majesty of mountains

sun+clouds+snow

Days Left: 318
Photos Posted: 47

people in motion

Taken early this morning, somewhere between 1 and 2am at the hub in johnson, i love the way the bar is solid and the people are fluid.  The suggestion of motion makes the shot kinda cool, as does the huge pink blob that was of course a big grisly bear of a guy wearing none other than a pink snuggie...logical, considering it was about -10 outside at that point, and thats not including windchill.  

Days Left: 319

Photos Posted: 46

stoweee

Days Left: 320

Photos Posted: 45

again with the josey photos...

shes so cuteeee!

Days Left: 321

Photos Posted: 44

location location location

taken out of the drivers side window of my moving vehicle, at about 50mph...cropping out the road in the foreground might make it a little prettier, but I just love this spot.  Its even more beautiful when its clear and sunny and you can see the mountains in the background.  In this shot though, I like the clouds, and how the lightest part of the sky is right over the church...kinda neat huh?

Days Left: 322

Photos Posted: 43

puddle

I'm not sure why I like this one, but I do.  I think it has to do with the green grass (suggesting summer) with the puddle (suggesting spring) with the snow (suggesting winter) and the leaves in the puddle (suggesting fall).  Its an interesting juxtaposition of all 4 seasons.  

Days Left: 323

Photos Posted: 42

another round of puppydog eyes...

because shes so good at them...

Days Left: 324

Photos Posted: 41

natures noisemakers

Beech leaves hang on for dear life all through the winter, they give the forests around here sound effects during the quiet months, muted by snow.  I found these on the top of a hill, shaking and clattering away in the sunshine today.  A little splash of orange in an otherwise white, grey, and green world.

Days Left: 325

Photos Posted: 40

the great northeast!

I just couldn't help myself, look at these clouds!

but then, there were others that I liked...so heres another just for fun:

those are both taken on the cross country ski trail around the graveyard in johnson today.

Before I call it a day though, I want to share this one, not taken by me but of me, me and my Josey-Pie!

I love this lil girl!  (You're going to have to get used to photos of her, right up until I move and have to leave her behind...so so saddd)

Days Left: 326

Photos Posted: 39

my josey!

i'm gonna miss this little one when i move to Cali!

Days Left: 327

Photos Posted: 38

doggy walkin

theres more than one way to play in the snow...

Days Left: 328

Photos Posted: 37

between the trees

taken somewhere between eden and lowel...i wanted to get you folks a sweet shot of the old eden asbestos heaps, but it was dark so toooo baddd...they're pretty cool tho...look it up.  pretttttty sweet.

Days Left: 329

Photos Posted: 36

almostttt forgot today...

we all know i love jewelry, so heres a photo of some of mine in a tangled mess...i like it, i mean, its composed entirely of shiny objects, whats not to love?

Days Left: 330

Photos Posted: 35

mountains

Brief update:  If you recall, when I started this whole blogging business...again, after my Peace Corps blog came to a close, I started up my job hunting blog and told you all about my efforts to find permanent or semi-permanent employment.  One of the many opportunities I was pursuing was an Americorps position in California.  I made it all the way to the second round interview and then was not selected for this position, HOWEVER just a few days ago I received an email, it seems it has opened back up, and I have been offered the opportunity to take it.  I hummed and hawed and thought and thought, its very late notice, training starts today so I would be getting there late and would be way behind everyone else, I need to finish up my Peace Corps medical crap before I can go, I would have no car, etc.  After much thought I realized these are all challenges I can overcome and this opportunity will be worth the sacrifice so I accepted, now i just need them to accept me back on my terms, my late arrival and lack of car, etc.  I gave my answer on Saturday and heard back that night, my requests are reasonable but need to be approved by my site, etc etc so I should hear soon.  

I've been checking my email every 5 minutes all day to see if I've heard from them, the royal "them", the ones who will decide my future, my very near future, namely if i'm moving in 2 weeks or not.  At about 5pm a friend reminded me that today is a holiday and I probably will not hear until at least tomorrow...and while thats logical and sensical and all that jazz, I'm still rather impatient so I took the doggies to the park and took dozens of pictures of puppies in snow and mountains and trees to settle my mind...heres my pick of the day:

Days Left: 331

Photos Posted: 34

Happy Birthday to my Dad!

Today was my Poppa-Bears birthday and I spent the whole morning baking this cake, selected specifically with my Poppa in mind:

It was 4 layers of from scratch, dark chocolate cake with homemade raspberry filling between them and a dark chocolate ganache frosting with raspberry garnish.  It took between 3 and 4 hours to make, bake, and assemble, and if I may say so myself, it was worth every minute.  mmmm mm good!  I found the recipe here: http://www.pickycook.com/dessert/chocolateraspberrylayercakewithchocolateganachefrosting.aspx  in case anyone wants to try it!  Let me know if you do, I'd love to hear how it goes, and if you like it as much as I did!

