like water off a duck's back-- a few moments in time

yesterday, Tom and I went out for lunch (a very good Indian restaurant that has a lunch buffet- yum!) and to run a couple errands. Since our errands had us up in the East Valley, part of our schedule included stopping at the Riparian Preserve, so I could show him the place in person. We walked one trail, and were only there for a couple hours (so I only took about 300 photos, lol!), but there's always something to see as long as you're looking for it!

a self-portrait (Tom on the left, and me with the camera)

The pictures were all taken right near the library building. There's a small group of mallards and ring-neck ducks that hang out there waiting for people to throw them snacks from the floating bridge, so they get pretty close. 

fyi, you really should click on the photos to make them larger- the details in the pictures are amazing! 

unfortunately, here is where I lifted my finger off the shutter so I didn't get any pictures of him settling back down onto the water, darn it!! (but I'm sure I'll go back soon, to take some more, lol.) It's interesting to me how quickly this kind of thing happens in real life, and the fact that a camera can capture it in such small increments. It really is almost like 'magic' when I look at the pictures on the computer and see what information the camera got that our eyes can't really process to that extent when we're just watching.

(I'm going to post some super-close ups in another post, too-- maybe water droplets and bird feathers aren't that interesting to everyone, but I was really amazed by the amount of detail the camera captured in some of them.) 

birding, part one. (semi-random photos from a few hours in time)

Since I didn't start my new job until January 6th, giving my notice at my previous job gave me an unexpected week or so off between Christmas and New Years. So, with some free time, I decided to take my camera, binoculars, and bird book out for a spin. Some Western birds are the same as the ones I grew up seeing in Illinois, but there are quite a few I'm not overly familiar with yet. I hadn't really been out 'birding' since college, when I took a summer ornithology class at the school's field station along the Mississippi river near Hannibal, MO. 

It was great to get out and enjoy the outdoors, watching the birds was really alot of fun, and getting some pretty good photos out of it was the icing on the cake. And thank goodness for having a digital camera and a delete key, since I took well over 2000 photos over the course of three different days out! (Birds don't sit still for very long, you know-- I have plenty of badly composed shots, blurry pics, or the bird was already on its way out of the picture by the time I clicked the shutter.) 

The photos in this post were all taken at the Gilbert Riparian Institute, a 110-acre preserve in Gilbert, AZ that has 7 ponds and a lake, situated behind a branch of the Gilbert Public Library. The pics are semi-random... they were all taken on December 27th, starting at just after sunrise till about 11:15 am. Oh, I have plenty more where these came from, too- I just didn't want to add too many to one blog post-- enjoy!

sunrise with geese... gorgeous!
(even though I did have to get up early to see it!)

some sort of hawk, catching an early-morning thermal.
No idea yet what species it is- I need to do some more research. 

I was quite surprised to see this fellow come out of the bushes.
The geese weren't concerned by him at all.

According to someone I spoke to later, he hangs around the preserve regularly;
the birds must be quite used to him. (plus, they're pretty big for him to take on.)

I have no clue what this bird is- I'm no good identifying sparrows
and the like. But I really liked the pose!

RIng-necked duck. (not the best lighting; this picture was taken kind of early,
before the sun was fully up.) 

This gives you an idea of how close you can get to the birds-
well, more like you wait quietly, and they come to you, actually.

snowy egrets (on the tree) and a great egret (by the shore)
it's tough to see in this photo, but the snowy egrets have black legs and yellow feet.
(there's a couple double-crested cormorants in the background, too- there were tons
of them around, fishing in all of the shallow ponds.)

 

female Hooded Merganser cruising in the morning light-
there were three of these hanging around together.
I love their crest of feathers!

Northern Pintail, I think. (? I might be wrong; I don't have the bird book handy)

pied-billed grebes-
they're somewhat odd looking diving ducks; it looks like they don't have a tail.

Mallard
(I thought this was funny- it looks like he's checking out his hair, perhaps??)

a few shorebirds-
the larger ones are Black-necked stilts, but I'm not exactly sure about the smaller ones.

I hope you enjoyed this little slice of winter birding in AZ- I'll be back with more soon!

I AM still here!

...in case anyone wondered, lol! 

Let's see what all there is to blog about: a new kitten (that makes three dogs and three cats now- yes, we may be crazy!); a weekend road trip to Albuquerque and Santa Fe (we went to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta! I took well over 1000 photos- yikes!); growing job dissatisfaction over the last 6 months or so and a new job that started last Monday (yay!!); getting back into bird watching, which I haven't really done since college (1000s of photos again, of course!); also some crafting and scrapping in there, but not as much as I'd like...

I'll be back with some photos and more posts, but I do have to get up early still for the new job, so even though I have writer's inspiration now, I can't follow up. (isn't that the way it always seems to happen with inspiration?!? darn it!!)

But sooner than last time I posted, for sure- I promise!! :)

languishing in DRAFT status...

I am still here, but my blog has been sadly neglected over the course of the summer. Not sure how that happens, other than sometimes my 'introvertedness' gets the best of me... I can only focus on so many things at once, and over the summer, my blog was the thing at the bottom of the list. But no more! 

I originally wrote this post originally back in May, but never hit the 'publish' button, so when you read it, keep that in mind... it's been more than a few weeks! 

A few weeks ago, I spent some time at a pretty fun estate sale. The person had an actual 'library' in their house- a small room (well, really a spare bedroom) with one whole wall of bookshelves chock-full of books. They were even separated into sections by subject matter! I didn’t really need any fiction books, but I did find a few things I wanted: a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds (finally- yay!), a very nice 2002 calendar, and a paperback museum exhibition catalog from the late 1980s. Why would I want these things? Well, the bird book is obvious; the other two, not so much... unless you happen to be into collage and art journaling! (or unless you wanted to know what day of the week something happened, back in 2002, I guess- lol!) 

Anyway, the calendar and the museum exhibition catalog didn't stay the way they were for long- here's a few selected pages of a 'just for fun' visual journal that I started:

papers include: scrapbooking, magazine, handmade
paper (textured) and an image from the internet.

Most of the pages are strictly paper, glue, and tape. No painting, no fancy stuff- just the basics (well, my basics, anyway). It was kinda nice to just glue things down with no real rhyme or reason other than I liked them together. Even if they didn't really 'go' together to 'mean' anything. (Tom asks me about that every once in a while when I show him a journal page, "but what does it mean?" "What are you trying to say with this page?" Honestly, sometimes the answer to those questions is, really, 'Nothing.' Other than my love of pretty paper, glue, and pictures. Sometimes that's all I need!)

magazine and book images, wrapping paper, hand-painted and stamped,
scrapbook paper, clip-art butterfly from the internet.

scrapbooking paper (inside the glassine envelope),
rub-on (on the envelope), decorative paper tape and 
an Alice in Wonderland themed playing card.

 The photo above gives you a good idea what the calendar looks like- it's a really nice heavyweight paper, and the paintings are very pretty, if you're into the cliffs of Dover, that is. I decided I wouldn't orient the whole book  either landscape or portrait-- just whichever I felt like for each individual page.

a close-up look at the glassine envelope + rub-ons...
I like how you can see a bit of the patterned paper inside. 

Another page, waiting for paper and glue

So, there was more to 'what did I do with my summer vacation' than just this journal. Let's see... We went to the town July 4th celebration, we really did go on vacation (for a week, back to the Midwest to visit family), I did a lot of estate saling and thrifting (even on vacation, lol!), and in addition to this calendar journal, I worked in some (two? three?) of my other journals. Oh, and I bought a Smash journal, and took a class and made another journal... no scrapbook pages, but I guess right now it's 'art journaling season' for me! 

I have at least a few hundred photos on my computer waiting to be edited, and tons of things to take photos of, too... (oh, hey! While we were on vacation we toured reproductions of the ships Nina and Pinta! On the Mississippi River, no less! I totally need to post those pics, for sure!!) I guess I have some photo-editing, and some photo-taking, to do!!