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You Capture – Hopeful

This week’s theme was “hopeful,” which for me is VERY appropriate. I am really HOPEFUL someone looks at my pics since I’m all late posting them. I took these dang pictures days and days ago. Then last night I went to bed at like 8:30. And when I woke up this morning, I forgot it was You Capture day.

I’m posting them anyway. Because I took every single picture with this week’s theme in mind. Really.

You can read more about You Capture if you like. It’s basically a project where quite a few other people  post pictures each Thursday inspired by a predefined theme. I love checking out all of the other pics to see how different people interpreted the theme.

There are a lot of Moms who participate. And every week, no matter what the theme, it seems I see a lot of baby feet. That’s cool, because I love baby feet. But I’m sort of jealous. I don’t have any baby feet just laying around to photograph.

Not any human baby feet anyway.

I am HOPEFUL not too many people make fun of me for taking a picture of one of my furbabies’ feet. Doesn’t she have pretty feet though?

One of the "Baby" Feet We See Around Here

I found it interesting, after our last pitiful dusting of snow, the see the ground under the bird feeders covered in bird footprints. I know you can’t really get a sense of scale from this shot, but I know they are sort of large prints left by the gazillion Grackles that have been visiting our feeders. This is evidence that on this day there were a lot of birds HOPEFUL for castoff seeds and/or crumbs.

Grackle Prints

Speaking of under the bird feeders… this cat has stood guard out there for years, HOPEFULly watching the birds come and go.

Hopeful Cat Statue

Look closely at the bottom right-hand corner of this shot and you’ll see Belle’s foot. She was helping me look for bird prints, HOPEFUL that she would catch a bird. She is a bird dog (Brittany) after all.

In case you are wondering, these prints, which are much smaller than those shown previously, are  from a Dark-eyed Junco.

Bird Dog in Action

While we’re talking about Belle, here’s a shot of her with her head on my keyboard HOPEFUL that I’ll turn the computer off and take her outside.

Can We Go Out Now?

Once you have dogs, you realize they communicate extremely well. They just use body language, whines and barks. In the next pic, you see K sitting in front of me looking at the door. She’d look at me then look at the door. Look at me, then the door. She was HOPEFUL I’d get up and let her outside.

Let Me Out

Finally, this next shot shows all of the dogs HOPEFUL that Hubby, who just got home from somewhere, will hurry up and open the door.

Dad's Home

That’s it for this week. I am very HOPEFUL that next week’s shots are more interesting. And posted in a more timely fashion.

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The Crazy Cat Lady

So, the other day I mentioned that I’d gone to Carol’s house and taken lots of cat pictures, right? I did take a ton of them. But I was practicing, trying to get the pics without flash. It was sort of darkish when I shot many of them, so I ended up with lots of blurry pics. But that’s why I took a lot. To make sure I’d get at least a couple of good ones.

I think I succeeded, too. But I’ll let you be the judge.

This is Daisy Mae.
Meet Rocky.
Ellie was the least cooperative. I never did get a very good shot of her.
This is Wolfie. Quality-wise, this is not a great shot. I like it anyway for his expression.

Daisy, Ellie, Rocky and Wolfie are siblings. Carol found them under her shed when they were days old. Their mother was run over by a car, so she bottle-fed and raised them. Initially, the plan was to maybe keep one of them. She already had two cats, Lily and Jesse, but she fell in love with those darn babies and just could not bring herself to give them up. That’s how she became The Crazy Cat Lady.

Jesse, Carol's "baby" (he's the oldest).

Jesse is actually the second cat Carol adopted. Tabitha, the first cat, stayed with her Mom when she moved out. She rescued Tabitha from her brother and sister-in-law, who were going to have the cat euthanized because she had a really bad case of fleas.

Meet Lily.

Lily is a stray that showed up outside of Carol’s house one day. She had a brother, Grady, who was so desperately ill, he had to be euthanized.

