the icy roads, our icy parking lot (despite the salt truck that we called to come through) and our icy sidewalks (despite my going outside at least three times to sprinkle more ice-melt pellets all over the sidewalks), and at least two people fell on their way in. No one was hurt, thankfully. Driving home wasn't too bad because they'd salted and the roads stay slushy with traffic on them. When I got home I wanted to stop and get my mail from the mailbox, which is at the end of our slightly sloped driveway. I nearly had a heart attack when, after putting the car in park and setting the parking brake, as I put one foot out on the ground, the car slid a few inches! Yikes! Not good! I quickly decided the mail could wait til tomorrow morning and got back in. This icy stuff is really really scary to deal with. Give me a foot of snow or a torrent of rain over ice any day...

Rusted snowy remains, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Meant to post this Friday as soon as I had the photos, but I ran out of time as I was going out with friends to see Bolt in 3-D (adorable fun movie, I highly recommend it, though you totally can skip the 3D, it doesn't really add much). Then Saturday was our library's special joint private screening of Twilight for our teens (another fun movie! They did the book justice, yay! And we had over a hundred teens come, double yay!) so I got distracted by all of that. But today's a lazy Sunday and I wanted to share my interesting experience from Friday morning.

On Thursday afternoon a CSX coal train derailed as it was zooming through Kent, Ohio, the town where I went to college. No one was injured, thankfully, but 13 cars left the tracks, spilling coal everywhere and slightly damaging the bridge they were passing under. You can read more details from the Akron Beacon Journal and the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier--they had photographers on the scene immediately so they got really dramatic closeups of the spilled coal and etc. Well, I've never seen a train wreck before, and my inner photojournalist was screaming at me to go see what I could see and shoot what I might find interesting. Couldn't go right away, however, because Thursday night after horses I had an invitation to a jewelry party at a friend's house--friends with whom I haven't talked in years and whose new house I hadn't seen before, so I'm hardly gonna skip out on them despite the fact that a) there was a blizzard in progress and b) I'm not really a jewelry shopper. So, argh, had to wait til Friday morning to go stomping about the riverbanks. (Wouldn't have seen much in the dark anyway, though I later saw large lights on poles because, as I learned, they worked throughout the night clearing the tracks.)


This is a bulldozer shoving spilled coal out of the way in order to make room for replacement track to be laid. The Crain Ave. Bridge is in the background, with a worker walking across.

It was quite a little adventure, because the weather was fierce. Beautiful snowstorm, but it was quickly covering up all the train car wreckage, so as I photographed them I was thinking they looked more like stuff you'd find in an old junkyard, sitting neglected for years, than they looked like the results of a fresh accident. It lent a melancholiness to the scene, I guess, and also spoke about the passing of time or something, if you wanna get philosophical about it all. I just wanted to document some of it for myself. By the time I arrived they'd cleared all of the cars off the tracks and were working on laying replacement tracks.


Workers assist as a crane (yellow thing) lifts a section of new track into place.

I couldn't get closeup shots because the Crain Ave. bridge, which they'd been passing under when they messed up, was closed to traffic. So I had to content myself with shooting from the high bank above the tracks. Kent has 2 sets of train tracks going through town, one upper set on the ground level, as it were, that pulls up beside the old 1870's train station (now a restaurant) and the Williams Brothers Mill, a grain mill that still produces a lot of grain that gets shipped around the country. That's where I was. Then there is the lower set of tracks, about 15 feet down, along the Cuyahoga River, where trains pass through that are not stopping in Kent. You can get a better idea from this photo, taken from the other bridge, the Main Street Bridge, facing upstream:


The Cuyahoga River is at far left, then the lower tracks (with the headlight of a train engine visible--it had pulled in a flatbed stacked with new track sections), and then the upper tracks. There is a boxcar barely visible up there, right at the mill. They have this cool funnel to shoot grain down into a traincar, I've always meant to take photos of that sometime. But I digress...


