All posts by laurahinnj

Snapshots, Whatever

Through the looking-glass

21 Comments

Just a short pause to pat myself on the back for three years of mostly consistent blogging… it’s been quite a ride!

I love this little place we’ve made together: me alternately skipping or stumbling with the things that make up an ordinary life; you there beside me or imagined quietly looking over my shoulder, commenting on this or that or something I might have missed.

Having someone to write for, to share stories and memories with, has made this worth doing every day. Life, mine and yours, is much more interesting when shared and reflected on in this way, don’t you think?

So… a heartfelt thanks for three years of friendship and for meeting me here most days to laugh or rant or even cry at the wonder of ordinary things.

Snapshots, Wanderings

Behind the scenes

5 Comments

I wonder if you’re like me: inclined to play with all the toys that make noise, preoccupied with lifting up the table skirt to understand how the trick works, tempted to wander where you shouldn’t, add various other forms of polite misbehavior to the list…

😉

I’m not quite sure what I stumbled across here at the Grounds for Sculpture the other day, but it stopped me in my tracks as quickly as it tickled my imagination.

Can you imagine the fun to work in a place like this? Have characters instead of coworkers? Be able to tell a story by simply moving the frisbee player in front of the painter? Next to the guy with the camera?


At first glance it looked to be a loading area for newly arrived sculpture or something of a temporary graveyard for retired pieces…

But I couldn’t help feeling as if someone had arranged them just so for the whimsy of passerby… like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting… maybe a groundskeeper who secretly wants to study art history and tries his hand at creating a tableau from discarded stories.

Creepy! With pitchfork in hand, these two guarded the entrance to this place I wasn’t meant to see. At least I don’t think I was meant to see it…

😉

Small truths, Snapshots, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Letting go

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Mother, I’m letting go.
It’s what you did a year ago
Now I know how, I swear
Walking so long in the dark, I arrived
To this now.
I don’t have to tell you
The forces that were my life,
You know.

You who could describe the moon
With so much care
And spoke everything – but not of your fear of dying
You knew why flowers grew on grass
To say, “I’m born”
Or that they might spring from crevices of rock to dance with the wind.
Sometimes your words split darkness the way you crack open a rock
Nothing diminished or unseen.
Like the time we described the good and happy life of a friend
And you said, “I know, I know, but he’s a hurt person.”
He’ll never know how you saw into him.
What Thoreau said he longed to do, you did –
Speak “first thoughts,”
While ours lay like cocoons spread in confusion

You never said the reasons for failure – why we get lost
Only that we are, and whether your thoughts spilled like butterflies into air
Or cut like an axe
You never lost the knowledge of center
That the failure to love ourselves deeply enough
Is more or less fatal

Well, the eventual is now
And I am broken like the moon,
Driftwood in the sea of my own drowning

Let me feel the attention you gave
To this world.
(Were you afraid of dying in case what came afterwards took less?)
With the same care you gave all along.
Safe with yourself.
I’m turning now to that shore.

–Constance Greenleaf

Bits of this were bouncing around in my head as I watched this scene, but it took a happy accident yesterday for me to come across the complete poem. It feels presumptuous to think I know anything of what was going through Lynne’s mind that day on the anniversary of her mom’s passing, but I liked the spirit of this poem, anyway, and was very touched by Lynne’s trust in sharing some of her grief with us.

Hugs to you, Lynne.

Snapshots, Wanderings

Grounds for sculpture

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Art, especially contemporary art, is not really my thing. It’s not ever felt accessible to me. It puzzles me, mostly, or makes me laugh sometimes, but I’ve always felt that I’m somehow missing the point.

Save for a few pleasant experiences in Spain, sculpture displayed in stuffy museums or galleries doesn’t interest me. Set that artwork against a backdrop of autumn’s finest colors and well… I’m there!

I took advantage of the day off, overpaid government employee that I am, and, after doing my civic duty, visited the Grounds For Sculpture in Hamilton. It was a perfect day for a stroll through the grounds to enjoy what is also a fine garden and arboretum. The fall colors were gorgeous.

