Happy April!

Here's a moon rise picture from a couple of nights ago.
And Sophie was behind me coming out of the pond. The water was so still it was like glass, until of course, she disrupted the calm. I like the ripples. ANYway.

I was also able to go down and take pictures of the UT tower being lit with the number one.

Bi. Freaking. Polar.

My fellow Texans are aware, but for those who are not, I'm going to let y'all in on a well known fact about the Lone Star state. The weather around here is bi-polar. Menopausal? Erratic? Any of those adjectives will do. One minute it's all flowers and sunshine, and the next you've got a thunderstorm on your hands. For your viewing pleasure, a sampling of mother nature's work this week:

Spring is in the Air. And in the front yard garden.

Peach tree blossom buds.
Peach tree blossom.

I'm not sure of the name of this one. It could be referred to as a hen and chick plant, I think.

Daffodil!

Meet Norbert!

I am twenty-something years old and this is the only snowman I have ever constructed. Is that sad? It took a freak central Texas snow shower for it to happen, too. And, yes, I named the snowman Norbert. Cherry tomato eyes, traditional carrot nose, and a blueberry mouth.

I would have loved to make a bigger snow man, but seeing as how it was, in fact, a central Texas snow shower and it just wasn't cold enough to stick for long, I didn't have enough snow or woman power to build the 6 foot snow beast of my dreams. So, Norbert did just fine.
I felt like an 8 year old trying to build him.
Too bad I didn't have someone to have a snow ball fight with. I'd have dominated.

There's me catching my reflection in the shed window. That's a dish towel protecting my camera. It sort of did a good job. Must look into professional looking protective weather gear...

The cows hiding under the barn...
I think they were confused as to what the heck that stuff was falling from the sky.
They didn't like it.

The snow on the field. Pretty B&W, I think.

Will it ever snow in Central Texas again? Probably not for a LONG long time, I think.

What is this?

What is this? Come on. Play along. Guess!!!

What about this? Guesses? I want to hear them!!!

Last chance!
This next picture should give it away.

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If you guessed, "ICE!!!" Ding ding ding!!! We have a winner!!!

I went to the DFW area this past weekend-ish. When the high decided to be below freezing. Mother. Of. Pearl. It was COLD!!! Went out to K's property on a beautiful blue sky 'bout freezing day. There's a small creek that runs through it that happened to be completely frozen and the ice made some AWESOME patterns. I can't really figure how they formed that way, though I have a few ideas. Theories? Anyone? Anyone?

ANYWAY. Sadly, there is no cash prize for guessing correctly. You just get to continue reading...if you're not completely annoyed, that is. Was that fun? Want to play again? Really? Okay! Look below!

Do you know what you're looking at?
Stare really hard, make a guess, then read below.

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Okay. There was this dog wandering on the property and she just decided to walk on the ice like it was no big deal. Only, it cracked and broke under her weight. No biggie. Because all the water had evaporated under the top layer of ice. This is a five inches of water deep creek, y'all. SO. You're looking in between the broken sections of ice. Towards the top of the picture is the top layer of ice. Below that (the in focus part of the picture) is what was under the intact ice - where water should have been, but had mostly evaporated and ice chips remained, as well as ground, and a baby tree stump in the right of the frame. And at the bottom of the frame, taking up 1/2 of the picture, is the fallen piece of ice on the ground. Make sense? No? Read again. Yes? Yay! Kind of abstract, right? Weird.

Enough of this cold. I want my 70 degrees back. Jesus can keep the humidity, though.

Reflections.

Sunset in my back backyard. Nice one, Jesus! Not Jesus the cricket (<-- read to figure out what the hey I'm talkin' 'bout)...the actual, ya know, Jesus. Him. Capital "h". The Man upstairs. Yeah. Got it? Great...

Lightning...

There was a thunderstorm that came through tonight. It came with a pretty lightning show. I was lucky enough to get a few good shots. I like it when the lightning is symmetrical (image 3). Boom Boom Pow.

What's That Noise?

Let me preface this by saying that I am afraid of tornadoes. Really afraid.

I'm visiting my friend, V, for a few days in Blooming Grove, Texas, which is somewhere in between Hillsboro and Corsicana, (the part of Texas where it actually rains). We have had great fun so far. We stayed up late last night watching Fast and Furious, the fourth one, and eating Chili's left overs. Yum. So we go to bed at 2 in the morning, I think, with thoughts of getting to sleep in until late. Yay.

