It’s about time…right? This first one I swear it took me an hour to get it blown up, and saved where I could upload it. Editors are not my strong point 🙂 You never know what you will see in traffic:

This next one deserves some sort of title. I’m going with “Hulk said NO TICKETS!” (It is actually an old retired police car, and the local Rescue Squad used it as a demo for their extraction tools/techniques)

This next one also deserving of a title. How about “Tennessee Customs?”

 

Next few are a result of one of our river excursions, we like to go for boat rides and island walks. Note this is one of the boats I had mentioned restoring at some point in the past. The pic here I didn’t even know I took, the wife is on the left, we were trying to sneak up on some pelicans, but they refused to cooperate.

Oh hey, let’s play with the water moccasin, or cottonmouth, depending on your preference 🙂

A tree of noteworthy character.

Another tree of noteworthy character. This one is full of pareidolias. I see a lost dog, a lost hog, a crow/raven, and a big cat with a fish in its mouth. I quit looking at that point it was freaking me out a little. 😉

This one, one of the boys came in the house proclaiming “hey dad look what I found in the pond!” I was like… “get that out of the house! Oh wait let me get a pic first.” Doesn’t look like tadpoles, so Im guessing some sort of fish spawn.

These are tadpoles. Caught them on one of my many creek walking adventures.

More shots from the creek, umm don’t step on that rock!

Creeks inevitably have bridges, the swallows like to make thier homes here. There are a few in the pic along with their nests. They weren’t real happy about me being there. I did not disturb them any longer than it took to get the shot.

Oh wait, I did stick around and got some more pics when I noticed the stalactite formations under the bridge, you can see some of it in the swallow shot. Here is a better view, they were all over the underside of this bridge. I am often fascinated by things most people fail to notice.

One of the places my wife works at is a farm, the owner has a real job too, so things get a bit cluttered up. They have horses, cows, and goats, I was leaving one day and saw this. Note, that vehicle is the one that the 16 year old girl I posted on died in. They had put a new hood on it before she started driving it. Not that it matters.

I started to ask that stupid goat what it thought it was doing up there, then I saw the goat mafia staring me down. I left quietly.

This next one is a spring storm moving in, I was thinking wow, look at the way the sun behind me is illuminating the trees, with the storm as a backdrop. I had to get a pic. I’m weird like that. Yeah, Im the guy you want to meet on the highway, driving and taking pics through the windshield 😉 Nobody was coming…

A Tennessee downpour. Almost a whiteout condition. Kind of unusual, I’ve seen a lot of grayout conditions, but the whiteout I haven’t seen very often. Well light gray perhaps. Wipers were on high.

Allergies anyone? This would make a tough 1000 piece puzzle…

Tennessee sunset.

And another one.

And another one.

My youngest son has a friend from school, this is the view from their yard. Also I got the previous sunset pic from the same location.

Guess what? Another sunset.

We get severe storms here from time to time. This is what can happen. Note the building is really messed up. They cleaned this all up quick, in just a couple of days it was an empty lot. They already had a large trackhoe onsite for demolition when I got the pic. You can make out part of it on the left.

Stupid deer. Well maybe not. Deer anyway. Low light conditions and my iphone do not get along.

Yeah…I’m starting to think it’s not going to happen.

Shelf mushrooms on a tree, I don’t recall seeing mushrooms growing on live trees before. Dead trees, often. Lousy focus.

Fairy circle! What is odd about this one is, maybe 3 feet back from the sidewalk, the landscape goes up a steep ass hill. You would have difficulty climbing this hill it is very vertical. Yet the fairy circle is still quite round.

This last batch is one my my favorite captures. I do love me some sundogs. We were driving down the highway, the wife and I, she said to me “isn’t that one of those things?” She does me like that all of the time, ummm what things, dear? I look where she is pointing and she had spotted the sundog! I’ll have her trained one of these days 🙂 I caught it in several pics, zooming in, zooming out, and catching its transformation over several minutes. They only last around 5 minutes or so in my experience, so you have to be observant to catch them at all. I pulled off the main highway asap, and knowing they are short lived did not have time to find a good location, so there are electric wires in the shots, but it is what it is…

That does it for this version of Picture Day. I think I have enough pics around to do another. I’ll get it when I can. I hope you enjoyed the trip. 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may recall the tale of a little 4 year old girl who passed in a recent post. If only that were the end of it.

My wife had worked another case part time, which due to the recent death of her previous patient, she has been filling in there a bit more lately. She looks after another young girl there with enough medical issues requiring a nurse to work the case. This little girl has some older brothers and a sister. The older sister had recently turned 16, and had acquired her drivers license as most do at that age, and on her way to a Halloween event ran off the road, to unknown causes, rolled the vehicle she was driving, and she didn’t make it. She probably died instantly or soon thereafter having suffered significant head trauma. So damn if we weren’t visiting another wake, all too soon after the funeral we had recently attended. I knew this girl only briefly, but I knew her well enough to know she had a wonderful personality and a good head on her shoulders. I know because she was very interested in politics and was very much not a tRump fan. We can’t afford to lose good minds, especially when they had an entire lifetime before them. A damn shame.

 

Cancer Is A Bitch II

I posted a while back on my neighbor, he was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer right at 3 years ago.* He put up a good fight, he went well beyond the 6 months the dr.’s gave him to live. After a long and valiant fight, my friend and neighbor passed away this morning. It was much like watching a train wreck in super slow motion. You know what is coming, but it happens at a slow enough pace it almost seems like just maybe the damn train won’t wreck after all. Then it does. And it leaves you in a state of mild shock and disbelief that it could have had happened at all. Unreasonable I know, but the feeling persists. It was honestly a little more than a week ago I helped him winterize his RV, and also helped him fix his tractor. He was frail, weak, had trouble walking, but his drive was persistent, his attitude positive, always speaking of the things he was going to do next year or the year after. I really didn’t think it was going to be this soon. It all went downhill quick.

I saw him yesterday, he was laid up, passed out from the morphine he was on. Hospice had been implemented, the cancer had spread throughout his body and moved into his spine. His pain was extraordinary, I know he is without pain and suffering now. Little it does to ease the hurt of losing a friend and neighbor. Yet I hold on to the knowledge that none of us should suffer so. He is gone. A damn shame.

It has been a rough ride of recent. May you and yours be well.

I promise to put up something a bit less depressing next time, I have a ton of photos to go through, maybe Ill get a Picture Day up next time around.  🙂

 

* See here:

https://evidencebasedreality.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=4790&action=edit