Here’s some favorite views:

This made me smile!

October Gathering by Joan Danziger… I really liked this one, though the scale was tiny compared to many of the others.

Gorgeous colors in the background here…

On Poppied Hill by Seward Johnson

Lintel by Emilie Benes Brzezinski

More pics to come…

Garden, Snapshots

Afternoon visit

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I nearly missed him standing there beside the dogwood, but he spotted me quickly once I stepped outside with the camera. In case you’re squinting at the fuzzy focus (what’s new?) I counted six points on this buck… a trophy to some, I’d guess.

I followed him through my little woodland garden of mountain laurels and viburnum, trying to get close enough for a halfway decent pic, but he spooked and was off with a snort and a flash of his white tail to the park out back where he makes his living. Usually I see him there at night on walks with Luka, one shape among many in the moonlight, disappearing into the shadows.

Snapshots, Whatever

From kings to grooms and Luka in between

8 Comments

It’s been a busy couple of days here that involved lots of picture-taking…

Thursday there was a retirement party for my boss, whom we thoroughly embarrassed for his 38 years of service with a cape and a crown and plenty of mostly-good-natured roasting… He’s worked at social services for as long as I’ve been alive. Jeez.

Nice was the time to chat with coworkers without the pressures of ringing phones. This is my friend Anne who works in personnel and makes sure we all get paid on time and Cathy, one of my favorite people in the whole world; she and I used to work together, then she got promoted and I got promoted and now we don’t see much of each other anymore.

My buddy Pete and I; we’re neighbors and got to work together for a short time last summer while I was assigned to the homeless services unit. He was transferred to my building recently, so I stop by his desk a couple times a week to talk birds and photography.

On Halloween morning, there was a parade of trick-or-treaters through the office. Click for a peek at the Christmas tree costume – I love it! Note person at desk in background actually trying to work…

😉

I had to bribe him for it, but Luka will do most anything for a Haloween treat!

Finally, last night, there was a nephew’s wedding to photograph. My camera needs a few days off, I think.

Now to catch up with comments and all of your blogs…

Small truths, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Hints that your friends might be just a little nerdy

15 Comments

So we were on a non-birdy bird walk, led by my friends Scott and Linda from SHBO, at the Beanery in Cape May. The Beanery can be a very fun place for birds, but it was really quiet in the rain and wind that day.

Good friends or good naturalists can find plenty of ways to amuse themselves when the birding is slow. Mostly we made bad jokes and acted obnoxiously. We had plenty of opportunities to embarrass ourselves this way over the course of the weekend.

Every so often there’d be a new plant we could dork out about, like these sweet gum balls that Lynne wanted to try planting at home in Minnesota or the wild persimmon fruit that I got them to taste just by promising them it wasn’t poisonous.

😉

I don’t guess many non-birders dance this way when spotting a Black Vulture for the first time. A little nerdy? Yes. Fun? Absolutely.

Other than Jay’s prodding it with his foot, this is not a typical scene when normal people spot a black rate snake along the trail, is it?

😉

Nerdy.

A very pretty snake, btw, though it was a tad nervous with all our cameras pointed its way.

At some point we’d given up on seeing any birds and wandered away from the rest of the group, content to find our own fun elsewhere. Who needs birds when you’ve got friends that are just as nerdy as you are, anyway?

Note: Susan, Lynne, Jay from birdJam and Delia will not take offense at my calling them nerdy. We’re cut from the same cloth, I think. That’s why I like them so well.

Birds, Travels with the flock, Wanderings

Birdy post

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Just like last year’s Autumn Weekend, I only got one life bird this time. Most anything is more exciting than last year’s Rusty Blackbird, but this year’s was an especially good bird… one I’ve missed so many times. It wasn’t a really satisfying look, but I finally got a Golden Eagle at the hawk watch on Monday! It seemed to get much birdier after everyone had left for home… there was a Bald Eagle, too, and a Peregrine that put on a nice show and some Sharpie’s and Cooper’s Hawks and a Harrier also. In year’s past I’ve spent most of the weekend just hanging out at the hawk watch in the state park; most everyone shows up there at some point and it’s a nice place to catch up with friends and see what hawks happen by.

