Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Rich's Wedding and the Cincinnati Nature Center

I went to Cincinnati this past weekend for my cousin Rich's wedding. It was really wonderful. :)

I've got longer videos of the dance that I'm uploading to google video at the moment. I'll post them here when they finish uploading.

Update: here they are. 1 2 3 4

On Sunday after a brunch at my Aunt's, my mom and I along with my other aunt and uncle went to the Cincinnati Nature Center. Here are some pictures from that. I missed the height of the leaves changing by about a week, but I saw enough of it to tide me over.

The video in that album is of woolly aphids devouring a limb of a beech tree. The only thing that eats them is a particular type of carnivorous caterpillar.


There are a lot of wonderful things at the nature center. In the spring the frog ponds are all suitably full of frogs and lily pads for them to sit on. The larger lakes are great places to watch fish and turtles come up to the surface to gulp down any offered food, or to watch turtles sunning themselves on a log. In the summer the prairies are full of birds and the sounds of locusts. In the winter the clearings in front of the bird blinds fill up with birds, and they are my favorite part. When I'm in a bird blind I feel like I'm simultaneously kneeling at an ancient forest shrine and watching the lost boys have a food fight. Together, the two effects ensure that I always leave refreshed. I think I like Charley Harper's art for a similar reason. A lot of artists capture the grandeur and beauty of nature, but I've seen few that simultaneously capture it's silliness.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ryan -

I love your photos of the wedding!! Overall, they're so much better than most of what I've seen so far. I'm hoping you can tell your mom how we can put them into iPhoto on our machine (large or original format) and then put them onto a disk to take in for printing and also e-mail to Christie's dad for a DVD he's making.

Anonymous said...

Ryan,
I enjoyed the woolly aphids video, the photos of the wedding and Lauren's visit - some cool shots with the foggy or misty atmosphere. Lovely!
I'm not very blog savvy so wasn't aware of the comments section. Sorry! You can educate me!

We're so glad we were invited to join you and your mom for the Nature Center walk. We love that sort of thing. I've often wondered if I could find funding to simply watch squirrels and bird behavior at the bird feeders each winter. I'd quit my day job at the U of M for that!!!

We'll be sending disks of the photos, I think. We're still learning the digital camera stuff.
The prints we got back were pretty good although the color has a more brown tone on some of them but pretty nice overall - better than we expected.

Sat. we get Shadow, our foster dog, for 1 week so Angie, our kitty, and the dog behavior will be our focus. The 70 pounder is always scared of the 10 pounder!

Bye!!
A. Gail

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