Red Peppers for Thursday Challenge Reds
Red peppers are red. Green peppers are green. Thursday Challenge is RED. Red books were once seen. What would you do with a red pepper?
photography
Mrs. Cardinal and Kitchen Scallions
I got some nice shots of a female cardinal visiting in our backyard. You can even see her feathers.
This is a close-up detail of her feathers.
Hello, Mrs. Cardinal! What a fine bright red beak you have.
Is this the same female cardinal? She looks a little different than the one shown above.
Mr. Cardinal was a bit further off, hiding in the lower branches of a neighbor’s bush.
On a different topic, I put some scallion ends in water in my kitchen. Truthfully, I forgot about them; oh, my, I see they really have grown! I did change the water at least once. I think you are supposed to change the water every other day.
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Nature Notes: Butterfly Three Photos
Instead of skipping Nature Notes yet one more time because I have no new photos or observations to add (I did see a hawk on Sunday flying over our home, to add one new comment), I decided to post a photo from last summer in three different ways.
It can seem like a different photo if you crop it differently.
This is probably the one most people would pick … and indeed, I posted a similar version of this butterfly photo last summer.
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Thursday Challenge: Light
This was my father’s chanukiah – as he passed away in October, we had to decide whether to give away his chanukiah or to use it. We decided to keep it. The middle branch, called the Shamash (literally the helper), is broken off, and I plan to get it fixed sometime before the next Chanukah. I am hoping a jeweler can fix it. The photo above shows the candles as they were lit on the third night.
Here is the chanukiah on the last night of the holiday. You can tell it is the last night because one typically lights from left to right, and that chanukiah is going to get filled with light all the way to the very end! The other light in the photos are from our other chanukiot (or their reflections).
Thursday Challenge theme is Light (Photos of beautiful light, reflecting, shining through, colourful,…).
Verbena and Cardinals
Little did I know early last summer when I purchased pink verbena because I wanted some color in my front yard that the verbena would survive frost, snow, a hurricane and live longer than the mums, the snap dragons or the nasturtium.
The verbena looks handsome among the fall leaves – those orangey brown pine-like leaves are from our bald cypress tree.
Truly the only pink in our front yard now is from the verbena – mostly brown, some green, and these dots of verbena pink.
In other nature in my yard news, I got a photo of a female and male cardinal together. They often travel together, but I don’t usually see them this close.
And I got a close shot of the cardinal – he looks like a proud guy, or maybe he has just eaten a lot of the black sunflower seeds in our bird feeder.
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Hurricane Sandy: Tree Before, No Tree After
Before Hurricane Sandy storm hit hard
Here is my street last Monday, as Hurricane Sandy had begun to blow its winds but still hadn’t damaged Highland Park, NJ. Note the tall maple tree on the left. Little did I know that this series would be the last time I would record that tree in an upright position. You can see photos of the maple tree on past blog posts.
You can see the skies are gray, and all is wet, but unless you listened to the news you would have no inkling this was the beginning of a devastating storm. And behind the car on the left you can see the full grace of the tree that would soon be no more.
I like taking photos of the foliage each fall. This one of the block before the storm will have to do. See, at this point we were hoping that the storm wouldn’t be a big deal after all. Well, you can’t be right all the time.
I wasn’t the only one outside at this point. You can see one of my neighbors crossing the street in the far left of this shot.
At the other end of my block, all looks peaceful, right? Currently, four days later, there are still down live wires in front of the house with the white fence. It is difficult to enter our block by car, because we have live wires at both ends. Hope they fix it soon. The PSE&G truck just sat there in front of the live wires today.
During the Storm
The night of the storm, Monday night from about 4 pm to 11 pm, was really, really scary. If you weren’t scared, then you were a master of denial, which can be quite helpful at times like these. I was watching this tree in my neighbor’s backyard (see the tree above in photo day after storm that is now broken off and leaning) sway back and forth, back and forth. I decided it was less scary to watch the swaying tree than to look at pictures of the devastated Jersey Shore on my computer. We still had power at that point, but we lost it a bit before 9 pm.
After Hurricane Sandy storm hit hard – the morning after – Hurricane Sandy Trees
I woke up the morning after the storm and went to explore. Uh, oh, the big tree a few doors down was no longer up. Luckily, it had hit only a lamppost and had injured no person nor any house.
Many were taking photos, including this young reporter who has just started her journalism career with her school newspaper. She is unsure whether she wants to focus on photography, drawing or writing for the newspaper. This photographing of the down tree is a good start.
Crews have finally begun to remove parts of the down tree – it is now cut into pieces, and one can pass through on one side of the road with a car.
