Day 72

I went over to my parents' house to drop off Alex for a sleep over and to have dinner. Before dinner, I went outside to take photos.

This is the early sunset from their back porch.

I went to throw something away and noticed all the acorns covering this part of the driveway. There had to be thousands of them. Squirrels don't go hungry in their yard.

Mom grew moss along the slate path to their house. It's really soft and is growing over some of the slate. This small leaf was laying on the ground moss.

Their garden reminds me of the beach. They have all these yellow leafed beachy plants.

Day 71

Today, I headed to Shockoe Bottom (in the city, where most of the bars and clubs are) to deliver something. While I was walking back to my car, I decided to talk some photos.

I love seeing plants growing through man-made objects. In this case, the plants are growing through the foundation of a building.

These are the same kind of plants, but these are growing through the sidewalk.

The trees lining 18th street were gnarly with new growth.

These are the roots of one of the trees. I loved how these looked among the rocks from the street and glass from broken bottles...ah the bar district...

When I got home, a hawk landed in a near by tree. Sorry for the blurry photo. I went outside to try to take a better photo, but it flew away. Hopefully the hawks will stay in our neighborhood and I can take better photos.

Day 70

Today, I showed Alex how to hunt for little and weird things. I'm not sure how much she learned, but she really tried. These are the things we discovered today.

Baby pine tree

Moss

This is a soft kind we really like.

This leaf looks like a normal leaf right? Nothing that special about it...though I do like the spots. The next photo explains why this leaf isn't normal...

This leaf is HUGE. This is it in comparison to Alex's size 1.5 shoe. This leaf is even larger than my size 8 shoe. We didn't see any other leaves this size. I believe it's an Oak leaf

Day 69

It was still rainy and overcast this morning, so I took photos of wet plants. The weather has improved.

I liked the discoloration in this pile of wet leaves.

These red berries had lovely clinging drops of water.

Some of the gumballs were dark when wet...

...and some were normal colored.

The pine cones were dark from the rain.

Day 68

Last night, it rained and I took photos then of the ice clinging some plants. However, it was dark, so I couldn't see very well past the area I was in...our front yard. While I was driving to the post office this morning, I noticed that the trees were covered in ice. When I got back, I took some photos in our neighborhood and yard of some of the frozen plants.

This is ice in a drop formation on a tree branch.

This is ice covering the bud and limb. The whole tree was like this. Some areas, like above, had frozen drops.

While I was taking photos of one tree, I heard a crow caw above me. I looked up to see it perched in a barren tree. Hopefully you can spot the bird amongst the limbs.

The leaves and branches of this bush are encased in ice.

The pine needles on all the pine trees were weighted heavy with ice.

Day 67

Today was cold. Late in the evening, rain started. I realized that I hadn't taken photos yet and had to remove the soft sweet kitten from my lap to venture out into the cold for the sake of photography. The kitten wasn't happy about this, but thankfully I've learned how to do this quickly, so she snuggled up again when I came inside.

Since it was so cold, the rain drops on the leaves (and anywhere else) were freezing in drop formation. This was really neat and was something I would have missed had I not been slacking off on taking photos during the day. Again, I played with the flash and macro settings of my camera to take these unexpected photos. The longer drops are the most frozen ones. However, they are delicate. I touched one and it unfroze in my hand. All the leaves were covered in thin sheets of ice. They reminded me of glass leaves.

Camellia bush

If you look closely, you can see bubbles captured in the ice on the leaf.

Camellia bush

Camellia bush

Rhododendron bush

Day 66

To celebrate my dad's birthday, we went to Tanglewood Ordinary in Maidens, VA. While I was waiting for my parents and younger brother to show up, I took a few photos.

Some of these berries were pink, some were purple and some (like the ones in the photo) were red. They were all on the same bush.

I liked the country feel of this photo.

There was moss (I guess it's moss) on the wooden fence.

This is a tree that has grown around a tree. That is the best way to describe it.

On the way home, the sun was setting. It looked so pretty with the cloud formations. I took this while riding in the car. I loved how this one came out (some were blurry from being taken in a moving car), with the one tree high above the others.