Wildlife photographers impress the socks off me

I mentioned last week that I spent some time standing still in my back yard on a chilly evening waiting for my friend Pierre le Pew the skunk to emerge so I could photograph him.  He never showed up, or, probably better put, I gave up before he appeared.  I've been contemplating that defeat ever since.

I love photography, and I enjoy the heck out of this whole blogging thing, but I'm beginning to see a problem.  The patience required for taking great wildlife photos is contrary to my very nature.  I think I'm well described by a line from one of Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey books, where Lord Peter describes his mother as follows:

"Here's my mother by Laszlo - a first class portrait of her, a good many years ago, of course.  Not that anything but a very rapidly moving picture could convey her quality."

I do not like to sit still.  Not for a minute.  We don't have a TV and I am largely pop-culturally illiterate because I cannot sit still long enough to watch a show or movie.  I can read because I guess enough of my senses and brain are thereby engaged.  The ability to otherwise sit still for long periods of time?  Not a talent I possess. 

Aside from the patience required, wildlife photographers need to be able to ignore physical discomfort.  I can ignore a lot of things - cold, fatigue, hunger, loss of blood flow in extremities - fairly well.  What I cannot ignore, however, is bugs.  Like these, for example. 

My best friend used to spend her summers canoeing in the boundary waters of Minnesota and in the arctic.  She has described waking up one arctic morning before the rest of her group awoke and counting something like 47 mosquito bites on one hand before giving up on counting and opting for breakfast instead.  I'm sure there are plenty of wildlife photographers who have could have counted that many on one finger while trying to get just the right shot in the arctic.  Aieeeeee!  No, no thank you.  I'll pass.  I suspect I'll miss the shot every time while I swat and scare off the subject of the photo shoot.

I figure the only way I can try to compensate for my lack of photography patience will be to spend as much time outdoors with my camera as possible.  The more I'm out there, the better my odds that I'll have a critter encounter when I have my finger on the trigger.

Until I have time to spend in the woods and get lucky enough to spot a critter wanting his photo taken, I'll just have to stick to shooting subjects I can bribe to sit still and pose for me.

Voila!  Wildlife.  Only about 45 photos and two irritated cats later.

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Late Autumn Garden Review

Surprise, surprise!

While engaged in our massive yard-work Sunday, I took a few minutes to clean out the garden and to reflect on my gardening successes and failures from this, which is really my first year of vegetable gardening.  The cauliflower above was a pleasant surprise.  I knew I had grown massive cauliflower plants, but all the rest had not grown heads, but rather had long stalky bits with whitish nubs at the ends, mixed in with lots of little leaves.  They were rather weird.

Not easy to eat.  I'm not sure how I managed to achieve that effect.  Regardless, I'm tickled with my one pretty cauliflower, which will be a lovely addition to my dinner table.

My cabbage, on the other hand, was largely a failed experiment.  They did grow to enormous proportions - check out this stem:

They weighed a ton.  Trouble is, everybody apparently loved my cabbage.  This is what they all looked like:

After having found the proverbial half worm in a partially eaten bowl of homemade potato kale soup earlier this summer, I have been reluctant to wrestle my way through a cabbage that looked like that to try to select the few edible bits, sans protein.  Just the thought of potentially slicing through a few dozen worms in a chop made me cringe.  Since we do (mostly) organic gardening I couldn't come up with any obvious solution for discouraging the little chompers.  So, we left the cabbages for the worms.  I think I'll skip the cabbage next year, unless someone gives me some tips on organically discouraging all the nibblers.

We did eat one head before they got to looking quite so bullet-riddled, and it was the spiciest cabbage I've ever tasted.  Query:  what kind of critters want to eat something that spicy?  It never makes sense to me what things the garden pests will like best.  Bugs love strawberries - okay, that makes perfect sense.  But then bugs also love artichokes.  Huh?  I don't even know how they get through those fibrous leaves, much less spit out all the little spikes.

