Sun Setting and Cloud Watching

I considered saving this for February in Photos but decided not to because I’m too excited to wait that long. 😅

I slowly panned to the left to get more and more of the sunset colors…

Golds and oranges…

So many trees obstructing the view, but I like silhouetting things against the sky.

And here the reds can be seen too!

I saw some really interesting cloud formations coming through the trees at this point. I ran to the road so I could catch it before it re-entered the trees on the other side…

I was astounded – were the heavens opening up?

At this point I really began to wonder. The blue spot was opening? But then…

The cloud formation I had seen came into view. I wish the power lines hadn’t been in the way but I didn’t have a better view than this.

And just like that, the cloud went on its way. The clouds were moving so fast!!

And one last shot – like I said, I like silhouetting things against the sky. This was an accident, but I liked how it turned out anyway. 😆

So, what do you see in the cloud formation? I saw a crab. 😊

My December 2018 In Photos

I didn’t take as many photos in December, but the majority of the best ones I got were either of the sky and trees or of Jack.

The tree in the middle looks kind of knotty. I like the uniqueness of it. 😊

I love the color of the sky. I wanted to silhouette stuff against that sky.

I played with angles a bit too. 😀

I’ve heard about clouds having a silver lining… but not a gold lining.

December was a great month for sunrises and sunsets. 💜

Two planes in the same shot! 😮

Zoomed in on one plane and was surprised at how well it came out. 😁

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These two are from my iPod. 😊 (Tomorrow at 11 CST, I have a  Caturday Saturday scheduled that are photos from December. These really fit with my December theme here, so this is just a taste. 🙂 )

My mom likes snowmen, and Jack seems to like them too…

I think he thinks he is one. 🤣

My November 2018 In Photos

…yes, November. That is how far behind I am with this. O.o I’m going to catch up this month, hopefully! I’ve been so busy lately.

Weird mushroom I found at my grandmas.

Another angle.

Close up – it somehow grew around the leaf.

And it was oozing. O.o

Flowers! When in town, I spotted these outside a business. I don’t know what kind these are but they are lovely. ❤

Closer up. 😀

Autumn leaves. ❤

It was so cold, the mudhole froze over. There is a leaf in the center. XD Aaaand…

We got snow!

It was just a dusting but it was enough for pretty scenery.

I probably took too many photos of the snow. XD

The top of the gazebo and our house covered in snow – and the autumn leaves in the same shot. ❤

Dew and snow on the same leaf.

Snow on the banister.

Thanksgiving moon – weird that it had a ring around it.

Up close, it was hazy.

Squirrel! This one wagged its tail at me. I think he was upset.

Some trees I thought were cool looking.

Another squirrel! This one gave me the privilege of allowing me to watch him eat a nut.

And here he is eating it. 🙂

This concludes another episode of a month in photos! Hope to be back soon for December’s. 🙂

Sunrises Of The New Year

(Couldn’t sleep, so I’m posting this early. 😅) The first week of 2019 came in with colors. Several days were rainy, but the few that weren’t were amazing. I thought about waiting for the January In Photos post, but I decided I couldn’t wait that long to share these. I’m too excited. 😂 Also, I didn’t compress these images as I usually do to save space –  want these to be in the best quality possible. So without further ado… I present the morning of the New Year.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.  (Psalm 19:1 NKJV)

The heavens declare His righteousness, and all the peoples see His glory. (Psalm 97:6 NKJV)

His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of His praise. (Habakkuk 3:3 NKJV)

O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens! (Psalm 8:1 NKJV)

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And a couple of shots of the foggy mornings after that:

“I have wiped out your transgressions like a thick cloud and your sins like a heavy mist. Return to Me, for I have redeemed you.”  (Isaiah 44:22 NASB)

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And here is the morning of the 6th! It was the most incredible yet!

“Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, indeed everything that is in the heavens and the earth; Yours is the dominion, O LORD, and You exalt Yourself as head over all.” (First Chronicles 29:11 NASB)

(I can’t help it, now I’m going to revert to giving some commentary.) I love the clouds here. Also, see that speck on the top of the tree in the center? I almost didn’t.

It was a bird! “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26 NKJV)

The clouds kept getting more amazing. Didn’t think I could like it any more than I already did, but it just kept getting better and better.

The name of the LORD from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun; when the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD will lift up a standard against him. (Isaiah 59:19 NKJV)

And brighter and brighter! The city had no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light. (Revelation 21:23, NKJV) Just think – if the sky and heavens are this brilliant, how much more will the Creator of this masterpiece shine?!

Finally, with this photo, I stopped because I could tell the sun was close to breaking out, and I didn’t want to damage my camera’s lens.

How has your New Years been so far? 😊

Treasure Tuesday finds – 11/13 – 11/27

(Sorry if you are getting this twice – it posted back in time AGAIN. I think I will have to break down and learn to use the new editor because the old one posts the time I created the draft instead of immediately like I told it to.)

