Photo Friday 7/19/13

It's been a long time since I made a Photo Friday submission but since today's prompt is a Mobile Phone Photo it seems right up my alley.  Almost every single photo I have taken recently has been captured, edited, watermarked, and posted from my iPhone.  I just love technology.  Especially when it is at my fingertips all the time!

This is a picture taken on a walk at our local pond earlier this summer.

Hurricane Sandy aftermath

Well, we survived the hurricane pretty well (WAY better than some people in NY and NJ did).  Surprisingly we kept our power and only lost our cable and internet overnight.  I was following our town reporter on Twitter and boy, was she good about posting updates to the minute so I knew exactly when the bottom of my street flooded to impassable and when a tree at the top of my street blew over (almost into a house!) and when and where the rest of the trees/wires/poles in my neighborhood came down.  I had no work for two days as the public schools were closed so that the town could clean up and restore power.

We didn't go outside during the storm, but I did take a picture out the window.  Look at how much the little tree in the distance is bending in the wind!

After the storm was over, we took a walk around the neighborhood to see the damage, and there was quite a bit.

lots of leaves in the backyard

leaves stuck to the side of the house from the wind

pretty much the extent of the damage in our yard

giant tree almost in a kitchen window at the top of our street

After walking our neighborhood we took a walk down to the pond to see how it fared.  It was such a gorgeous day out that you would never tell a hurricane came through just the day before (except for the monster trees down)!!

gorgeous

lots of water came through here

I jumped in for scale

Although we're lucky to have survived as well as we did there are lots of people who didn't and we're thinking about them and hope things get sorted out as quickly as can be!

Frankenstorm

We are quickly approaching the "storm of the century" which is a hurricane, arctic storm, and some other storm all converging over our heads for multiple hours at a time.  Everyone who can be is staying home today and the wind and the rain are picking up quickly.  Power outages are predicted for long periods of time.  This is almost exactly one year after Halloween was postponed for major storm related power outages last year.  Supposedly the storm will be at its worst this afternoon and evening so we are waiting to see what we get.  This is the first big storm since we've been in the house so we have our eye on some trees in the backyard and one that's right over the power lines.  Since most trees still have lots of leaves on them they can cause a lot more damage when they fall.

The wind really picked up this morning as you can see from these pictures that I took of the yard.

This is the yard yesterday when we were putting all loose things away:

 

And this is the yard this morning at 9:30 AM

I can't wait to see what it will look like by tomorrow!!

Here's the deck this morning (and also my PhotoFriday entry for "changing seasons"):

Good luck to all going through Hurricane Sandy!

pumpkin carving update

Well, we carved our pumpkins on Tuesday so I thought I'd give a little update to how they are doing.  I didn't check on them on Wednesday, but when I opened the front door on Thursday to let the warm sun in, I spotted this guy...

Uh oh...   I watched him for a bit and he was just eating some weeds in the yard so I didn't think about it, but when I went to light the candles in the pumpkins, this is what my howling wolf looked like:

THE WHOLE WOLF WAS GONE!!  Now it's just a full moon....

We thought about bringing Jared's pumpkin inside but didn't want it to get too warm and mold so this is what it looked like on Friday:

Very disappointing :(  I was hoping that they would last at least until Halloween but I guess our neighborhood critters had other ideas.  We had thought about spraying them with a water/bleach mixture but after reading online the results were inconclusive so we decided to wing it.  Maybe if we had sprayed them the animals wouldn't have liked the taste and left them alone.  Guess we'll have to try again next year!

pumpkin carving

Halloween is almost here so we knew we had to get busy carving some pumpkins!  Since we've been in various apartments over the last few years, I haven't had the opportunity to carve a pumpkin in a while so I was excited to do it this year.  Jared got into the swing of things too and we picked a couple up while we were at BJ's the other day.

The first thing we did was peruse the internet and find some carving patterns that we liked.  It just worked out that we both picked ones with wolves in them!  Jared picked one that was advanced and I picked one that was a little easier.  Then, we spread out newspaper, put a Halloween mix on Pandora, and got to work.

I always find the scooping-out-the-insides part the grossest...

While we scraped out the goopy stuff, we separated some of the seeds so we could roast them.  I was really surprised at how easy it was and it made the house smell sooo good!  I just rinsed them off, spread them on a baking sheet, sprayed them with vegetable oil, and sprinkled a little sea salt on them.  Then I baked them at 325 degrees for 25 minutes and they were delicious! Very crispy and salty and the perfect snack while we worked on our carvings.

But back to the pumpkins... Jared had brought home one of those little carving sets (but only had the scoop and the little knife) so we took turns using it.  We put the patterns on the pumpkins and poked holes with a pin all around the outline so we would know where to cut.  We got so into the project that I forgot to take pictures!

Here are the results, and they are pretty impressive if I do say so myself!

my pumpkin

Jared's pumpkin

spooky stoop decorations!

Bring on the trick-or-treaters, we are ready!!

Photo Friday 10/19

Took a walk to the pond by my house.  Fall is definitely in full swing!!

This week's challenge: Vibrant

Photo Friday

I'm pretty much in love with taking pictures with my iphone and editing them to see just what my little 3-generations-ago smartphone can do.  I came across this website with a weekly photo challenge every Friday so I'll be uploading pictures (iphone and digital camera based) here to submit them.  Let the photography begin!

This week's challenge:
In Motion