Yeah, not so much. V's mom comes in the room to wake us up at 6 in the morning and tells her that there's a tornado warning in Navarro County and that she should probably turn her computer off so it doesn't get zapped by lightning. Okay.
I'm waking up and I ask V, "Where's Navarro County?"
She replies, "This is Navarro County..."
Lovely. So she turns her computer off, and we're laying there letting that information simmer. I see lightning, hear thunder, and my blood pressure is rising by the second because the word "tornado" was mentioned. I also hear this faint distant low rumbling noise that doesn't seem to quit.
Not thunder.
I say, "Do you hear that?"
"Yes..."
We get up to see what's going on, I'm starting to get into full panic mode, the house is dark, rain is falling on the tin roof. I walk down the hallway to go see what it looks like outside from the living room window and freeze. I barely hear it over the airconditioning vent that I'm standing next to. A tornado siren.
Vanessa came up behind me and I said, "Do you HEAR that?!"
The siren had just quit.
She says, "What? The airconditioning?"
The siren starts up again.
"No, THAT!"
We hear it loud and clear, now, and look at each other and our eyes get real wide and my heart feels like it wants to jump out of my chest and I don't know what to do. Yes, the thought of hiding in the bath tub crossed my mind, but I looked outside and it didn't seem too ominous...besides the purple lightning, loud thunder and sheets of rain.
I go to her mom's room where the weatherman is on the TV going on about the thunderstorms in Dallas county, but admits, yes, there is a tornado warning in Navarro County and briefly shows the weather map that is full of red, yellow and green colors. And then we lost satellite. But only for a few minutes.
Her aunt and mom are sitting on the covered front porch watching it rain, because they had the informed impression that the worst of it had already passed us. Which it had, thank God. But I wasn't convinced yet and proceeded to let my heart beat really fast and my entire body to shake uncontrollably. Really scared, I tell you. At one point I thought I was going to be sick. As I said before, I really don't like tornadoes.
I called my mommy long distance so she could look up a weathermap on the internet and assure me that the storm had passed through the area. And to tell me that it would be okay. Which it was. All ended well. The storm went away and I layed back down and was able to fall back asleep eventually to the sound of falling rain on a tin roof.

It wasn't the worst experience ever. The wind wasn't even blowing that hard and the thunder wasn't that loud. But hearing that tornado siren in the dark of night really scared the heck out of me. If by some miracle you've never heard a tornado siren before (the movie Twister? come on) I invite to listen to one here. Tornado Siren

Swallowtail butterflies and a possible tornado...

I found this Swallowtail butterfly in my yard the other afternoon...

This was yesterday. I could have sworn a tornado was going to pop out of it,
but that never happened. Thank God.

Starry Night

Last night there was supposed to be a Leonid meteor shower. The best viewing time was supposed to be 2-3 hours before sunrise, so I guess 4-5 AM. I'm not sure, I never see the sunrise. I was only able to stay awake until 3 AM. I star-gazed for about 30 minutes, and I had my camera with me, doing long exposures hoping to have a meteor shoot across my view. But alas, it never happened. I never saw ONE! Oh well. You can kind of see the big dipper in this shot.

Over the rainbow!

It hailed the other day when a storm cell that used to have a tornado in it moved over the area. Here's a video of it! Shoestring is the white cow that didn't know to go to the barn, and Hershey is the black calf following his mom. You can't tell, but when I'm talking about Babe, she's shaking like a leaf she's so scared. Then my dog, Woofer, just hyperventilates whenever it even begins to sprinkle, so he was on the verge of a heart attack. Then after all of that a lovely double rainbow appeared! I didn't have a wide enough lense to get a picture of the whole thing, and even then it was only there for a couple of minutes before it went back to a single...

Ha HA! I was right!

So I was at my brother's house this past weekend for my niece's first birthday party, which was super neat, the cake was AH-mazing! But that's not the point of this story. Saturday night, which was really cold, in the 30's or so, I went outside to get my suitcase from my car and I just happened to look up at the sky and notice this giant ring around the moon. I had only seen one or two others before this one in my life, and the difference between this one and the others is that this one was huge. Huge! The other ones I had seen were closer to the moon, not this one. My camera lens didn't do it justice, but this ring was not close to the moon at all and took up a good portion of the sky. After staring at it for a good while I got all scientifically curious as to why a ring like that would form around the moon. My guess was that the air in the atmosphere was so cold that there was an ice layer, or something to that effect, which was acting like a filter to the moon's light. And whadduya know. I looked it up this evening off of an educational site and here is their reasoning behind the aforementioned moon ring:

"The ring around the Moon is caused by the refraction of Moonlight (which of course is reflected sunlight) from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. The shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring."

Bet ya didn't know that, did ya? Ya learn something new every day.

God made a pretty this evening!