I can only say "mostly" with regard to our organic gardening because I have one weakness:  poison ivy.  That horrid stuff follows me around.  It stalks my ankles (pardon the pun).  We had massive infestations of it at our most recent rental townhouse, and I had my first ever poison ivy rash from it.  I'm amazed I never had a reaction to it before given a) the amount of time I've spent in the woods, and b) that my immune system is completely absurd and reacts to all sorts of things it shouldn't (like foods), so should theoretically be overly sensitive to something as irritating as poison ivy.  That one horrifyingly itchy blistery rash was enough to make me completely paranoid, though. 

When we moved here and I found poison ivy in both front and back gardens, I caved, and bought a pesticide that supposedly specializes in poison ivy.  I have no idea what's in it and frankly don't care.  My concession to my organic gardening was to use as little as possible.  It worked.  Mostly.  I just discovered 2 stems and 6 little poison ivy leaves in my front garden this weekend.  A pox on the stuff!

Back to the things that are supposed to be in the garden.  Here's my kale.  It tied with potatoes for 1st place in my garden.  After harvesting more than half of it, and following several hard frosts, it still looks like this:

Looks like I have a lot more blanching and freezing to do.  My Brussels sprouts, in contrast, were pretty pathetic.  Check out how weenie those little sprouts are:

But damnit, I'm going to eat them, regardless.  I'll carefully shave them off with a sharp thin knife and chuck them in the pot of stew.  One thing is for sure - they won't need to be in there long to be cooked through.  They'll be hard to distinguish from the peas.

Other successes included two varieties of incredibly good peas, several varieties of lettuce and arugula, a pretty crop of onions, and some delicious butternut squash, including one that is staggeringly huge.  The mint, of course, is threatening to take over the whole garden, and some of the other herbs did really well, too.  Complete failures included okra, some cool twisty gourds that never appeared at all, and carrots (one feathery frond appeared but never grew a root).

I wish we had more space for vegetable gardening.  The only part of our yard that gets enough sun for veggies is the front yard.  Thankfully, the neighborhood isn't so persnickety that anyone is inclined to complain about our unruly veggie patch in the front yard.  We did mix in flowers and try to make it look vaguely like an overgrown perennial patch rather than just a vegetable garden, but we're really out of room for any more vegetable gardens.  While we live here I'll have to just make do with a little veggie garden dabbling, and lots of trips to the farmers' markets.

While not edible, I am particularly proud of my holly.  I'm partial to holly generally since it's my namesake.  However, when we moved in all our gardens were in shameful condition, and the poor holly plants were practically dead - largely bare branches with a few scraggly blighted leaves.  I couldn't even tell at the time if I had a male and female, which is necessary if berries are desired.  Lots of organic acidification and TLC later, and here's my female holly this fall, a year and a half later:

Lookin' good!

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Leaf Conspiracy Theories

We woke up early on Sunday to the most glorious November day imaginable.  It was in the 60s, with brilliant sun.  We were heartbroken that we weren't in the Adirondacks, but I guess there's no denying that we desperately needed a yard work day.

Here's the morning moon, overseeing our outdoor breakfast.  Too nice to be inside for a minute:

This is the primary reason we needed a yard work day:

Those are my ankles disappearing in the leaves, in case you couldn't tell.  The remarkable thing about it is the leaves were just plain that deep over the entire yard.  The whole thing.  Another view:

Uh, yeah.  That's the chopping block being eaten by leaves.  See that nice strip of green in the background, where the neighbors diligently raked their yard?  They put us to shame on Saturday.  There was no putting it off any longer.

I swear there was some kind of conspiracy this year around the neighborhood.  I think everyone  secretly bagged up their leaves and transported them to our yard, scattering them to make it look like they just fell there.  We have a few maple trees, but this was ridiculous.  Seriously, we had at least twice the number of leaves that we had last fall.  We also had lots of corn husks in our yard.  We did not, however, grow corn or decorate with corn husks.  See what I mean about conspiracy?  The wind was clearly in on it, too.  I hate that crotchety old wind.

