Musings

We got antsy this afternoon and took what on another day would be called a Sunday Drive. No destination. No agenda other than Getting Out of the House. Which is a fine goal.

This place is called Eagles Nest.

And here’s a Great Lake and some low sand dunes, foreground, and much higher dunes in that rather distant shore-curve.

Wandered down a dead-end road and found a half-barn. What beams! And the silo is wood, too, with metal straps encircling the walls one above another.

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Around noon, things got rather quiet here, as our social-distancing houseguest left…zoom zoom. Then, we discharged our batteries with a few chores and, this evening, dove into the new “Perry Mason,” which is nothing like the TV Perry Mason’s of my childhood (in re-runs near you).

This photo is from last night…and the bright dot above the moon is…(have I already forgotten?) Jupiter?. (Too sedentary right at the moment to check my app. 😴 Lazy gal.)

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I’ve been trying to snap this cluster of white birch trunks for a few days, and every time I bring them into focus they have a beige/brown cast on the screen that I don’t see in reality. I know I can remove that in post, but I kept trying to find a situation where the camera wasn’t “confused” by the color. Finally, this oblique angle (both me and the sun) produced relatively true color.

And this is a close-up (duh) of a mullein (Verbascum thapsus) leaf (top surface). The fuzziness appears like another world’s surface.

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When the Manistique River is high this time of the year, the lake it flows from must be high, too? Roight? And it is. And it has been. For years. We go from drought years to this in, what?, just a few years…and this high-water has been with us for, what?, a decade?

The lake it flows from is a shallow lake, big and shallow, and the speed boaters always had to take that into account…like anchor their boats well off-shore (takes some depth for those big motors) and take a dingy in, and the like. Well, those folks like the high levels. The rest of us watch our property wash into the water and disappear. Not happy-making.

In short, Lake Michigan is high. The feeder rivers that flow into it are high, and everything upstream is water-filled. Welcome to climate change, this local version right at present.

Today’s official palate-cleanser flower….

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I have only a wee-teeny meteorological knowledge of clouds, and that weensy database includes no name for this pattern. I hereby name it a radial cloud pattern.

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I still don’t know what this sapsucker was up to with the wing held sideways. S/he eventually stuck the beak under the wing in a normal manner when preening, then flew off, but s/he held the wing-out position for maybe two minutes without paying attention to it. Not hurt; a yoga stretch, perhaps?

I called these harebells the other day, but I think they’re garden bluebells gone wild.

First photo: not a woodpecker; second photo: not a harebell. I’m living and learning. 🤨

Both photos qualify as snapshots and no more. The first was through the screen/window, and the second just would not expose better.

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Green as in: well before harvest time. Green apples.

Green grapes.

Okay. And a fine view of the blue sky, white pouf-clouds, and the grey-turquoise lake. With red chairs.

We are lucky living in this colorful place.

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Fancy a human-made landscape? Here’s a transformation of tundra-swamp into open water…albeit shallow. When it was built in the 1930s, none of this vegetation in the water existed. Now, MaNachur is turning it back into swamp via mats of reeds and lilies and the like.

For now, trumpeter swans gracefully feeding. Shallow, no?

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Mighty tasty black raspberries.

Lovely lake. Open sky.

Winsome woodchuck. [But a big eater. S/he moved on from the lawn to nab flowers. Rrrrr.]

Or maybe it’s more the images than the adjectives.

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We escaped the Metro. We found blue ridges. But not The Blue Ridges. Pretty pretty pretty.

On the move snaps can be blurry…or capture surprisingly pleasing not-what-I-was-hoping-for shots.

Posted at 9:22 PM | No Comments »