Drat My Camera

 

 

My thanks to Donna for this lovely Tag.

 

Yesterday was my ‘work’ day instead of Tuesday.

Driving along the country road to the farm I was watching out for the pheasants of last week.  The ‘ones that got away’. My camera was ready sitting on the passenger seat, batteries charged to the full, so I drove along in hope.

I wasn’t disappointed as there on a raised verge beside the wall on my left was one lonely cock pheasant.  He froze as my car approached and didn’t seem to know what to do.

‘Photo Shoot!’ I cried out loud to nobody but myself…Lol!

I took one whilst he was stood like a statue but it was from inside the car and through the windscreen.  The flash wiped it out.  I thought ‘next time’ and set off for work.

This silly old pheasant hadn’t got a brain.  Instead of flying up and over the wall it ran down off the banking in front of my car hither and thither..lol!    At slightly over 0 miles per hour I snailed slowly along the road so as not to run the silly ‘Road Runner’ over.

I stopped, it stopped, I stopped it stopped, and I thought…its a stand off.  Make the most of it so I got a hold of the camera again.  This time the photo took, but it was still taken through the windscreen.  It wasn’t too bad I mused.  Then I set off in the hope he would get out the way before I squashed him.  He took flight and landed on the wall parallel with the door on my right side.  I was so close!   Had the window been opened I could have grabbed him without hardly stretching out my arm.  He stood there looking at me all wide eyed, so again I thought..’ wind the window down and grab the camera’ but when I turned to take a picture the batteries dropped out of my camera.  Two days before we left to go on holiday to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland I dropped it and have since had it taped with gaffer tape.  When the camera is switched on the surge of power pushes the blessed batteries out the camera.  The pheasant was still there!!  On the wall ..looking straight into the car at me and I missed it!   ****Bleep!  ****Bleep!  And I’m not practising to be a road runner here either. 

What an opportunity missed.   Oh well!   Next time.   Lol!

Today I’m off out looking for fungii.  I got lots of photos of various fungii last year after the rains of Autumn, so I hope to see a nice variety today.

So for today…be happy.  I know this week has been a sad one in JLand at the loss of dear Penny who we all prayed would ride through her latest chemo’ treatment for leukemia. It was not to be.  I don’t think she would want us to be sad forever.  I for one want to smile and remember that brave lady who still walked down the hospital corridor to keep in touch with us all even though she was so poorly. How much love did she shine out to us all by doing that?  No…I will remember her love and thoughfullness and smile.

Have a good day and stay well and happy.

My quote of the day below..

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions—the little soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of a playful raillery, and the countless other infinitessimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

                       THIS IS BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH. 

                                    DON’T FORGET TO CHECK!

                                                

GOD BLESS!

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My Judith HeartSong’s Artsy Entry Competition entry..

Hello Again!

 I have decided to enter this months Judith Heartsong’s friendly ‘Artsy Entry’ Competition again. I so enjoyed visiting all the other entries last month!

I wrote this last year and have since tweaked it so that it falls in to line with the competition requirements.

We had to create an entry using some or all of the words on Judith’s list.

I have used some of the words she provided and have dotted them about my essay for you to find highlighted in blue.

I hope you enjoy the walk as you look for the words on loan from Judith’s list.  It is one I take regularly all year round with Nature’s various changes to distract me en-route.

Please note I have copywright on all of my entries so please do not copy or save them to your computer.  Thank You.

                                                ***************

                      

 

                                  An Autumn Walk  

                                            by Jeanie Kirkby ©  2006-10-07

 

I see the warmth of summer escaping from the land like a ground oozing wraith.

In the middle distance the lake wears an atmospheric cloud inversion.

Autumn has stepped into the landscape.  With a sweep of her cooling hands, she paints the leaves with copper and gold tints.

Flowers shudder in her presence, maraca shaking their seed pods at her feet.