And I hate raking.  It's a good workout, there's no denying that.  It's also outside, which makes it vastly superior to cleaning the house.  But it's exhausting and slow going.  If I had to break down raking into its component parts and identify the single most irritating bit, this is the thing that annoys me the most:

Gah!  It bothers me just to see all those crunchy little suckers stabbed on there!  I want my rake tines to stay neat and clean, not gather massive leaf skirts.  I don't know if the rake is actually less effective with all the leaves stabbed onto the tines, but it feels like it is.

Here's the front yard leaf pile (a portion of it) threatening to consume me as a snack:

We raked the entire day.  We only own a quarter acre of land!  The only break we took was to drive 5 miles to Ace Hardwear and get more leaf bags and a new pair of hedge trimmers since Spouse bent the last pair irreparably on the privet.

At least we had some good company.  Tucker was in his glory.  He was outside on a sunny warm day, with his humans for company.  Here he is, apparently looking at the leaf pile from a different perspective while rotating to get sun on his underside:

And of course, the hounds hung out and watched, too.  Simon even kindly peed on one of the leaf piles, just as I was about to get ready to bag it.  Here he is, looking bored and forlorn:

Clearly he is as fond of yard work days as I am.  We didn't just rake - we pruned all the shrubs, cleared out all the gardens, and removed a massive pricker bush that's been ambushing us whenever we went near it.  I have no idea what it was - I hope it wasn't some kind of native species I ought to have left for the well-being of the ecosystem.

The berries are so pretty this time of year, but 11 out of 12 months it was just a scraggly massive lawn-mowing encumbrance with the wickedest thorns I have ever had the misfortune to be stabbed by:

You can see what I mean by "scraggly", and that's with near-constant attempts at pruning the unruly brute.  It's all past-tense, now, though, because a chain saw made mighty quick work of it, although chopping it into bits we could haul to the curb was an incredible undertaking.  The poor Village employees who have to remove all our brush are going to swear a whole heck of a lot when they encounter those thorns.

Anyway, by the time we finished for the evening it was dark, and we were raking with headlamps.  35 well-packed leaf bags, and a pile of thorny brush later:

And we're still not done, because we ran out of bags for this:

I think, against all the laws of nature, the leaves were breeding throughout the day.  I cannot fathom how we could fill 35 bags and still have this much left.  If we're good, we'll bag this before the snow falls.  If not - well, at least the pile is in a different place this year than the one we left through last winter.  I figure the lawn in that spot needs a break.

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The Consummate Suckers

We have a fur problem.  I'm going broke feeding and vetting our furry friends, and do not have enough laps or hands to pet everyone who wants attention at once.  I trip over fast-moving objects continually.  A day after vacuuming there are tumbleweeds of fur again, which grow to incredible proportions. These days I vacuum solely because I am afraid one of those tumbleweeds is going to develop a personality and we'd have another mouth to feed.

The breakdown of the fur problem is as follows:

Of course, we have the basset hounds.  We went to the Humane Association for one dog, and came home with two.  Why?  Because they're so cuuuuute.  And they're litter mates - we don't want to separate them!  And they're special needs but that's okay.  We can work on their extensive behavioral issues, deal with digestive problems, and take care of a stump.

Note to self:  in future remember that if a dog has been available for adoption at a shelter for 6 months, there's probably a reason no one has taken it home before now.  Especially when they're purebreds. 

It took us a year to get Lucy housetrained (and she's still not exactly reliable), there are baby gates in nearly every doorway, Simon has destroyed countless pairs of shoes and thus far one rung on the antique railing, and between the two of them we need new carpets throughout the entire house.  They are unruly (to say the least) when there are guests in the house.  They've injured us countless times by taking off down stairs while we're attached, slamming their hard heads into our noses, knocking us off whatever we're seated on, or all sorts of other exuberant obnoxiousness.  There is no amount of exercise that will wear them out, and no amount of rewarding good behavior will get them to knock off the bad.  When you ask one of them to "come", s/he will calmly look at your hands, and if no treats are detected, s/he will bolt the other direction.

