Fall

Fall in east Tennessee...if I didn't dread winter so much, I could enjoy this time of year much, much more! This has been one of the prettiest falls in awhile--beautiful clear blue skies, great color on the trees, and pretty decent weather; cold at night, but up into the 70s most days

This is a picture I took on a quick-little outing one day last week, which I then played with in Photoshop.

Watercolor version, on right

Oil paint version, on left

Same photo, with a kaleidoscope effect, on right

Cumberland Falls

My sister and I went to Cumberland Falls on a very cold January day. It was a good time to go, because recent heavy rains made the falls pretty spectacular, and there weren't very many people there because...did I mention it was really cold?!
Anyway, it was absolutely beautiful with not just the waterfall, but all the ice-falls cascading the rocks nearby. We took nearly 300 pictures! Praise God for digital cameras...take all the pictures you want, and you still don't have to buy more film!
Anyway, these are just a few that I thought would be fun to play around with...there may be more later.

Me and my Sis

A beautiful Ice-fall

This is one of my favorites; it was a neon-chalk effect
in my photo-editing software

A little Bugged

Nothing arty about this, really, I just thought it was pretty cool. Recently, our scout troop was doing the flag ceremony for a grocery store's grand opening. While we were waiting for time for the ceremony, two of the boys saw these two different insects on some rocks out in the parking lot; they picked the rocks up and acted like they were going to pit the bugs against each other...only imagine their surprise when the little critters actually DID attack each other!
They were almost as surprised as I was when I realized I'd gotten as good a picture of it as I did!


The little stink-buggish critter won, by the way; it not only struck first, but the grasshopper kinda struck back real fast and then hopped as hard as it could to get the heck out of Dodge!
And at least ONE of the boy scouts screamed like a girl....but I won't say WHICH one...

Happy New Year!

My exciting New Year's Eve consisted of watching Auburn beat Clemson in OT, and then watching the ball drop at Times Square...my youngest teen was already sound asleep as 2008 rolled away and my eldest greeted the new year playing Xbox...wow, gotta keep the thrill level down!

Welcome 2008!!! Now, I'm going to bed...

I'm too tired to play with the pics...note the time in the bottom right of the second pic--pretty good timing!

Baltimore & Poe

I recently went to Baltimore, on what I call a "medically-induced vacation." In other words, I didn't really CHOOSE to go there, and I wasn't really there to sightsee, but I did get to spend one day, after some testing at Johns Hopkins the day before, exploring the Inner Harbor.

It also happened to be on Halloween, and we got to go to the church/cemetery where Edgar Allen Poe is buried and take a tour of the catacombs under the church, as well as hear some dramatists present some of Poe's works, including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.
Halloween ranks pretty low on my list of holidays, but I must say this was an excellent way to spend the evening...it was not presented as a creepy, scary thing, but had a much greater historical/literary emphasis, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I did take pictures in the cemetery and in the catacombs, but I'm only posting one of Poe's grave, because there were just too many other beautiful things to photograph in Baltimore. This is just a small sampling; I took over 100 pictures, easily, but haven't had much time to play with them. I'll add more as I can, but even if I don't play with them, they have to be adjusted to a more web-friendly size.

Never Forget

We Remember.

Rose of Me

In the posting on Sept 4, I mentioned how random flowers have popped up in my mostly barren yard, the most recent being a Rose of Sharon (okay, I don't know my flowers all that well, and this could easily be a hibiscus rather than a true Rose of Sharon...but hibiscus doesn't have my name in it, so that's just not as cool...)

Anyway, I mentioned that I had not yet been able to get a good picture because they hadn't really bloomed out well. The very next day, of course, they were suddenly out en masse...all white, except for ONE purple bloom...crazy.

Anyway, here's a few pictures of them I've played with: