Happy New Year or Feliz Ano Viejo

The last 2 months of 2009 didn't go exactly as planned, I spend a good part of them in New Jersey taking care of my father. He's doing well now after 3 surgeries in 5 weeks, it's been very impressive how at 82 years old he recovered from a quadruple bypass and 3 weeks later went in for a hernia fix. The good part is I was able to help him and spend lots of time together, the bad part is that Joe and I missed our trip to Ecuador. Joe wasn't able to switch his time off, so now I'm going to Ecuador without him :-(

Ian is having a grand adventure in Peru with his friends Andrew and Chris, equally passionate birders. We keep in touch with facebook and emails, and on Christmas day by old fashioned phone from a cabina in a rural Peruvian town. He's seen over 800 species and here's a photo I love he took in Contamana Hills, Peru.

Red-and-Green Macaw. Photo by Ian

Moving on from tropical birds to snowy New England!

Our neighbor, a monk from Thailand, clearing his front stairs.

Walking to the library in the snow yesterday, Joe and I admired the homes covered in white.

Joe clearing our front walk with a bit of help from Milo.

December, West Orange New Jersey, Kessler Rehab. The same place Christopher Reeves went for his spinal injury. My dad spent a few weeks here working at recovering from his small stroke and bypass surgery. After a while I grew accustomed to seeing people in wheelchairs in various forms of disability, and the naked behinds or fronts, yikes, of those not in wheelchairs.

My dad's spacious shared room after he was switched out of the awful first cramped room. Squeaky wheel and all, but I always tried to remain a pleasant squeaky wheel. We were later told the old room would not be used anymore for 2 people...

My dad with his new cell phone!

I was caught off guard in NJ without my winter gear. It was relatively warm when I left and I didn't bring my scraper, winter boots, etc. The ice on my windshield made for a good photo, and I learned how to use a credit card as an ice scraper.

My dad with a hat I crocheted while sitting around hospitals. Crocheting and GPS were life savers for me during my time in NJ.

Cabbage outside of St Barnabas Hospital where we spent a day in emergency. Turned out all was fine.

Morristown Memorial, a very well funded hospital where my dad had all his surgeries.

Getting ready for the Blizzard of 2009, December 19. Morristown Memorial Hospital.

Medication is now dispensed to patients from these carts, all computerized and rolled from room to room.

Back home for Christmas!! Ian's in the photo, but definitely not home for the holidays, and I'm missing him.

I'm home for 2 weeks and have spent time with friends as much as I could before leaving for Ecuador on Tuesday. Julie and her lovely children came for a visit. Maddox giving the thumbs up!

Danika being very resourceful, she found the stool and dragged it over to the chair so she could have a seat. My version of a booster chair was to pile on the seat cushions. Gail, do you recognize the stool Dave built for me about 30 years ago?

The building blocks representing love, laughter, good health and friendship for a Happy New Year!

Giving Thanks

Too cute too eat! Our photo club has been doing Monday Morning walks and I took this a few weeks ago walking around by White Horse Beach.

For Ian's 18th birthday we went birding, well Joe and I went with him while he birded, his favorite thing to do. Looking for an elusive sparrow here.

Not just birding, Ian also has a keen interest in dragonflies and damselflies.

Another pretty place in Plymouth, MA.

The nice thing about birding is all the lovely places you visit looking for birds, or photographs :-)

In back of the dump on Beaver Dam Road in Plymouth, MA

Ian getting ready to leave on his 3 month trip to Peru. He has a great blog describing his adventures at Birding Across the Globe.

Ready to backpack, camp and look for beautiful birds in Peru.

Dropping him off at Logan was difficult. I'm happy to see him pursue his dreams, sad to not have him around.

Joe feeds the squirrels.

Another bunch of Monday Morning walk photos.

Bittersweet, nice to look at, don't pick it and spread it. Highly invasive!

Our band of photographers cruising the streets at 9am.

My Dad and my brother Nelson in Morristown, NJ.

My Dad with his therpist learning how to speak and move again after a small stroke. All better in less than a week.

Me, my Dad and Nelson who has done wonders taking care of our Dad.

Joe and I drove to NJ to help out. Joe's also been a big help.

Found this in the family home, I think it's my grandfather Mario from Sicily.

Nelson.

My Dad's bookcase in his home that we cleaned up while he was in rehab.

At the moment my Dad is recovering from a quadruple bypass at 82 and is doing amazingly well, although some days he doesn't think so :-) So I have a lot to be thankful for this year, more than my usual bounty of blessings.

Fall in Beautiful New England

The most beautiful color can be found during Fall in New England and I take my camera everywhere. The Plymouth Digital Photographers club is going strong, we've had 45 meetups since June 15th and are now 243 members and growing daily. I'm even giving a talk to the Kiwanis on Monday night, and I attended a vocational advisory dinner at the high school last week. Community outreach at it's finest! I am loving organizing meetups, making new friends with like minded photographers and seeing others doing the same, so rewarding. My best 'job' ever, a labor of love.

We've been out shooting, a lot, and here are some of my favorite images.

Purple Coneflower after the petals have dropped.

Rick, a member of the photo club, did a presentation on HDR yesterday for our club and I downloaded the free trial version. A very cool program to bring out the details in your photos, easy to use and this is from one exposure, not the traditional 3. HDR is all the rage, stands for High Dynamic Range.

Morton Pond. I stopped by here late in the afternoon and what a beautiful catch, for me and the fisherman.

Looking through these photos I noticed how many have water in them. Maybe I have a thing for large bodies of water??

Ting and Ric's home in Walpole, NH.

HDR apples from Alyson's, NH.

Ting and Gail, the Waybacks, picking apples and resting in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Plymouth Harbor and gull.

A happy mistake at a sunrise meetup.

Milo hanging onto the money.

Troy, NH.

Oliver Mills Park in Middleboro, MA, a meetup led by Greg on how to shoot moving water.

I stopped the car on the side of Rt 3 southbound to take this photo of a stump studded marsh.

I won't do that again, the traffic was going way too fast for comfort!

Rick talking to a fellow photographer.

Ed Randall's cranberry bog, a lovely day to enjoy this very well kept water harvested bog. Some bogs are dry harvested.

Processing the cranberries into the truck.

Churning up the berries to get them off the small bushes that are under the water. They float to the top and are corralled then sucked into the truck.

Ed Randall's home.

Jim and Mary.

The 3 of us celebrating Joe's birthday with a vegan banana peanut butter cake. Photo by Jess.

Hydrangea in the fall.

This year the leaves of the Hydrangea by the front door turned a beautiful shade of purple.

Juvenile Red Tailed Hawk at Plimouth Plantation. He was so young he didn't know he wasn't supposed to pose for us.

Tail end of a chicken.

Club member Ken.

18 of us showed up to shoot the sunrise last week on White Horse Beach.

Looking back at the light on the beach homes.

My friend Julie's family portrait, maybe for her Christmas card?? Danika, who just turned 3, and I spent the afternoon together and what a fun time we had! Being a grandparent must be a blast...

Harvesting Wine Grapes in Walpole, NH

What a fun day I had picking grapes with Ting and Gail in Walpole, NH! We had the perfect day, sunny, cool and the best views anywhere. Virginia Carter, owner of Barnett Hill Vineyard in Walpole offers volunteers the opportunity to harvest the grapes she grows and offers lunch for your troubles. Only it's no trouble at all, the pleasure was all mine.

If you are interested in participating in the grape picking you can email her and sign up for a morning or afternoon harvest, Ginny provides all the supplies and instruction, no experience necessary. Her email is vineyard@sover.net. Unfortunately, you will have to wait until next Fall...

The Vineyard is on top of a hill overlooking the river valley between NH and Vermont, gorgeous!

Partial view of the extensive rows of grapes Ginny has planted.

Winery headquarters, recently built, open on Saturdays to the public.

In the winery where the magic of turning grapes into wine happens.

Dolores, Ting and Ginny.

Gail and Dolores are punching down the must cap in the tank.

We lifted the nets off of the rows where Ginny told us to pick.

Beautiful, healthy grapes!

The special tools we were given to cut the grapes off of the vines. Way better than clippers.

The bins we put the grapes in, keeping like grapes together. Ginny has many, many varieties.

Ting and Ginny. When picking low it's good to sit, or you can stand if picking at the top of the vine.

The 4 of us volunteer harvesters really going at it.

I'm easily distracted by all the beauty around me.

Gail.

Our picking time is over, it went by quickly, and we're tidying up before we go in for lunch.

Everyone had a great time!

Fine wine.

We picked all of this.

Ginny's Mom cleaning up after the very good lunch she made us. And for me the best vegan tomato mushroom soup ever!

The grape crusher.

Walpole is located about 15 miles north of Keene, in NH across the river from Vermont.

200 Meetup Member Milestone!!

Plymouth Digital Photographers Club, the meetup I started on June 15th, just hit the 200 member mark yesterday! We were in the October issue of South Shore Living Magazine, a very nice glossy MA publication, a beautifully written half page article on our club. Apparently photography is alive and well as a hobby, Plymouth has many more interested photographers than I ever would have imagined. I am honored to have met so many of them in the last few months, I have thoroughly enjoyed going on our 30+ outings together!

Here are a few of the many places we've been to over the last month, we have between 15 to 28 people show up for our meetups, some working during the week, other's retired or otherwise free during the day. I've kept everything free and pay the website and other fees with donations, which have been generous enough to cover the costs.

I have been very happy with the people at meetup.com, they've been responsive when problems arise from the website, and it's a great way to create community. I highly recommend it if you want to meet people with similar interests, have just moved to a new area, first time parents, retired, or just want to learn something new. Whatever your interest, from petunias to old cars, there's a meetup nearby. And if there isn't, just start one like I did! Meetup makes it very easy to do so.

