November is Mitten Time

Daytime temperatures have scarcely been above freezing these days, resulting in cold hands on our walks. Gloves helped to some degree, but when I have to be holding onto a cane the whole time, and possibly removing the gloves to take a picture or seven, the poor little digits do suffer,

It was time to charge up the mitts, which you may recall, do have batteries and heating built in. They had languished unused for lo these many months.  ➡️ 

After plugging them in, the missus and I headed over to the pharmacy for both our flu and COVID jabs. Neither of us have suffered from either shot in the past, but I don't think that we have combined them like this. This morning, I can report that I am feeling fine and that I even had a half-decent sleep of almost six hours.

From the pharmacy, we headed to the grocery store for dessert and rolls for tonight's family dinner. I think it has been more than a month since we've had the fam over although we did get over to theirs for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago.

After shots and shopping we returned home to bundle up for what would be a pretty cold walk. Before heading off, I wanted to memorialize our first wearing of our hand warming devices for the impending 2025-26 winter. 

I set up the tripod. Our first efforts all turned out like this or even worse. Somehow, when I tried to trigger the phone camera from my watch, it caused lens to zoom. It was most perplexing  

After several more efforts, we achieved this ↓ result. Although it is good enough, it was still zooming in somewhat on its own and cutting off a bit of my foot. While that wasn't much of a problem, I wanted to get it right. I went back and forth between our pose position and the phone several times, but I was getting at least some zoom every time. 

We began to figure out that, somehow, it was moving my sleeve to trigger my watch that was, somehow,  causing the problem. We tried it again (we're on maybe the fifth try by now), but this time we found ourselves taking a video. Pretty funny, but would we ever manage to take the shot the way that I had set it up?

Finally, I captured the composition that I had envisioned, with Sue being the one to trigger my watch as I held my sleeve out of the way. 

Oh and by the way, I captured a very Bleak November sort of photo on our subsequent trail stroll.

The wind was howling, and then it began to rain while we were still a distance from our car.

November is Upon Us

November begins with the time change, which, believe it or not, I looked forward to this year. You see, I have been getting to sleep around 1 o'clock, give or take. I would prefer to get off to dreamland an hour earlier, like I was doing a few months ago. In fact, the sandman dropped in to see me by 11:30 on many a night.

With the time change, 1 o'clock would be 12, and I thought that my preferred adaptation would thus ensue seamlessly. 

Except that on that particular night, sleep eluded me until 2, which meant that it was 1 new time. I can verify this because I saw the flip with mine own bleary eyes as I stared anxiously at the darn clock. So now new time is the same as the old time. Blast it all.

November also begins with us emptying the flowerpots that were looking so good when I posted of them just last week. Despite still not being overcome by frost, they were beginning to show signs of losing their zest for life. Since the town's garden waste, autumn pickup begins today, we thought that we might as well pull the plants, bag them, and send them curbside.

Note: A peculiarity of our town is that they only pick up compostable garden waste for four weeks per year — two weeks in spring and two in autumn. And the autumn pickup starts today.

A third beginning to Cruel November is the bleakness which I bemoan with frequency. Most leaves are down, and with the skies looking grey these days . . . well look . . . ↓↓

 
Bleak House in a Bleak Month

The Arena Walk

We don't visit the portion of the Riverwalk Trail by the arena often enough, so we made amends on Wednesday. While we often confine ourselves to the main, broad trail, we took a short subsidiary offshoot down to the river which is running very low. Actually, this is a distributary of the river that flows around McArthur island (other bank in photo).

This selfie shows a somewhat similar view but with much better foreground. 😎

I zoomed in on just reflections.

A wonderful thing happened. We heard a large and cacophonous skein of Canada Geese approaching, and then we saw them. I managed to capture a portion of the skein as they passed over the river. Possibly, I should have switched to video to also capture the sound, but I seldom think of  shooting video.

We returned to the main trail, and I eventually took one more photo of a well-lit little Y-shaped branch of young sumac, or at least a Y within a Y with another Y behind. It stood there shimmering at me and demanding to be photographed. What a nerve!

Caturday 84: A Dose of the Feels

This card and pawprint stamps came in the mail this week from the veterinary clinic. Feels ensued  

Card is to the left and top with individual stamps on the right and bottom.
Maybe I will put a paw print in my wallet or stick one on my computer.

Meanwhile, Lacey's first podium flower, a yellow Mum, began to wilt, so I purchased another flower, much smaller this time: a pretty, pink Calandiva. The pink bow at the top in first photo tells us that the purchase price included a donation to the breast cancer society, which seems pretty catgone appropriate.

I tried to get a little arty with this ↓ shot. I might be able to use it as an overlay texture in another photo at some point. It could add a pink wash to an appropriate image if it were blended correctly. Well, that was my thinking anyway, but I don't use textures much. lol

Happy Halloween

Our neighbour across the street has erected quite a display. He's got a lot of stuff over there and some of it is big stuff, and it is in a little space that is also not very well lighted. Those conditions don't make for easy photography, but one must do one's best to rise to the occasion. These characters probably all have names, but I don't what they are, and I don't care much.

A tall guy and his cute, little puppy.

This scarecrow guy is even taller than the previous fellow. Erecting him must have been quite a feat. I have two shots. The second reveals how difficult it is in the dark when objects don't have their own lighting. I had to use my photoshop skills to get the Grim Reaper at the bottom left to be visible in the photo.

A genuine Hell's Angel maybe. 

This final bloke has no self-lighting, and I couldn't manage a decent photo in the dark. So, I took a daytime photo and tried to make it look like a night scene. I added lighting bolts in the process, but I think he is feeling a little down in the mouth.

I did shoot a few others, but I think these will suffice for this year.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween ↑ is not an image but just text done in Blogger with its fonts and colour choices
Gravitas One font

Hanging Tough

The flowerpots are now enduring frost on a nightly bases, but all eight out front are still hanging tough. Here are the five that have been gathered to the very front where passersby can still enjoy them. 

When we drove through Tims for coffee, I couldn't help but roll down my window to photograph this lone tree, standing tough, proud and still beautiful. That is Wool Grading Station in the background; I am reminded that I promised that I would to take you there some day.

We took our coffee to Riverside Park and sipped it while walking along the path. I doffed my gloves and laid my cane down quite a few times for pics, including these two of yon hedge framed by park trees. The hedge is hanging tough and looking good.

I waited for the boys on their school lunch break to clear the photo, but I think I prefer them in there. Whatcha think?

By the by, we will curse the hedge come winter, for as nice as it looks now, from this vantage point, it will obstruct the view of the river from our preferred winter coffee spot near the boat launch. I am not sure why they didn't trim it this year although it does look rather good at the moment.

Back toward the other end of the park, we could see the stand of birches across the river. They are fighting to hang onto their leaves, some trees toughing it out better than others. I am sure that I have taken this shot in almost every autumn, and the birches look good in winter too. That assumes that I can access the park as winter proceeds, for they do not plow the pathway for some reason.

I hope the flora hangs tough for just a little longer.

Walking in the Light

It had been awhile since we trekked in the woods on the northern edge of town. I really like it in there, but we tend to lose out bearings a little bit, and we can't seem to find a way to track little walks like that in either GMaps or Apple Maps. Fortunately, it isn't exactly a vast forest, so we couldn't get too lost for too long.

Most leaves were down, and I thought that I would report on that, but it was sunny, so the leaves that remained were looking quite splendid, like this stand of orange in the distance beyond the mostly leafless trees in the intervening space.

It turns out that the two other photos that I liked best were of the same subject as each other but shot at different focal lengths and then also cropped differently in edit. I don't crop in square ratio often, but it seemed to work just right in the first photo. The second was a telephoto zoom with a somewhat unusual, narrow, vertical crop.

The light made the difference in these photos, compared to the ones that I posted recently.

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By the way, my dad was born on this day in 1912. I like to mention him in passing. Although he passed in 1999, he hasn't died his third death yet.

"The three deaths" can refer to several concepts: a philosophical idea about finality, Leo Tolstoy's short story, or a documentary about Marisela Escobedo. The most widely discussed concept is the philosophical one, where a person's three deaths are the physical death, the death of their memory, and the final death when their name is forgotten forever.

Possibly 1982