Berries and nuts ripen too, tossing their sun roasted bodies to the ground in their haste to withdraw from the coming winter.

These ‘tumbling’s’ which I find myself crunching underfoot, are as though a jar of  pebble-like winter toffees has been spilled and scattered around for all those sleepy hollow creatures to devour; through the lean dark days to come.

Squirrels scamper up their larch ladders, like circus clowns on a tightrope, harvesting cones to add them to their cache of nuts for those rare bleak short days when wakening hungrily from their hibernating torpor.

The swallows have left as a squadron, navigating the European landfalls to their African hunting ground; with its beckoning sun and plentiful flies on the wing.  Their summer holiday retreats are still stuck to the eaves of roofs and barns, abandoned for another year.

Skeins of Greylag geese begin to arrive from the Arctic regions to our warmer climes.  Airborne in the high stratus thermals for so long their legs have become strangers to them as they land on the marshes. They tumble forward with an undignified nosedive along the margins of the lake.

The wind enters this scene fitfully.

Now and then it tests the fallen leaves for their flap ability; skirmishing with them along the paths and under the trees.    

Small whirlwinds suck the leaves from the forest floor spiralling them lightly aloft.  Then, just as suddenly, released of this new mode of travel, they skitter like a covey of pheasants at the sound of the hunters gun, change tack again, then glide like goose feathers to the ground.

 

 

A window opens up down through my woodland vantage point, showing more of the lake in the distance.

The mist has begun to shift and rise revealing more in its translucency as the day moves on.

I can see that the lake hasn’t escaped from the testing parries of the wind. 

Small white horses can be seen rearing southwards, away from the prevailing autumn wind whooping down off the high northern fells which are receding to a vanishing point somewhere beyond Grasmere.

 

 

A startling crack of laboured feather like flapping draws my eyes to a pheasant whose feathers camouflaged him so well on the forest floor.   Looking up through the trees, a watery sun flickers leaf and branch shadows down through the opaque shafts of light to the golden, crunchy, sloughing carpet beneath.

Here and there amongst the damp detritus of past storms are rotting limbs colonised by mosses which compete with one another so that they almost create their own isomorphism’s. All living in their own chosen microcosm; sharing the nutrients from the fallen skeletons of previous year’s storms.

These limbs  are wrapped about, as if for protection, by looping barbed wire-like tendrils of brambles, whilst sentry like nettles ward off my reaching fruit picking fingers.

The trees are not alone in their transformed autumnal attire.

Poking out from under each genus of woodland tree is fungi native only to that species and the nutrients which it releases. 

Rust, tan, red, green, blues, blacks, red spotted with white fungi, are all vying for attention as I pass by. Umbrella shapes, phallic, fluted and frilled. There are even some who turn their rims up to show their gill like undersides; as though stood on the same warm air grid as Marilyn Munro in her famous floating dress scene.

 

They slide slowly into the light, like snails, through previous years of wet mulched leaves, revealing all in their moment of glory; whilst offering their spores to the damp air.

 

In the surrounding suburban gardens, which I pass on my outward and return journey, nasturtiums are one of the last splashes of vivid colour to offer their faces and leaves to the autumnal shivers.   Their long saucer shaped leaf stalks trembling in the wind like the many plates balanced on top of the tall canes of performing jugglers.

 

 

Back home, and in the warmth, I look out my window to a spangled shimmer of sun bright water, which breaks the mirrored reflections of the plants and trees protecting our pond from the worst of the elements. Water lily’s slip slithery, skeletal and translucent rotting leaves lower into the dark water, joining the sluggish fish lurking closer to what’s left of the summer’s warmth in the depths.

The rain arrives washing the laurel and rhododendron leaves to a glossy wet slicked greenness. The uncut grass of the lawn has had a last spurt of growth; Foxing the gardener who has put his lawn mower away until next spring.

 

Its Harvest Festival time and there is much to rejoice in Nature.

 

Have a lovely day.

Jeanie xx

 

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