[ Lost in the Landscape ]

defensive boots

It’s a dan­ger­ous time out there for Cal­i­for­nia gar­den blog­gers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though for­tu­nately with an out­come way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. (If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snow­globe that came with the deluxe collector’s let­ter­boxed edi­tion VHS tape which mir­rors the tone of the film per­fectly. It memo­ri­al­izes the infa­mous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gun­der­son comes upon the crim­i­nal try­ing to dis­pose of his lat­est vic­tim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with lit­tle red flakes. Magical…)

Another blog­ger broke her arm, tak­ing her away from post­ing for a while.

Not to be left out, a lit­tle over a month ago, while work­ing on my house repair project, I ended up step­ping into a pile of scrap wood that hap­pened to have a big spikey nail that was point­ing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes–some bat­tered old Skecher ten­nies that were hip in the late 1990s–were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m per­fectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.

I really should have bet­ter shoes for work­ing out­side, I thought after the lit­tle acci­dent. And this week­end I finally got around to replac­ing my unsafe and ugly tennies.

So here they are: some indus­trial Tim­ber­land work­boots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of pota­toes but are sur­pris­ingly comfortable.

So was this overkill for work­ing out­side and around the gar­den? They should be great for forc­ing a shovel into the patches of the gar­den where the earth is seri­ously hard­pan clay. But they’re def­i­nitely noth­ing to wear when try­ing to weave gin­gerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant any­thing over the last cou­ple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny lit­tle plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actu­ally wear them gardening.

What­ever the ver­dict, one mem­ber of the house­hold is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoe­box accom­pa­ny­ing them. The cat approves.

November 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cats • Fargo (film) • films • injuries • Scooter • workboots | 9 Comments »

garden in moonlight

Last night the moon was nearly full and the gar­den glowed brightly in its light. The images below are all long expo­sures, from sev­eral to thirty sec­onds, so a tri­pod was essential.

Moon, con­trail, clouds…

Yucca in moon­light: The flow­ers are white, but light from the nearby street­light made them appear orange.

Water lilies reflect­ing the moon, over black water, with bent papyrus stems in the fore­ground… This is my favorite pic­ture from last night.

Papyrus and falling water…

The cat, explor­ing on the roof…

A view towards the water from the deck…

…and finally, a shot of the gar­den. In long expo­sures like this one, the gar­den almost looks as if it’s being lit by the sun. But the odd, the­atri­cal col­ors from the lights in the houses give it a color cast that makes you look twice. Day or night?

Long dig­i­tal expo­sures always have a degree of noise, the grainy pris­matic fuzz that pol­lutes the darker parts of the images. (It’s par­tic­u­larly obnox­ious in the cat image above.) Pro­grams like Noise Ninja can do won­ders with reduc­ing the noise and mak­ing the images look more nat­ural. But I think they’re fine for shar­ing on the web.

December 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: cats • moon • night photography • Scooter • time exposures | 8 Comments »