Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

Picture of mine, "8²"

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So, we are into the new year. Terrible windstorms continue, with many fallen evergreen boughs in the street and across powerlines throughout the Pacific Northwest. We lost a 60-foot hemlock the week before the end of the year, and spent days bucking it up. It now awaits splitting--something I and many men my age inordinately enjoy doing.

The lake in November was inadvertently nearly drained by a man trying to replace a water gate that didn't need replacing, then he completely plugged the outlet culvert, producing a flood of the lake at the end of December that put many people's beach-front property under water.

Presently the lake is about two true vertical inches higher than we've experienced it in the more than ten years of our living here, with lawns under water and gardens submerged, and bulbs rotting in the ground. A terrible miscalculation on the part of one man and the lake association's officers, including its president, who looked aside while all this was taking place and claimed, "Not my responsibility."

Whose, then?

Another tragic, untimely death?

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It'll be nice to get Jerry Ford buried, at last, and some mail delivery again.

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A sunset like this one takes place is a few seconds and is quickly gone. If you mishandle the timing, or go for your camera, all you will see is the ghost of the sunset, in itself very pretty, but not the big event. not the whole enchilada

It will have escaped you. Too bad! But then you won't know what you have missed.

Merry Christmas.

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I am fascinated by nighttime photos--as you may have gathered. Not all of them are great, and many require graphic manipulation, which means tinkering around with in Photoshop. And then the results are often, well, mediocre. As with the above snap.

But such pictures do convey a  mood, a mood of nature. A peculiar combination of natural light, atmospherics, and artificial lighting from homes and, in this instance, Christmas decorations. And then there is the wonderful radiance produced by lights on water, which multiplies the visual effects and creates new ones of their own.

Often these are unexpected. The camera lens sees much of what we do not see, and we are the delighted beneficiaries of such serendipity.

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor