A Sunday, Snowy, Sampling

A quick look at the what was hanging out at our backyard bird feeder a couple of weeks back, yesterday Sunday. The Goldfinch are beginning to take back their yellow feathers. The male House Finch stands in contrast with his red-color coat - he never lost it for the winter. The White-capped Sparrow stands incognito - its brown coat blending into the barberry branches and thorns that have been left bare for the winter, and the white cap, the perfect camoflague, that matches the small patches of snow caught in the shurb; the Hairy Woodpecker has adapted to picking the fine seeds from the artificial bark that the finch-feeder-mesh can substitute for the house siding in summer on a humid lake; and the frame of that large brute, the Northern Flicker, that comes and goes where it wants, hammering like a power tool on the metal rain gutters, sounding like a construction project on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning.

American Goldfinch and friends

House Finch

White-capped Sparrow

Hairy Woodpecker

Northern Flicker

Red Potatoes and Poet Laureate Phillip Levine

Preston Stanley

The news of United States Poet Laureate Phillip Levine's passing was on NPR Morning Edition yesterday. I came across this poem, that happened to be about red potatoes. It also just happens to be that last week was the Southern Rocky Mountain Agricultural Conference at which the Colorado Certified Potato Growers Association display of potato varieties that are marketing in the state, around the country, and around the world. Red potatoes, yellow potatoes, white potatoes, harlequin-skinned potatoes, purple potatoes, fingerling-shaped potatoes - the diversity expressed by these potatoes is remarkable; a credit to the Colorado State University potato research program that develops these for our industry partners.

The Simple Truth1

I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red
   potatoes,
took them home., boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and
   salt.

Colorado Rose

Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In the middle of June the
   light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and
   mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the
   potatoes

Masquerade

was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater
   and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat," she said,
“Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”

Purple Majesty

   Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and
   true
they must be said without elegance, meter and
   rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the
   salt-shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for
   themselves.

Fortress Russet

My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in
   1965
before I went away, before he began to kill
   himself,
and the two of us betray our love. Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions and potatoes, a
   pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is
   obvious,

La Ratte

it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always
   wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call
   salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live in it.

A box of genetic diversity

___________________________

1 Posted at the Website for poets.com.

Another Camera Trick - Minolta Auto Bellows 1 And Nikon D3100

Bellows mounted on a digital camera

In an earlier post, I explained how I was able to adapt a prism lens filter from my old Minolta SLR film camera for use on my Nikon D3100 digital camera. Along the same line - adapting old onto the new - I finally bought a an adapter ring that fits between my Nikon camera body and a Minolta Auto Bellows 1 so I can take very close-up photographs with my digital camera. The Fotodiox Pro MD-NIK works like a charm, so now I can take macro-digital-photographs what were really difficult to do with my old Minolta film camera because of needing to estimate exposure

First attempt at macro-digital-photography

times. With my Nikon set to M for manual, with daylight coming through the window, I have had no difficulty getting perfectly exposed images. My bother-in-law Marc bought the bellows set up for me on his second deployment to Asia in the 1970's during the Vietnam War. I had given him a list of "wants" to pick up for me when he was able to shop at the base exchange on the Sasebo Naval Base in Japan - things were really cheap on base back in those days before Amazon and other on-line shopping.. As I remember, I had really wanted a 300 mm Rokkor lens, but there weren't any available, so he picked up my second choice, the bellows. It was probably around 1985 that I finally bought the Minolta MD Macro 50 mm lens shown in the photograph of the set up. As it would be, it took more than 40 years to finally get everything in sync.

Just Wondering - XC Skiing Dreaming

Ma and Pa giving it a try

The temperatures here in Fort Collins are up in the 60's today, so the snow is melting fast in front of the breeze. Back with the earlier snowfall weeks back in the teens, conditions seemed just right for cross country skiing. We haven't tried to ski since back in early 1990's when we stayed at Black Butte, Oregon. Other than going to REI and Sierra Trading Company stores a couple of weeks ago to just look at equipment, I have really no idea about the right kind of equipment to get. Good thing for the Internet, a quick search and I found an informational video by Ors Cross Country Ski Direct.com at the bottom of the article titled: Don't Make The Mistake Of Spending Big Bucks For XC Skis that gives an introductory overview about skis and boots.

Our Children's Losses

January 16, 2015

An excellent article today in the Washington Post that shows the effects of war on children left behind by lost service parent since the war in Afghanistan started following September 11. A difficult read, but good for remembering - not to turn away from because of the uncomfortableness of it all. Children of the Fallen: Portraits of Loss. A child's story for each year since 2001.

Nature and Artists Juxtaposed - Search for Ellie Bogardus

We have admired Melanee Sylvester's landscape paintings for as long as we have been aware of Cambria. Her style has evolved through the years, slightly, but her work is our favorite of what we have seen on the Central California coast - her work characterizes this part of the world.(1) Jan and I have purchased a half-dozen of her prints and have them hanging on the walls around our house. For what would have been a steal price-wise now, the cost of her oils were more than what we could have afforded then - such it is. When coming into Cambria along Highway 1 as we are approaching the stop light,  I always look for the back of her gallery in the row of stores along West Village on Main Street.

Today I received an email from a blog viewer who kindly furnished a picture of an Ellie Bogardus painting that she and her husband have. They were in Cambria this weekend on a mission to find out more about Borgardus, and were wondering if I had any leads to share. They had checked with a woman at the Artifacts Gallery (another of my favorite places in Cambria), and found that she had used to work with Ellie at the production company that made the Peanuts cartoons, but didn't know of the Cambria connection. I gave a few suggestions, and hope to hear how their quest turns out.

Melanee Sylvester at work

A natural landscape on Park Hill

 Ellie Bogardus' and Mellanee Sylvester's works couldn't be more different - than Matisse and Renoir.

Tracy Sylvester-Harris' work

Melanee's daughter Tracy paints scenes of life along the California Coast as well. Her art is displayed at the Sylvester Gallery as well and information about her is found here, but I saw she has showings at other venues and media as well. Click here, here, and here to view. The later has very nice images of her work. An inventory of her exhibitions are found here.
 _____________________________
 (1) Sylvester's work is even referenced in reports of such prosaic events as the drought and its non-effect on a kind of local flora (click here).

Blue Skies

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have."

“Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.” Puddleglum the Marshwiggle

C.S. Lewis
The Silver Chair
1953

__________________

Irving Berlin, Blue Skies

I was blue, just as blue as I could be
Ev'ry day was a cloudy day for me
Then good luck came a-knocking at my door
Skies were gray but they're not gray anymore

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see

Bluebirds
Singing a song
Nothing but bluebirds
All day long

Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly

Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now on



I should care if the wind blows east or west
I should fret if the worst looks like the best
I should mind if they say it can't be true
I should smile, that's exactly what I do