take a photo every week as a way to document my life

I refuse to take down the Christmas lights. I need to have something twinkling in the midst of all this black, white and grey. Every once in a while, snow can be pretty, and I have those lights to thank.

We had a tremendous, but very short-lived, storm yesterday evening. I was looking out the window as it rained harder and harder, and then suddenly the hail started. When it was all over, my hostas were full of little bullet-holes, but everything else looked okay. I grabbed a quick photo before it melted.

It was surreal seeing the ground covered in ice when it was 80 degrees outside.

I just got an Amazon gift certificate for walking. My pedometer counts my steps and when I reach certain milestones, I get money. It’s a pretty sweet deal, really. To reward myself, I decided to buy a compact digital camera to replace my aging 35mm.

I spent several days surfing Amazon and dpreview.com trying to find the right digital camera. I want a camera that is small, lightweight, inexpensive and still takes decent photos. I went to Circuit City yesterday and played with every single compact and sub-compact and took notes. The ones I really wanted are way out of my price range. The Canon Elphs are lovely and tiny.

My final selection is a Canon Powershot A460. It’s less clunky than the A550 and it has a super-macro feature. It also takes AA batteries and uses SD cards. I already have a Canon S2 IS so I know they make nice cameras. That means I won’t need new software to read two different cameras. I wish I still had Photoshop but the Canon software is decent. With luck, my new little Canon Jr. will be here next week before my vacation!

Today’s photo is a rose called New Dawn. It’s a climber that is rampantly covering the chain link fence along the right side of my yard. It’s so beautiful I want to crawl into those petals and take a nap. New Dawn’s only flaw is that the blooms have very little scent. I don’t mind because the canes are covered with blooms and the ground beneath is littered with pale pink petals.

I love Cuteoverload.com and I’ve become enamored with cute shots of little critter ”’tocks”. I captured this bumblebee crawling into a penstemon blossom. They have to crawl in so far you can barely see anything except a fuzzy black tuckus sticking out, and then they back out and fly to the next one. All of the penstemon blooms have been shaking for weeks while bees visit for the nectar. It’s a pretty cool setup because of the way the anthers dust each bee with pollen as it crawls in and out.

I’m a big fan of penstemons in general. Tubular flowers are great for hummingbirds and these are so pretty. The unopened buds are covered with sticky little hairs that show up fairly well in this picture. Flower morphology is amazing when you take a close look.

One of my favorite books is Gerald Durrell’s “My Family and Other Animals”. Durrell is a famous British naturalist and he’s the reason I want to visit Corfu someday. His writing is hilarious, but the general theme is his intense fascination with everything in nature. He spent most of his childhood looking at things up close and I can see why. My camera is opening up whole new worlds of wonder because now I can see things in intense detail – even better than if I used a magnifying glass.

My garden has been a big part of my life lately. June is my favorite month because everything is fresh and new and it changes so quickly. Every day feels like Christmas when I walk around the garden. I never know what I am going to find.

When everything else in my life seems to be going to heck, I try to sit back and appreciate this beautiful thing I helped create. It reminds me there are some things I’m good at and that hard work will show results.

I finally figured out the super-macro feature on my camera, so this also fits the goal of improving my photography skills. Double-score!

This is Pulmonaria, commonly known as lungwort. It’s growing under a pine in my backyard. That area had been half grassed over with river rock embedded in very dry compacted soil. I dug it up, mulched like heck and filled it with hostas, Pulmonarias, Epimediums and ferns. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The Pulmonarias are one of the very first perennials to bloom, and actually started before the grape hyacinths and tulips even had buds showing. The flowers change color from pink to blue-purple as they age. They’re still going strong and some of my plants haven’t even started blooming yet. I can’t believe I only found them in the past few years!

Also appropriate to my current life, some herbalists believe Pulmonaria has medicinal uses for treating coughs, bronchitis and asthma. Whether this is due to the fact that the leaves are spotted and vaguely resemble lungs or not, I am not curious to try to treat my chest cold with it.