The Glow......

He has his time limited on the tablet as he would stay on it all day. He can watch movies on it though which really helps to kill time when riding in the car for six hours. We shared the movie "Rio" with him one afternoon on the tv screen and he really liked it. The music made him want to get up and dance, as the various songs were styled after that area of Brazil.

Painted Sky......

The weather patterns this year are giving our state a lot of beautiful sunrises and striking sunsets. It is really gets cold in the night now and the warm up is slow in the day.

Retired For Now......

The boy that powers the train is gone.  It was a toy of our two boys years ago. The next generation has taken it out of moth balls so to speak and is putting on more miles on it.

Have a Hug.......

Our youngest grandson is at the age where hugs are essential.  These pictures of him with his dad best represent his personality.  He definitely can express himself when he faces disappointment but all in all he has such a gentle temperament. He gave his grandparents hugs often with great glee throughout his visit with us. Teddy is one year and a half in age and walking everywhere checking every door and drawer in the house.

Down Under......

Barney had retreated to the safety by being under the dining room table. There was a lot of energetic feet running around and the table seemed to be the safest place to be. But never fear,  the younger grandson can also get under there to join him.

Relax, We Are At Grandma's........

Visitors making themselves at home. They are a bundle of energy but they sure are good kids. They are having fun playing with their dad's ole toys.

Greenhouse Blooms......

We see these flowers used in restaurants in a single vase. Their shapes are such that they look like they are an artificial flower.  It is not, but I think it is a form of a lily flower that are sold in larger bouquets. I told my wife to pick out one while we were at the grocery store.  There were large batches of the bunch flowers.  It was deceiving as when we got home we realized that there were only five stems of a different flower in the bundle. They are still very nice but next time we may have to buy two of them to really get a full bouquet.

If you haven't noticed yet while viewing the photo, I turned the camera sideways to get a good shot of that particular kind of flower. I couldn't figure out at first what I was seeing then I realize it is a side view of the flowers. It is nice to have fresh flowers as the fall winds down and winter sets in on us.

One of my blogger friends says it is an alstroemeria, a Peruvian Lily. It is good to know. I assume that it is grown in greenhouses as our weather in North America probably isn't too kind to it. 

Thanksgiving Morn.....

There is great color coming from the sun's rising in the East. Our view is a cold one as we are at 31 degrees F. The high for today will be 50 degrees F. which will make for a pleasant day for us. I noticed today that if I crop things just right I can project the image as a farm scene instead of suburbia.

Being that this whole area was a farm field of corn and soybeans 16 years ago, it could be a view from the farm.  There is an old house at the top of the hill which possibly could have been the original farmer's home. As a bird would fly east and south. it would run into the Des Moines River valley. The roads from here actually go down into that valley.

Burning Issues......

Turning more orange as it drops its leaves, the burning bush is giving us quite a show. I continue to be amazed that I had not been able to identify this bush until the fall season.  There are a lot of different uses for this shrub in our neighborhood.  Down the street three large burning bushes have been trimmed into large cylinder shapes. Again, I didn't recognize then as that variety until they started to turn their leaves.

As I take Barney outside four or five times a day I see the bush often. As a bonus photo today I want to show you what it looks like looking up our street. Our house sits at the turn in the road and then it goes straight up the hill heading northwest.

Oxalis Staying Warm....

It is a blurry photo but it is a great visual representation of green shapes with stems, enjoying the daylight inside the house.

Outside the window there is a lot of dismal brown of dead leaves and mulch. The rose bush that is very old with its history from our old place, has been planted against the fence.  The shadows of the maple tree blend in with all of the colors making the rosebush hard to see. The former owner has mulched the area with dead sticks. It is an unconventional kind of mulch and will be replaced with something else in the future as the decay.

B & W.......

I see the trend on Facebook is challenging one another to take black and white photos. Everyone just converts a color shot to b and w.  I thought the effect of this one really does create an eerie new world. It is a little warmer day today and I took a walk out to see what is left to do out there. I can see that the leaves will really mow up easily and that can be done later next week after they have truly dried out. The real Canada geese are all around us flying from corn field to cornfield. They also like soybeans and do try to glean anything that is left over on the ground.

Kitchen Clutter.....

We moved away from an old home that had a large built-in buffet that held all our collectibles. A lot of our old things are very old and other things are really not so valuable.  As we move into a new home we are caught overloaded with things that we can't store inside of a cupboard. I am now on my third clutter filled display of things above the kitchen cupboards. The ceiling is a vaulted ceiling so there is  a lot of blank space above our cupboards.  They look ok, but the creator of these displays ,me, am already a little bothered by all of it.  By spring I can see that we will revisit this displaying of things.

