Giving It a Whirl

In my last post for November, I lamented that I was running out of media space on my blog after 14 years of photo-heavy posts and wondered if I would have to end my blog, start a new one, or pay to continue. My long-time blogging buddy, Montucky, told me how you can link Flickr images to your blog and not use any media space. And, coincidentally, WordPress just made that even easier. I have had a Flickr account for a long time so I guess I can keep my little blog going for awhile. Thank you, Montucky. This is his blog.

So here are a few Christmas shots of the cats: Ferguson, Bouche, and Torti…

Easy peasy, I think. This is our outdoor Christmas tree. It’s plywood and, last year, my neighbor had it outside his house with a “FREE” sign on it. I grabbed it to use as a photo prop but that has never really happened. We decided to paint it and put some lights (and a couple cardinals and a hummingbird) on it for the season. We love it now and have gotten several comments on it. The neighbor’s wife also told me that he originally pulled it out of the Bed, Bath, and Beyond dumpster, haha. You can see that the outdoor cats like it, too. That is Tabby and Callie.

And now, for a few December yard birds…Rosy-faced Lovebirds enjoying a seed bell, a juvenile one finishing the bell off, a Verdin dining on an orange, Inca Doves on my neighbor’s garage waiting for me to put sunflower seed out, and a posing Anna’s Hummingbird, male. The bird in my leading photo is a Curve-billed Thrasher in a Winter Wonderland.

So it seems to work this way. You don’t even need a Flickr account…if you have photos posted on any other sites, you can just embed them by using the url…at least I think so. The only thing I can’t do now is make galleries or stacked photos…unless there is a way that I haven’t figured out yet. I also can’t control the placement of vertical photos but that’s no biggie. At any rate, it’s a great solution!!!!! I can keep blogging. It was really easy to do, too, so if you have this WordPress issue of limited space remaining, there is an easy workaround.

I hope we all have a Happy 2023!!!!!

Random Stuff

• 

• 

• 

Three hosers: Abert’s Towhee, Northern Mockingbird, White-crowned Sparrow.

Wintering Orange-crowned Warbler, “Tink”

Rosy-faced Lovebird

Lesser Goldfinch, female

Gambel’s Quail, male and female

I was surprised to see 8 quail in our yard the other day! That is only the second time I’ve seen them in our yard, which is not the typical place to find them. They hung around off and on that day, nibbling on various things, and I haven’t seen them since.

Here are a few more from my pandemic-driven “Anthropomorphizing Birds” series. They feature one of the 2 Curve-billed Thrashers, one of the 2 Abert’s Towhees, or one of the 2 Northern Mockingbirds that hang out in our yard and will work for peanuts. The whole album, to date, can be seen here on Flickr.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

And here’s a little Inca Dove. The’ve been very plentiful lately, which is good, as they had been scarce in the Phoenix area for awhile but they’re back!

I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about a book called Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You). Remember when almost everybody had a blog? I guess that’s sort of “out,” now but, since I don’t want to have a podcast, I guess I’ll stick with blogging now and then. How about you?

800!

I knew my next post–this one–was going to be my 800th so I thought it should be something special. However, I haven’t had anything particularly special to show so I figured I’d better do it now or I’ll totally get out of the blogging habit like so many of my original blogging friends seem to have done.

This bird probably doesn’t look very exciting to a lot of you and American Robins are pretty common in much of the U.S. However, they are not very common at all in the Phoenix area so I was totally shocked one day to see this guy in our yard. He’s an immature robin. He hung around all day, dipping in the bird bath, flying here and there. I thought he might stick around awhile but he was gone the next morning. I guess he was just passing through. This was yard bird species #48!

On another extremely hot day, there wasn’t much activity in the yard so I made an effort to find a few things…

Gila Woodpecker Feather

Sitting out in the yard for very long is not appealing when it hits 115° some days and 105° on a “nice” day so checking up on my little yard friends is sporadic and brief.

Curve-billed Thrasher

Anna’s Hummingbird, male

Black-chinned Hummingbird, female

Verdins, adult and juvenile

This cute little cat drops by every few weeks and meows very pitifully. I thought she was homeless and would probably wind up joining our group at some point but she disappears for long periods of time and looks healthy so I’m hoping she has a home closeby.

So on to 900 now but that won’t be for a couple years…

 

The Letter F

Flicker (Gilded, female)

Finch (House, female)

Fun (with the Rokinon 800mm Mirror Lens)

Tony gave me this lens for Christmas. You have to shoot all manual and the aperture is fixed at f/8 and the focal length at 800mm so there are limitations but the above shot was handheld. Click to enlarge; I was pleased with the detail. Imagine if it were on a tripod. I’ll be doing more moon shots in the future.

Fisheye

Tony gave me this fisheye lens a few years ago, too. It’s an awesome lens (Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8) with very crisp detail. I played with it on one of our recent rainy days.

Fog

Fog is an extreme rarity in Phoenix but Super Bowl Sunday morning had a lingering fog for our many out-of-state visitors. Fog shots abounded on Facebook, I just wish I had gotten some pretty ones like many I saw.

This post was brought to you by the letter F.

*This is my 591st post and I started blogging on 2/13/09 so I’m averaging about 100 posts per year and I still love it. Thank you for checking it out.

Liberate Your Art 2014

This is my 3rd year participating in Kat Sloma’s Liberate Your Art Postcard Swap. After all the postcards are sent out to the 200+ artists/recipients, it’s time for the Blog Hop!

This is the card I sent (seen above with other postcards I had made by moo.com):

And, here are the cards I received in the order I received them, below. In previous years, I scanned the cards for my blog but this year I attempted to photograph them in complementary settings, which is what we were supposed to do. (Click photos to see the true beauty of the postcards.)

From Linda Yeatman.

From Adrienne Mason.

From Leslie A.

From Stacie Bebber.

From Cathy Brashear.

From Kat Sloma, the organizer of this annual postal and online event.

And…from a sideswap I did with Deanie Houghtaling, who I “met” through this event last year and found out she lives about a mile from me and then who I met in person a few months ago. Deanie shares my love of cats and photography and we need to go out shooting together soon…or at least back out to dinner.

There was also a Facebook group for this event (and an Instagram one, too) where people posted cards as they got them so we could all see a lot of the cards.

So…you can check them out, too, by looking at the blogs of the other participants. And you should join in next year, it’s really fun! Thanks, everyone, and thanks, Kat, for all of your hard work.

Here’s the link to the participating blogs: