ABC Wednesday: P is for Pairs

Proud Pretty Preening Primping Pairs

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Nature Notes: Turtle Time

I was surprised to see so many turtles at Shelley Lake this weekend.

I usually don't see turtles sunning themselves until late May or June.

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Our World Tuesday: My Green World

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Today's Flowers: Spring in my hood

My street is a court and doesn't have a sidewalk but one of the parallel streets to mine has a sidewalk and leads to a park. I walk by this garden all the time but particularly drool over it in the spring. The guy in the red shirt was doing some cleanup work in his garden. I usually don't photograph people but I decided it wasn't too much of an infringement of his privacy to get his back in the shot.

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Combination Post: Photohunters and The Weekend in Black and White

To combine the two photohunt themes (traces and ink) I manipulated a photo using graphic tools (tracing as well as pin and ink). I figured tracing a photo worked for traces and the pin and ink tool worked for ink.

Below is the same photograph I used for the photohunt but this is what it looks like as a regular black and white shot for the weekend in black and white.

Last, the shot in full color. As a rule I'm not happy with the results when I try manipulating a photograph in a graphics program. However, in this case I like the way the first picture worked out using the graphics tools.

Click here for the traces photohunt, here for the ink photohunt, and here for the Weekend in Black and White.

SkyWatch Friday: Mackerel Sky and New Leaves

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ABC Wednesday: O is for Ordinary

As I mentioned when I featured creative mailboxes for M day, I have an ordinary mailbox. However, now that my oversize, outlandish, opulent, some might say outrageous, azaleas are in bloom they create a flower wall around my mailbox making it photo worthy for O this week.

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Nature Notes: Natural Lawn Mowers

Canadian Geese pitch in to mow grass the natural way. They also provide nature's own fertilizer which isn't necessarily all good until the manure has broken down over time.

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Our World Tuesday: Many Walking Choices

I have a lot of choices when walking from my house in the neighborhood and on the greenway trails. I always looks for the wisteria this time of the year.

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Today's Flowers: I held my breath Wednesday Morning

The temperature dipped below freezing Tuesday night. I held my breath when I opened my driveway door on Wednesday morning but the spring flowers didn't seem to mind the cold. Some of the azaleas are starting to look a little worse for wear after a few cold nights but overall it is a magical spring. The azaleas at the bottom of my driveway are a bit frazzled by the cold but as you can see, they are way too big to try to cover at night. Even the smaller azalea under my dogwood tree is past the point where I try to cover it. We are close to our average last frost date and since so many flowers are early this year, I'm hoping we won't have too many more nights below freezing.

 

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Photohunters: Indigo Still Life

An indigo frame around a harvest still life I took many years ago is all I could think of for a combo photohunt. I found indigo in the color options I have in an old graphics program when framing the still life. When I converted to a jpg file, the color wasn't true to what I saw when I created the file in CorelDraw. I decided it was close enough to indigo to let it slide.

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The Weekend in Black and White: Pollen and water

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SkyWatch Friday: the bluest blue

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ABC Wednesday: N is for Northclift

Northclift Drive is a street in Northclift subdivision near where I live in a North Carolina town in the triangle area and this road ends on North Hills Drive.

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Our World and Nature Notes: Beautiful second week in April

One of the noticeable nature notes for me during the second weekend in April was that the gulls have all left Shelley Lake. Although there are gulls in central NC, where I live, year round the ones at the lake near my house always leave during the spring and return in the fall. There were geese, ducks and cormorants at the lake and I heard the heron. The cormorants usually leave in the spring or summer but they are still at the lake. If you look closely at the bottom right shot, my neighbor's cat was hiding in my azalea bush. Since birds nest near there I hope the cat doesn't annoy nesting parents. The only non nature shot in this group from my world was of a softball game at my neighborhood park this weekend. My plan is to combine nature note and Our World Tuesday unless I have a post for Our World that isn't mostly nature shots.

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Today's Flowers: Springtime in my neighborhood

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Photohunters: Ginormous Stones

I think the rocks at Linville Falls, NC qualify for ginormous stones.

In another stream in the NC mountains, I think the stepping stones across the water are ginormous in comparison to the thousands of tiny stones at the bottom of the creek.

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The Weekend in Black and White: A gull and her reflection

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SkyWatch Friday: Second Week of April

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ABC Wednesday: M is for Mailbox

  
There are as many different decorative mailboxes in my neighborhood as there are minds to come up with them. My mailbox isn't included because it isn't anything special until May when my azaleas bloom and cover it with blossoms. I think my favorite of these is the top far right hand one where they built a little stone house to surround the mailbox. That mailbox house also has a small garden bed which will be pretty when the flowers bloom.

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Our World Tuesday and Nature Notes: Spring is in the Air

 The first montage is of nature shots I took in my yard and neighborhood over the past six days. The brown thrasher was calling for a mate in my tree. The bottom right shot of flower petals on the ground almost look like snow to me.

The second montage is of a walk at Fallon Park this Saturday which is in the neighborhood where I grew up. The field of buttercups reminded me of my childhood when we would make long necklaces in this park with the buttercups. From what was left on the picnic table I'm guessing some children picked more than they needed for necklaces. I rarely go to this park because there are so many parks near where I live now but whenever I visit someone or have an errand in that part of town I like to check out the old neighborhood park.

The last montage is from a walk at Shelley Lake, which is in the subdivision where I've lived for the past 30 years, that Bill and I went on today (Sunday). I would have missed the deer if a helpful man hadn't told me where they were. Sometimes people see my camera around my neck and will tell me about various things. Once someone told me where to look for a juvenile bald eagle and people often mention where the herons are. The cormorant in the shot above the deer stayed in that posture for a long time. The top left shot in the group below is of an area of wetlands and generally has a lot of water but it looks like it was dredged for some reason I can't guess. A lot of water birds nest near that area and I hope the dredging didn't upset them.

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