September Shots.....

Teddy's legs are a little short for this big wheel but he still likes sitting on it. These shots were buried in my files and this one was taken by our son in their front yard in Illinois.

AJ has grown up fast.  He is sitting along Lake Michigan, if I have my geography correct.  They were visiting a peninsula that is called Door County, Wisconsin. Yesterday's activities shut down my time to take new photos and I never did share these photos of our son back in September.

One Photo Today.....

So I have been getting confused. I am older so I need a keeper.  I shared one photo on this blog yesterday and then continued to do my Creative  Zone post on the end of it.  The one photo a day blog was filled with many photos and lots of words. Today I will stick with this just one photo.  I have been rearranging the art gallery display, already, and hung the blue painting above the arrangement on the bookshelf.  I thought it made a good still-life arrangement.  The wood top of the bookcase looks like it has a haze on it but that was dusted before I took the shot.

Flashy Glass......

Old stuff, that apparently I moved so I would have something to photograph. The glass flue on the left is leftover from a discarded candle stand.  It won't fit the old glass lantern at right because the lamp is so old that it requires a different smaller sized flue. Old bottles can be placed in the trash without any lost to this civilization;s history but one always needs to have an old one hundred year old egg crate with lid to use to put our eggs into from the chickens we don't own.

I snapped this shot to share a story about a stick.  It has been quite a few years ago when this young girl gave me the multicolored, painted branch.  It looked like it had a head on it so she painted a beak and gave it some eyes.  She was a sweet girl that lived up the street and she had decided to give out gifts for Christmas to the special people in her life. That stick could have just as well been from an Egyptian tomb, with the quality of its creation and the symbolism that she saw in the stick.  Sometimes kids do things for their teachers that make them feel special.  She really admired her work of art and I still do today. The little girl was from a broken marriage, living with her dad, and they moved away after a couple of years in our school district. I will keep the stick around to remind me of why people create.

I talked about dividing and overgrown sansivera plant for years. When I finally did so earlier this summer, I put three of them in my antique flower pots. It is like an artistic statement to put the pots in a row and the plants makes it a family. They will be placed into a window soon. The junk on the table behind them are compliments of me. I need to put some more things away and clear that art stand.

We did have frost on the pumpkins last night. Everything was coated with frost and it all did shine in the sunshine this morning. Our pumpkins don't seem to be far enough away from the house to actually freeze. I did notice this morning that my invading vines in the back are being effected by the freezing weather.

My featured sunrise today is actually the reflection of the sky on the front of the house.  The sun comes up behind that end of the house.  The sky opposite the sunrise was showing colors of pink and lavender this morning but I couldn't get a shot. There were more houses in the shot that actual sky as we live down the hill half way.

It is a hodgepodge day for my posting today.  I am showing the clump birch across the street. The house is for sale as the young couple with one small child moved away all in one weekend.  He was the one that took the child to daycare in the morning. They had two beautiful retrievers the same color of Barney but the hair was longer. I never met them and they flew three flags on their front porch telling me they were patriotic and fans of Iowa State University.

The tree would be a bonus for me for this property but the front yard is all very difficult to mow. It was created with a sharp incline from the house to the street with very little walking area across the front of the house. When he would mow it he had to push the mower up and  back it down to get it accomplished. The backyard is a sharp incline down, steep drop from front yard to back into a valley. They did a creative job to get the house into that row across the street. It looks good but is a very impractical lot. I like having the birch to watch as we can see it go through the seasons just like the one at our old house. I do see parts of bark that have blown into our yard from time to time.

I noticed that I have a dog's tail in my shot.  I didn't see that until I got down to the bottom of the photo. I get some interesting photos with a dog attached to me while snapping shots.

It is a spontaneous kind of day today.  I have chores, projects and maybe some shopping in my future.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Morning Skies........

The sun is coming up and the reflections keep changing the clouds colors. The wind is blowing and the clouds are moving around continually.

A few minutes later the view turned to this as the sun is almost up over the horizon. My tree with a dead limb now looks like it has all dead limbs.

Awkward Angle.......

As I start work on another project I found I could catch some shots of it.  It is an old piano stool. The ones where the seat can be raised by turning the seat.  The claw feet seem to be deteriorated to a rough surface not allowing me to see any detail on them. I will try brass cleaner on them but I don't things will turn out very well.   The glass ball is held in the claw by something but I don't know what.

