The Arena Walk

We don't visit the portion of the Riverwalk Trail by the arena often enough, so we made amends on Wednesday. While we often confine ourselves to the main, broad trail, we took a short subsidiary offshoot down to the river which is running very low. Actually, this is a distributary of the river that flows around McArthur island (other bank in photo).

This selfie shows a somewhat similar view but with much better foreground. 😎

I zoomed in on just reflections.

A wonderful thing happened. We heard a large and cacophonous skein of Canada Geese approaching, and then we saw them. I managed to capture a portion of the skein as they passed over the river. Possibly, I should have switched to video to also capture the sound, but I seldom think of  shooting video.

We returned to the main trail, and I eventually took one more photo of a well-lit little Y-shaped branch of young sumac, or at least a Y within a Y with another Y behind. It stood there shimmering at me and demanding to be photographed. What a nerve!

Caturday 84: A Dose of the Feels

This card and pawprint stamps came in the mail this week from the veterinary clinic. Feels ensued  

Card is to the left and top with individual stamps on the right and bottom.
Maybe I will put a paw print in my wallet or stick one on my computer.

Meanwhile, Lacey's first podium flower, a yellow Mum, began to wilt, so I purchased another flower, much smaller this time: a pretty, pink Calandiva. The pink bow at the top in first photo tells us that the purchase price included a donation to the breast cancer society, which seems pretty catgone appropriate.

I tried to get a little arty with this ↓ shot. I might be able to use it as an overlay texture in another photo at some point. It could add a pink wash to an appropriate image if it were blended correctly. Well, that was my thinking anyway, but I don't use textures much. lol

Happy Halloween

Our neighbour across the street has erected quite a display. He's got a lot of stuff over there and some of it is big stuff, and it is in a little space that is also not very well lighted. Those conditions don't make for easy photography, but one must do one's best to rise to the occasion. These characters probably all have names, but I don't what they are, and I don't care much.

A tall guy and his cute, little puppy.

This scarecrow guy is even taller than the previous fellow. Erecting him must have been quite a feat. I have two shots. The second reveals how difficult it is in the dark when objects don't have their own lighting. I had to use my photoshop skills to get the Grim Reaper at the bottom left to be visible in the photo.

A genuine Hell's Angel maybe. 

This final bloke has no self-lighting, and I couldn't manage a decent photo in the dark. So, I took a daytime photo and tried to make it look like a night scene. I added lighting bolts in the process, but I think he is feeling a little down in the mouth.

I did shoot a few others, but I think these will suffice for this year.

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween ↑ is not an image but just text done in Blogger with its fonts and colour choices
Gravitas One font

Hanging Tough

The flowerpots are now enduring frost on a nightly bases, but all eight out front are still hanging tough. Here are the five that have been gathered to the very front where passersby can still enjoy them. 

When we drove through Tims for coffee, I couldn't help but roll down my window to photograph this lone tree, standing tough, proud and still beautiful. That is Wool Grading Station in the background; I am reminded that I promised that I would to take you there some day.

We took our coffee to Riverside Park and sipped it while walking along the path. I doffed my gloves and laid my cane down quite a few times for pics, including these two of yon hedge framed by park trees. The hedge is hanging tough and looking good.

I waited for the boys on their school lunch break to clear the photo, but I think I prefer them in there. Whatcha think?

By the by, we will curse the hedge come winter, for as nice as it looks now, from this vantage point, it will obstruct the view of the river from our preferred winter coffee spot near the boat launch. I am not sure why they didn't trim it this year although it does look rather good at the moment.

Back toward the other end of the park, we could see the stand of birches across the river. They are fighting to hang onto their leaves, some trees toughing it out better than others. I am sure that I have taken this shot in almost every autumn, and the birches look good in winter too. That assumes that I can access the park as winter proceeds, for they do not plow the pathway for some reason.

I hope the flora hangs tough for just a little longer.

Walking in the Light

It had been awhile since we trekked in the woods on the northern edge of town. I really like it in there, but we tend to lose out bearings a little bit, and we can't seem to find a way to track little walks like that in either GMaps or Apple Maps. Fortunately, it isn't exactly a vast forest, so we couldn't get too lost for too long.

