A Cold Neighborhood

For those of you without internet or the Weather Channel, Minnesota and Wisconsin have been socked in with a major snowstorm. They are already calling it "THE BLIZZARD OF 2010!" on the local news channels. That this is the only blizzard so far of the whole year makes that understandable, if still a bit overstated. But that is easy for me to say. St Cloud "only" got about 8 inches, and the wind is "only" blowing about 30 MPH around here. South and southwest of here received up to 20 inches of snow.

So it wasn't a day for a long drive but it was worth going through the park, the same one that was pictured last week. These pictures show better visibility than there actually was. It was (and is) a real live blizzard. I am glad I am in for the night in a warm apartment with good smells coming from the kitchen. Every now and then, I peek out the window to watch the wind whip the snow into unmanageable drifts.

On a sad note, I have to note the demise of a good friend of this past year and a half or so. Above is a picture of my Macbook, the tool used to post almost all of these blogs these past months. Since then I have saved almost 15,000 photos that I shot this past year on this computer, and written almost 300 blog posts with this computer. It slipped through my cold hands and slippery down coat yesterday, and fell on concrete. It was after a crappy, crappy day at work, and I was almost in tears. And I would have been if I hadn't discovered that although the screen is totally toast, it does still work with an external monitor. Talk about small favors, but it does seem that the real value of things, just like the value of life, is the memories, or in this case, the memory of a still functioning hard drive.

What makes a neighborhood a home...

In the next few weeks I am going to take some photos of my "local," the bar adjacent to my home. It's not that I head there immediately after work, but it is a warm, nearby place to hang out.

Can you believe it snowed in Minnesota?

It did indeed snow. Not that much, but enough to make it worthwhile to carry a camera around for a bit this morning. Actually, these photos are interesting to me, though probably not to most others, as they do show a bit about the thought process that goes on to "make" a photo.

I have noticed this interestingly shaped birch tree before and drive past it every morning on my way to work. I had envisioned, or imagined how I would photograph this tree, and the photo of the branch with the house in the background is pretty close to that vision. What I didn't imagine was the "view" the other way. The shot of the branch and the blue Studebaker truck is the result of simply looking a different way at a "subject" that I thought I saw every day. It's not high art, but it is a mildly interesting photo.

The photos of the trees show a similar process. I liked the more distant shot of the large oak, and it did sort of work out. But then I looked up and saw the tree that was right above me, and the two other photos showed up. Again, I am not sure if any of these are even printable or worth all that much, but they accomplish several things. First, they do show the results of a Minnesota winter storm. And these photos also show a tiny bit of the process that happens when I wander about with a camera.