Photo Blogging Challenge (October 2014) - Photographer's Choice

So this month, PJ, in his infinite wisdom decided to have the challenge be a photographer's choice.  Now he's gone and done it.  I can post anything I want this month and don't have to worry about whether it's following the them or not.  Or at least I don't have to try and justify whether it's following the theme or not.  Yeah, like I do that anyway.

Usually what happens is I take photos with little regard for the theme (sorry PJ).  Well, I take that back.  I'll usually have the theme in the back of my mind and if something comes to mind, I'll take a photo in that direction, but I've found in the past that when I force myself a certain way into photography, I tend to get stuck.  So in the long run, it's easier to just take photos and see if any fit the theme.  Very rarely do I not get five that fit the theme.

With this month being photographer's choice, I just decided to pick, what I consider, my five best shots.  And so, without a whole lot of extra fanfare, I give you my five shots for this month's theme.

1.  76 trombones
Nope, there weren't 76 trombones in this parade, nor were there 110 cornets either, but this is our town's intermediate school marching band walking down our city streets the last weekend of October during the annual Village Venture Arts and Crafts Faire.  The band usually leads the Halloween parade that opens up the day-long event.  I was standing on the curb and saw the trombones coming and took several shots, hoping to get a good one.  Because of the angle, I actually got a bonus selfie out of the deal as well.

2.  The Skeleton family
At the Village Venture, there are always a lot of people dressed up for Halloween and it's a great spot for people watching.  Anyone who's followed this blog for any length of time knows that I enjoy street photography and an event like this is right up my alley.  I spotted this entire family of skeletons hanging out after the parade and just couldn't resist taking a shot.  I have several other street shots that aren't quite as good as this one, but I may post a couple more on my Flickerstream sometime later on.  This one just worked really well.

3.  Black and White Sunflower
I took this shot in the middle of the month down near the downtown area of Anaheim, just north of Disneyland.  I had met a very good friend for lunch and before and afterwards, we'd walked around the area geocaching.

While walking toward where we were going to eat lunch, we ended up in this city garden.  The entire area is undergoing some urban renewal and this particular garden was nearing peak fall harvest.  My sunflowers tend to blossom out in July, but this one was in full bloom in the middle of October, suggesting that it had been planted later in the year.

It was about a day after I took this shot that I had been challenged on Facebook by another geocaching friend of mine to a five day B&W challenge where I was supposed to post five B&W photos over five successive days.  The nice part of that kind of challenge is I didn't have to take them five days in a row.  This particular shot  ended up being day four or five of my challenge.  

Although I like color, especially when I'm taking flower shots I decided to process this one in black and white.  There was such a riot of color in the shot, the yellow sunflower, the green of the rest of the plant and the plant behind it, the purple flowers on the left hand side and the deep blue of the sky accentuated by the white clouds that I felt the color would actually district from the beauty of the flower.

4.  Butterfly
Another one of my favorite subjects to photograph are butterflies.  I haven't seen a whole lot of butterflies this season, so I haven't been able to post many butterfly shots, so I was rather fortunate when this one started sipping nectar on flowers that I happened to be walking by on my way home from somewhere.

It was also fortunate, because I had my zoom lens on at the time, so it was easier to get this guy in the shot without having to tromp through someone's plants, something that I wouldn't do anyway.  I ended up with a couple dozen shots or so, of which this one ended up being the best of the bunch.

This is a gulf fritilary.  We have plants on which they thrive growing in planter boxes next to a parking structure in the downtown area.  Last summer I'd go down there quite often to get shots, but this year, I never made it down for various reasons.  I don't know whether this one is from that area and was straying a little far from its home base or whether it was just out enjoying the nectar that its neighborhood had to offer, but whatever the reason, it gave me a pretty good shot.

5.  The owl
Last, but certainly not least, is this photo of an owl that I took at the Village Venture.  I posted a couple of shots of this owl and this one was by far and away the best one I took.  Something about the shot just screamed that I needed to process it in black and white.

This particular owl was being displayed as part of an educational program.  The birds are rehabilitated after being found injured by Wild Wings of California, a local organization based in nearby San Dimas.  The particular owl couldn't be released back into the wild because of the damage that had been done.

It had been found lying on the ground.  I didn't hear what caused the initial injury, but while it had been lying on the ground, several ground crawling insects had crawled into its ears and laid eggs.  The hatched larva caused significant damage to its ears that its hearing was very much impaired.  An owl relies on its hearing almost as much as its eyesight and with almost 50% of its hunting prowess impaired, it wouldn't have fared well in the wild, so it has become one of Wild Wings educational pieces.

And there you have it. My five selections for this month's photographer's choice blogging theme.  Please stop by PJ's blog to see what the other bloggers in this challenge posted.  I think you'll enjoy the photography.

Let the harvest begin

I guess you could say I've become a gentleman farmer.  Not really, because I should never be confused for a gentleman in any stretch of the imagination, but I've at least had a pretty good run this year with my fruits and vegetables.  

The tomatoes are coming in rather nicely. One of the two plants growing upside down in the topsy turvy has already yielded several tomatoes that are the sweetest they can be. There are probably a dozen or more tomatoes on the vine all in various stages of ripeness.  

My only complaint thus far of this particular variety is the toughness of the skin.  Store bought tomatoes seem to have soft skin which isn't very chewy.  These tomatoes I'm growing seem to have a tougher skin, more chewy in nature.  I'm wondering if that's particular to the type of tomato I'm growing or the fact that they are being vine ripened as opposed to being picked way early the way store bought tomatoes are.  If anyone has an answer to that one, I'd appreciate it.

As far as the sunflowers go, they've been blooming pretty steadily this week.  If I remember correctly, my first blossom from two years ago showed up on July 1st and the last blossom came around the end of the month.  This pattern should hold true for this year's crop, although they've been blooming for about a week already this year. 

Most of the traditional yellow ones have started to bloom, but I knew that I'd also planted an orange variety and one of them finally bloomed today.  I'm not sure if the photo does the flower justice as it appears to be a more brownish color than it actually looks like in person, but that's the way digital images sometimes work.

All in all, I'd say it's a pretty successful garden this year.  And I haven't even mentioned the nectarine tree that we planted three years ago.  The limbs on that are weighed down with fruit.  I love nectarines.

Fullerton Arboretum

This past Tuesday, I went geocaching in Orange County.  I  only found two geocaches, which doesn't seem like a whole lot for a 6 hour tour behind the "Orange Curtain" but there were extenuating circumstances.

My friend Jim and I had decided to come down and get some caches and play a couple of other GPS games that we play from time to time.  We scored points in the other games, plus found one cache before lunch, then headed over to the Fullerton Arboretum, located on the campus of Cal State Fullerton.

Cal State Fullerton isn't a well known school unless you follow college baseball.  They are quite often in the College World Series, as they are again this year.  I attended the school for a year and a half while I was getting my teaching credential in the early 80s.  The campus was smaller and looked a lot different than it does now.  New campus housing, a new baseball stadium and the arboretum are all new additions to the campus in the past 30 years.

I don't know why I should be surprised about this, since my own school, Humboldt State University looked a lot different when I visited there several years ago.  Change happens.

The cache we were looking for in the Arboretum was a 5 stage multi-cache.  That means we'd have to find four different points, gather clues from each point, which would then lead us to the final cache.  We also needed to bring a QR reader along because the clues were in the form of QR codes.  I had a QR code reader on my iPad, so I brought it along.  With my cell phone, iPod, iPad, camera and GPS unit, I was a well geeked out techie on this little hike.

Once we got over to the first stage, we started looking around for the first QR code.  Unfortunately, we didn't find it, so we could have been done for the day, but the cache page gave us some other clues that gave us an idea of what we were looking for so we started walking through the Arboretum.

We weren't really sure what we were looking for the first time around, so we ended up wandering.  We actually walked right by the cache and one of the clues, but didn't spot them on the first time around.  We were actually enjoying ourselves with the butterflies, hummingbirds and the large expanses of native vegetation.  There were large displays of Mediterranean type vegetation as well as areas devoted to desert environment and African savannah.  Pretty much any plant found in California was represented here plus several other areas as noted above.

After walking all the way around the Arboretum once, I think we both figured out what kind of signs we were supposed to be looking for, so we tried some secondary paths that we hadn't walked on before but we still came up empty.  Needless to say, I was getting frustrated.  My friend Jim wasn't nearly as frustrated and kept persevering suggesting we go back to the beginning again and check out some things that we might have missed on the first two go arounds.

Once we got back to the first stage, I found something that we hadn't noticed before: a magnet on the back of a sign.  Now why would there be a magnet unless it was meant to hold something?  The something that this magnet was supposed to hold wasn't there, but it gave us a glimmer of hope that we were at least on the right track.

We took another path that we hadn't tried before and I spotted one of the signs we were looking for about 12 feet from where we had walked a couple of hours earlier.  The QR code was attached to the back of the sign, which was read by my iPad and it told us where the final was supposed to be.  We'd bypassed stages 2 and 3.   We hiked further up the trail and found stage 2 as well, but without a QR code, so we decided to head back to the final and see if we could find it.

It didn't take too long to find the final cache, so although we didn't do the cache as intended by the cache owner, we'll take credit for the find, since we did find the final.  Overall, it was a fun cache.  It got us into an area we hadn't been to before, so that was a good thing.  If all the codes had been where they were supposed to be, we probably wouldn't have stayed there as long as we did, so in a way, that's also a good thing.  Hopefully, the cache owner will see our logs and replace the missing QR codes so others can enjoy the full experience.  

As it was, we never did find one of the stages, but we found the stage that counts.  In other words, sometimes, you're good and sometimes, you're just lucky.  In this case, I'd say it was a little bit of both.

4 weeks of growth

About four weeks ago, I wrote about the start of my garden for this year. If you click on the link, you can see the difference in growth of my tomato plant over the past four weeks.

The original photo shows a plant about 6 inches in length growing out of the bottom of the Topsy Turvy.  The plant, 4 weeks later is now about 4 times that length (approximately 2 feet total) and sprouting three blossoms, plus several other blooms that are ready to open up.  If you look closely, you can see the three blossoms on the main trunk of the plant.  

If all goes well, sometime in June, I believe I will be pulling large tomatoes off of this plant and placing rather large slices on my burgers.  Mmmmm.  I can taste them already.

I'm really amazed at how well this plant is growing thus far.  I really had no idea how this would work and it just seemed like a crazy idea, but if those tomatoes actually develop, I'm sold on this.  In fact, I think I'll probably buy another one to double my output of tomatoes.  I'll try to keep you updated as the weeks go by.

Trying something different

My daughter helped me set up a garden two springs ago at our house.  We planted a variety of things, but the two things that did the best in the first two years were the sunflowers and the tomatoes.  The sunflowers did better the first year, the tomatoes did better the second year.  This year, I'm hoping they both do well.

In the past, at least on my 365 project, I've posted about my battles with tomato worms.  After several postings of worm shots, a friend of mine got tired of me ranting about my battles with the worms, so he bought me a Topsy Turvy.  The premise is the tomatoes grow upside down.  But the real reason he bought it for me was to get me to stop complaining about the tomato worms.

Tomato worms pupate in the soil, then just climb up the tomato plant to lay their eggs.  With this device, I shouldn't get any tomato worms this year.  I hope it works, because I really hate those things.  And besides, nothing's better than homegrown tomatoes, bar none.  If this thing really works, there's a spot in the same general area where I can hang a second one, so I can have two different varieties.  Right now I went with a beefsteak tomato.

If you look in the background, you can see the planter where I had our tomatoes and sunflowers last year.  This year, that planter is just sunflowers.  I amended the soil today and planted about six different varieties of sunflowers, all of which are supposed to grow at least five feet high.  One is supposed to have flowers that are at least a foot in diameter.  If all goes well, I'm going to have lots of sunflower seeds for the birds to enjoy later in the summer.

