Category Archives: Snapshots

One of those days

I’m in the middle of one of *those* days. I left work early because I wasn’t feeling well. As I pulled into the driveway the radiator on my car self-destructed, spilling antifreeze all over the place. I’m glad it waited until I got home to decide that it needed to give up the ghost! I couldn’t reach my DH for a while, but finally got him on the phone and he went in search of a new radiator at 5 o’clock. So, here I am trying to figure out how I’ll manage to pick up Cricket and Boomer from the vet later with no car. (Cricket had her surgery this morning to remove the thing growing on her lip.) And I still don’t feel good. And there’s laundry to do. And prep work for my final exam review tomorrow night. Can you hear the tiny violin in the background?

Apropos of nothing there’s this photo of wooden grain shovels that I took at the gristmill at Walnford a few weeks ago. The sunlight was streaming through the windows onto the old equipment on display and I thought it was very pretty. I forgot to use the fill-flash so my original pic was underexposed and didn’t show any details. I played around a bit with the highlights and shadows in Photoshop to bring out some of the grain in the wood. I really had no clue what I was doing, but thought the pic looked better afterwards.

Sky-blue or robin’s-egg blue?

I’ve been seeing pictures of this sky-blue grist mill for years and decided today to visit and see if the building really is that blue. Pretty, isn’t it? Not quite the color of the sky, but close. More like robin’s-egg blue.

The grist mill is located at Historic Walnford and is now part of the county park system. The site has been recently renovated and includes a Georgian-style mansion, carriage house, and other farm buidlings like a corn crib and cow shed.

The mill, situated on Crosswicks Creek, still operates for demonstration purposes and is powered by a turbine rather than an external water wheel as I expected to find. The creek is shallow and slow and could no longer carry goods by boat from Walnford to Philadelphia as it did during the 18th and 19th centuries. It is, however, still a popular spot for fishing and canoeing.

The communities surrounding Walnford are some of the most rural in our county. The only time I usually get to this area is when I visit the rescue that I adopt my bunnies from, but I really enjoy the little backroads that travel past horse farms and a winery or two. That’s another NJ surprise – we grow grapes here.

Traveling a bit further west today I came across a picturesque old town that I would like to revisit if I ever get in the mood for holiday shopping. What interested me most there today was the old mill pond filled with hundreds of snow geese. Quite a sight and a surprise this far north as I usually drive an hour or more south to see them in the winter at the wildlife refuge near Atlantic City. The only explanation I can imagine for their presence here are the many sod farms in the area. I would love to have a pic to share, but my camera battery died after taking pics at Walnford. Hopefully I’ll find the snow geese again on my next visit. There are more pics of some of the other buildings at the Walnford link above and I may post a few from the interiors on another day.

Creepy things in the woods

This is why I don’t like to wander in the woods alone. I might just run into the person who did this.

Maybe a Halloween prank, but for whom? Who carries a faceless handmade doll into the woods and strings it up by its neck along a sugar-sand trail in the Pine Barrens?

Why?

I don’t think I’ll be wandering down that particular trail again anytime soon.

Anyone in the mood to share ghost stories around the campfire? What creepy things have you found in the woods?


And in case you’re wondering; I was not alone and we got in the car and got the heck out of Dodge, thank you.

8/23/06 Mid-week bunny fix


Maybe, just maybe, I’ve finally found a bunny that will pose for pictures, rather than running underneath the nearest piece of furniture when the camera comes out. Peeper likes to sit beside the window on my hope chest and that’s where I took this pic today. The afternoon light streaming in the window does wonderful things for her brown fur, don’t you think?

It’s almost two months now since Peeper *showed up on the doorstep* with the help of a kindly neighbor. Just about a month since she was spayed. The change in her personality has been quite dramatic in that short period of time. She no longer peeps at me like a little lost bird; she doesn’t often have reason to be frightened now. For a while she would peep and growl at the vacuum cleaner, but now she just boxes at it if I get too close while cleaning her cage. She doesn’t peep when I touch her, but is frightened when she thinks I might pick her up.

She’s learning to like being petted and loves to explore in the evenings when she’s out. I’ve had to set up an x-pen to confine her to the office and hallway, otherwise I’m sure she’d take run of the house. With Dora, who used to live here in the office, I never had to set up a gate at the doorway because she would not cross the threshold; Peeper has no such fear and a moment of inattention on my part found her down the hallway in our bedroom, under the bed.

