This has been one of the busiest years in quite some time. Last year ended with my mother in the hospital over Christmas but turning the page to 2011 brought only change after change. My older sister, best friend, photography compadre and all-around mentor, Nonda Surratt, died quite suddenly at the end of March, and her passing was followed in short order by the death of my last cat, Gandalf, and one of my older and most underfoot educational animals, Franklin T. Squirrel. I also lost my entire team at work to downsizing so was put on the responsible person’s treadmill of too-often 100-hour work weeks. All of which left precious little time to look, let alone photograph.
But I won’t complain. The new roof that leaked every winter from the day it was installed was finally fixed so we are finally making plans to have all the interior damage repaired. I was able to order the parts for and fix my spiffy and equally overworked Fisher Paykel washing machine by myself. When a distracted driver plowed into the back of my Jeep while I was waiting to make a left-hand turn, neither I, nor our educational groundhog in her carrier in the back, were more than badly shaken and the repair shop has the Jeep looking like new again. And when my mom ended up in the emergency room again just before Thanksgiving, it turned out she’d been carting around a very dead gallbladder for a while now so its removal means she’s finally on her way to a full recovery.
Spending so much time indoors found me looking up when given any opportunity to be outside for a moment. While there is no grand vista to be found where I live, we do experience all four seasons and the skies to match; often they have been quite spectacular and I found myself capturing snippets of them.
Summer storms:
Mid-fall morning:
The inherent lesson is that there is really never only down; where there is down there is also always up.
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