The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
On weekends I am awoken usually by the whimpering of the Dee-oh-gee, who usually gets to somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00am before he has to go out and relieve himself. Fine. Then I make coffee and usually try to sit and read a bit before getting on with the day.
This morning, however, Carla and Rosa (one of the two cats we adopted recently…huh, not sure I ever blogged about them!) decided they had other plans for me.
Such is the life of a pet owner, I guess. Sheesh.
I’ve long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don’t like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takes forever for trees and bushes and everything else to come back to life, to the point that green isn’t the dominant color here until Memorial Day at the earliest. The snowpiles in parking lots and at the ends of streets endure, in their dirty grayness, and it seems like mud is everywhere.
And yes, it usually snows in April around here. Last year it even snowed not near Mothers Day, but actually on Mothers Day.
But we do once in a while get to enjoy a day like today in springtime around here, a day when it is warm and sunny out, when we get to open windows and switch out the stuffy indoor air for fresh outdoor air, when we can walk the dogs multiple times, and when the sun shines from sunrise to sunset.
Geology and astronomy may be in agreement that it is spring here, but it’s just not. Not yet. Not in a way that feels real.
That’s not stopping nature from looking like it’s embracing the early wake-up call….
That’s Chestnut Ridge park, just this morning. It’s one of my favorite places, where The Dee-oh-gee and I visit often on our weekly Sunday morning nature walks. That particular stream is a combination of two streams that tumble from the upper reaches of the park; this is at the park’s northern, and lower, end. Here it tumbles down through what’s left of a deep ravine, and under a steel-deck bridge before it flows on, winding its way toward Lake Erie before it finally empties into Eighteen Mile Creek, which then flows on to Lake Erie. A lot of that water will eventually flow out of Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, over the Falls, and out to Lake Ontario…and on and on, eventually to the sea.
There’s still snow up there (Chestnut Ridge is in what the weather people call “the upper elevations” when they are threatening snowfall for some of us), and as of now there hasn’t been enough warmth to cause the grass to really start greening or for dormant trees and bushes to start budding. But it’s tempting to look for those things.
Spring in Buffalo Niagara. It’s here…kind of.
There’s a vintage advertisement for the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons that makes the rounds once in a while, so this time I decided to play a game of “Who Wore It Better”. I think I did it pretty well!
I’m happiest that I was able to be accurate down to the brand of overalls the kid is wearing. Score!
In old movies–especially the black-and-white noir films–you’ll often see someone standing under a streetlight. In the movies the streetlights always cast a distinctive pool of light below, with a relatively sharp boundary between the light and the darkness beyond. In reality, though, streetlights haven’t been like that for years, owing to the high-pressure sodium lamps used in modern streetlights. These lamps cast the familiar, ridiculously-bright light that spreads outward in all directions, fading at length.
Now, however, in the interests of energy efficiency, municipalities all over the country are switching from the high-pressure sodium lamps to energy-efficient LED fixtures. The LEDs really do cast distinctive pools of light below, with a relatively sharp boundary between the light and the darkness beyond. The light is a natural spectrum, thankfully, so the light doesn’t feel false–in fact, it feels even less false than the brilliant burning amber of the old lamps.
One thing you discover with LEDs is that unless they are filtered through frosted glass or something similar, their light is extremely directional, which means that shadows made in LED light tend to be very sharp and accurate. This was driven home for me tonight, when we walked our dogs as snow fell from the sky. It was a peaceful night, no breeze, so the snow was able to just flutter down to the ground on its own time and agenda. These are my favorite kinds of nights to walk, during the wintertime…and tonight I noticed something else, when we passed beneath the first of the new streetlights on our street.
The snowpile sparkled like snow usually does–but there was something else. Tiny shadows of darkness, all flitting in the same direction across the snow on the ground. It took me a minute to realize that I was seeing something I had never seen before, something I had never thought to see before. I was seeing the shadows of the snowflakes themselves, snowflakes casting their own shadows on their already-fallen brethren. I never thought for the tiniest of seconds that a snowflake could cast its own shadow.
But it turns out they do. And that, my friends, is a bit of magic.
Except for a few days, winter here in Western New York has been a dingy affair thus far. I like snow, but we’ve had barely any at all. Mostly it’s just been one gray, damp, muddy day after another. Days like what we’ve had thus far tend to be what March and April are like in these parts. But last night we got snow, and more is on tap for tonight, so maybe we’ll finally have some actual winter, the way winter is supposed to look.
Here’s the view of my street when I left for work this morning. It really was quite lovely.
I haven’t done a grab-bag of recent photos from my adventures of late, so…here we go!
These next few are in a special category, because they’re photos I took with my phone and then processed through a cool app called Prisma. I don’t use the app all that often, but sometimes I get effects from it I like. (Two of these, which will be obvious, I took while I was waiting for my coffee water to boil in the morning.)
