Watery Wednesday

     In last week's Watery Wednesday  post, I blogged a 1980 photo of Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.  Being young and energetic back then, my husband and I continued our hike, venturing down the trail to Bierstadt Lake...

     

     I recall the forest there was so quiet, the ground covered with a thick layer of pine needles, and it was free of underbrush, unlike the deciduous woods here in Iowa. From Bierstadt Lake we took a different trail and got a little lost, ending up tired and thirsty and a long ways from the Bear Lake parking area where our car was.  

Visit Bluff Area Daily for this week's Watery Wednesday.    

Drive-by Trees

As we were going through a wooded area on our drive last week I snapped the shutter like mad, hoping for some cool photos.  Many ended up being deleted, but I kept a few.

This next one I cropped to use as my Facebook page's cover for a few days...

 I like these kinds of photos!

Sumac

     All week I'll probably be posting photos from last Friday's drive to Elkader and this is one of them.  I liked the look of the sumac which bordered the roads here and there... 

     Right now its too cold to take the camera outdoors anyway.  Yesterday I watched the Inauguration festivities most of the day.  I enjoyed seeing the Capitol and other buildings.  I've never been to Washington D.C.  My two older kids went there on a band trip in high school.  I should have volunteered to be a chaperone, then I could have went along.  

Barn Charm

Here's a drive-by shot I took the other day, not even realizing it would be perfect to use for today's Inauguration Day Barn Charm  blogpost...

Visit Bluff Area Daily for this week's Barn Charm.

Cattle

Here's another shot taken on our drive to get milker parts the other day...

     I think those are Black Angus beef cattle.  On our farm we have dairy cattle of the Holstein persuasion.  Yesterday morning we had some bad luck with one of our milk cows.  She wasn't feeling good when my husband got to the barn early to do the milking.  He called the vet but before he got there she died.  She had milk fever, something that occurs on occasion in cows that have recently calved.  Try to imagine moving a dead cow out of the barn.  It is rather difficult.  It involved log chains and a nervous me backing the skid loader up per my husband's instructions.  I don't drive the skid loader very often.  We traded for a more modern one last year and it has a heated cab which was nice to be in as our temperatures were in the single digits above zero yesterday morning.
    

Two Seasons

On our drive the other day I snapped a photo of this tree-covered hill, recalling that I'd done the same thing last fall...

Here's how it looked back on September 22...

Weekly Top Shot

     As we drove along the day before yesterday, I stocked up on barn shots.  I decided this one was not quite fit for Barn Charm, but I like the way the old barn is in focus behind the blurred fence.  I don't really understand how that happens, though. When taking drive-by photos, I use my Nikon D40 with the 70-200mm lens attached.  That way I can focus in better on barns that are further away.  Its fun to see what the photos look like!

Visit The View From Right Here for Weekly Top Shot.

Yesterday

Yesterday my husband needed to go somewhere to get parts for the milking machines.  He didn't need to ask me twice to ride along.  It was a chance to take drive-by photos, so why wouldn't I go!  Along the way, we saw scenes like this...

Our destination was Elkader, where we saw the Clayton County courthouse, built in 1878...

Actually, we were kind of lost when we drove by the courthouse.  We couldn't find the dairy supply business we were looking for.  Maybe we should have followed this truck a little further...

We got a kick out of the cows-comin'-at-ya scene!

Skywatch

Photo from earlier this week...

Thanks for stopping by!  

CLICK HERE to go to Skywatch Friday.

Watery Wednesday

I decided to start joining Watery Wednesday  last week because it gives me incentive to search through my stash of old photos.  Here's a shot taken in June of 1980 as my husband and I were hiking around Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.  That's Hallett Peak in the background.  Sorry, I couldn't get that spot on top to disappear in Photoshop and didn't want to crop out the photo's edges.  It was taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera I bought when we got married.  (The photos in yesterday's post were taken with a Kodak Hawkeye camera I received for Christmas one year when I was a kid.  Those are square in shape while this one is slightly rectangular.)

    

 We took this trip to Colorado shortly after my graduation from LPN school and before I started my job at a hospital.  We actually took trips back then in the days before my husband became the sole operator of our dairy farm.  Want to be tied to home?  Get a herd of cows!

Thanks for stopping by!  

Visit Bluff Area Daily for this week's Watery Wednesday.

1977 Trip to St. Louis

     Just call me a blogger blowin' in the wind today, this post having been prompted by another blogger's post.  Recently, Bluff Area Daily  blogged photos taken near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, which reminded me that I had been there once.  On Labor Day weekend in 1977 to be exact.  Here's a photo I took from inside the top of the Arch.  To get up there, we rode in little compartments that had seats in them and I recall that as I got in it seemed like I was climbing into a clothes dryer.

    

     Back home earlier that weekend I had been the maid-of-honor in a wedding and after the reception my husband-to-be and I drove most of the night to get to St. Louis.  We were young and weren't fazed by doing something like that.  We also went to the St. Louis Zoo and on the way home stopped in Hannibal to see Mark Twain's house and toured the famous cave from Tom Sawyer.   Here's the car we drove down there in, my future husband's Pontiac LeMans:

     That's an old-style Iowa license plate.  The car owner's county of residence was indicated by a smaller number ahead of the license number.  Number 9 stood for Bremer County which in our case was untrue because neither of us lived in that county, but the former owner of the car did.  We lived in county number 7.  Does anybody know which county that is?  Nowadays you take your license plate off and keep it when you trade or sell your car.

     Lastly, here's a view of river and road traffic along the Mighty Mississippi.  I decided to remove my future husband who was sitting on that bench on the left side of the photo. Actually, though, he still is part of my life's picture.

Winter Chore Attire

     Drum roll, please!  In this post I will tell you about my farm chore attire in the wintertime.  Over the years, by trial and error, I've learned what works for me.