I didn't get a shot of it standing up with its seat inserted down the base.  I know the stool is over 40 years old as that is how long that I have had it.  I am being foolish as it has to be twice that age as it was gifted to me from the same house that I acquired the library table.  My friend said her mother had them in about every room of the house and wanted me to take one away for her. I am not sure that I will restore it to a wood finish. The wood is in pretty bad shape.  I will share photos of it again as I decide and work on its final finish.

Monday's Shot......

Patterns in the Sky.......

As the temperatures drastically move up and down so do the cloud formations keep changing. We have rain moving through this morning so no real clouds formations exist except solid gray. The photo is from Saturday.

Starting the Weekend......

The weather has changed again and we received the cold Arctic air.  Two layers of clouds overlap here while the free floating ones show up in the one triangular clear spot in the sky. A high of 41 degrees F. seems like a heat wave.

On Fire.......

Our burning bush is getting to be more red each day. If cold air helps it to turn we should get a lot red sooner.  Euonymus alatus is the name of the shrub and its higher classification is spindle tree.  Christians tended to relate it to the bush that was burning , as described in Exodus in the old Testament. The shrub has a red berry on it which the birds do love to eat when it gets ripe. The bush is considered poison but my information source doesn't share whether that it is the leaf or the berry.  

Glowing in the Sky........

It was a clear crisp morning yesterday up at the old place, and I took some shots of the silver maple.
The leaves are slow to fall.  I will have to deal with them by next week as it gets colder. The balsam pine continues to get taller each year now bumping into the maple tree.

Frosty Stuff.......

Two pretty common shots of no special things. It is a day of showing informational shots of frost.  It isn't snow, so I am not allowed to whine about it. The pumpkins didn't get a hard freeze but everything was coated with frost. Sparkly grass that really did crunch under foot. When the pumpkins do start to droop I will know to get them off the steps.

Project Image.....

A good composition found from a random shot of my on going project.  An antique library table that had been shortened is getting a whole new makeover. Looking for abstract shots can be easy but getting the composition to work sometimes has to be a lucky accident. Spontaneous shots means that you also don't take time to vacuum the sawdust mess from the carpet.

Red Glow....

It was only for a moment when the sunrise was red like this.  I had glanced up from an early breakfast and saw pink in the sky.  I knew I had to go look immediately as the colors leave as fast as they come.

The pink that I was seeing was this view looking northeast. The top photographic view was southeast. Barney doesn't understand the time change and I stalled getting up with him for a half an hour. He was awake but did behave while waiting for me. It still was dark outside when I took him out. Breakfast was almost eaten by the time this show started up. My wife also ventured out with her camera onto the deck to get some shots.

Resting.....

Coffee, cookie and the remote control makes it the perfect photo of a person seeking comfort. The half priced Halloween cookie is an old one.  I am sure they were made weeks before Halloween and sat on the shelf for a long time. The spider web is a nice design.

Sunrise.....

As the earth keeps tilting I can see that I won't be seeing the sun in the sunrise eventually.  I will see the effects but the sun will be rising behind that row of houses on the right. Maybe I can go to the front porch to see it but there are houses on that horizon too. This was a beautiful cloud formation and those clouds hung around for half the morning making the sky have wonderful patterns that reflected the sun's light. I just now noticed that the sun was rising over by the tree to the left.  My past photos showed the sun behind the tree with the one dead branch.

On the Bridge.....

While driving on the mile long bridge, I took a blind shot. The accidental shot gave me a view of the bridge railing and the reflections on the water. There is some traffic on the bridge most of the times so I had to just open the camera and shoot over my left shoulder, not looking at what the camera was going to catch. I like the capture but regret that I really didn't get the sun into the picture. There is a haze on the left side of the shot because it was really a hazy view.

It was one of those strange sunrises in which the sun became visible part way up from the horizon giving off a sunrise in the sky.  The shot at left was taken an hour later than the above shot and it still was splitting the sky. That is an Iowa pond, a sewer lagoon, that reflects the sky.

The Train, it is a Coming.....

It has been over a year that we took the train ride at the Boone Scenic Valley Railroad.  These are a few archived photos to share today of the experience.

Red Twigs.......

The red twig dogwood shrubs are all been pruned. From garden magazines examples, I know  I could have taken them down closer to the ground. At this height I had shorten them a lot from 7 foot branches. I think that are few of these shrubs that are also the yellow twig variety but I will wait to see if they turn yellow more distinctly before I photograph them. This type of shrub gets brighter in color as the snow starts to fall and the temperatures drop below freezing.