Sunday Morning 1:00 a.m.

Home.  Sunday morning around 1:00 a.m., after 4000 miles and five days of hard driving, we pulled into home from Alaska.  Tired and a little beaten up by the road, we are safely home and glad to see the spaciousness of our small home.  Compared to living in the van, it's a mansion!  We always appreciate our home so much more when we've come back from van camping.

I flew up to Alaska the end of August to spend a few weeks with The Fisherman there before driving back to Arizona.  I hope to get some posts and photos up in the next week or so.  And I hope you enjoyed the photos I scheduled to post while I was away.  Kind of a wrapping up of the summer here in the woods.

I'm looking forward to catching up on the blogs I follow to see what you've been up to this September.

I'll be back soon!

Ponderosa Water Drops

I'm kind of behind in getting some summer photos posted but I figure better late than never.  A couple weeks ago we had a nice gentle sprinkle that lasted about an hour.  It was so gentle that it took awhile for the long needles of the Ponderosa Pines to begin accumulating droplets.  So gentle was the rain that the droplets clung to the needle tips for a long time without dripping.  I had a fun time trying to capture this beautiful sight.  Here are some of my best attempts.  They turned out better than I expected, but still, a macro lens is what would work best for this kind of photography.

Mushrooms

It's amazing to me how quickly mushrooms spring up when it gets really rainy.

During those weeks where we had so much rain every day that I'm still collecting water out of the basement, mushrooms started coming up all over the place.  It was at the same time I was dogsitting Clancy and as I would take him out walking several times a day, I'd see new mushrooms breaking through the gravel and pine needles.  For such delicately skinned things, I always wonder that they can push through the forest floor without getting damaged.

We had a few varieties of them, too.  I like these little flat topped ones.

These look like they might be the same as above, only at an earlier stage?  These kind always remind me of Walt Disney's cartoon, I think it was, Fantasia where mushrooms turned into Chinese dancers with thier broad cone shaped hats.

This one pushed up through the earth and carried with it some of the soil.  I love that!

Thistles, Thistles! Everywhere!

Several years ago, we had a couple Thistles in the area.  Then we had a couple on our property.

And now they are everywhere.

I really like them.  they have such cute flower, and, as I said before, I love purple.  This is more of a lavender or a pinkish purple, and I like it, too.

I took these photos along a road with a typical form of fencing for our area: barbed wire.  There are several things that say "RURAL":  worn split rail fencing,  beat up old trucks,  gravel roads, cows or horses in a field.  Barbed wire fencing is another.

And Thistles.  Though they are a weed, and have nasty thorny stems and leaves, I do like their little spikey "hats".

These are some gentle photos of just a few thistles along a roadside.  I didn't get out to our little fruit tree orchard to take a photo of the solid 3ft x 6ft patch of hundreds of them.  I wish I had.  Thistles are just weeds, but wasn't it nice of  God to put such a cute flower on top of them?  Weeds are a result of the first sin in the Garden of Eden.  But I think God made some of them pretty for us as a gesture of kindness.