There was a very pretty sunset this evening! My photo editor kind of fudged the colors a little bit, but there were the most vibrant reds and oranges against an awesome blue sky. I can't decided whether the clouds look like fire or ocean. Either way they look like brush strokes from a Monet painting.

I like the fog

It makes for awesome pictures! Too bad I didn't have time to go around photographing all day. I just had time to catch a few pictures of the farm in the morning.

It's nerve-racking to drive through though. Yet strangely awesome! It was kind of strange for me today as I was driving because there was no one on the highway, the road was the only thing I could see, and the signs and other objects along the way would emerge from the mist only seconds before I came upon them. It seemed kind of post-apocalyptic or something. I'm glad I'd driven that road a hundred times otherwise I would have had a hard time of knowing where I was. The fog was so thick I couldn't tell what my surroundings were, buildings, signs and the like.

Here's Sophie blending in with the grass among the fog.

It SERIOUSLY needs to rain...

This is what it looks like down at the edge of the giant family pond. The pond is about a month away from being no more. Mother Nature seriously needs to think about all of the poor fish, amphibians, reptiles and other hapless fresh water creatures that currently reside at the pond. The fishes' oxygen level is being depleted daily. The turtles are going to have to check out and commence on a treacherous voyage taking them to new lands never seen before, most likely across the dangerous black top which, considering the contest between the turtle and a vehicle going 60MPH, would lead to an unpleasant demise. The frogs will find their way into my back yard, along with the snakes and this will send me into a state of psychosis (from the snakes, not the frogs) of which I'm quite certain would take me weeks to recover.

In my own yard, away from any water source, there are giant cracks forming in the ground...that are being craftily concealed by the dead sprawls of grass. This is a perilous situation in more ways than one. One, I stepped on a hidden crack and almost broke my ankle. Two, I stepped on another hidden crack and almost broke my ankle. There's a pattern forming here, I can sense it!

No innocent creature needs to die a horrible, prolonged, sticky death. I certainly don't need the nightmares from snakes finding their way into my house. And I certainly don't need any broken bones.

SO. I say again, it seriously needs to rain.

Get it right for once!

This is a picture of a central Texas sunset the night before Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast. You can see the bands that were a part of his cloud cover. Very cool, I think.

Just so you know, weathermen are complete morons...

I live in Austin, Texas where a certain weatherman at a certain local weather station stated that without a doubt the capital city would indeed be getting a LOT of rain from Hurricane Ike. A thunderstorm! Rain! A cloudy day! An end to the quasi-drought we've been enduring! Hoo-ray! Days before Ike was supposed to hit I noticed people gearing up for the nasty weather that was to come. I found crowds at the grocery store buying out nearly all the water bottles and ice, lines at the gas pump 3 cars deep...and this was in Austin, which as you should know is no where near Houston! I can only imagine how much worse it was there. Even on Friday, the day before it was supposed to make landfall, the aforementioned weatherman maintained that we would see a 90% chance of rain showers and storms for Saturday. Now I know that Mother Nature can change her mind at the drop of a hat and I'm willing to forgive the unpredictability of a minor direction shift in the hurricane's path, but seriously...It's Saturday in Austin, Texas and I kid you not, I wake up this morning and the local weatherman (who I will forevermore refer to as "Mr. Moron") might as well have said, "Whoops!". He was trying to explain that Ike had shifted from the predicted direction, taking a course that would deprive ATX of any rain, at all. "A big fat zero." inches of rain for Saturday. That's a direct quote, mind you. This is not the first time he's messed up ladies and gents! All year I can account for numerous occasions when he has called for rain and it must have evaporated into thin air...no pun intended. Literally! Where the heck did it go?! I think his computer model forecast interpreting skills are lax. Why do you ask do I care? Because I LIKE RAIN! Can I get one good torrential downpour on my house PLEASE! And yes, I like to blame the weatherman. With one sentence he sets the whole city into a fury of preparing for the worst, making everyone spend money on things they don't need, and he sets me up for a happy day and then all my hopes get dashed when his forecast is wrong...Moron, I tell you! Moron!

I also must contend with the weathermen who like to stand out in gale force winds in the middle of a hurricane shouting into a microphone, trying not to fall over all the while trying to bring the viewers news about "what's going on out there". As I watch with incredulous disbelief at their intelligence level, I keep waiting for a huge piece of debris to knock them over. It is kind of entertaining to watch though...

Don't get me wrong. My heart goes out to all of those affected by this hurricane, I sincerely hope that everyone is alright, and I feel blessed that my home and the homes of those I know have gone unharmed. But, seriously. I don't think just a little bit of rain is too much to ask for. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.