Those lower tracks go underneath two bridges, and this illfated train of 119 cars (yoiks!) was doing just that when it derailed. Luckily the bridge was hardly damaged at all, because 15,000 cars drive over it every day, but it's still closed while they repair the damaged sewer lines underneath it, which the train smashed. And this 40-year old bridge is due to be replaced next year, so I suppose it was a good thing this wreck happened now, to the old bridge, and not to a brand-new span. Anyway, I walked all around town up and down the river, both banks, trying to get shots through all of the trees. We have a lovely wooded riveredge, with a park and trails, but right now it was in my way! :-) Oh well. What started out as a "photojournalist wanna be" trek turned into an Ansel Adams-type landscape photo shoot, as I kept getting distracted by the gorgeous snow covering everything.





Just wished the light had been better--but I can't have it both ways, can I, you either get sunshine or you get falling snow :-) Rarely both!I couldn't shoot with gloves on, however, so I had to stop far sooner than I wanted to or get frostbite. Plus my car was getting buried in snow after only a few minutes! And this is the stuff I like to do in the snow, not ski on it or sled down it, but tramp in it and shoot it....sigh...
As always, if interested you can see more photos at my Flickrstream.

Geese on lake at sunrise, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Last weekend I took some time to go in search of nice fall foliage to photograph. I'd been driving past this little pond near my farm that has lovely mist in the morning and a lone sentinel maple tree that just bursts with reds. I tried one morning to get the mist off the lake with the tree in the same shot, but realized there was too much foliage between me and the lake--so I went back the next day with my 6 foot ladder to see if a new vantage point would help. It didn't, not really. I even schlepped that ladder all the way around the pond looking for good shots, but didn't need it. But one can never be too prepared for a photo. Turned out that lower was better, because this photo above I got by crawling into the bushes at the edge of the lake, all the way up to the water's edge so that the geese would be in the shot and not blocked by bushes. I felt like quite the wildlife photographer. And this was at 8am, so I was trying not to disturb any human neighbors either. ;-)

Anyway, I uploaded a few other shots to flickr today, the results of that early morning adventure. Now it's been raining and we've had frost, so I think we're losing our colors pretty fast, unfortunately. I've been working both days this weekend and didn't feel like venturing out on an expedition or I'd have tried for some more. In other news, it's been a busy week for me, with library inservice training one day (put out a fire in a burner during extinguisher practice, woo hoo!), Media Day for youth leadership another day (took the students on a tour of the Cleveland NBC affiliate station, and a tour of the Akron Beacon Journal newspaper offices--my inner Lois Lane always loves to see those big newsprint presses), and had two nice dinners out--one with friends on a conference advisory board and one at a wedding reception. Whew. Getting ready for more this week, our fifth grade library tour/visits start up again and I will be busy with them. Ta for now! ~The shutterbug

Broken tree, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Last night we suffered through very high winds and stormclouds, courtesy of the weather systems pushed to Ohio from Hurricane Ike hitting Texas. This morning when I woke up I discovered one of our apple trees had been destroyed. The trunk was hollow and rotten already, so it was inevitable that something would topple it sooner or later; but it was still a dramatic sight.  This is what the trees look like today:

And this is what they looked like in February 2006:

At least none of our other trees on the property were knocked down. All over Ohio there are problems today with power outages (in the 100s of thousands); our neighboring towns have had school cancelled too. It was really windy when I stepped out of the library at the end of work yesterday--like, "Hellooo, Ike!" But I don't think we got any rain here, just the winds. (I went to bed early, I was really tired, tho it was hard to fall asleep with all that wind banging around.)

Anyway, just a quick weather update. Today it's supposed to be partly cloudy--so far they're right--and 65. I haven't checked email yet today so I hope all of my Texas friends are okay down there.
[Edited later: Actually we lost 4 trees total, I later found out from the farm owner. They were just in the back where I never go]

Storm comin'!, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

Tonight we thought we were in for a storm, when this cloud bank rolled in overhead within a very short time. But there was no thunder, no lightning, no rain. Wind picked up for a few minutes, but it was only to move the clouds on out of here. It had been really dramatic as it loomed over us, big enough to engulf my building but not filling the entire sky. The sun was just setting as this blew in. We still have a chance of thunderstorms but only 20%. Whew.