GRACE UNCENSORED

sunday

yesterday i figured that i was already out of things to take pictures of, but then i looked out the window and there were a bunch of geese in the yard.

when mollie and i went outside the geese started to saunter towards the lake, of course.  that’s why all their backs are to us.

i like this picture because there’s that diagonal line of geese in the water.  plus on the lower left there are just those two little goose heads sticking up.

the goose on the right looks like it’s bowing.

by this time almost all had scurried down to the water.

and suddenly, the remaining geese took off!  i think this my most favorite picture i’ve ever taken.

and they head out over the lake…

and there they are, swimming along, out of harm’s way; they won’t get eaten by me and my ferocious dog.

here are the geese who had been in flight, and in back of them, more geese, and then all those snow geese.

we’re supposed to have lots of snow tonight and tomorrow morning, and then gusting winds.  but i’ll believe it when i see it.

ok then,

monday grace.

the perils of reading

i’ve been in a pretty good mood lately, nothing to worry about, and more importantly, nothing crazy in my head making me worry for no good reason.  i’d even be so bold as to venture that my mood has actually been full-on good, not just pretty good.

but then last night i did a lot of reading - news news news.  did you know that the definition of poverty in this country is based on a model determined in the 1950’s?  so that makes lots more people living in poverty than the government reports, and there are many many people in horrible trouble and they can’t get support from the government because they have too much money to be defined as in poverty.

first it was toyota gas pedals sticking, now they’re saying that toyota priuss have something wrong with the brakes.  picture the scenario where a camry is barreling along way too fast because the gas pedal is stuck, and they encounter a prius who can’t brake…

the tea party.  sarah palin.  i’ve been trying to avoid reading anything about either, but i finally read about the latest big meeting of tea partiers.  did you know that at the big convention where she spoke, the guy who organized this particular branch of the partiers decided to turn it into a for-profit organization and charged the 600 attendees $600 apiece? i couldn’t bear to listen to any of palin’s speech but i did read her line addressed to obama, it was something like “how’s that change-ey, hope-y thing going for ya?”  I have this horrible fear that because there are just so many stupid people in the world, somehow she’ll get nominated.  sarah palin in the white house is simply too insane and horrible to think about.

i also read a big article about medicaid and medicare and how if one spouse has to go into a nursing home for a long, long time, and they can’t afford it, in order to qualify for medicaid, the person would have to “spend down” all their assets dwindle down to $2,000 before they can qualify.  another alternative is that the spouse not needing care would have to divorce the spouse in need so that that person could qualify.

then i read about how in order for your brain to keep working you need to keep sharp and the article had some little tests to see how you’re doing.  i didn’t even have to think about a couple of the puzzles for more than a minute and figured them out and that made me feel smart, but then there were a couple of others that i didn’t even understand what they were asking.

brain shrinking.

at the library a few weeks ago on the display in front were a bunch of mysteries.  i picked up one of them, and it was called “monsieur pamplemousse,” about a former police detective in paris who now works for a guide that’s like the Michelin food guide.  he goes different places and rates them, but then there’s always some mystery to be solved.  there’s lots of talk about french food (i can figure out many of the french dishes that  he talks about), and the places he visits sound interesting.  i read one book, and then checked out a bunch more in the series.  they’re not exactly deep reading but they’re fun.  he has a dog named Pommes Frites (french fries). Pommes Frites goes everywhere with Pamplemousse, and gets to go to restaurants with him and stays in hotels, and i keep thinking what would happen if Mollie was allowed to do that.

the author of the series is Michael Bond, who also wrote the wildly popular “Paddington Bear” children’s book series.  i checked out a paddington because it was so long ago that i read it, and i fell in love with that funny bear.  The stories are really funny; paddington gets into all kinds of silly trouble and then everything is all right again and he always, always comes out on top.  there are cute little illustrations and paddington reminds me of Shadow, who i continue to miss.

