Relief



Jack Benny rose and spider guest
On a rainy day



Jack Benny rose and spider guest
On a rainy day
Art edit

 It was drizzling outside but it had also cooled things off a great deal. What a relief! Just standing outside a couple of days ago would make the sweat drip down my back; I'm still getting wet outside but it feels so cool and refreshing.



Blanketflower in the rain




Blanketflower in the rain
In the star lit sky
Art Edit

 I still can't go out in the garden and work so I am practicing with picnik.com and having quite the good time. Some people might complain that today is cold and dreary but I think it is absolutely wonderful, cool and refreshing; a relief from the heat. You just have to know how to make it fun. I took some delightful water dropped photos then came in and played with them.


Leaves in the rain



Leaves in rain
Art edit



Enjoy

☺☺☺Johnina☺☺☺

Bright, Colorful New Year

“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”  Albert Einstein 

I got up New Years day to this beautiful sunrise.  I woke up feeling pretty good and having slept better than normal.  What a delightful way to start the new year.  I intend to keep up this peaceful,but bright, colorful start to my new year.  However as I was taking out the power lines, I realized that I wouldn't have this beautiful sunrise without the clouds, not all may go smoothly but look at the beauty that is in the world because of what we would normally perceive as a bad omen.

I have lots of raptors who nest in the surrounding woods and they were particularly active that morning, flying overhead, dive-bombing, riding the winds.  I was trying to capture them, but was having very little luck, so serendipity stepped in and they flew across a rainbow.

Over the past several weeks I have been thinking about a theme for my goals for this next year.  This past year I have found reasons behind my health problems and have worked at correcting them, with improvement in my health.  This past Thanksgiving and Christmas were the first ones in years and years were I was not hospitalized.  Hooray for me!!  We were even able to have a real live tree with out it making me sick.  Nice for the whole family.

Now that I have started to get better by correcting health problems; I now need to heal the damage caused by these underlying health problems.

Seeing this rainbow first thing on new years day almost made me cry; a confirmation of my main goal for the year.  For many years a rainbow has been a symbol of healing to me.  My oldest daughter got very sick when she was six years old.  Her digestive system shut down and the doctor had no idea why; she just got sicker and sicker.  She started to look like the starving children with skinny arms and bloated stomach from lack of abdominal muscles.  There was another girl her age with the same problem.  Our Bishop had us carry Sarah to church ( she was so weak she could not cross the living room without collapsing from exhaustion) and the other family to bring their little girl also.  He then asked for a special day of fasting and prayer for these girls as he was inspired that they would not live till the next week so he asked for the fast to take place the next day.  The next day there were two rainbows in the sky.  One for each of the girls.  Sarah got up and ate and asked if we could walk down to Mr. Lees a little 5 and dime about 3 blocks away.  She wanted to go spend her money that Grandma had sent her.  Amazingly she she was able to do it, when the day before she could not cross the living room.  My miracle child.

Rainbows are also one of those things of beauty that is dependent on rain ( a commonly perceived bad weather display).  But viewing this rainbow certainly gives me hope for healing in the year to come.  Join me in my new journey this year.

Johnina ☺☺☺☺☺

PS Sorry this took so long to post we have had lots of things going on here, then blogger went down on me and I couldn't post.  Everyone is back home safe and blogger is now working so I'm back.

Stormy October weather

We have had several days of rain in a row.  I does clear up for a couple of hours in the afternoon everyday so it's not so bad.  The wind however continues to gust all day long.  I decided to try out a new technique to see if I could capture the movement of the leaves during the times when the rain was not falling but the wind was blowing.  I experimented with the shutter speed so that the lens was open longer to catch the leaves as they moved while trying to keep the tree trunks and backgrounds sharp.  Some of the results are below.  Let me know what you think so I can adjust my camera for the best photos.

 My daughter also has stormy weather every fall as she starts school and breaks in new roommates on top of the weather change.  She has already had to cope with snow flurries at night already.  Since she has asthma the weather change makes a difference, but the biggest of her stormy weather is breaking in her roommates to her allergies.  You see she has severe food allergies that can send her into an asthma attack or worse anaphylaxis and it's not just eating the food, it can just being around when the food is cooked.  She posts a list which causes some teasing; it is very long and even if her roommates are understanding some of their friends are not.  They are also not used to being careful in what they eat and fix so they sometimes forget and then she can't breathe.  She really did a good job of describing what it is like for her on her blog

http://snarkandart.blogspot.com/  

I can relate; I have different medical problems but a lot of the same frustrations.  Check out her blog it will give you a different view on life.

  I have been reading the first Dresden files book.  I've read a couple of them and they are just fun, quick to read fantasy books.  This one did have a tidbit of wisdom in it and finding these little character thoughts that really round out the characters is why I still read.  The saying that the book is always better than the movie; I believe to be true almost exclusively.  Anyway here is the quote from "Storm Front" by Jim Butcher that kind of sums up how to handle the storms of life.
'Rain was coming down in sheets.  I could hear it, on the concrete outside and on the old building above me.  It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke.  I could probably stand to learn something from that.'  
I think we could all learn to bend in the storms of life so we don't break.


Johnina  :^A

Rainy days and Mondays....

....Always get me down.  I believe those are the words from a song from my teenage years sung by the Carpenters.  Although at the time I really liked the song it no longer applies.

I now love Mondays as the beginning of a new week full of opportunities.  I like to think that if I have messed up on meeting my goals or had a bad week that I can start over; kind of like a mini New Year.   Especially after a restful, uplifting Sunday like yesterday.  Benn came over and both Benn and Jeremy had their girlfriends with them and we all enjoyed visiting after a spiritual church meeting and just relaxing in each others company.  Wonderful, wonderful Sunday; I love the sweet spirit of Sundays.  After a day like that, I feel even more like I can start again and improve over the week before.

And rain, well without rain I wouldn't have my flowers.  You have seen many pictures of my flowers in my flower garden and even though it has had to be watered on occasion; without rain even that would not have been possible.  We have had many a drought year lately were water restrictions did not allow for watering of flower gardens.  One year we used bath water to water the flower garden, but this year we have had rain and at times bountiful flowers.  The cypress flowers pictured above are a good example.  These huge plants started out as two small seedlings this last spring.  They have climbed up a 6 foot trellis and are lush and thick and stick out about a foot and as you can see they are covered in flowers.
Johnina :^A

An Atlanta Tour

Yesterday I had a doctors appointment on the other side of Atlanta which for me is a little over seventy miles.  The doctors have requested that I not drive in Atlanta due to my disabilities and my medications, so Tom was driving.  I can drive around Griffin; it being smaller and my being familiar with the area, but driving in or through Atlanta is an entirely different proposition.  Any way it was raining at times very hard I was getting drowsy; I was still in a great deal of pain from my fall of a couple of weeks ago and I was in need of a diversion.  The book I brought with me just wasn't doing the job.  Tom had the radio on talk radio (driver controls the radio) and normally Neal Boortz is interesting and creates some interesting conversations between Tom and I, but yesterday Mr. Boortz was really in a mood, he even admitted it on the show.  So I searched for another diversion and since I almost always have a camera with me; I decided to try taking pictures from in the car.  The camera that I usually use is being cleaned and repaired, but I did have my starter point and shoot camera with me.  Perfect for just playing around with.  I set it for Auto and started snapping away.  I was amazed at the photos that I got and I had fun at home just playing around with my editing and creating moods with my editing.

 

This is one of the first pictures I took and because of the mist, it had such an old fashioned look that I decided to make it look like an old-fashioned postcard.  I don't know what buildings these are or when they where built but they just seemed to fit into the scene.  

 All the photos were taken on I-75 or Ga 400 and in this case the MARTA rail is just on the right.  The gate you see open leads onto the MARTA tracks and seems just a little dangerous to me.  I wonder if I should report it.  I really liked this composition especially the buildings disappearing into the clouds, except in the original everything was gray and misty except for the trees in the foreground.  They were bright green.  I tried every edit I could think of even just going down the lists of editing options on some of my programs.  Some I kept some I deleted, aren't modern electronics just so cool  until I had the photo almost where I wanted it and then I saw  a button I had never pushed before and WOW just what I wanted.  It looks like a night scene but still has enough contrast to look nice.  This key was to make it into a negative and normally I don't like doing that in my editing, but I really like the way it looks here.  NOTE: Just because a program has the same name on it's edit doesn't mean it will look the same on all programs, such was the case here.

