Learning Log – November 2015

October provide a variety of learning opportunities.

Two Coursera courses that I had worked on in September continued and completed. The Tibetan Buddhist Meditation and the Modern World course is the first of a series from University of Virginia. The first course was intense but worthwhile so I am watching for the next one to become available

Forests and Humans from University of Wisconsin-Madison was larger in scope that I had initially assumed. It became clear that to understand forests at all – one has to know something about the Earth systems that enable forests to exist – to thrive or decline. The mix of lecture, interviews, and readings was well done.

I’ve completed the first week of a new course: Ancient Egypt: A history in six objects from University of Manchester. The organization of the core material is very good…and that makes the references (there are quite a few very good ones they provide) easier to use.

Change always brings opportunity for learning. There were two instances that seemed more significant this past month:

The annual enrollment for health insurance. There are always a few changes that require study and choices have to be made. The package is as big as a small book!

I decided to experiment making Zentangle patterns on soft drink bottles to decide if I could transfer what I did on flat tiles to a curved surface (and maybe follow through to make the patterns on spherical balls for our Christmas tree). It was a learning experience…enjoyable but not enough for me to forge ahead with the higher cost project.

Travel learning is somewhat like the opportunities change brings: we tend to do different things when we travel away from home. Our fall foliage trip was my first Star Party so everything was new…and something I want to do again. The places we went in West Virginia were repeats but different enough to be learning experiences too; for example – there could have been puff balls at Beartown when we were there in 2001 but I would not have recognized them!

Sometimes a ‘travel’ type experience happens close to home too. I finally got a tour of the farmhouse at Mt. Pleasant farm…and learned about how the house had been enlarged around the original long cabin. The continuity of a family living there and modifying the house to meet their needs over the years was more interesting than many of the houses of wealthier people I’ve toured over the years.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 31, 2015

Happy Halloween!

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Hamersley Shows Off the Beauty of Australia's Wilderness – A 4 minute film made using drones around the Hammersley rnage and Karijini National Park.

Blocking enzymes in hair follicles promotes hair growth - Wow! The results in mice a pretty dramatic for ‘normal’ mice. Experiments to address hair follicles affected by hair loss disorders are under way.

Microphotographs Reveal the Wonderfully Odd World of Plants – Images created for a 2016 calendar.

Photography in the National Parks: Your Armchair Guide to Big Bend National Park – Part 1 – This is a national park I’ve not explored....maybe it’s time to plan a trip.

A Rough Guide to the IARC’s Carcinogen Classifications – Andy Brunning’s graphic about carcinogens. Processed and red meats have been in the news during the past few weeks.

Using the Light When the Light is Right – A series of photographs from The Prairie Ecologist.

The Ten Creepiest Spiders of North America – Just in time for Halloween.  I remember by mother making sure I knew what a Black Widow spider looked like very early….a good thing since I found one in my sandbox one spring and recognized it!

Black Bears Facing Hard Times at Great Smoky Mountains National Park – Evidently the traditional fall foods for bears (acorns and grapes) did not do so well this year so they are foraging in larger areas and eating foods that are not their favorites (like hickories and walnuts).

Digging Deep Reveals the Intricate World of Roots – I do field trips with second graders where we collect some soil cores and then look at not only the soil the roots we find in it. They are always surprised that there are roots even 12 inches under the meadow where we usually go to collect the sample! This article shows that the roots actually are probably much deeper than 12 inches.

Urban Explorer Gives Viewers an Interior Tour of St. Petersburg's Architectural Gems – Over the top architecture…it is hard to image any of these being places people actually lived.

Intimate Landscapes – October 2015

I enjoyed Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here) enough to think about my own photographs from a similar perspective and will start a monthly series this month with my ‘picks’ that fit the criteria: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

I liked this first one because of the colors…and the tenacity of the plants growing on the rocks sticking out into the lake. The colors from the landscape are a blurry reflection in the water surrounding the plants.

The next one is close to a macro image. It is beech nut hulls and lichen in the mulch. Again the colors – golden brown and pale green – were what drew my attention.

The newly fallen leaf – surrounded by older leaves and pine needles (some of which were shed after the leaf fell since they over it) - appealed to me as did the hint of a red leaf peaking from under one of the brown leaves.

I was surprised to notice so many plants growing in this scene – moss, lichen, shelf fungus. That may be a rhododendron at the back. This intimate landscape is teaming with plant life!

CSA Week 22 – The Last Week of the Season

This was the last week of the 2015 Gorman Produce Farm CSA. I took an extra bag because I anticipated a lot of food. I’m glad I did.

The main part of the share included:

• 2 kinds of lettuce
• Broccoli
• 3 watermelon radishes
• Pac choi
• Tatsoi
• 4 beets
• 2 bunches of turnips with greens
• 4 garlic
• Honey
• Parsley
• Chard
• Radicchio 

The 6 pounds of sweet potatoes and 1/2 pound of spinach did not fit into the picture!

The overage table was pretty full to and we were not limited to one or two items. I got carrots (with tops still attached), Brussel sprouts, bell peppers, and snacking peppers.

When I got home I had a lot of processing to do:

• The sweet potatoes are cured so will keep outside the refrigerator but they had gotten wet (rainy day) so I spread them on a big tray to dry.
• I cut the tops off the carrots and copped them up with the parsley…the pulp is on a tray drying.
• The turnip tops are cleaned, cut into pieces and in the freezer for use in winter soups.
• The Brussel sprouts are cut from the stalk and clean – ready to roast or toss into a stir fry.
• The Pac choi, Tatsoi and Chard leaves are in a bag – clean and ready to easily cut up. The stems are collected into a small bin; I’ve discovered that I like to cook the stems a bit more than the leaves so it is convenient to have them together rather than still attached to the leaves.

The crispers are full…the 3 bins I have for the overflow of veggies are full too. I’m focused on eating the ones most in danger of spoiling first!

3 Free eBooks – October 2015

It was really hard to pick just three this month. So – two of the three are actually series. The Internet Archive’s new interface is a little different from the old one. I like to browse through (or read) the books online; clicking on the magnifying glass symbol on the far right of the display results in the book displayed in 2 page mode…and a page turn is just a click away.

Sharp, Helen. Water-color sketches of plants of North America and Europe, 1888 June – 1910 September. The sketches are packaged into 17 volumes and available on the Internet Archive here. I clipped a portion of the goldenrod page to include in this post. I recognized many of the plants. Evidently the sketches were used for teaching purposes.

Rattenbury, John. Living Architecture – Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects. California: Pomegranate Communications, Inc. 2000. Available from the Internet Archive here. What an architectural feast! I picked the one I clipped because of the turquoise cladding at the top. Somehow that color is one of my favorites when the landscape is full of more muted colors.

Peterson, Bryan. Understanding Close-Up Photography. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications. 2009. Available from Internet Archive here. Photography is something I’ve come to enjoy a lot in recent years…and classes and books on the topic add to the techniques and compositions I want to attempt! It turns out that the Folkscanomy Photography collection available via the Internet Archive has quite a few books; take a look at the book covers here and simply select one to look at the book in regular Internet Archive format.

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – October 2015

Noticing something worth celebration each day is an easy thing for me to do. The habit of writing it down reminds me to be grateful for these and a myriad of other things in my life. Here are my top 10 for October 2015.

Several celebrations involved the volunteering I do with the Howard County Conservancy:

A rainy day hike with 1st graders – It could have been a disaster…unhappy wet children…but instead we moved quickly from covered are and to covered area when it was only sprinkling and the children were very happy all during their field trip. I celebrated their resilience (and my own)!

The snake and second graders – The response of children to snakes is hard to predict. I had a group of eight second graders and three chaperones that simply enjoyed watching the small snake move through the grass and then moved away from the direction the snake wanted to go, allowing it to escape. Fascination rather than hysteria…something to celebrate.

The 25th birthday of the Howard Country Conservancy – I am celebrating that the non-profit I enjoy volunteering with has been around for 25 years!

There were a lot of things at home to celebrate in October too:

Bringing the glass bird bath indoors – We had a first frost and that triggered the retrieval of the glass bird bath. I cleaned it thoroughly and it now is in its winter role: holding potatoes and onions on the dining room table. Making this change is always a celebration of seasonal change.

Bountiful CSA shares – Wow – we are getting full bags each week at the CSA season comes to an end....celebrating a riot of fall veggies!