The second photo is a special photo, although it's not really much to locate.  That's Kathryn's nectarine tree.  My daughter planted that two springs ago.  She was working with her hands and she really needed to do something and so we decided that it was a good spot for a nectarine tree in the back yard.  The first year, it had a couple of blossoms, but we didn't get any fruit off of it, which is probably a good thing.

Last year, I think there were about 10 to 12 fruit on the tree, but we had a really nasty heat wave of over 100˚ for about 10 days in a row and the fruit just shriveled up and fell off the tree no matter how much water I was pumping into the soil.  With only two years of growth, it was probably a good thing.  This is the third year for the tree and hopefully some of those blossoms will give us some sweet nectarines to eat.

Looking at the photo, I see I need to do some pruning on the tree.  There are a couple of sucker branches down below that need to be removed.  The tree was a bare root we got at a local nursery. It's now about a foot taller than I am, so I need to address that as well to keep it under control.  That should be too difficult to deal with and we'll still have a good looking fruit tree.

Here's to a successful year for anyone out there who has a green thumb or wished they had a green thumb.

Spring Break

Spring break has sprung!  I just looked and realized I haven't posted in a week, so I figured I'd get you up to date on things.  It's Spring Break and unlike many school districts our district has decided to have two full weeks off.  I love it for several reasons.

Everyone says Christmas break is great.  Bah.  Christmas break is a cruel break.  You spend the first week running around gearing up for Christmas and then spend the next week running around gearing up for New Year's.  If the actual holiday falls early in the week, then you might have three or four days in which to actually rest and recuperate. And, if the weather's bad, you still have to go out, because things need to get done.

But Spring break?  Two weeks with nothing to do.  Nothing to really shop for, and no place that you "have" to go.  The weather's nicer, the days are longer and if you get an occasional bad weather day, you can curl up inside with a good book and a good movie and just enjoy the day.

Since the break started, I've been out geocaching a couple of times, once by myself and once with my good friend Jim.  The latter was more enjoyable because it was with someone else, however I found more caches the first day.  But it's not about the numbers is it?

The front lawn has been mowed and the back lawn will be mowed.  The plan is to do that tomorrow and then work the garden soil and plant many different kinds of sunflowers.  Two years ago, we planted sunflowers and tomatoes.  That didn't work too well.  I've discovered sunflowers need lots of water, but tomatoes need to be stressed.  They need water, but you have to stress them out with long dry periods in order for them to produce good fruit.

The first year, our tomato yield was negligible, while we had glorious sunflowers as evidenced by the photos.  The next year, I figured the seeds that were dropped from the year before would sprout new sunflowers.  They did, but they didn't do very well, because I wasn't watering the area as much.  Great tomatoes that year, but the sunflowers were lucky to get 2 feet high or 2 inches in diameter.  This year, the sunflowers will occupy one area and the tomatoes another area.  Hopefully I'll get good yields from both.  

Taxes need to be done this week.  Then next week, I'll be taking a nice road trip up to the bay area to visit with my daughter and celebrate her birthday.  We're planning on going to San Francisco on her actual birthday and being tourists.  I'm looking forward to it since I haven't been to San Francisco in 25 years.  

Yes, there are things to do, but there's no deadline on them as long as they get done by the end of the break.  It's a much more relaxed kind of deadline.  This is the kind of break I like.

Flashback Friday

A neighbor down the street has an excellent front yard garden.  Repeatedly, over the past couple of years I've walked down there because there seems to be so much activity with butterflies flitting about, ladybugs doing all sorts of things and an occasional squirrel.  

This particular squirrel, however, is an European Brown Squirrel and it's an introduced species into the environment here.  We should see lots of gray squirrels in this area, but they are being pushed out by the more aggressive brown squirrel.

I can remember talking with my neighbor about seeing this squirrel in his olive tree and he said with a disdainful look, "Oh, that's Fred."  or something of that nature.  It was clear my neighbor wasn't happy with Fred at all and would probably have liked to have seen the demise of Fred.

What I remember about Fred is he stayed perfectly still for me while I stood about 10 feet away from him and composed my shot.  I liked the way he was peeking out from behind the tree trunk and how the small olive branches framed him.

Photo originally taken March 25th, 2011.