I hate snow. Even when we only get an inch or so like we did last night, I hate it. I even hate it when it makes everything look all pretty and picturesque and winter wonderlandy like this morning. I just hate snow!
Hey snow, I got your winter wonderland right here. Jerk.
Here are some pictures of fallen trees and rocks and stuff in the woods behind the house.
Wasn’t that fun? Everything was in Manual Mode, but really… it was sort of faux shutter priority. I set the aperture as open as it gets for the lens and just adjusted the shutter speed to get the light meter in the camera to the right setting. I should have used the light meter app on my phone to give me suggestions rather than just doing it myself. I don’t know what I am doing, but I have to assume the light meter does. So there.
Now I have to figure out what the next pointless photography project will be. Also. What does Exposure Compensation do, and how do I use it? That’s my YouTube tutorial project for tonight.
Pretty sure the line of rocks marks the property line. Or maybe it did at some point in the past. Something like that. Whatever.
You know how when you live in the woods you often hear noises coming from somewhere in the trees and you can almost never see whatever it is that’s making the noise?
Why is it, when you go outside in the daylight, that noise always sounds like a squirrel or a chipmunk or something small enough that you can step on it and put it out of its misery, but when you go outside at night that sound always sounds like a deer, or a coyote, or a bear, or a gorilla, or a manbearpig or a Targaryen dragon?
While you ponder that, check out the moon. iPhone astrophotography and shit.
My beloved wife ordered some groceries through instacart today. In the spirit of social distance I like to wait 5-10 minutes after the delivery dude arrives just to make sure he’s not going to accidentally turn around and come back again. Paranoid? Hells yes, but who cares.
When I went out onto the steps to bring the bags in their was a little fluffy tailed rodent sitting on top of one of them. Mammalia Sciuridae… I think… or is it Sciuridae Mammalia? I don’t remember high school biology at all. Whatever, it was a little bastard muthatruckin’ squirrel. He was sitting on top of one of the grocery bags which was open at the top to expose a loaf of bread. Squirrel bitch had his nose in a tiny little hole in the plastic bag the bread was in that he had gnawed out and he was munching on a teeny tiny morsel of bread. I hate that little shit with every fibre of my being, but even I have to admit that it was super cool.
So that loaf of bread never came into the house and it somehow lead to a second story involving wilderness adventures.
I brought in the rest of the groceries, wiped everything down like a good quarantined doobee, washed my hands, and then went back out for the bread. I took it into the back yard and threw it all over the place. If the prick squirrel wants it, the prick squirrel and all his prick squirrel buddies can have it. I took a picture because I am the undisputed king of all things nerd.
So there I was, out in the back yard admiring the view while the temperature slowly ticked it’s way up toward 60 degrees of Spring bliss. As is often the case these days my eyes wandered over to the “tree incident”. Last summer while we were in Florida a tree had tried to fall down but it hit a second tree. The trunk of the second tree split dramatically, but managed to stay up. Now the first tree is leaning against the second tree. Someday they are going to come down. Let’s just hope they both fall in the same direction and that our yard is in the other direction.
The underbrush hasn’t started growing in yet. The weather was beautiful. I could actually see a roundabout path to the “tree incident”. Yeah, I’m going exploring. I’ve wanted to do it with my camera but I just said screw it and went with just my iPhone. Before we got there I had to look at this and ask what the hell is this?
And now we get to the tree itself. I can’t really see this from the yard, but I could see enough to know it probably wasn’t as simple as tree A falling on tree B. The fact of the matter is, tree A didn’t just fall, it snapped off about 6-7 feet from the ground. It then hit the second tree and snapped again, with the lower half dropping to the ground and the upper half (I say half, but it’s really more like the upper 80%) dropped straight down so that it was standing up on the ground and then it fell over into tree B. It looks pretty chaotic and it makes me kinda wish I had seen it happen.
Then there was the water. I knew there was a small body of water somewhere behind the neighbor’s house. I thought it was further away, but it was just beyond the first hill, and the “tree incident” sits on top of that first hill.
The question is, is this a pond? Is it a lake? Is it an ocean? Is it just a puddle? I’m guessing it’s just a big puddle. I can’t see how far away this body of water goes. That’s a woodland adventure for another day though.
And now at long last we come to the actual point of the story.
It’s Spring. It’s the woods. It is well known that there are ticks living out in them thar trees. Deer ticks. Lyme disease carrying little arachnid asshole ticks. Every once in a while we’ll find one crawling on us after we went out in the yard. It happens. Once I found one buried in my gut. I had to take a lot of antibiotics that day, let me tell you.
So ticks were on my mind, but I didn’t see anything when I got back to the house. It is tough to look at your own ass though so who knows. I got into the house, said hello to everyone, went to the office to check out the pictures on my phone and… about two minutes later… found a friggin’ deer tick crawling on my leg. I grabbed it in a tissue, flushed it’s murderous, diseased ass down the toilet, and jumped in the shower. My clothes are in the washing machine.
The moral of the story is thus: Squirrels suck and ticks suck too.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I hate snow.
Three deer came by the house today to try and cheer me up after the Bruins game one double overtime loss last night. I was able to take a few pics.
There hasn’t been a lot of Spring growth in the woods behind the house yet, but there seems to have been enough to make my autofocus go crying home to mommy. Most of these were manually focused. I usually don’t do very well manually.
This pic was the first one I took. She heard me open up the bedroom window.
We are getting to the time of year when deer sightings become very rare. This picture makes me wonder, are deer sightings rare in the Spring and Summer because they don’t come around, or are they rare because those buggers are camouflage masters? Trust me, there is a deer in this picture.
I’ve always wondered about this. Do we have any owls living in the back yard wild kingdom? There are a couple of hawks, some woodpeckers, and some other cool looking birds too. I’ve never seen an owl though. I know they live in this part of Massachusetts, I’ve just never seen one in our woods.
I’m pretty sure I just heard one though.
Whooo whooo whooo.
Awesome.
For the third straight morning I have seen at least one deer in the woods behind the house. I managed a pic or two today, but I’ll have to see how they look later. I hope this trend continues. I love seeing deer.
One thing that telecommuting allows you to do is be a little productive around the house during lunch breaks. Lately I have spent my at-home-lunches recording music. Today I took out some trash, brought the barrels in from outside so that the hungry wild kingdom can’t spill them all over the yard, and I cleaned out the cat’s litter box. It cannot be said that our Patches is full of shit. No way.
Anyway, when I walked outside I strolled around to the back of the house to make sure the yard survived the winter and I saw something I’d been seriously hoping to see… longing to see… needing to see.
Color.
Actual color. Not the drab winter brownish/nothing color, but actual green.
Check it out! There are actual green places in the woods behind the house! Oh Happy Spring!
Oh yeah, and there is also a kitty named Patches.
Spring. It’s here. It’s really here. Granted it’s pretty cold out there right now, but it’s still Spring. Screw you, winter!
Inside the Red Head's Head 