I keep saying to myself that i  might write a children’s book, and that’s why i’m now trying to read every single paddington, but really, they’re just a lot of fun to read.

so that’s how i’m counteracting all the real-world things getting me down.  if you see a middle-age woman wearing a pink knit cap with “obama” written on the front wandering around in the children’s section of the library, that’ll be me.

oh, and “pamplemousse” - it means grapefruit.  i found this out the other day because somebody had a fancy candle with the description in both french and english written on it, and there it was, “pamplemousse.”

ok then,

sunday grace.

painting cures all

i FINISHED THE PAINTING the bathroom.

except, of course, i really didn’t.  i thought i did, but then i looked at the room for the 100th time and realized that i forgot one side of one of the doors.  but it’s mostly done; the main parts are done.  done.

i just turned on the super bowl and it’s the 3rd quarter and i just saw some really good ads.  there was a kind of weird one about the census, of all things, with a bunch of funny actors including ed begley jr.  it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense - i wonder if the people who have been watching/drinking for hours now understood it.  maybe you need to be drunk in order to get it.

then there was a cute ad featuring a life-sized sock monkey, robot, teddy bear and some big plastic red thing that i couldn’t identify.  they all went to vegas in a KIA and it was quite entertaining.

ok, so, here are my photos from yesterday.  you may have noticed that i’ve suddenly started posting more photos on here, and i’ve been better about writing in general, and now my own personal goal is to try to post a different lake or outdoor photo every day.

i feel that this goal might be too great, but it seems like a good idea right now.  if there was just an easier, quicker way to get the photos from the camera to the website…

first, kevin took this picture of mollie in the office.  can you tell she’s losing weight?

yesterday it was sunny, cold and windy.  it was supposed to snow FIVE INCHES on thursday night, but that didn’t happen at all, or at least only barely.  all the ice was gone.

mollie marches resolutely up the hill.

even though it was warm, it was really windy - you can see the cover on the table blowing.

the snow geese were back and i had to take a couple pictures.

my personal goal for the week is to see “up in the air.”  it appears that many other interesting movies are coming out now but i just want to see one.  to start with.

ok then, good luck getting through monday,

sunday night grace.

friday

here’s what it looked like out the window on friday morning:

the woodpecker clearly wasn’t intimidated by the projected HUGE SNOWSTORM.  he didn’t mind a little rain.

i ventured outside when the rain stopped.  it was windy, but not that bad.

this is the inlet in front of our neighbor’s house.  i liked the way there was the water then the slushy ice then the ice.

not swimming weather.

the snow didn’t really start seriously falling until last night, after i’d arranged for everybody to go out for pizza.  kevin was surprised that we were going out; he thought i meant we were going to order pizza.  because of the many many accidents he saw when working the road many years ago, he doesn’t want to go out in bad weather at all.

it wasn’t THAT bad…except that the roads hadn’t been plowed yet because it all happened pretty fast.  “you could go a little slower if you want,” i said.  when the road is snowy i usually go about one mile an hour, and he was going about 30. “the speed limit is 40 here,” he said, and we had a discussion about that because i said i was sure it was 30 and i ALWAYS went the speed limit along that stretch of raod.  he just kind of chuckled.  luckily he can’t give me a speeding ticket.

we managed to make it out to the pizza place and then home safely and i said I’M NOT GOING OUT ANYMORE.

but then this morning, i was sitting here and realized that if i left RIGHT THAT MOMENT i’d make it in time for a class at the fit club.  so i bolted out the door and the road was a SHEET OF ICE for a few miles.

one mile an hour.

now, painting painting painting today, and the end is in sight.

ok then,

saturday grace.

not so much snow…

there was a 100 PERCENT CHANCE OF SNOW!  i mean, wouldn’t you agree that’s a pretty high percentage?  but instead of snow, last night it rained, all night long.

and this morning, more rain, then a short period of freezing rain which looked bad, but it stopped and then there were big fluffy snowflakes.  but right now it’s just barely snowing.  so maybe we’ve been spared all the bad weather.  plus the lake isn’t frozen anymore, but it’s pretty choppy out there and i definitely wouldn’t want to be out in a boat.

of course, the day isn’t over yet…

meanwhile i didn’t make myself go running in the not-so-nice weather today.  mollie is disappointed but i’m pretty happy about it.

