Making Progress In Hog Heaven

It's been a pretty slow week as far as outside appointments and obligations go. I've been taking advantage, doing little things like grooming my pony tail. No, of course not my hair: no way it could have grown that long since any of you have seen me. It's still just long enough to not have to mess with, but still keep a decent shape and a little curl.

No, I'm referring to my (bigger) ponytail palm. It broke my heart a little when the one I'd nurtured for 30 years since buying it in Georgia, moving it to Minnesota via Oklahoma - divorce time, doncha know - and finally planting it in Arizona, croaked on me. Too many years as an indoor plant. So when, back north for a summer, I found a few young'uns with multiple trunks in a WalMart for a cheap price, I bought 3 and planted them when we returned.

Rabbits got one, despite them being something rabbits didn't actually like. Oops, forgot to tell the rabbits, I guess. The remaining two went immediately into chicken wire cages. When the rabbits gave up on eating event the leaf tips sticking through the wire, I removed the cage on the smaller. It worked for two years. Along came a new generation rabbit, uneducated in its supposed dislike of my plant. Earlier this week I plunked a cage back on the remains of the smaller one - in every way, now. But there was a lot of yellow and brown on the big one, the one with 4 trunks and 2 1/2 feet of foliage. With the aid of careful repositioning of a chair, I spent a couple hours and filled two garbage bags turning it back to green. To celebrate my accomplishment, I took several pics of it uncaged, then several caged again. While I was at it, there are a couple of aloes blooming or about to that I allowed to photo bomb my afternoon.

Ahhhh....

Just in the tiniest case you don't know this about me as well, I'm something of a camera addict. It's not that I have two camcorders and two cameras, including a fancy Canon SLR. It's that I'm addicted to using them. Although, lately that means my Nikon Coolpix. Yes, it's not the fanciest one in the arsenal, but it is - literally - handy. And the important bit of the old photographer's adage, "F8 and be there" is "Be there!" This fits in the hand, and a small light case leaves no excuses to leave it home, while it holds camera, charger, spare batteries and sim cards, along with one of those little gizmos with a sim card slot on one end and a  USB plug on the other. The case is a hardbody, so I never worry about tumbling around in the car.

Nope, no excuses. It doesn't hurt either than I cam do pretty fair macros with it and it's got a fantastic zoom and a nice level of megapixels.

This brings me to the Hog Heaven part of this post. Back on the 9th, I mentioned reanimating my old neglected laptop, the one holding something around 15 and a half thousand pictures, long neglected. Ten days later I'm well through my first culling. I make a note each time I shut it off of which # picture of how many total I need to find to go back to when I restart. There are about 8400 total on it now, and I'm keeping only 4300 or so. So far.

Yeah, I know.

But there's a reason I'm keeping that many. Memories. These last few days, I've been seeing family members from as far back as 2007 and watched them grow up, or just older, during the time these cover. In addition, I've gotten shots of the house in Minnesota through the seasons and through its changes, as well as places I passed by while in my courier travels when I could snatch a moment for a stop, some of which I'd completely forgotten. Until this project. There was a regular morning run into Wisconsin, for example, where a farm in the fog outlining multiple silos caught my eye, another farm with a donkey, and all the spots in fall where the variety of maples along highways and fields turned them into a progression of spectacular color.

There are well over a dozen trips up to Crex Meadows in western Wisconsin, including fall, winter and spring shots that I can't get any more. The goal was always sandhill cranes, once I'd heard this was a major fall staging ground before they migrated south, accumulating possibly 20,000 before liftoff. While I probably shot a thousand pics, good ones are rare, these birds being shy. I wish I'd had the current camera the year three wayward whooping cranes decided to join in the fall fun, as the pictures I have of those are about 4 megapixels on a poor zoom.

But I got them!

Of course, there were a whole lot of other targets for my camera: trumpeter swans in all stages of family life, hawks, eagles, egrets, herons, owls, a gazillion varieties of ducks, geese, osprey, turkeys, pelicans, songbirds and more as they migrate through. One year a black ibis landed for a couple days before hunting out more appropriate territory. Don't neglect turtles, lizards, otters, deer, insects, wolves (OK, den only), flowers, pussy willows on red stems, and all the landscape and skyscape shots a heart's eye could desire. Once I located something I hadn't seen since 1964, a particular grass we called "speargrass," a barb on one end and a long tail that curled after they dried, assisting them to stick to something and migrate to new territory. We kids, of course, used them in battles. Nobody got seriously hurt, just uncomfortable when one landed.  For some reason, that was usually me.

There are at least 3 weddings in there, two nieces and one of Steve's granddaughters. I do candids of the people and include the settings and decorations. By the time I'm finished, maybe half are flattering enough to share with the couple. There is also my granddaughter's high school play, Pirates of Penzance. With a dearth of males, she played a pirate, and my favorite shot is of her holding a fake sword to another character's throat, with the only case of red-eye in the whole set of photos giving her a particularly demonic mien.

The real gold mine is the travel photos. There were the RV trips to Crex, the North Shore, and out west. There were also regular road trips, meaning everything we could cram into our trips between Minnesota and wherever. Think Black Hills, Rocky Mountain National Park, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Tetons, Greys River up out of Alpine, Wyoming. For coastal shots, among others, add Oregon, Jacksonville, Alaska's Kenai Peninsula plus Denali.... I'm sure I'm forgetting some already, and I still have thousands to go through.

Again, my travel eye orients to landscapes, animals and birds, flowers, and anything water, whether reflections, waves, frost patterns, or glacier blue ice.

So how hard is it to cull? Well, I'll never get to professional photographer standards, once explained to me by my son-in-law as shooting a hundred and picking out the one best. But I tend to shoot a subject over and over, this way and that, so it can take me a while to get the best one or two of that bunch. Do the eyes/horns/fur/feathers show? Are road signs photo bombing the shot while the vehicle is in motion? (Oh, YES!) Is the sun from the right side, or is it blurry, is the color true, or is this just another in a widely scattered set of similar shots? How's the focus and depth of field? Is it even interesting? What about composition: does this compel me more than that one? To make it more fun, there are always the ones shot when I had that particular camera on repeated shooting, a frame about every third second or so, and one of however many is plenty. But did enough happen in those fraction seconds to make selection meaningful? Or just blindly pick one?

Now if this sounds a lot like work, keep two things in mind. First, the laptop heats up after an hour or so, plus the battery tends to drain in that time also.  Outlets in that corner of my world are maxed out already, so battery power only. Thus the task is broken up into bits, and recharging limits me to three or four sessions a day, depending on what else is going on. Yeah, that is slow too.

Second, and most important: it's all those precious memories! I go to sleep with images stuck in my mind, the best of all those times keeping me company, comforting me, the beauty of the subjects holding me in thrall.

One additional side effect, while watching TV now I analyze scenes by composition as if I were behind the lens and could freeze select frames. Mostly they flash in a fraction of a second and continue on to serve the plot, but if I were just there with a camera....