Light On Dark Water

That Big Ol' Moon

The "super-moon" stuff from last weekend--a full moon at the moon's closest approach of the year (or for some number of years, I think)--was a little overdone, with many pictures of the moon looking truly enormous. But if you actually looked at the actual moon, you saw it looking pretty much like it always does when it's full. That doesn't mean it wasn't beautiful, though. My wife took this with her iPhone, from the parking lot of Ed's Seafood on the Mobile Bay Causeway. Pretty nice for a phone camera.

Well, okay, the super-moon stuff was a lot overdone. Those pictures that show it looking so big were probably taken when it was rising or setting, then cropped so the moon fills up more of the frame. As everyone who's ever watched it knows, the moon (and sun) look bigger near the horizon (and also reddish-orange instead of white).

Sunday Night Journal — May 6, 2012

Images and Sounds

I haven't posted any pictures here (my own pictures, that is) for a while. The reason is partly that I haven't been taking very many, and partly that I haven't sorted through the ones I have taken over the past months. And the reason for both those things is lack of time.

And if you're a very regular and attentive reader of this blog, and also have a very good memory, you might remember that sometime last year I posted a couple of videos (nothing elaborate, just things captured with the video setting on my camera), and that I mentioned that I was also planning to post a video taken during Tropical Storm Ida, which I believe was in 2009.

So I decided this afternoon that instead of writing I would spend some time selecting and beautifying some nice images from my past six months or so of pictures, and also post that tropical storm video. Well, as is often the way with computers, I ran into unexpected technical problems with the video, which I won't bore you with, and then was pretty much out of time. But here are a few pictures, starting with a still from Tropical Storm Ida.

One of those strange spider webs on the ground in the woods, that you only see when the dew is heavy:

One of many pictures I've taken of these dead trees in the bay. They were probably cypresses. I don't expect them to be standing that much longer--the next hurricane will probably knock them down. This was taken last October.

A heron in morning fog, December 31 2011:

And, from the same morning: I don't know why I took this, and it's entirely possible that it was an accident, but I for some reason I really love it:

And also: a couple of years ago my wife gave me for my birthday a little hand-held sound recorder. Sometimes I use it to record little notes to myself, usually about something I'm writing, while I'm on the way to or from work. I've also played around with recording natural sounds with it, and I did that one night a couple of weeks ago when I was taking my nightly walk to the bay with the dogs. There is a little creek that empties out into the bay, and up in that creek a bit there are a lot of reeds or rushes which provide homes for frogs. (It's the mouth of that creek which reflects the trees in the picture above--it moves around and changes shape all the time.) And there are woods all around. For some years now we've had very few lightning bugs--"fireflies" to most of the world, and I think that's a nicer word, but it feels slightly pretentious for me to say it, because I grew up saying "lightning bugs." But this year there have been quite a lot. I was standing about halfway between the bay and the reeds with the recorder going, and the woods beyond the reeds were full of those sweet cool flashes of light from the lightning bugs. You can hear tree frogs, an occasional bigger frog, and insects, but mostly the waves. At some points you can hear the traffic from up on Section Street, several hundred yards away. I'm sorry you can't see the lightning bugs.

 SpringNightAtTheBayApril2012-2

 

The Tuscaloosa Tornadoes

Hmm, sounds a bit like the name of a rock band.... But no: Friday will be the first anniversary of the devastating (to put it mildly) tornadoes that hit northern Alabama last year. An old friend of mine, one of a number of people who came to Tuscaloosa for college in the late 1960s and never left, was in a neighborhood that took a direct hit from the one that destroyed a big part of the city. She lived to tell the tale, and has recently put it online here. It's pretty long, too long for me to read in one stretch, but only the first quarter or so of it deals with the day of the storm itself, while the rest describes the aftermath.

"There's been a lot of whiskey drunk to that song"

An interesting profile of an interesting fellow in the local paper: Eldon Bryson, who has been repairing stringed instruments for many years. He's a country guy who learned the trade on his own over many years, and now orchestral players with instruments that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars trust him to take care of them. Click here to read the story, which also includes this video:

I've been in that workshop. Mr. Bryson worked on my violin-playing son's expensive instrument, and my guitar-playing son's old Fender Mustang (one of Fender's cheaper guitars). There was a big old Fender amp in the corner when I was there.