Sunday...errr Monday stills: things with wings

Ok so I had a phenomenal weekend. I spent it with two of my best bud's, Lisa and Michelle. My old friend from Amherst high school, Thomas showed up too!
We wandered up town and danced until they kicked us out in the wee mornings. What a great night. Not often I get to sneak away and be a "city girl" I sure do love coming back to my little hick town.
Yesterday we went swimming. It was kind of windy out but the pool was 88 degrees! wow talk about warm. I got cold getting out of the pool. Then we had a bonfire and made hobo pies (quick, what is a hobo pie!? Who can answer that one?)

So I just got to taking my Sunday stills pics today. I thought about it. I really did not have time to stalk birds. I thought about taking a picture of Indigo and doing this to it:



harharharharhar. Baaadd photoshop, bad.
She is my angel though. Sweet, evil, neigh trying to dump me back the laneway and run home today after I let you have a corn stalk to eat on our ride. Bad neigh!

But as I thought about birds and how hard they are to photograph and how I get attacked every time I go to one of the local wineries and see the Canadian geese. All I hear is this hissing noise and WHAMMO! goose pinch. Ouch.

So I got these suckers.
Everyone has their own name for them. June bugs, fish flies, May flies. My mom and dad have always called them june bugs. I guess actual June bugs are those beetle things around here. All I know is when they die, and they die by the MILLIONS they smell like rotting fish! Gross! They are majorly attracted to light so all the street lights are turned off at night. They can be dangerous because they die under the street lights. If you hit a patch of them with your car they can be more dangerous than a patch of black ice!
They live for a whole of like 24 hours and their sole purpose in life is making babies and being bird food. The birds love them and so do the bats and frogs and fish.
They lay eggs on the surface of the water which sink down and burrow in the mud. They stay in a larvae stage for up to two years under there before hatching and flying around. The bloody things.
See they don't bite. They just fly at any moving object and stick to it. Imagine the frustration of a horse when you ride past a bush or tree and a few hundred of these things fly at them, land on them and don't fly away when they twitch their muscles or swat them with their tails. They are gross if you are riding. You come back with an annoyed horse and these buggers smushed into the seat of your pants. Grrrrr.
I remember my dad walking through this tall grass area when I was young. All I hear is my mom scream and my dad coming out, hanging his arms to the side looking like swamp thing, every single inch covered in fish flies and a big swarm of them hovering above your head. Good thing they don't bite.

They do molt a time or two or three when they are here. They leave these skelletons behind clinging to your window.

They also come in tan, or brown. I find the tan ones are more skittish. Weird. Here is the wikipedia page on them. Of course you can't believe everything wiki says because people like you and me write those articles.
Just be lucky you don't have them. The season is just starting. They will cover our house in a week. Gross.


I grab them by their wings. Oh looks like this little fellow isn't happy. His little legs are flailing.

They are great fun for kids to collect. See who gets the most fish flies. So here is it for me being busy. Hopefully there will be some wildflowers next week on time.

Seeing red

Sunday stills

Before I start I want to add something about barns since there are old barns in my pictures. Traditionally farmers used linseed oil to seal the wood of the barn. This would turn the wood an orange hue. Unfortunately this would not keep mould, moss, fungus or moisture from getting into the wood and the barns would have a short life span. This is where the real red tinge came into play. Farmers would add ferrous oxide (aka rust) to the oil mixture. When it dried it would give a rich reddish orange hue to the wood and protect it more than just the oil.
After red became the traditional colour wealthy farmers would add blood to the oil mixture after a big slaughter and it would dry a burnt red colour.
Once paint became cheaper to seal wood with the fire engine red became typical to see.
Dairy farms came around and white washing was cheaper yet.

There you have it, a history of red!!!

This Sunday stills was easy. Finding the time wasn't. I do however have an abundance of red things around. I could have gone on all day to photograph tons of things. Red truck, red tack trunk, red carriage, red four wheeler of the neighbors zooming up and down the lane. The list goes on.


Red halter

The red Canadian stop sign

Red grain buckets

Red Konk lid


White...err mud horse, red barn. I think shes trying to use horsey eye and ear language to say "Put down the evil bright light device and feed me already!"
Red barn
Red barn(s) The two in the front of the picture used to be about 200 meters or so back in the field. Don't quote me on it but I believe they are about 150 years old, maybe older. They were moved up closer to the road in the 70's and added on to.

This is the front of the barn. This used to swing down(the section there with the boards a little shorter than the others) and that little hole at the peak is where a pulley would be. Hay would have been loaded onto a wagon, pulled by a team of drafts and then hauled up into the big hayloft. The pulley system is still there in the loft but I wouldn't want to use it anytime soon.

RED RUM!!! RED RUM!!*Cue Stephen king* ok, just testing.

Red rock! This one is in the garden by the barn door. We have a big slab of rock under the farm right where the paddocks are so every spring rocks surface. We can pick them up every year and they just pop back up in the spring. Good for keeping the horses feet hard.

Enjoy. Have a happy easter.