Most leaves were down, and I thought that I would report on that, but it was sunny, so the leaves that remained were looking quite splendid, like this stand of orange in the distance beyond the mostly leafless trees in the intervening space.

It turns out that the two other photos that I liked best were of the same subject as each other but shot at different focal lengths and then also cropped differently in edit. I don't crop in square ratio often, but it seemed to work just right in the first photo. The second was a telephoto zoom with a somewhat unusual, narrow, vertical crop.

The light made the difference in these photos, compared to the ones that I posted recently.

==================

By the way, my dad was born on this day in 1912. I like to mention him in passing. Although he passed in 1999, he hasn't died his third death yet.

"The three deaths" can refer to several concepts: a philosophical idea about finality, Leo Tolstoy's short story, or a documentary about Marisela Escobedo. The most widely discussed concept is the philosophical one, where a person's three deaths are the physical death, the death of their memory, and the final death when their name is forgotten forever.

Possibly 1982 

Point Form: Cream Pie and Even a Brownie

• October 23, 2025 was National Boston Cream Pie Day in the USA; there are a lot of weird days down there. I may have only had this dubious delicacy once, and I had never heard of it until our Sunday School class went out for a restaurant lunch. I could have been 9 years old, or maybe 8 or 10. A friend raved about Boston Cream pie, so I looked forward it. Disappointingly, it turned out to be cake and not pie at all. This was a  major blow to a young boy who had only known apple pie in his brief life, and this was most definitely not that. 

• When I wrote, above, that there are multiple American observance days on every calendar day, here is the October 24 list, which, for all I know, may not even be exhaustive: National Bologna Day, Black Thursday, Food Day, Global Champagne Day, National Good & Plenty Day, and National Tripe Day. 
  
  
• Locally, at the grocery store, we were rather shocked to see a bag of hard boiled eggs on offer. Yup! Cooked, de-shelled, and in a bag. So you don’t have to go to the bother of boiling them, don't you know.
  
  
• This ↓ seems to happen an awful lot: hypocritical right-wingers getting caught with their pants down as it were. While I am sure all political persuasions have their evil-doers, as far as I can tell most don't feign virtue in the very sin in which they wallow.

• When this camera image appeared on some feed or other, I grabbed it, for it was the first camera that I ever used. It was my mother's camera, but I remember purchasing a roll of film.

• Then I found myself looking back into my old photo album, and I believe that this was from the very first film that I ever purchased and shot in May 1960 when I was still just 12 years old. My friends (Neil, Peter, Nelson and Brian from left to right) and I visited the little airfield where mostly 2 and 4-seater Cessna's flew. Nelson was my bestie, and we renewed acquaintances in our 50s after living thousands of miles apart. For whatever reason, we later drifted apart again. My apartment dwelling isn't shown, but it was very close to the farthest apartment in the left background and just around the corner from it.

I leave you with this deep thought.

Three Walkies

I already revealed two pics from the evening when I went downtown without Sue: the ones in which I went a little wild with my Halloween-style post-processing. This was another, more or less, straight photo from that night. Many little trees along Bridge St are lit in orange; this was one of them with hints of others in the distance.

The next day, on a neighbourhood stroll, this time with wifey Susie, the sun was brilliantly lighting a red bush with an orange tree behind. The green grass in front looks good too.

Unfortunately, yesterday gave us a taste of what is coming — bleak, colourless November. The sky was overcast, and much of the colour was down in Hackberry Park.

Around the corner, however, there was a little more colour, as well as a bit more light, but it is still clear that we are trending toward bleak.

I'll toss this next and last photo in because I have it, and I don't know what else to do with it. I did the final bbq on Saturday afternoon, and I seized the opportunity to photograph the interesting changing of the leaves on our lilac bush in which sections have turned very orange while most of the leaves remain green or close to it. We don't recall seeing it go quite this way in previous years. Of course, in my case, I don't recall much at all.