not a lot was going on out on the lake yesterday.  i took some pictures with my phone after mollie and i went running.  it was cold and windy and i wasn’t thrilled to be outside, but of course mollie enjoyed herself thoroughly.  but i had the  satisfaction of knowing that there wasn’t a big chance of the running happening today.

sometimes i think about that - being a dog, mollie has no idea what’s going to happen next.  at any minute we might say “let’s go for a walk, mollie!” and her day is suddenly made.  or better yet, we might go IN THE CAR, followed by a walk, or nirvana, going to petsmart where she gets to smell so many delicious things plus she might get to sniff other dogs.

anyway, yesterday, grey grey grey.  here’s a lone and lonely duck sitting out on the ice, which was more icy yesterday than the day before.

see, the snow was almost gone.   underneath that ice on the rocks is where the raccoon was hanging out, we think, before the ice melted.  when it was frozen solid covered with snow we could see tracks leading under the rocks.  mollie is still sniffing around for the dead goose.

i took this with the phone in order to make a panorama.  even though my phone looks very low-tech, it takes good pictures.

ok then,

friday grace.

NOT GULLS, YOU MORON!!!

some nice person named darla left me a comment saying that all those white geese weren’t gulls, they’re SNOW GEESE.  i thought it was very nice of her to point this out to me, but since i don’t know darla i decided i’d better verify it with jim, who i know knows EVERYTHING about all birds and he said, yes, they’re snow geese.

well, he didn’t actually SAY that, he texted it to my phone, because my sister and brother-in-law pretty much mostly just communicate via text-messaging.  he also wrote “they make a higher-pitched honk (almost like a whistle).”

i wouldn’t have ever known that all that noise they were making was a HIGHER-PITCHED honk.  i assume it’s higher-pitched than the honk of a regular, non-snow goose?

darla also commented that there might be some ROSS’S GEESE in there.  i wonder what one of those looks like?  and what kind of honking they do?

I’m woefully ignorant, about so many things…the other night i was playing this game on the website freerice.com.  it’s a vocabulary game, and when you guess the correct meaning of a word they then (allegedly) donate some rice to people in need.  it’s a fun game plus you’re doing good for somebody when playing, and you should check it out.  i usually do pretty well until they increase the challenge-factor and all of a sudden they’re words i’ve never seen before but even then i can sometimes guess correctly.

but then the other night i saw that there are other categories, like chemistry and math and geography and naming world capitals.  of course i sucked at chemistry and was pretty pathetic at math; i’d already known this about myself.  but now i know that i DON’T KNOW WHERE ANYTHING IS.  it’s a miracle i can find my way across town.

it was multiple choice, too, which should have made it easier - unless you’re CLUELESS about the places.  it kept showing the part of the map where norway, sweden, the netherlands and denmark are located, and one of the countries was highlighted and you had to pick which one it was.

because it was so late at night and i was so tired (yes, and RIDICULOUSLY IGNORANT about where anything is!!!), not only did i guess wrong, but they kept giving me the same question and i continued to guess wrong and i know that right now i could not tell you which one is which.

because i was doing so badly the questions got easier and easier, and finally MEXICO was highlighted. YOU’D HAVE TO BE REALLY REALLY DUMB TO NOT KNOW WHERE MEXICO IS.

at least i know where mexico is.  but don’t expect me to pick out malasyia or thailand or turkmenistan (or to spell them correctly).

because kevin is now taking not one but TWO classes at lincoln land, i’ve been (very very slightly) thinking about taking some kind of class.

but now it is clear that instead of taking a community college class i should just GO BACK TO JUNIOR HIGH.

that’s where i should have learned the geography.  somehow because i changed schools a few times, i never really had any geography classes.  do they even have geography class, or is it part of some other class?  hmm, like what other class, grace, like french?

at least i don’t have to go back to junior high.

ok, i must go to bed now so i can avoid looking at the IMMINENT SNOW FALLING.

ok ok ok,

woefully ignorant grace.