Cats tend to gravitate toward Carol. She just saved another, Jasper, who will be going to live with Carol’s niece. There was another feral cat who she fed and tried to tame, but he was beyond taming. Sadly, he was run over by a car.

I’m sure there will be more cats in Carol’s future. Which is nice, because there are a gazillion cats in shelters, roaming the streets, etc. It’s nice to know people like Carol are out there helping them.

Wolfie and Daisy, snuggling.

I just had to share this picture of Wolfie and Daisy. They were so cute all snuggled up on the couch together. You may notice Daisy is a bit, um, voluptuous. With 6 cats, it is next to impossible to regulate what each individual eats. All of the babies (Daisy, Ellie, Rocky and Wolfie) are a bit chubby. But that just means there are more of them to love.

If you’d like to see the rest of the pictures I salvaged from the many I shot of Carol’s cats, you’ll have to visit my Flickr site.

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Readjustment

Now that the holidays are over, it will be interesting to see just how long it takes the girls to readjust to my work schedule.

This scene was repeated over and over yesterday. It’s a good thing I wasn’t busy…

My girls can be quite demanding at times. After I’d let them out a gazillion times, all K wanted was to sit on my lap. Having her there tends to put a crimp in my typing speed, however.

With my handy new point-and-shoot, which I can keep by my side at all times, I snapped a couple shots of K on my lap. Then, last night, I did some editing with PS Elements and this is what I ended up with…

I applied some different lighting, color and texture effects. Then I framed it. What do you think?

I took Wednesday off to go skiing with my baby boy. I am determined to take advantage of some $21 all-day lift ticket specials this year.

Wish me luck. It’s still damn cold. Tomorrow’s forecasted high is 20 degrees with snow showers and some wind, so it will feel like 8 degrees. If I dress appropriately, all should be fine. Right?

Snow conditions are great. They’ve had 63″ so far this year and expect some more overnight tonight. We’ll be driving out to the WV place this evening if all goes as planned. That’s about an hour away from Wisp and just outside the snow belt, so we shouldn’t have any problems.

If you want to see how things are going for us on Wednesday, check out the Wisp web cams.

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I Got to Hold TWO Puppies

The family that served as K’s foster family while she was still in rescue are fostering a young French Brittany mother and her two pups. I have always wanted to see a Brittany puppy. Other than Max, a friend’s yellow lab, I’d never held any puppy, much less tiny little 4-week-old puppies like these!

Comet (shown on left) is the bigger of the two. He’s a boy. Dancer, shown on right, is a girl.

I like Dancer’s little freckled nose. Here she is all wrapped in a towel after I rocked her to sleep.

The first time we went down to see the puppies, we left K upstairs. She was not happy. She cried the whole time I was gone. So, when we got back upstairs, she wanted to hang out with me. Emily sat on the floor, too, and soon we were surrounded by critters. Other than me spinning K around to face the camera, this shot was not posed. Isn’t it hysterical that even the cat got in there?

K was such a good passenger. On the way home, after stopping at my parents’ house, I stopped at a pit beef stand to get dinner. I asked if I could have a couple of little scraps for K. They gave me a bag with at least a pound and a half of beef, ham, turkey and corned beef scraps. Thanks to K, all of the dogs ate well last night!

I created a slide show using some of the pix from yesterday. I did it with Photoshop Elements, and it was super-easy. If you are looking for an inexpensive but powerful piece of image editing software, that’s the one I would recommend.

I had hoped to stop at Conowingo Dam on the way home for some eagle pix, but, as you’ll see in the slideshow, it was ungodly cold. Most have left the dam to head for their nests. Eagles lay their eggs in mid-January. Wanna see some Eagles nesting, laying eggs and hatching the chicks? Follow the Eagle Cam link I just installed in the right navigation bar at the bottom.



NOTE: There’s an error in my slideshow.
The picture of two dogs labeled Hannah and Brandy
should read Bella and Brandy. Sorry, Jenn!