80 daffodil bulbs planted – I actually celebrated when the job was done. The bags did not seem that daunting when I purchased them but 80 bulbs requires some effort to get in the ground! I am already anticipating how pretty they will be at the edge of the forest next spring.

Zentangle® on a soft drink bottle – I saw an article about making the patterns on Christmas balls and decided to try it on soft drink bottles as a practice. The first one did not turn out so well; the curved surface is very different than a paper tile. With practice – I now have some that I like…and I still have a few more weeks before I’ll switch to ornaments. I’m celebrating my developing skill.

Blue jays in the maple – The small flock of blue jays that I’ve noticed the past few fall seasons is back and visiting the maple I see from my office window. I am celebrating their return.

Our October road trip had at least one celebration each day…but I chose 2 to not overwhelm the list for the month:

Staunton River Star Party – I did not know what to expect…but it was fun and comfortable. I am celebrating the beginning of a new tradition since I am sure we’ll go again next fall.

Fall foliage – I suppose I could have listed this in the ‘home’ category too. October is the month to celebrate the beauty of deciduous trees preparing for winter.

Lessons from Our Fall Road Trip

Our fall road trip was 5 days – 2 nights camping in southern Virginia and 2 nights at the Snowshoe Ski Resort. It was an enjoyable time away from home and, like most travels, a learning experience.

We had not camped for more than 20 years and the type of camping at the Staunton River Star Party was different than we’d ever done before. We learned that:

• We can indeed both sleep in the car…but it is a pretty tight fit.
• The food is reasonably priced and tasty. We’ll still take an ice chest next year…but buy more from the vendor.
• The facilities at the park (like hot showers) make it easy to imagine a camping for longer than 2 nights. We’ll probably stay for more than 2 nights next year.
• We need to figure out how to create our own shade for during the day on the field. It can still get warm in the afternoons in early October.

Several lessons from the West Virginia portion of the trip:

• Cell phone reception is not good in the mountains. In fact – don’t count on it at all.
• The Snowshoe Resort is empty in October…and almost everything is closed. It seemed eerie to not have more people about. I might stay at the base of the mountain next time although I did enjoy the sunsets from the window of our efficiency.
• The efficiency had a queen sized Murphy bed. When it was folded up – a table folded down into the space where the bed would be later. It is very appealing to use space so efficiently. I tucked the idea away for application if I ever do extreme downsizing.

Cass Scenic Railroad State Park

The Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in West Virginia has a train and restored logging town; we went for the scenery but there is a lot of history to absorb as well. I’d bought the tickets ahead of time online. We arrived early enough – leaving Cranberry Glade behind and enjoying the winding roads through the West Virginia forested mountains near Snowshoe Ski Resort - to walk around the depot area and have lunch before our train departed. The hillside across from the depot was full of color.

As we started our journey up the mountain, the sawmill ruins were not far from the track. The track, engines and cars for the scenic train were originally built to carry logs out of the mountains…down to this mill.

Now the area is reforested (although the trees are still relatively young…there are no giant trees yet) and

The streams appear to be recovered. The area is either National Forest or under conservation easement.

The day was sunny and comfortable with a sweater or sweatshirt. The train moved slowly up the mountain and took pictures all along the way. We had taken this same train ride back in 2001 but I had forgotten that the train gets up the mountain via switchbacks. The slow speed and then stopping to achieve the switchback makes it easier to get pictures of the forest.

Many of the trees has already dropped their leaves but there were brilliant exceptions.

The train stops at Whittaker and the passengers get off to buy hot chocolate, photograph the hillside,

Or walk around the ruins of the logging camp. The temperature was cooler than down at the depot…and a good deal more exposed to the wind. Men that worked here lived in thin walled shanties.

As the trains went around a curve – lots of passengers leaned out to get a pictures of the engine with its billowing smoke. It is a coal fired steam engine. Our trip to Whittaker and back took about a ton of coal.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 24, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Why being single is much more than handling just loneliness – Even though the number of singles has been increasing in many places (sometimes to over half the adult population), the market has filed to understand the commercial experience of singles by always skewing to the ideal life centered on couples and nuclear families.

