2 Things Challenge: Venture/Night

The 2 Things Challenge this week was Venture/Night.  The definition of venture includes some degree of risk.  

A couple of years ago I took a photography class on alternative lighting and it included several night shoots.  Trails of car lights are standard fare for such shoots, but several people commented on the risk I took setting up the tripod so close to the traffic, so maybe this was a "night venture."

On the way home after another night shoot, I tried shooting out the front window as I was driving, . . . alone, so maybe there was some risk involved there too.  If you want to do this I would recommend that someone else drive and you do it as a passenger.  This was the last shot I took as I went through THE "downtown" traffic light in Columbiana.  If you look close you can see the signs for M&F Bank and the Chevron station.  The twist came from rotating the camera, not a rollover accident.

The Plague

I mentioned in my last post the stresses and turmoil that people on the farm face.  One of those is that, although they may be closer to nature than most of us, they are also more subject to the whims of nature and the weather.  

This summer the farm in Pennsylvania was hit by a plague of grasshoppers/locusts.  While maybe not of Biblical proportions, they were quite destructive to the very localized areas they hit, including the farm.  This one is munching on one of my mother-in-law's hosta plants.

 

They did not eat everything is sight, but were somewhat selective.  They ate so much of the grass in the hay field that my brother-in-law must consider selling several head of cattle because he won't have enough hay to feed them through the winter and can't afford to buy more.  Just a few weeks ago this was a very healthy green lilac bush.  It, along with the crab apple tree, a dogwood, and many others, is now stripped bare and we don't know if it will survive.

They ruined the garden too.  Corn was stripped to the stalks, and they may have even eaten some of the stalks.

I believe this is the remnants of the potato vines.  Hopefully the potatoes had developed enough that they can get something of crop when they dig them up for harvest.

While comforting in a black sort of way, the story was told that they also ate some of the poison ivy and as a result died.  I'm not sure how true that is, since dead ones could be found everywhere, but at least some of the poison ivy was fought back.

2 Things Challenge: Peaceful/Patterns

The 2 Things Challenge this week was Peaceful/Patterns.  For someone who has spent most of his life in or near fairly large cities, the pastoral setting of the farm can seem like a very peaceful, simple way of life, and even influences where I live today.  We had a visit of a few days last weekend to my wife's family on the farm in Pennsylvania.

Below are a few patterns from our brief visit, some peaceful, and one chaotic.

By the way, those who live this supposedly peaceful, simple life on a day to day basis might argue that it is itself full of just as much stress and turmoil as the big city life, just different.  More on that in the next few days.

Carved?

A little detail I saw on an antique mantel Sunday.  I thought it was carved at the time (it was kind of dark in there), but studying the photo I now believe it is a plaster molding.

2 Things Challenge: Music/Control

The 2 Things Challenge this week was Music/Control.  They control all the music in the contemporary church service using the dozen or so slides, scores of push buttons, and hundreds of little knobs on the sound board.  I have not figured much of it out yet.

What's for supper?

Salad with grilled chicken and cashews, three cheese sour dough bread, and a glass of Chilean Chardonnay.  Not bad.