They can't be separated for more than a few minutes without one or the other suffering a nervous breakdown.  They have both been known to engage in spite peeing (i.e. peeing on the side of the bed belonging to the human who has just finally lost his/her patience and shouted at said hound).  They flunked their first obedience class quite dramatically, and I think were allowed to graduate the second time only because the trainer didn't want to deal with them again, despite the fact that she has raised and trained and competed with basset hounds for 25 years.  They drove her nuts.  Hell, they drive ME nuts.

Despite the fact that I want to strangle them on an almost daily basis, I love my dogs.  That we still have them proves that a) we're insane; b) we take our commitments to our pets seriously when we adopt, and c) they got ridiculously lucky that we had lost our old beloved dog and were looking for a new one at the precise time they were at the shelter.  No other humans would have kept them this long, I swear.

So that's the dog factor.

Then, there are the cats.  You've already read about Tucker, who we rescued from a dumpster long ago.  He's destroyed furniture, clothing, bedding, woodwork, and carpeting by peeing on it.  He won a many-years-long fight about whether he gets to go outside by battering at our defenses and whittling away at our nerves, until between the two of us humans we had one nerve left and he was getting on it.

But he's cute.

By the way, he bosses everyone else in the house.  The humans, the cats, and the dogs.

We actively went out and adopted Sneakers (the stripey one below) when our old dog was getting decrepit, because we were afraid Tucker would be too lonely when our old dog died.  Ha.  Tucker hates Sneakers.  She's sweet, but a little off.  No one in the house quite understands her.  She is slowly destroying the wooden railing in the attic by clawing it to pieces, despite the dozen or so different types of scratching posts and blocks available to her.  And she has the most irritating meow conceivable and never shuts up.  We have the Fran Drescher of the cat world.

Our cat Wednesday (the black one) I guess we actively adopted too - my paralegal's brother took in a stray cat that had kittens.  We took the miniature one.  She weighs 6 ½ lbs and is full grown.  To put that in perspective, Tucker weighs 12 pounds and Sneakers (a.k.a. "fatty") weighs 13.  Weenie is the One Good Pet.  She's cute, fuzzy, affectionate, and always in a good mood.  Her only flaw is that every once in a while she'll pee on some random object.  Considering that nearly every surface in our house has been peed on by somebody before, though, I understand her thinking the entire house is a litterbox.

This is Sneakers looking through the space where the railing rung was before Simon ate it:

Mind you, these are not the only three cats we've had.  We also took in one extremely sickly stray who only lived for about a year after we adopted her.  Then there was Maxfield, who was an adorable fluffball of a cat who spent his first six months in our house flailing, clawing and hissing when anyone approached him.  Spouse and I still bear scars from him.  He lived entirely in our spare bedroom for six months.  Spouse let him in one day, scrawny and matted, because "he was just so cute."  Just about the time that he settled in to being the most affectionate squishball of a cat ever, he developed severe urinary tract problems.  We paid for surgery to essentially turn him into a girl to prevent him from blocking, but it was unsuccessful.  I still miss him.  $4,000 dollars later.

So, you ask, why am I going through this list demonstrating our insanity?  Because, now there's Rocky.

Because we're insane.

Rocky is Tucker's boyfriend.  They sleep in an excruciatingly cute pile of paws and tails and whiskers on the porch.  They've been buddies since Tucker started going outside a year ago, but we've never been able to get close to Rocky.  We assumed he was as wild and feral as the rest of the feral cat colony in our neighborhood.  Apparently not.  After a year of coaxing, he actually allowed Spouse to pet him this morning (there was food involved).  Damnit, if we can get close enough to him to pet him, and we're feeding him, then we need to get him to a vet for a checkup and shots and worming and neutering.  I promise, he very obviously needs the last of those items.  And if we're feeding him, petting him, and taking him to the vet, that does rather make him ours, huh?

*sigh*

Well, Rocky, welcome to the family.

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