The rapid and startling decline of world’s vast boreal forests – Boreal forests are Earth’s single largest biome…up to 30% of the globe’s forest cover. An indicator species of this biome are moose and their numbers in Minnesota have dropped so quickly that some groups want to list them as endangered in the Midwest. The Boreal forest may be shrinking…dying…changing. The boreal forests are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. There could be a near term tipping point. Many trees are dying already.

Sweden is on track to becoming the first cashless nation – I’ve noticed in recent years that I use a lot less cash…but not quite cashless. The US has a ways to go.

The Chemistry of Superglue – A little about the history of superglue…and how it works.

The end is in sight for reading glasses – I hope this works! The idea of replacing natural lenses with liquid crystals is also applicable to helping people that have cataracts.

Chaco Culture National Historic Park – Another Dark Sky Park. Now that I’ve been to one star party….I’m looking for other places in the US that have as good or better dark skies! I’ve been to Chaco once….during the day…and thought the isolation of the place made it easier to imagine the people that lived there long ago.

A nap to recap: how reward, daytime sleep boost learning – As I read about the study – I wondered what the results would be with a meditation break rather than a sleep break.

Winners of Nikon's 2015 Small World Contest Reveal the Microscopic Beauty of Our World – Images of things you can’t see so easily with just your eyes.

Orange lichens are potential source for anticancer drugs – Parietin in a pigment in orange lichens and rhubarb…that has the potential for treating leukemia without toxicity to human blood cells.

Study compares traditional, modern views of aging – There seems to be consensus that older people are more respected and perceived as wiser than younger people. However, traditional societies think older people have better memories and modern societies think older people have poor memories.

Cranberry Glades Botanical Area

Cranberry Glade Botanical Area was a stop on our way between Beartown State Park and Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in West Virginia. It is a boggy area with mountains around it. Many of the trees on the mountains had lots their leaves already…although there were some remnants of color left.

The cotton grass was waved in the breeze.

The boardwalk makes it easy to stay just above the bog yet see the dense grown on old logs.

The mosses growing directly in the bog are mostly green…but sometimes are vividly red.

Small plants are everywhere

But require bending down for a closer look.

There is a visitor center nearby that had an exhibit about invasive species (insects) that are causing problems in the area. They also had a laminated, folded quick reference about invasive plants that I bought – similar to ones I have about native birds and plants.

CSA 21 and Beautiful Food

Next week will be the last of the CSA for 2015. We are getting a lot of vegetables each week as the fields end-of-season harvest rolls on. The week the bag was stuffed again.  The leaves of the bunch of turnips and stalk of Brussel sprouts stuck out of the top. The 3 pounds of sweet potatoes and watermelon radishes were at the bottom of the bag. A head of cabbage and bell peppers were toward the middle and the lettuce and bunch of cilantro was at the top. I traded the hot peppers included in the share for an extra bunch of cilantro. We were allowed two items from the overage table and I chose the pink stemmed chard and a pound of small broccoli stalks.

There is so much that is beautiful about fall foods. The one-potato-soup made with a broth started with water beets were cooked in (very red, a little vinegary) was a beautiful color and tastey.

Some food are beautiful in the raw – like these Brussel sprouts.

I’ve discovered that I use the firmer veggies like broccoli, sweet potatoes, kohlrabi, radishes and turnips in salads (slaw or added to lettuce) and stir fries when they are already shredded and ready to go.  The shredder disk of the food processor makes it very easy and the result – all mixed together – is beautiful and tastey. The picture below is from last week with the watermelon radish contributing the bright pink, sweet potato the orange, broccoli (the whole stalk!) the green, turnips and kohlrabi the white. Later today I’ll make a new batch with the veggies I need to use up now: purple cabbage, watermelon radish, sweet potato, broccoli, and turnips.

Beartown State Park

We visited Beartown State Park in West Virginia for the first time back in 2001. It is a small, but memorable park and well worth another visit. It consists primarily of a boardwalk around huge boulders covered with moss, ferns and lichens….

(and some very fast moving chipmunks)

With lots of trees that manage to grow up through the rocks.

The deep narrow crevasses are as similar to the slot canyons in the western US as we get on the East coast.

I took a picture of a staircase with my husband on it to provide some an element of scale.

The rock face had eroded pits. It is hard to fathom the amount of time it takes for weathering to form these pits; some of them are large enough to hold a person.

The leaf color was spectacular up close and

Looking up to the sky.

My special find of the walk was a pair of puff balls.

Staunton River Star Party

My husband and I spent last Monday and Tuesday at the Staunton River Star Party (held at Staunton River State Park). The park is an International Dark Sky Park….lots more stars visible than in the area where we live. The park prepared well for the event – with star party themed jack-o-lanterns, red cellophane on all windows were white light my leak, and paths marked with red snake lights or small red LEDs on stakes.

The observing field already had a lot of people setting up by the time we got there but we managed to get a spot that was close to one of the electrical hubs – good to be able to run equipment directly and/or easily recharge batteries during the day. We started to unpack and quickly discovered that we had forgotten our tent! Fortunately we did have the tent-like cover for the back of our SUV and some extra tarps. My husband and I managed to sleep inside the car on an air mattress (it helped that he was observing until the wee hours of the morning since the space was a narrow enough that we could only roll over in unison)!

We tied one side of a tarp to the roof rack and used tripods we had brought for our cameras to hold the corners away from the car. The wind came close to knocking the tripods over before we hung heavy equipment bags as weights. Having the tarp helped during the day when it got a bit warm in the bright sunshine.

I took sunrise and sunset pictures too: Sunrise on Tuesday morning. Note the various tents, trailers, awnings and cars…the whole field looked like this with a lattice of drive lanes to provide just enough organization so vehicles could get in and out.

Sunset on Tuesday evening. There were enough clouds at sunset that everyone was looking around for signs of clearing…and it did by the time it was fully dark.

Sunrise Wednesday morning – a few hours before we left. There were quite a few crows greeting the sun and they seemed to like the bare tree – stopping there before moving about and sometimes coming back to perch again for a little while.

The clouds on that last morning looked like they were losing part of themselves as they floated into morning.

The dew was heavy both nights we were at the star party and people generally called it a night before 3 AM. Those that did not have heaters to keep condensation off their mirrors had to stop earlier. I took pictures walking around during the mornings when the telescopes were generally neatly covered.

 

I took one short hike and found more fungi than I expected. There were a few colorful trees as well. Otherwise – I was feeling relaxed and lazy with the flurry of star party activity going on all around me.

Fall Road Trip

Last week we made our annual fall road trip. Last year we went to Chincoteague and Blackwater National Wildlife Refuges (blog post here) which is southeast of where we live. This year we went south into Virginia and southwest into West Virginia.

Our trip started with 2 days at the Staunton River State Park for a star party. The park is in south central Virginia…and has very dark skies. Our car was completely full with telescopes and camping gear!

Then we drove into West Virginia along very curvy roads. It was a step back in time with little cell service and gas stations with only one grade of regular gas….but the drive was scenic – up, down, around, all the colors of fall.  There are rhododendron and pines to provide a dark green backdrop to the yellows and reds along the way.

We noticed that some of the mountains had trees already bare for the winter…some with brightly colored trees…and some that still looked like summertime. Altitude and the direction of the slope make quite a difference.

We enjoyed Beartown State Park, Cranberry Glades Botanical Area, Cass Scenic Railroad State Park and the Snowshoe Ski Resort. I’ll be posting more details over the next couple of weeks.

CSA Week 20

Our CSA ends at the end of October. Right now we are almost overwhelmed with fall veggies. I still have a lot left from last week and there was another very full bag for week 20:

Several kinds of peppers: bell and snack (I got double snack peppers by trading away my hot peppers).

Turnips. There were two kinds to choose from (red and white). I got one of each by trading away my eggplant for one of them. The turnip greens are a lot to eat before they go limp.

I’ve already made chips with the bunch of kale.

The broccoli and a few sweet potatoes were shredded with some turnips and watermelon radish left from previous weeks. It makes a complete meal when combined with dried soy nuts…and cooks quickly when added to stir fry. Of course I still have sweet potatoes to last for quite a while after the CSA officially ends.

I chose the red leaf lettuce rather than all green. I like the color variety. The arugula and pale green cabbage is enough ‘green’ for salads.

I picked up a bunch of mizzuna from the overage table.

My focus for meals over the next week is to eat the veggies that will spoil most easily….and save the ones that will last a week of more in the crisper.

Gleanings of the Week Ending October 17, 2015

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

One-Third of Cactus Species Threatened – The main dangers to cacti are illegal trade for horticulture and private collections. I was surprised that development in areas where they grow was not high on the list of dangers too.