All of the birds we saw this weekend were common ones for me, but birding with people from out of state makes me appreciate even more what NJ has to offer. It’s occurred to me in the last year that if I hope to ever see new birds, I need to travel. Of course, there’s plenty of life birds just waiting for me offshore, but there’s that whole fear of seasickness thing that keeps me from ever doing a pelagic trip.

😉

Anyway… here’s some pics that I’m not too embarrassed to share. Something else that’s occurred to me from this weekend… I have serious camera envy and need to come up with some way of managing better bird pics.

Further evidence of my on-going love affair with the ubiquitous sanderling… even sleepy ones. I have so many pics of Sanderlings. They’re such fun to watch, the sweet way they run ahead of the waves and sleep on one foot and hop away on one foot if you wake them. Sunday night there was a lone sanderling that kept us company while we watched the sunset. I guess they’ll feed at the ocean’s edge even past dark.

Not a common bird by far and always nice to see… a Peregrine that had been enjoying a meal on an osprey platform somewhere in the middle of the intracoastal waterway. I thought Susan might wet her pants when we spotted this one on our boat trip… her first *wild* Peregrine. I’ve learned to look for them in what counts as high places here at the shore; bridges, water towers, the tall casinos at Atlantic City, the railings on lighthouses.

Imagine that some people get excited about Great Black-Backed Gulls! Hi Lynne! I was excited just to get most of it in the pic.

A Snowy Egret that was nice enough to show off its golden slippers as it fed in the muck at low tide.

A Great Egret, sans the yellow slippers, being difficult and shy. I hear that there’s places where these birds don’t automatically fly off whenever you point a camera lens at them, but I don’t believe it. I love this pic anyway.

Ah. A Common Loon… one bird that I was excited to see and Lynne was bored with. She gets to see them in the summer when they’re all pretty and spotted nicely. I was glad to see just the remainders of their beautiful breeding plumage. In the winter they look so darn gray.

Part of the flock of Black Skimmers that rests on the beach somewhere between the Convention Hall and the Second Avenue Jetty in Cape May in the fall. I love walking the beach to find them. It was neat to watch them feeding in the ocean with the terns; closer to home they feed in the bay or course along the quiet creeks and usually I see just a couple at a time.

I almost got all of a Brant in this pic, our winter sea goose. They’ve just begun to arrive in the last couple weeks from their breeding grounds in the Arctic and I love to hear their peculiar barking call across the water because it means that all the pretty winter ducks will be arriving soon, too.

Oystercatcher! I never get enough of seeing these guys… there were a couple dozen feeding with Dunlin and Black-bellied Plovers on a sandbar. We had really nice looks (and the chance to listen to the sweet music of a mixed flock of shorebirds) while our boat’s propeller was snagged on a crab trap in the marsh.

Lynne’s favorite birds were about in full force this weekend… we even tried to turn one perched on an osprey platform into a Bald Eagle. I was surprised to see Turkey Vultures in the salt marsh, but I guess they like the sweet smell of rotting vegetation, too.

😉

Have you not read EVERYWHERE how I love the smell of a salt marsh? My flock friends thought that smell was unpleasant. Pfft! Smells like home to me. You Mid-Westerners can keep your pure air.

By the way, if you don’t have occasion to read Susan’s blog, please stop by for this post, at least, and a video of what was probably the funniest moment of the whole weekend.

A nice group of Forster’s Terns hangs out with the Skimmers and Sanderlings at the beach. Funny that I have trouble recognizing them in their winter wardrobe when it changes every year. We never found any Royal’s or Caspian’s, but I’m sure they were around somewhere.

I wish I had pics of that Golden or the Scoters at the Sea Watch at Avalon to share; maybe someday my camera envy will get the better of me and I’ll cave for a point and shoot with a really powerful zoom.