For some unfound reason, blogspot will not let me write between the photos, in the time I've tried to make it so I could have finished this post, argghhh!!! So the copy will be placed in random places or not at all. These photos are of all the wonderful sunrises, sunsets and beautiful places in Plymouth along with the photographers I hang out with.

Late in the day we all met at the beach to learn about portraiture. Glenn Bacci, a member who has his own photography studio on the Cape, was wonderful about sharing his techniques. We practiced on each other, some people brought their families, the light was wonderful.

This body builder was on the beach and offered to pose for us, one of our members, Arnie, knew her from his gym. An unusual subject for us to photograph...

Sometimes we meet indoors and a member will teach us all something interesting. Doug here gave a class on matting.

Greg knew of this lovely farm in Middleboro and invited us all there, we had a large turnout for this on a beautiful evening.

People run into others they know at the meetups, Jim, above, was very surprised to see his nephew's fiance, April, at the farm.

Jim and Mary hold hands a lot, very sweet.

Ian's Mallard was accepted into the Plymouth Art Guild's Annual Show, so we all went to admire it. It was a lovely show and our photo club had a good time appreciating the wide variety of art.

Beach photos are of Plymouth Beach at sunset, a 2 hour walk out to the point. We are the only ones out there, one of my favorite places to walk this summer.

At another meetup we got permission to go to the Plymouth Boat Yard, private property, at 6am and watch the sunrise, spectacular! Afterward we headed to Cordage Park, the area with very old buildings that used to make rope, the main employer for Plymouth a long time ago.

Some favorite images around Plymouth.

Plymouth Beach late in the day, a wonderful place to be.

Jamie, a friend from my photographers club, at a Plymouth Beach meetup.

Sunset that same evening.

Bee on Gailardia.

Joe giving Ian a buzz cut on our deck.

Ian with a hawk caught in the nets at his bird banding job. Most unusual!

The bees really liked the Gailardia, and I like them.

I try to walk to White Horse Beach every day, a simple pleasure.

Another sunrise from the cottage.

White Horse Beach with a Semi-Palmated Plover in the foreground.

Amusing myself by stacking rocks, then photographing them :-)

A random cat on my walk home from the beach.

I took a zillion sunrise photos from our yard this summer! Each one was a work of art, never to be truly captured in an image, but it's fun trying.

Our cottage from across the pond. The wonders of telephoto!

A piece of toast and juice after an early sunrise.

Zinnia and web.

One of my prolific Black Eyed Susan's.

Dinner plate Hibiscus did well with year from all the rain.

Taken by a member of my photographers club during a meetup about portraits. Thought you might like to see what I look like lately :-)

Julie's daughter, Danika, and her friend at a Triathlon meetup.

Cranberry bog near Julie's house where we both spent a lovely afternoon.

Plymouth commuter rail station, waiting for Luke, Ian's friend, to arrive from Maine.

Enjoying August in New England

Summer in New England is wonderful, everyone's out and about, active and having fun with family and friends. Whatever you didn't get around to doing in July is moved to August, the last chance before school starts in September and people resume their non summer lives.

I do my best to keep summer going until November, and stretch out the warm outdoor time as much as possible.

The Plymouth Digital Photographers went to the Plimoth Plantation on August 7th. I love this photo of my smiling, happy photographer friends.

Pilgrims Progress is a reenactment done by the Mayflower Society House on certain Fridays during the year, and Thanksgiving Day. It was such fun photographing children dressed up as pilgrims frolicking in a beautiful garden.

Pilgrim's Progress.

Julie's 3rd photo outing with her 3 week old baby boy. Being very talented and resourceful, she's not letting having a newborn keep her home or stop her from taking photographs!

Judy (on the left) and Yvonne (middle) are members of our club.

Pilgrim lineup.

Julie's 2 and 3/4 year old daughter, Danika, adorable and very photogenic.

Pilgrims starting their procession along the waterfront in Plymouth.

August 9th was the sculpture show opening of Tim Gough, my Wayback friend's son. He's a gifted artist and his show was awesome! Link to his website.

Tim's art on the wall.

Gail, a Wayback friend, Ric, father of the artisit and Joe.

Ting, mother of the artist, talking with Gail. The metal dress to the right was made by Tim entirely of thumb tacks!

The Buddhist monks from Thailand moved across the street and had a lovely open house for the neighborhood.

Ric, Ting, Gail, Joe, and Ian. A group portrait to show we all really were together for the weekend. And because I made them pose for me :-)

You can tell it's me from my name tag.

Ian and I went to visit Janet and her family in Chatham, where they were vacationing in early August.

Janet's grandaughter, Madeline.

Madeline's parents, Julie and Glenn. Grandfather Bob with Janet on the right. All eyes on the cute baby!

Yep, I always go onto my roof to use my cell phone.... This is Cape Cod, after all.

Back in Plymouth where I dropped off and picked up Ian from his job on the Captain John Boats this summer.

Ian waiting to get off the boat. He counted birds and collected data, the rest of the people are on the boat to whale watch.

Plymouth Harbor.

Rain on the waterfront.