BUNNIES!

we took these photos with my phone on saturday night and i forgot to post them.  we went to dinner at tim and gena’s, and they have three amazingly soft bunnies in addition to their lovely sparkly-teethed sweet and entertaining dog Shiloh.

they let us hold the bunnies.  i guess the proper word isn’t really “let” because we weren’t all WE REALLY WANT TO HOLD THOSE BUNNIES!   but gena and tim encouraged us to hold the bunnies so we did, because how often do you get the chance to hold a bunny?  not often, at least not for me.

here’s me holding this GIANT BUNNY, whose name happens to be Big Bunny.

we’re pretty sure this bunny that kevin is holding is Yoda.

big bunny kinda looks like he wants to escape from my arms, doesn’t he?  they kept telling me that big bunny NEVER EVER lets anybody hold him as long as i held him.  yeah, i have the magic touch with the bunnies.

big bunny seems calmer here; maybe i had him in a really tight grip so he couldn’t get away?

yoda appears to love kevin quite a bit.

in addition to a delicious home-cooked dinner plus holding fluffy soft bunnies, we also played WII BOWLING plus SCENE IT on tim’s XBOX.  tim is what you’d call a GAMING FANATIC.  he also has play station plus i imagine millions of games for each one of these things.

i have to admit that the “scene it” was pretty cool - it’s a game about movie trivia, and the xbox version has all kinds of different questions including clips from actual movies.  it’s very clever and creative. the bowling was fun too, plus there was the bonus of having a WEIGHT-FREE pretend bowling ball.  when we went bowling on new year’s eve day, even though i used the lightest kiddie ball i could get my hands on, it still felt really heavy after a while.

gena rocked at the WII bowling - she did this funny little move where she kicked her leg out every time she let go of the “ball,” and she got multiple strikes in a row.  i think it’d be funny to see if that worked when bowling for real.

i could be doing some more painting of the bathroom right now, but my arm kind of feels like it’s going to fall off.  i had to give massages after painting today, and i have to give some massages tomorrow, so maybe i’ll take a break from the painting.

right now i’m just sitting around waiting for the HUGE SNOWSTORM they’re saying we’re going to have.  oh brother is all i have to say about that.

ok then,

thursday night grace.

many many gulls

yesterday, furiously painting the bathroom, i came into the living room on my way to the basement to find a paint container.  i looked out the window, and all the gulls in the world appeared to have landed on the lake.  here’s what they looked like from the deck.

i started to walk down towards the water, and it was amazing how loud they were.

they just kept coming in and settling…

here’s a panorama so you can see all of them, plus the geese over there on the right.

as mollie and i got closer to the water, the birds starts to rise up.  the noise was incredible.

louder and louder as more and more of them took off.

finally, here, i think they were all in the air.

higher in the air, and they all swung around facing the direction that they’d come from.

they started settling again, further away from this shore.

and they continue to drop out of the sky onto the ice.

…and almost all of them are settled in again, at a much safer distance from me and mollie.  just in case one of us was going to try to swim out there and get them.

it was sunny again yesterday, and grey today.  no gulls at all in sight.  there’s more ice down next to the dock, even though it’s supposed to get up into the high 30’s today.

and i’ve been putting off returning to the painting way too long, i must get back at it.

i hope you get outside today because of the potential snow tomorrow accompanied by falling temperatures.  theoretically i’ll take mollie for a run this afternoon.  right now she’s very happy to be curled up on the couch.

ok then,

thursday already grace.

yesterday

it was gray yesterday, but today the sun is out.  there are still gobs of geese out on the lake right in front of the house, and down the way, but i’m not going to take any more pictures because we’re in the process of remodeling the bathroom and right now, as i type, i should instead be PAINTING.

but it’s nice to sit here for a few minutes before i plunge into it.  but i need to hurry up and get it done, because kevin can’t put the new floor down til i’m done painting, then he has to put in the new sink.  and i need my bathroom back!

so, quickly, here are some of the many pictures i took yesterday morning of all those darn geese.  i liked it that there was water and ice both, and some of the geese looked like they were walking on water.

the orange and the potato used to be somewhere out there.  they’re on the bottom of the lake now, and i’m sure they’ll start growing pretty soon.

i wish this photo was bigger, but you can see the ice floes in front of the geese.

i love this with the two geese front and center who are facing in opposite directions.  i kept trying to take a really tight zoom shot, but the camera just wouldn’t stay still enough.

i like this one because there are those upside-down geese in the top of the frame.  plus of course the goose walking on water.

mollie could still smell the dead goose from the day before, and when i turned around she had walked out on the ice!  very bad dog - the ice was very thin.

i yelled at her, and up she flew like a shot.

i was surprised to see winnie out on the dock.  he’s been going crazy staying inside, but it has just been too cold and snowy for him.  i guess he figured he’d make an attempt since mollie and i were out for such a long time.  but almost right after he got there, amy let numie and noodle out in their fenced-in yard and they were barking like crazy.

here he is, about to flee.

as he ran up the hill he started to puff up.

his tail is still really puffy.  at least he got outside for a few minutes.

today, though, it is supposed to be in the 30’s.  but i won’t be going out anymore because I MUST PAINT!  RIGHT NOW!

this morning at the fit club a woman said it’s supposed to snow 3-5 inches on thursday.  i’m hoping she just made that up.

ok then,

vey busy wednesday grace.

the orange of the lake…

someday, when we’re very very old, there will be a huge orange tree growing right out of the lake not too far off our shoreline.  people will drive up in their fishing boats and their power boats and their pontoons and canoes and waverunners, plus in whatever new type of water vehicles that might have been invented by then, and they’ll marvel  at the orange tree growing so tall right out of the lake.

and if you have a very good memory, you can tell your grandchildren, “that tree was planted by grace.”

on saturday, the lake had completely thawed.  the water was full of waves and it must have been very, very cold, because on sunday morning, it was all covered with ice again.

“it can’t be THAT thick,” i said, and went down to the dock to investigate.  on the way down the hill i spotted an orange sitting in the snow.  we had thwoen it in the compost bin a while ago and somebody dragged it away.  i picked it up and carried it down to the edge of the dock and threw it as hard as i could onto the ice.

it didn’t even make a dent.  it hit the ice and skidded along the top.

the ice was THICK, and it happened overnight.

later that day mollie and i went down to the dock again, and this time i decided to try breaking the ice with a potato.  you might recall that frozen potato that was sitting outside the window, the one that neither the birds nor the raccoon was interested in.

once again, i threw it hard (relatively speaking, of course), and once again, not even a dent.  it too, rolled right out onto the ice.

and there they sat.

the orange is on the right; the potato, on the left.

the orange.  it was interesting that the top had been all frozen and gray, but the bottom, the part that was buried in the snow, was still bright orange and looked perfectly fine.

the potato, very hard.  i have to confess that i hoped that since they didn’t sink, that the geese or maybe some ducks or somebody out there would want to come over and have a lovely orange or potato snack.  but no.

sunday was nice because the sun was out.  today it has been gray gray gray all day, as it is most days here in the winter.  but the blue skies and the billowing smoke even made the power plant look scenic.  i couldn’t decide which of these pictures i liked better, so included them both.

i like this first one because i like the inclusion of the shoreline on the left, plus i like the big panorama of the lake.

i like this one because the mirrored image of the smokestacks seems better, plus i like the geese flying.

that shape there in the foreground?  a dead goose.  when we first saw it on sunday mollie was quite excited and wanted to go out on the ice to look at it.  it looked like maybe it had gotten stuck in the ice, but yesterday when we found it in the yard we realized that wasn’t the case.

poor dead goose.

the rest of the geese seemed to be having a great time.  that one in the middle, a little off to the right, looks like it’s skating.

as we watched, the geese kept taking off and more of them showed up.  i tried to capture it, but it’s hard with a digital camera.

i started shooting right up in the sky and have a few photos that are just perfectly blue and empty.  this is the only one featuring geese that wasn’t fuzzy.

i took yet more pictures this morning - it’s funny how that now that it’s over 20 degrees, it feels pretty warm outside.  this morning the geese were right in front of the house.

i’ll post those soon.  later today, even, with any luck.

ok then,

grace on tuesday.