How to tangle on glass Christmas ornaments – Wow! This is a project I want to try. I’ve already started practicing by tangling on soft drink bottles. It takes some new skills to work on a rounded surface!

Take Free Online Classes, Get Course Credit at MIT – The experiment is a one year program in supply chain management. The first half is online (and free); the second semester is on campus.

What Those Frost Patterns on Your Car Window Have to Do with Ice in Space – The patterns are like abstract art – I prefer to use the defroster rather than the scrapper…watch them melt slowly.

DuPont Predicts CRISPR Plants on Dinner Plates in Five Years –Improving crops by rapidly introducing beneficial gene variants found in other varieties of the same species.

Microsoft’s Very Good Day – Microsoft has a whole new vibe….that became a lot more apparent in early October.

Postcard from Cape Monarch – It would be wonderful to see this many Monarchs on goldenrod here in Maryland. We have seen the butterflies this past summer – but not in the numbers we observed before the mid-1990s.

Dying at home leads to more peace, less grief, but requires wider support -

9 Germ Fighting Facts – Well timed for the beginning of the cold and flu season!

Not your average peacock – Peacock images collect by National Geographic editors

Zooming – October 2015

I managed to limit myself to 5 collages gleaned from snippets of photographs from late September and early October. The majority are from Longwood Gardens since that is where I took a huge number of pictures.

They are all botanical except for two: can you find the bee and milkweed bugs.

There are four clips of water lilies (pink, purple, white, and a giant that is white a pink)…the bee is on a water lily but it is clipped a bit too tight to see that one so I didn’t count that one. Can you find the fiddlehead clip?

Can you spot the poke weed? Hint: the stem is bright pink and the berries are dark purple. The connection of the stem to the berry is something I had not looked at closely before.

Dogwood in the Fall

I first became familiar with dogwoods when we had one in the backyard of our house in Virginia over 30 years ago. It grew by the patio under the tall oaks. We moved to the house in July so I first saw it with its graceful branches full of green leaves undulating in the little breezes. And then came the fall. The leaves turned red earlier than most and the red seed clusters were so vibrant they glowed even on cloudy days. Dogwoods became a ‘tree to note’ from that time forward for me. The one I chose to photograph this year grows at Mt. Pleasant Farm along the drive to the farmhouse. It is very similar to the one I remember.

Of course – the white blossoms in the spring (see post from last spring here) are pretty spectacular and I probably photograph them more than the fall foliage. I appreciate the fall foliage as a celebration of the season – the grand finale of the dogwood’s year.

Cut Flowers Photography

The flowers from our garden look a bit battered with the wind, rain and cooler temperatures of the past few weeks – but I cut two for some experimental photography. It was a quick project on a sunny afternoon.

I like the bright yellow and the bit of green in the corner of the sunflower image. The texture of the petals appealed to me.

The flower from the back was interesting too….and I liked the overall shape of the flower, leaves and stem enough to include the shadow.

The zinnia and its shadow made an ordinary flower something different.

The leaves of the zinnia have a bit of color in their connection with the stem….and the veins stand out too.

I had the sunflower I got from the CSA during the summer that has dried to look at as well. The petals are shriveled but retain their color. The curves and hairiness of the dried back of the flower seemed even more intriguing.

Centennial Park Reflections

There were thick clouds the morning I walked around Centennial Lake; the light made for muted reflections rather than crisp clean lines in the water and blue sky above the line of trees…but I enjoyed the challenge and got a few images that I like well enough to share.

There was a pile of rocks that has been extending into the lake long enough for vegetation to take root. The reflections of the plants growing on the rocks are reflected as well as the trees from the opposite bank of the lake. I liked the muted fall colors.

The trees are still mostly green but there is an occasional bright red. I wondered if the fishermen thought the fish were lurching in the water near the bright color!

The bridge over an inlet to the lake can always be counted on for color – and again there was a fishing boat nearby. The trees appear to be on the verge of losing their green; it should be all the colors of fall by the end of the month.

Centennial Lake in the morning has a good orientation for reflections. My challenge is to go back on another morning toward the end of the month when there is no breeze….to get the glory of fall foliage in the trees and reflections.