 On the north side of Atlanta sits two buildings the King and the Queen.  This is the King, with his square crown- the Queen has a rounded crown.  It refused to rain on the King although you can see the reflection of a raindrop from my windshield.  I was absolutely amazed at this photo and how clear it is.  We were on the highway going at a more than adequate speed, I was using a camera that the manufacturer considers obsolete and will not update the software so I can download from the camera, I have to download from the memory card and yet the photo is clear enough to see the railings on the porches and the lights on the inside of the building.  Amazing.

 On the way back I got a view of Lenox Square Mall and as you can see there was so much water on the windshield that that is what the camera focused on.  I just thought that it made for a neat shot all by itself so I only did basic editing.  Another thing that amazed me was the fact that the windshield wipers showed up on so few photos, even though they were going the whole time.

My ghostly picture

On the way back this building, which is the same one as on the first photo, was wrapped in clouds.  It's not often that I have really looked at a building like that.  It had an other-worldly look to it, so to add to that I added a reflection.  I think maybe this turned out to be my favorite.  There is one thing that I learn from photography and I keep learning it over and over is that there is beauty to be found in everything even in what in past days I would have considered a rainy, wet, NASTY day. 

I hope you enjoyed my tour of Atlanta. 

Rain, Rain Hooray!!!

Hi
After I had edited my little sketches I decided that I really kind of liked the way they looked.  This one looks kind of friendly so he's being used as my greeting today.  You will probably see more of my little sketches and drawings in my blog just because I'm having fun with them.  They are not great art but they are fun.
I've changed my layout, I got an e-mail about new blogger layouts and decided to try them.  I was thinking of changing my color scheme anyway; I was getting tired of the dark color scheme.  I think maybe it's because of a change in me.  Anyway once again serendipity came into play in the form of an e-mail.  One of the premises of Dr. Dyer's book Excuses Begone, which I am currently reading for the third time, is that when you are ready, the help that you need will come into your life.  Serendipity.  I have found that the more I accept the gifts of serendipity the more I get them and wonderful gifts they are.  Sometimes they seem small at the time but the joy they bring is out of proportion to the size.  For example the change in my blog colors, before I changed them I never would have believed how good it make me feel to see the new set up.  I could do a whole blog just on the little gifts of serendipity I have received of late, and maybe sometime I will but for now I'm going on with other things.

My last blog was on the outrageous pollen counts we in Georgia have had to endure.  Another serendipity, Tom bought me a painter's mask just a couple of days before the pollen rise and it has help me keep breathing normally or close to normal in spite of the pollen.  We woke up to dew on the pollen and it actually made it kind of pretty.  Then we got rain and got pollen sludge.  Yuck!

  After the second rain when most of the sludge was gone the pollen once again made patterns that where really kind of pretty.  That's why the post is called Rain, Rain Hooray!  Well that and the pollen count went down to 1941 still extraordinarily high but better.
I think maybe I should have called this post Hodge-Podge because I'm going to change the subject again.  The economic crisis that has hit pretty much all over has hit this family too.  Although it hasn't reached crisis proportions a little extra money would sure be nice.  I'm working on selling my photographs and now have a website on redbubble (see top right hand corner of my blog and click to go there).  I have also started with ads on my blog not something I wanted to do but I think it could be an advantage to both me and my readers.  I am only working with Amazon.com because they have good prices and service; I've used them and like them.  They also let me choose what to advertise so when I read a book and enjoy it all you have to do is find it in the slideshow click on it and it will take you to Amazon where you can order it. Convenient. I like that I can choose what to put up to advertise that way I know you will probably like it too.  Hopefully finding this will turn out to be serendipity for me too.
I hope you like and enjoy my new blog and your life is filled with serendipity too.

Rainy day

Rain, rain go away

Come again some other day

Little Johnny wants to play.

OR

Pain, pain go away

Never come another day

Cuz it's me who wants to play.

We're starting another round of rain which means MORE MUSHROOMS. I still haven't finished editing the pics I've got. I'm actually getting a little tired of mushrooms, but I've seen so many different kinds that I've never seen before I'm afraid to not go look and take pictures cuz I don't want to miss any.

While it's raining though I'm staying inside and getting some organizing things done. today I finished designing and got some contact cards done, some permission cards made up so I know I can use people's photos even on the Internet, and stickers to go on framed pictures I give away with contact info on them. Tom was a tremendous help in doing all those things.

I finished some editing and got some more pictures on flickr. I haven't been able to take pictures outside so I set up to do still life's inside and took a few. Kept up my blog. For me this was a Very full day, but I made sure to take a nap so maybe I won't pay to high a price tomorrow. Good night all.