Corpse Plant

Mushrooms found right by our cabin, not edible of course. Still kind of a cute, spooky little bunch. There are always a ton of different mushrooms hanging around our neck of the North Woods, so I like to photograph them when I come across them. XD Kinda reminds me of that one episode of BBC's Midsummer Murders, if anyone watches that show.

Thankfully I have friends who aren't as lazy as I am when it comes to looking things up!

Meet Monotropa uniflora, also known as "Indian Pipe," "Ghost Plant," and/or "Corpse Plant." Spooky, right? Really, I should have recognized it because I described Indian Pipes in one of my novels, and I usually retain that sort of information well. The corpse plant (now one of my favorite plants), is a parasitic plant that feeds on other plants, usually fungi mycorrhizal with trees. Thus, it contains no chlorophyll and can grow in the darkness. Usually completely white in appearance, it can have black flecks (like the ones I found), have a pink coloration, or even a deeper red coloration (which would look awesome, in my opinion). Apparently they're even part of the blueberry family. See? Awesome plant.

I've been majorly behind on my blogs. Partially just because I've been busy in general. The horse was injured for a little bit (nothing too major, but it did require some spoiling by way of daily massages from his two-legger), I've been working on a fairly hefty project, and then my laptop died. Yep, died. I spent half a week first trying to repair it, then trying to confirm what I thought the problem was. The hard drive has too many bad sectors to function, so essentially, it suffered hard drive failure. Luckily I've been going between my laptop and family desktop so much that everything essential was already backed up. But, still, it's been a journey.

It's finally feeling like fall here (it was, and then we had a few days of disgusting 80* heat and humidity), so I do plan on getting the camera out to the stable at some point. It also occurred to me that I've hardly taken any photos of Andromeda, this year's filly. So that needs to be remedied.

All in all, I'm hanging in there. I hope everyone has been well (better than me, at least), and to my blogger friends: I'm way behind on my reading. But I'll catch up this weekend, I think.

Over the Banks

The creek I mentioned in my other post. These were taken on the other side of the bridge I talked about. When I was younger the creek here used to be bigger--you can kind of see the space it used to occupy closer to the trees. It's been so low and trickling for so long the grass invaded the banks.


I lowered the saturation levels of the green and green-blues a bit for both of these images. I liked the vibrancy of the browns and pale yellow-greens. It probably makes it seem more like fall than mid summer, but that's fine with me.

Shared Dreams

I was going through some old photos and found this in my archives. Taken at the 2003 Kentucky Rolex, it features Jan Thompson and Shared Dreams. I can't remember how they fared at that Rolex, but I remember liking Shared Dreams a bit. Anyway, so there you go, a photo taken during my sophomore year in High School. Haha, if I thought that out right. XD

I do theoretically have a photo CD of all my Rolex photos, but I'm not sure where they are. I went to the Rolex several times in High School with my stable friends. We always had such a blast, granted I was a major shutterbug the whole time, but I do remember everything well. Definitely need to go again sometime! Anyway, my point was that this image was scanned, and while I went through and killed the dust, I wasn't terribly patient with it. So, forgive the slacking quality. ;)

Free Flowing, Again, or...Finally

As I mentioned, I used my fisheye attachment quite a bit with my Lensbaby up North. Here's one of my favorites of the creek. When I was young, I used to wade and swim in the creek that went past the cabin. There was a deeper pool next to a bridge we used to fish at, too. But in the past ten or so years, there has been a drought and the creek was at a standstill for a long time. Just exposed rocks and tadpoles and mosquito dens. There is no greater sense of time than looking at the changes of nature. A favorite spot from twenty years ago you remember better than yesterday's breakfast, so unfamiliar now it has become a ghost. Land becomes a part of us, part of our identity and personal mythology, the magnetic pole for our compass. No matter how far we stray, in the end we're looking for a reincarnation of that spot and the way it made us feel alive.