     My boot of choice is the six-inch Jobber Muck Boot.  Actually, I wear them year-round.  They have the advantage of being quick and easy to get on and off which is handy for me since I go back and forth between the barn and the house quite often.  Since starting to wear these boots several years ago, I no longer get cold toes in the winter.  I do put insole inserts in them for more support.  One pair lasts me about a year-and-a-half.  I don't feel guilty spending the money on them---I wore poor chore footwear for many years and had enough of that.  And, hey, its my chance to make a contribution to the farm expenses that are deducted at tax time!  I've never found any of these particular Muck Boots in stores, so I order them online.   

     My chore coat is a dark brown canvas one from Carhartt.  I bought it several years ago at a farm store.  I think it is a women's coat, but I can't find it on the Carhartt website anymore.  That worries me.  I should have bought two of them back then because when it wears out I will be very sad if I can't find another one like it.  It is car coat length and is very warm and has a hood and is cut longer in the back.  The zipper can be zipped up from the bottom, also, which is helpful when climbing over fences and such.  Before acquiring this coat, I wore insulated coveralls that looked sort of like this picture I found on the internet:

       

     They made me feel claustrophobic, though, and that's why I switched to wearing a coat.  So then what do I wear to keep my legs warm, you may ask.  Well, I wear Cuddl Duds under my chore jeans. They provide warmth in a non-bulky way.  The link leads to a Hanes outlet website.  I don't buy the Cuddl Duds from there, but I do on occasion order things from there or from their catalog---items that I need and can't find in any store.

     Knit headbands around my ears and neck and insulated gloves for my hands finish out my wintertime chore get-up.  Warmth, comfort, and practicality has to take precedence over style, of course.

   

Competition

Yesterday afternoon it appeared the snow in the hayfield was in competition with the clouds in the sky...

Barn Charm

This drive-by shot was taken last week and at the time I held out little hope that it would be usable due to the fact that I had aimed and zoomed very hastily.  It turned out that all this photo needed was for part of another building to be cropped off the left side and a few distracting cornstalks to be removed from the bottom edge.  They drew my gaze away from the main subject.   

Thanks for stopping by!  

CLICK HERE to go to Bluff Area Daily blog for this week's Barn Charm.

The Blinds

    
     Yesterday afternoon I tried to hide from the sunshine.  It was so annoyingly bright and cheerful, beckoning me to come outdoors for a walk, but no way was I going to do that.  It was just too darn cold out there.  

     So after doing the dinner dishes I settled in on the couch and read the Sunday newspaper. Then got sleepy and fell over and took a nap.  Then woke up thinking that I should get busy and look at some blogs.  Then got the camera to see what a zoomed photo of the window blinds would look like.  Then put this blogpost together.  Here's an unzoomed shot, too:

  

     Off and on I was thinking about how much I like my new My Passport portable hard drive that my kids gave me for Christmas.  I had finally opened it and started using it the day before.  I was scared to try it at first, but found out it is very easy to use.  Just plug it into the computer's USB and you're in business.  It didn't take long to copy all the photos on the laptop over to the My Passport.  Its capacity is a terabyte, which is a trillion bytes or 1000 gigabytes.  Its supposed to hold 200,000 photos.  I have a long ways to go to fill it up.
    

Pastel Sky

     This shot was taken yesterday afternoon.  I liked the hint of  pastel color that shared the sky with the clouds.  Liked it so much that I wanted to use it right away instead of waiting for the next Skywatch Friday.  

     We had a bit of a January thaw last week, but now the temperatures are quite cold again.  My fingers were freezing after just a few seconds of exposure while taking the picture.  Plus it doesn't take long for the camera to begin protesting about being put to use out in the cold.  It operates slower and growls while being zoomed and I don't blame it.

Weekly Top Shot

I think I finally figured out what Weekly Top Shot  means!  Sorry it has some unremovable stains and rust, but it was the only top I could find.  I bought it at a garage sale years ago when my kids were little.

Thanks for stopping by! 

 CLICK HERE to go to the blog "The View From Right Here" to find or join Weekly Top Shot.

Skywatch

Earlier this week we had a colorful sunset.  I zoomed in to capture part of it.

Thanks for stopping by.  

CLICK HERE to go to Skywatch Friday.

Food Photos

Well, I couldn't summon the courage to photograph my food yesterday so I borrowed these pictures from the Applebee's website...  

     I ordered the Creamy Parmesan Chicken, shown above, though it didn't come with a block of cheese, of course.  In case you didn't read the previous post, I went out to lunch yesterday with my sister and my mom.  We do that for birthdays.  We often end up eating at Applebee's.  They have a good variety of food to choose from. The last time we were there I ordered the Napa Chicken & Portobellos, shown below.  

     If its your birthday and you mention it to the server, then you get a free sundae, which went to my sister this time.  Mom and I didn't want her to have to eat dessert alone, so we each very reluctantly (NOT!) ordered one of the tiny hot fudge sundaes.  

We had a great time eating and visiting.  Then I did some shopping.  A fun day!

Page of Photos

     

     In the previous post I mentioned the old-style album with adhesive pages that hold the photos.  Big mistake it was to use those.  Our honeymoon pictures have been in an album like that since the late 1970's and  now cannot be removed.  I have to scan whole pages and crop out a photo if I want to use it.

     Here's a page that takes us from a drive-through redwood tree in northern California to the Hanging Lake hiking trail in western Colorado.  In between must be somewhere in Nevada or Utah.

     As soon as I post this to the blog I'm going to get ready to go out for lunch with my sister and my mom.  Maybe I'll get brave and take a photo of my plate of food when it arrives.  I always worry that I'll be hauled off to the mental ward for doing something like that, though.