We were lucky on our block about where the big tree fell. These homeowners were not so fortunate. This giant old tree hit wires and their house. I saw another house in Edison that had a corner of the house chopped off by a fallen tree.
Not to feel left out, North 8th had its own adventure with this giant tree. Looks like the tree barely missed the house (but I could be wrong about that).
Finally, here is why North Fifth still does not have power. The library, where many in our community would go when power goes down, is still closed. And my friends on North Fifth are cold, as are North Tenth, Dennison and a good part of the South side by South Adelaide. We had our power restored on Wednesday evening at about 6 pm – wow, was that a happy time for us.
Lessons Learned: Count Your Blessings
Thankful for my family. Thankful for no damage to our property. Thankful for fabulous, helpful, friendly neighbors. Thankful for smart phones existing and for car radios. And for heat in cars. And the fact that our stove burners worked even if our crockpots, rice cooker, warming tray, toaster, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, computers, lamps, coffee grinder and pencil sharpener did not (daughter asked, after we lost power: how will we sharpen pencils? I replied: we have some artsy pencil sharpeners upstairs that will work. We never did do any art work during the lack of power period).
The Jersey Shore communities are not so fortunate. More on this topic in a later post.
I plan to include this post in next week’s Nature Notes.
UPDATE: Part Two: Many Problems Post Hurricane Sandy (please read and share)
Nature Notes: Butterflies and Mushroom
Mount Greylock in the Berkshires has a lot of goldenrod on top of the mountain. And many happy butterflies are enjoying themselves.
We also visited The Mount in the Berkshires, where Edith Wharton lived for a while with her husband (before she divorced him) and his dogs. There is a pet cemetery near the garden that has lots of tidy flowers, many of which are butterfly-friendly, like this butterfly bush. The Whartons allowed their dogs to sit at their fancy dining table along with distinguished guests (is that natural? as this is Nature Notes).
We saw this red mushroom besides the trail that we climbed to the top of Mount Greylock.
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Mount Greylock Views
When you reach the top of Mount Greylock in the Berkshire Mountains, you are rewarded with lovely views. It looks a bit like a puzzle, the Mount Greylock views below and across (one can see more mountains in the distance).
If you climb this tower on the top of Mount Greylock, you see even more views. My husband and two sons climbed to the top. My daughter and I wandered around below, looking down at the landscape.
There is an inscription in honor of soldiers at the base of the Mount Greylock tower. You can also find two quotes from Henry David Thoreau at the top of Mount Greylock. Supposedly, he too as some point in the 19th century climbed this mountain.
I don’t know who the man in the yellow shirt is, but he added a nice contrast to the scene of the lake or pond below the mountain.
Need refreshment? There is a little cafe in the Bascomb Lodge at the top of Mount Greylock.
At the entrance to the Bascomb Lodge is a butterfly garden. I’ll save my butterfly shots for another post. There are also butterfly-friendly flowers all over the top of Mount Greylock.
On the way down the mountain, we took the Overview Trail. I was hoping for several scenic views on the trail, but we were only rewarded with this one scenic vista looking west.
For more views, visit Our World Tuesday.
Cabin on Mount Greylock
We just came back from a trip to the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. One day we climbed Mount Greylock (the highest mountain in the Berkshires). Toward the top we came across this cabin and pond. The trail is part of the Appalachian Trail that spans the mountains of eastern United States. We only hiked a tiny portion of the trail. In fact, we didn’t even climb the entire mountain. We parked at the top of the CCC Dynamite Trail, walked on Sperry Road to the Deer Trail, then took the Hopper Trail to the A.T. or Appalachian Trail. On the way back we took the Overlook Trail to the Hopper Trail. The Overlook Trail really only has one good scenic vista, so my daughter didn’t think it was worth the extra half mile.
It seems that I am not the only person who found this cabin and pond artistically intriguing. Valerie Carrigan did a lovely pastel painting of this cabin on Mount Greylock.
See more Weekend Reflections.
Review with Eggplant and Peaches
On My Blog
Lots of summery pics on the blog!
Elsewhere in the Blogosphere
- Highly Recommend: Holocaust memoir of Ben Zion Wacholder, Hannah Katsman’s father, called Last Days of Ozerow
- Jewish Book Carnival for July 2012 on the Whole Megillah – thank you for including my review of The Origin of Sorrow.
- Cooking Outside the Box hosted Kosher Cooking Carnival for Av.
- Jewaicious reviews A Thread of Grace.
- Benji Lovitt, who usually writes and delivers comedy, wrote a piece called Terror in Bulgaria — a comedian’s response. Sometimes you just don’t know how to respond. And this was before the massacre in the theater in Colorado. “But for now? Like everyone else, I’ll mourn.”
- If you can stomach the discussion, Therapy Doc has a post on James Egan Holmes.