She’s a very unassuming rabbit; a lot like Freckles. Very quiet though; she hasn’t learned to throw things the way Freckles likes to do. She’s happy sleeping the days away, eating greens, hay and the occasional baby carrot I hide for her somewhere, and exploring and contemplating by the window in the evenings. One at a time I’m introducing her to the treats that most house bunnies love. Most she likes and will grab from my fingers and run away with. Last week I gave her a small piece of what had to have been her *first ever* banana. Most bunnies love bananas. Not Peeper… not yet. She curled up her lips and backed away suspiciously… then she ran and thumped at me. Silly rabbit, not liking nanners!

8/9/06 Mid-week bunny fix

Freckles has been having a “bad hare day” for weeks.

I’ve never seen her shed this badly. She looks this way despite daily plucking and combing.
I take her outside for this treatment so her fur can blow in the breeze, rather than all over the house and in my eyes and nose. Only her fur bothers me for some reason.

Looking a bit better and less like Pigpen.

Missy is a lil’ Hot Bun!

This post back in February announced the Hot Buns 2007 Calendar Contest which benefits The Rabbit Habit . The winners were announced today and my photo of Missy won! There were a total of 36 winners (out of near to 300 entries) and the 2007 calendar will include a large feature photo and 2 smaller photos for each month. Missy will be one of the small photos for the month of January. I took this photo of her atop her cardboard castle a few years ago. I really liked the warm glow of the setting sun on her face.

I love this contest and calendar because it features many of my friends from the PetBunny List. Quite a few of us from PB are winners.

Below are pics of other PB bunnies who won this year. Congrats everybunny!

Wally (Mr. June) from Ca.

Rudy from NY

Oscar from Ca.

Mara Strawberry from Ca.

Cassidy from Tx.

Bee from Ca.

Ashy from Ca.

Bunny self-expression

Freckles loves to throw stuff. She’s pretty unassuming as girl bunnies go, but when she figures that she’s been wronged, she lets you know about it by banging things. Of course, I nurture this habit by giving her lots of clunky things to make noise with. She has the usual bunny things like a set of baby keys and a rattle of sorts, but she much prefers to toss the small candy tin or the canning jar ring because the sound they make is so much more satisfying! She hops up on her shelf and throws everything off, one by one. The stuffed rabbit with extra long ears, the willow ball, the small wooden blocks; they all go. If that doesn’t get someone’s attention, she’ll hop down to the floor and continue to toss everything around. Mostly, she wants more hay or has decided it’s time for me to feed her (again!), but sometimes I think she does it just to see me come along and laugh at all the noise one little bunny can make.

When the talking stopped


My dad was a talker, a storyteller, a lecturer. As children, my brothers and I were raised with the philosophy that children were to be seen and not heard; especially at the dinner table.

My oldest brother tells the story of an hours long drive to Canada for a fishing trip with my dad a few years ago, when my dad talked nonstop for the whole trip. He talked so much that he was hoarse when they arrived. Anyone who knew my dad would know this to be entirely likely.

As a result, I’m a very quiet person. Not shy, just more prone to sit back and listen. I spent lots of time wishing that my dad would just be quiet and stop talking for a little while. When I grew up and was married, I got to the point where I could joke with my dad about his talkativeness. He was a strict, very old-fashioned kind of person. He would allow this *freshness* from his only daughter and laugh when I rolled my eyes at him for saying, “In other words…” for the umpteenth time in a story that I had already heard a bazillion times. His talking was as much a defining feature as was the cigarette dangling from his fingers and the cup of coffee he never seemed to be without.

This picture was taken on Christmas morning in 2003 and we found out about 2 months later that he was sick and dying from cancer. One of the hardest things about the months that followed wasn’t coming to terms with the fact that my dad would die soon, but facing the day-to-day with him. Watching him lose all the things that he loved so much, little by little. He moved out of his home and gave up his dog to the SPCA because he needed my brothers and I to care him. He (finally) gave up smoking because he no longer enjoyed it. Coffee didn’t hold the same pleasure anymore without a cigarette to accompany it. He lost his appetite. Every favorite meal I fixed for him tasted like *cardboard*. He didn’t have the energy to sit at the computer or to make endless charts of his monthly financial budget.

He stopped talking and telling stories. Never did I think that I would miss that, but I did and I do. I wish that I had been paying more attention. I wonder that I didn’t maybe miss something important with all my eye-rolling.