Welcome to another week of Treasure Tuesday! 😁

Firstly, this just shows that junk is going to happen. Screws, bolts, washers, tin foil (I have a brand new hatred for tin foil this week… but this is last week AND the week before that, so I’ll try not to get ahead of myself.) Also, a shotgun shell. And a random strip of metal. And my mom’s old boiler. (I like to feed the opossums sometimes and someone took off with the old boiler. I found it in the middle of the woods. Weird. That thing is heavy for an opossum.) And lastly, one thing that I don’t have a clue what it is. To save from scrolling through the boring stuff, I made a gallery to log those finds and show the exciting stuff in full size. It gets more exciting, I promise. 😆

But I’m reminded to, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21) For me, it’s not about finding gold, though if that happened, I think I would pass out from the shock. It’s about the hunt, and the journey I go on, whether I find coins, gold, or random junk. 🙂

Here is the first exciting thing found. There was speculation. My friends and I had guesses. A superhero’s lost belt buckle? Gas cap off The Flash’s car?  Etc.

Here is the backside of this find:

Sure didn’t look like a gas cap on that side though. However, my dad finally figured out what it really is:

It’s the decorative piece on a tire. 🤣

And this is the car it came off of. It’s my mom’s old car that she drove before I was even born. It’s a Manta Opel. (Not to be confused with Opal, which is a rock. I had a hard time finding this online thing because of that spelling error. Then I actually read it off the car. 😂) So this was the find of the week.

This is the find of the previous week:

I had to ask my dad what this was, and then explain what he just said into terms I could understand. 😆 It looked like a small motor to me, but he said it’s the thing that starts the motor. And it’s off a car from the 1940’s – 1970’s, and he has no idea how it got out in the middle of our woods… He said over the years, he’s had about three cars that had this part, but he obviously wasn’t fixing those in the middle of the woods. Therefore, our guess is that over 50 years ago, someone came out here and their car broke down. They had to replace that thing and they heaved it into the woods out of frustration on it breaking and stranding them in the middle of the woods. 🤣

Now, for a few things I found that were not metal…

Holes in trees! 😍

This is a closeup. There was water in inside it!

The area I was detecting in. 🙃

A split in another tree. (Close up of the one at the top of the post.)

This tree is HUGE. 😮

Another tree with a hole in it. 😅

An experimental shot up into that large tree. I like the silhouette of this one. 😊

Mushrooms, of course. Have to make sure I have at least one photo of mushrooms… 😂

And that sums up two weeks worth of metal detecting! 😊

Life Updates – June 2018

Since the last update (not including the Clear Vision one), a lot has been going on and I’ve been taking a lot of photos. I guess an alternate name for this post could be, “My June Through Photos.” In this post, I’m going to focus on June and then post the July one in August – because there are a few days left in July and I may want to add another photo or two to it and this post is long enough as it is. 😄

There have been some gorgeous sunsets, like the one above, and a few stranger ones like the one below.

I think this may have been before a storm, but the clouds were really odd.

Here is what the sky looked like above my head at the same time as the previous photo. The clouds were so weird. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them like that.

My mom’s “candy cane” roses bloomed. (I don’t know if that is the actual name for these roses, they just remind me of candy canes the way they are red and white.) They are so pretty.

I met some snakes. This is a ribbon snake, and he’s hanging out on the garden gate.

A friend identified this one as a western worm snake. My mom uncovered him when raking leaves.

This is a Dekay’s Brown Snake. I almost stepped on him when checking the air in my mom’s car tires. (There was also a rough earth snake, but I wasn’t able to get a good photo of it; it was too fast.)

Tomatoes! First one of the season.

There was a knothole in the wood fence around my grandma’s backyard, and I had some fun with it. I couldn’t decide which I liked better, so this is the focused on the wood one, and this:

is the focused on the abandoned house through the hole.

I met one of the cutest frogs ever at my grandma’s. He was between the screen and the glass on her storm door.

And I met one of the cutest lizards ever in the garden.

I rescued this Aloe Vera plant from the Walmart people. The only thing wrong with it was that it needed water. So I bought it at the discounted price, watered it, and a few weeks later, repotted it. Now my old Aloe Vera plant (my dad calls it “The Octopus” because that’s pretty much what it looks like XD) has a friend.

Eggplants – the one on the left is a Black Beauty and the one on the right is a Japanese variety.

We went to a family reunion – there were some hymnals on top of the piano there. I thought they were neat so I took a photo of them, haha. You can see my blue blouse in the mirror. XD

And at the end of June, my potatoes were ready! Red, white and blue – just in time for Independence Day. 🙂

And this has been a look at my June through photos! 🙂

Purple Bearded Irises

After my grandma died a couple of years ago, we dug up her irises and brought them home. As long as I can remember, she only had one to bloom, and the others had never bloomed. And they never bloomed for us either.

Until this year that is. 😁

And they are PURPLE! (My favorite color.) As you can see,  was so excited about it that I took photos as the blooms developed. Here is the open bloom is all its glory:

Not only is it purple – it has little tiger stripe looking designs on the petals. You can see that better in the next photo. 🙂

From the research my dad and I did, it looks like they are called Purple Bearded Irises. I am absolutely floored by the beauty of these flowers.

This is the top view.

And here is an experimental macro shot of the veins in a petal. I like how this turned out! I think it just screams at me to put a quote on it.

And as if I wasn’t excited enough about one bloom… a second iris decided to bloom about a week later.

As you can see, it is also a Purple Bearded Iris, but it is a slightly different shade of purple. I love the variety! I hope these decide to bloom again next year, along with a few more. 😀