Tulips. Yup. Tulips

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2010

My Mom has a lot of tulips in her garden. A lot of them, like this batch, are siblings. She splits the bulbs every so often as they grow too large. At least the tulips aren’t as bad as the daffodils, which keep growing and being split so fast that she’s got stands of daffodils in every corner of the yard, and has started giving them away.

They’re pretty tulips, I guess. I’m just not that fond of tulips for whatever reason. They just don’t work for me. They do seem to be nice examples of the species, at least.

  

Falling for the Fall Line

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

There’s a waterfall in the river not too far from my home. Well, more a series of waterfalls, plus a few areas of rapids. None are too impressive, the farthest falling only a few feet. Still, it adds up to a respectable drop as the river goes over the fall line.

Perhaps I should explain that last term.

The fall line is a line connecting all the waterfalls that occur when streams cross from the hard rock of the piedmont, essentially the edge of the Appalacian mountains (though it has worn to gentle hills in most areas by the time it hits the edge) and the soft sands of the coastal plain between the mountains and the sea. It’s a fairly straight line, too, and runs for quite a distance. It’s really close to the shore near New York City, where the hard rock of the Palisades goes all the way up to the Hudson River, and rather far from the shore near the southern end, being near Atlanta.

One easy way to tell where it is is to look at the cities, actually. A lot of cities got founded right near it, since the rivers were navigable right up to where you hit this line, so trade could easily flow up to that point, but not past. It also powered a lot of mills and other industries, since it was easy to power a waterwheel by a waterfall. You didn’t need to haul the water up, after all. So a lot of the pre-electricity cities founded along the east coast both dot this line and became rather important due to being where trade and industry met.

I love finding odd little geographical tidbits like that. Who would have thought that the odd quirk of the water dropping just a little as it went from one type of terrain to the next would have such an impact on so many people who now lead their lives by these falls?

I do wish people would respect them more, and not let their water bottles get caught up in them. Ah well, a girl can dream.

  

Shall we go to the Land that isn’t There?

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Location Taken: North Bay, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010

I know, it doesn’t look like much. Just a simple picture of water with a bird flitting by in one corner and a buch of islands on the horizon.

Look a bit closer at those islands, though.

See how only the one on the far right is actually touching the water?

The rest are a mirage, appearing to float in midair. They’re not actually where they look to be.

Mirages are commonly associated with deserts, but they can occur anywhere there is flat enough surfaces and a view to the horizon. What is happening is that the light that is the sight of those islands which would normally be hidden below the horizon is bouncing off the smooth surface of the lake. This extra bounce makes the islands visible much further than they should be, though it does shift the sight above where it should be, placing them floating in the air. And actually, they aren’t even islands. They’re the distant coastline, but only the top of the trees are being caught by the mirage. The rest of the trees are still hidden out of sight.

It’s a simple optical illusion, and fairly simple once you know how it works. You can easily see why it fooled so many, though, especially desert travelers desperate for a city or an oasis despairing as the one they see far away that fades away as they get closer and the angles of light change.

  

Fluff-hound in the Snow

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Time Taken: December 2009

I’m drawing a blank on this week’s topic and I don’t even have access to my usual art creation tools, so I’m short on potential images to boot. So, time to pull out a backup topic!

My dog!

Well, one of my dogs. This is Kerowyn. She’s half corgi, half border collie. She got the coloration, length, and ears of the corgi and the intellegence, height, and energy of a border collie. She doesn’t always look as dignified as that picture above.

Here’s one a few seconds later of her about to play in the snow, including eating some. She likes snow.

Time Taken: December 2009

And one more, a few seconds after that, after she successfully nommed the snow and has stretched out, contented with her endeavor.

Time Taken: December 2009

She’s a silly pup, for all that we’ve had her for years. We got her rather young, about 6 months old, from the local pound. We weren’t sure about her at first, since she’s got a lot of energy (and kept knocking things over with her high-flying tail). But she’s mellowed out a lot over the years, becoming a dependable dog. She still knocks occasional things over, and she barks a little too much in her self-appointed job as guardian of the neighborhood. We’ve got a whole lot of dogs in the neighborhood, though, and a lot of them bark a tad too much as well, so the main one it bothers is me. And it is somewhat amusing to listen to Kerowyn chatting away with a neighbor dog. There’s enough variations in pitch and length in the bark patterns that I would not be at all surprised if it was halfway to a language.

She’s an outdoor dog, and a winter dog. She quite happily sits outside in the snow, carefully watching the world go by. Here’s one last photo of her, as she has largely buried herself in the snow, looking for a ball.

Time Taken: December 2009

She found the ball a few seconds later. And proceeded to play catch with herself, tossing the ball high in the air, watching it fall into the snowbank, then diving after it. The yard was filled with dog-dug pits in the snow that day.

She’s my Kero-pup, my long puppy, my fluffernutter. And I love her, just as I love all my dogs. I do have a great fondness for her, though, since unlike most of the family dogs that spend all their time with Mom, she actually occasionally wanders over and hangs out by me, plopping herself down my my computer chair, leaning on my leg, and just being content being with her girl.

  

Long View of High Falls

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Location Taken: Just south of Wawa, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010

Feel free to click on this to see a larger version. Panoramas don’t fit too well in blog format.

This is a somewhat unusual piece for my artwork day, since it is, well, a photo.

Ok, more like five or six photos carefully stitched into one in photoshop, carefully balancing the different exposure levels of each one, adjusting the angle and making sure the blending edges were invisible.

Which is why I’m perfectly happy posting this panorama instead of some other art. Besides, I didn’t come up with decent topics for the other pieces I was considering and this one was speaking to me.

This beautiful falls is not easily found. There’s a small sign on the Trans-Canada Highway just south of Wawa (which is, well, in the middle of nowhere). It says “High Falls, Next Left” (or I suppose “Next Right” if you’re coming from the other direction.) Said turn is a dirt road right from the start, winding along the edge of a few cleared patches of forest, down a hill on a curvy pitted path, and then, there it is, a gravel parking lot right next to the falls. There’s a few small signs, telling the history of the place, mainly focusing on the small dam at the top that keeps flood waters in check. On the right side of the falls there is a path up to the fenced-in observation area at the top of the falls, where you can also actually see the dam.

Mostly, though, there are the falls. Roaring, falling, twisting in the light. Braiding themselves amongst the hard rocks of the area. Each drop forming its own path that still follows the ones that came before.

It’s not an overly spectacular falls, the type to draw in tourists from hundreds of places. There are a lot of similarly beautiful waterfalls dotting the northern coast of Lake Superior, as streams come over the high rocks of the Canadian Shield and find themselves plummeting to lake-level. Still, for those who like waterfalls enough to stop at any that come their way, it was a rather nice one.

My Mom’s one of that type. Her parents are too. I saw a photo of them standing in front of a waterfall that looked nearly identical to this one, though they say they don’t recall stopping here. I suppose there could be another like this one, it isn’t an overly unique falls. Still, I do wonder…