Category Archives: Sunrises

Some sky shots

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I bought a tub enclosure for the new house Thursday afternoon (Nov 12). This is what I saw as I was leaving.

sundog2

There is a nice sundog on the right. There were no clouds to the left of the sun, so no sundog there. There is a hint of color above the sun which may be a camera artifact, although it seems to appear in cloud areas and (perhaps) not in clear sky. If the clouds had had the right mix of ice crystals, the sundog could have extended up into the clouds above it. The clouds obviously contained mostly hexagonal flat plates, which tend to orient themselves horizontally so that the sunlight passes through them along the hexagonal edges, dispersing the colored light only in limited directions. The “right” crystals would have included a significant percentage of hexagonal columns, which have no preferred orientation and can thus disperse the light into more directions. Anyway, it was nice.

On Sunday morning Leah told me to go onto the deck and see the sunrise.

sunrise16nov2015

I shot this with our little Nikon point-and-shoot. I wonder if the iPhone would have done a better job with exposure, since it seems to have a wider dynamic range. The bright areas might not have washed out.

Catching up on sunrise

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We had some nice sunrises in the first two weeks of February, but I haven’t gotten around to posting them.

This was February 1.

cloudysunrisefeb1You can see the plume from the Euharlee power plant on the horizon. I don’t remember the temperature that day, but on a cold winter night there will typically be a fairly large electric power demand, so the plants will work hard.

This was February 5.

skypano_feb5This is actually a vertical panorama. I couldn’t quite get everything I wanted, so I (actually, Photoshop Elements) stitched two shots together.

This is from February 13.

cloudy sunrisefeb13Since the sun is rising earlier these days, I don’t get out on the deck often enough to catch the sun right at the horizon. I usually see a good sunrise when I’m walking the dogs around the house first thing in the morning. The sunrise changes so quickly that I usually can’t get back inside, grab the camera and get out on the deck in time to get the most dramatic shot. That’s why the sun is so high in the sky in these pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas morning 2014

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christmas 2014
We spent a quiet day on Christmas. Leah is still watching her food to try to prevent further digestive problems, so we didn’t have a big Christmas dinner. We didn’t see relatives or friends until my brother, his wife, and his older son came down on Friday. We expect New Year’s Eve to be about the same.

Leah thinks this sounds depressing, but it really wasn’t.

 

Zeke’s latest experiences off the leash

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Faithful readers know how little I can trust Zeke off the leash. We keep thinking maybe if we try enough times, he’ll learn. So last Wednesday I gave it another try.

I have been working to locate exactly where our new house should go, and to figure out where to put the driveway. On Wednesday I loaded Zeke and Lucy into our side-by-side four-wheeler (it’s a Kawasaki Mule), and rode the few hundred feet to our new lot. It’s literally within sight of our current mailbox, but I take the Mule because I can’t carry a chainsaw, handsaw, axe, loppers, 300-foot tape measure and the rest on foot. As soon as we got to the center of the property, Lucy headed for home. She’s not the pioneer type.

I put a 12-foot leash on Zeke, figuring that if he wandered off, he would get tangled in the woods and couldn’t get far. I thought I could find him when he started barking for help. That worked for a while, but eventually he drifted off uphill into the woods. I didn’t worry much at first, since I really thought he couldn’t get far. After all, I had had to untangle him several times as we walked around. But he was gone, and he didn’t come when I called.

About an hour later I heard Leah calling from the street. We had spoken on the phone and I had told her that Zeke was loose, so she was watching for him on the way back from the dentist. She finally saw him lying in the woods near the front of our property. He limped when he came to her. I came down to the car and we found that he had nearly torn off his right dewclaw. Leah took him home and I packed up and followed.

As soon as I got home I phoned the vet, and they told me to bring him in right away. It was supper time for the dogs, so I offered him an animal cracker. He refused, which I attributed to pain. It turned out it was probably something else all together. It was almost exactly a year ago that Zeke got loose and gorged on something that looked like stew beef when he threw it up. This was a repeat.

Our vet is on the other side of town, about a half hour away. Zeke had started whimpering by the time I got him in the car, so his dewclaw must have been hurting. It certainly looked painful. The vet removed the nail but saved the nail bed; it should grow back. They had to sedate him to do it, so he was pretty groggy on the way back home. When I got him home, I found a double handful of meat that he had vomited up in the back seat. Fortunately he was lying on a canvas tarp, which caught all of it.

He ate a couple of dog biscuits and everything seemed OK. I took the dogs out at bedtime and nothing seemed amiss. About an hour after we went to bed, the sound of Zeke’s claws on the dining room tile woke us up. I put on some clothes and took him out. I was so sleepy I don’t even remember whether he did anything. We went back to sleep, and he woke us up again around 6, which is earlier than us old, retired people get up. I took him out again, and he relieved himself, I think. Before I could get back in bed, Zeke started making the “urk” that signifies that a dog is getting ready to vomit. He was standing in the middle of the bedroom carpet. I grabbed him and tossed him into the dining room, where he promptly threw up way more than another double handful of meat.

This was one of the worst messes I have ever seen, or smelled. I told Leah that if he had done it in the bedroom, we would have had to replace the carpet. The first time this happened I thought the meat he threw up looked too much like grocery store beef to be a wild animal that he had found or killed. But now I have to conclude that that’s exactly what it was. I have seen no sign of whatever it was.

Here’s the bottom line: Zeke’s dewclaw is not giving him any problems, he’s almost over whatever he ate, and he’s never going to wander free in the woods again.

Zeke is a gentle, affectionate, fairly obedient dog about 95 percent of the time, but I think that somewhere down inside, he has a streak of the wild, of the wolf. I probably wouldn’t have been surprised to find that out about a Doberman pinscher or maybe a German shepherd, but Zeke looks too goofy to have a wolf hidden inside. I mean, look at that face.

innocent zekeIs that the face of a relentless predator?

I couldn’t go back to sleep again after cleaning up Zeke’s mess, but at least I did get to see this from the deck.

sunrise4november2014

 

Morning sky

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Leah called me out to the deck Saturday morning to see the sky. This is the way a cold front made its entrance.

 

nikonskypano

This is a panorama made from three shots. Click to enlarge the view.

Saturday was the coldest day of this season. The temperatures were not terrible, but the wind made it very unpleasant to be outside. Saturday night we are supposed to have the first below-freezing low of the season.

Zoe is still missing. Leah is worried that he’s out there somewhere, cold and hurting because he hasn’t had his pain pills. Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely that an animal got him. We’ll probably put an ad in the local paper, but we don’t expect much from it.