Happy Birthday Daddio!

Days Left: 332

Photos Posted: 33

Give Hope

I wanted to share with all of you an email I just received from Sarah B, a former Peace Corps Mauritania volunteer with me.  I trust her and I trust the Haiti-Micah Project and would like to encourage those with the financial capacity, to consider a gift to the Haiti-Micah Project to help the hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti who were effected by this devastating earthquake.  




Hi everyone,

We all know Haiti has been dealt a bad hand.  She was just emerging
from decades of bad governance and damage from successive
hurricanes-and now the earthquake.  I volunteer with an organization
that works in Haiti. The Haiti-Micah Project (www.haiti-micah.org) has
a feeding program in a town not far from Port-au-Prince. The board
just approved increased funding so we can support the refugees walking
in from the capital. Because supplies to outlying areas can't make it
through right now, there is price gouging on available supplies (gas
is up to $100 a gallon).

The direct effects of the earthquake were felt mainly in the area of
Port-au-Prince, but the indirect effects are already at play in the
central plateau region and beyond.  Haiti-Micah actually began in
response to a similar refugee situation in the central plateau after
2004’s Hurricane Jeanne.

All donations to Haiti-Micah in the next few months are going to
emergency relief.

Haiti-Micah's fundraising board is volunteer so we have no
administrative costs-literally everything goes directly to Haiti.  I
would love to answer questions and urge you, if you were planning to
give and haven’t already, to consider Haiti-Micah.

Thank you.

Sarah B.

i'd like to get things in order here...

so folks, sorry about missing a day, then posting a day late, and then missing a day, and now posting two dates at once....i was traveling once again and power outages in Keene/internet downages/etc got in the way of my posting of photos and then big decisions...which i will explain later... distracted me for some time, but all is resolved, so, for the purpose of straightening out all confusion, the three photos posted yesterday, were for the day before, posted the next morning when the internet came back on.  The one I'm about to post right..............NOW!

.....is from yesterday, we spent our Friday night selling the works of Martha Gallagher and Brian Melick at Martha's annual LPCA Concert.  We saw the show too, of course, and it was wonderful (as always!).

Days Left: 334
Photos Posted: 31

The very next morning, today, i got in my car and headed homeward (where I am now) and en route I snapped this little beauty, for my photo of the day: today.

Taken in the heart of my old stomping grounds, Peru.

Days Left: 333
Photos Posted: 32

sorry stowe...lake placid still wins

taken out of a moving vehicle...and still gorgeous.

this one was an accident...just a random snap before we went into the trees and lost the view, but i think its lovely.

life is a winding road.

especially mine.

Days Left: 335

Photos Posted: 30

a real thinker

taken at the beautiful Gallagher Residence, this gargoyle captured my heart with his pensive pose and classic backdrop.

Speaking of, I'm in this neck of the woods to go see the lovely Martha Gallagher play her annual concert at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts...interested?  Check it out at http://www.adkharper.com/ and if you'll be in the area you should definitely try to come out, it's a great time!

Days Left: 336

Photos Posted: 29

star light..

star bright first star i see tonight

taken at a rest area off of 87N somewhere...

Days left: 337

Photos Posted: 28

rest stop!

taken at a pull over off the taconic....i wanted to show the mountains in the background.  i failed.  But i like this picture anyway!

Days Left: 338
Photos Posted: 27

shhh...

i got yelled at for taking this picture at the met, but i just couldn't resist the light and shadows on the wall.

Days Left: 339

Photos Posted: 26

trails in the snow

The snow machine trail i risked life and limb to climb today to take pictures of the fuzzy mountains of stowe, shown below:

Days Left: 340

Photos Posted: 25

fluffffffy snow

cop out...so i didn't take a picture today...and dad said the snow was fluffy, so i snapped off a close up in the dark of the fluffy snow on the porch.  I'm sure its the first of many cop out photos, but i'll try to take some good ones soon to make up for all the crap. :-)

Days Left: 341

Photos Left: 24

Wax Prints and Memories

4 months and 3 weeks ago I stepped off a plane into the Burlington International Airport dragging my dusty backpack and oversized purse filled with last minute souvenirs, and a heavy heart.  I was overwhelmed, overtired, and culture shocked and seriously over-optimistic about what was to come.  Picturing a 4 to 6 week stay with my parents while I figured out my close of service medical and dental stuff and found a job, then a quick move to where ever I would be working, and plenty of time to settle in and figure out where ever my new home might be.

Fast forward to now.  Still unemployed? yep. Still living with my parents? yep.  Still waiting for Peace Corps paperwork and dentist appointments? yep.  But we all know my life is in shambles, thats practically my calling card these days, so what else is new?  Today I got my box.

4 months and 3 weeks ago I made a list of all the things I could remember in my Selibaby home that I might someday want sent to me here in the states.  So here I am, this very morning, in my winter hat, coat, and scarf, mittens dangling from my coat sleeves, walking briskly up to my porch steps in the snow and cold after a nice long walk with the dogs and there it is.  My box.  It should feel like Christmas right?  A big box of memories from when my life was making sense, little trinkets to remind me of the people and the places that I love on the other side of the world; but it wasn't really what I'd hoped or expected to find.  As I cut through the tape and untied the bag, peeled back the plastic and started pulling out my dusty clothes and wrinkled photos, I realized that these were all the worst parts of that world.  The vibrant wax prints dulled by coats of African dust and torn by months of constant wear, I thought they would speak to me, saying "remember the places we have seen" but instead they said "look what I have become."  They were beautiful, but now they're faded, they were clothes but now their fabric, useless in the trappings of the world I live in now.  As I pulled things out of the box, the tattered sketches, scratched CDs, stained books, and bent photos, I wasn't happy to see them again, I was longing for the place I knew that they had been.  They got to stay there longer than I did.  They got to say goodbye.

I've been so positive and so optimistic these 5 months, applying for jobs, making small pilgrimages out of Vermont to visit friends and have some semblance of a social life, trying to plan my next move.  Every time though, that something gets close, like a move, or a job opportunity, I get cold feet, re-think it 12 million times, and sometimes push it aside in favor of waiting for a bigger adventure.  When I pulled out these wrinkled, dirty, old clothes, I realized that its been easy to pretend everything is okay here because I haven't closed the book on Mauritania.  My time in the Peace Corps still represents the best stories I have to tell, the memories most eagerly shared.  I still haven't called my host family, not once, in the almost 5 months since I said goodbye and boarded that plane in Senegal.  I couldn't figure out why, I knew I was afraid but not what I was afraid of, but now I know.  I was waiting, hoping the Peace Corps would re-open the program, hoping I could call them and say this is when I'll be back.  That is not happening, and its time I came to grips with it.  I don't think I'm done with the Peace Corps or with Africa forever.  I don't know when I might go back but I still get this longing in my heart when I read about other volunteers and their adventures around the world.  I don't want to be done with the exciting part of my life, so if I rule out grad school, and if I don't get hired by the Discovery Channel to be Mike Rowe's assistant on Dirty Jobs (my DREAM job!!) then perhaps sometime very soon I may find myself at another staging event for another country, getting ready to spend what I hope will this time be 2 full years in Africa...again.  Until then, its still one photo a day from me and constant adventure hunting.  Here is todays photo, my Africa in a box.

Days Left: 342
Photos Posted: 23

the sky

the sky is glowing...theres this big round thing,,,its almost like...no it can't be...is it?  the sun?!?!

Days left: 343

Photos Posted: 22

hydro-awesome

okay this is kind of lame, but I didn't have one to post today so I had my own little science experiment and photographed it, and here it is: I dropped a clean tomato in a bowl of water and watched the splash:

And then I dipped the tomato in olive oil (a hydrophobic substance) and dropped and watched again:

Much bigger splash, much cooler picture.  Science is awesome!

Days Left: 344

Photos Posted: 21

New Hobby?

building picture frames with dad...

I'm beginning to suspect that this project of mine isn't really improving or challenging my photography skills so much as making me okay with posting mediocre photos.  i guess you can't get gold everyday, still i wish i was a little happier with my posts so far.  oh welllllll.

Days left: 345

Photos Posted: 20

tape measure

shadows and sawdust.

Days Left: 346

Photos Posted: 19

beware of dog

caution...dog.

Days Left: 347

Photos Posted: 18

I'M LATE! / Happy New Year!

Oh my goodness, so here it is 2 weeks into my personal one photo per day challenge and I have already broken my own rules.  To be fair I did take the photos on time and selected them/added them to my computer at only 1:00 am...but I spent New Years at Burlington's First Night and the hotel we stayed at charged money for the internet; so while I wanted to post on time, I didn't "$10.00" want to post them...if you know what I mean.  So anywho, hope all 4 of my readers had the happiest of happy new years! And as promised, below is my new years ever photo, taken just before the Dixie 6 show at First Night (a fun and upbeat dixieland/new orleans style jazz band).  This little girl was dancing and I caught her while taking a break.

Okay, next, the New Years Day photo.  I rung in my New Year on the top floor of a Burlington parking garage in the gently falling snow with a bottle of champagne watching the fireworks over the lake.  It was pretty great.  This shot was taken after the celebration was over, my brother is standing in the background where I was when I popped the cork on the champagne, the foreground is the cork.

Its blurry, but it captures the magic of the evening pretty well.

Days Left: 348

Photos Posted: 17

Happy 2010! 

Today is the First day of the rest of this year!

Live it up!