Round Robin: Tangles of Branches

This week's Round Robin Challenge: Branches doesn't really need explaining, does it? Let's get on with the pictures!

An intricate tangle of branches stands out against bands of color in the late afternoon sky.

I think these are olive trees, but the shapes and angles remind me of bonsais, 

or trees in Japanese paintings.

Branches melt into indistinct blobs against orange clouds.

Branches illuminated by a streetlamp at sunset.

Karen

Now let's see what the other Robins branched out with!

Linking List
as of Saturday, 1/28/12, 12:20 AM MST

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Freda - Posted!
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Kara **Welcome!**
notes from the tiny napping house
http://notesfromthetinynappinghouse.blogspot.com/

Mary Tomaselli - Posted!
Mary Tomaselli's Photos
http://marytomaselli.blogspot.com

Tina - Posted!
Tina´s PicStory
http://tinaspicstory.blogspot.com/

Round Robin: Beneath These Roots

I half-intended to do something semi-clever and unexpected for the return of the Round Robin Photo Challenges, finding some surprising interpretation of the topic "Roots," as suggested by Vicki of the blog Maraca. Now the time has come to post, and I can't bear to do that. The fact is, I took quite a few pictures last year of the roots of olive trees in Gene C. Reid Park. It would be a shame not to finally present some of the shots I haven't previously posted.




The thing about old olive trees is, pretty much the whole tree looks like tree roots. It's a motif that's carried up the trunk, a mass of twisted limbs joined together. Tonight I came across a nice shot of the olive grove that illustrates this. (You can see it here.) But let's concentrate on the actual roots, shall we?



The other cool thing about this particular stand of olive trees, next to the rose garden in Reid Park, is that Cayenne and Pepper always seem inordinately interested in their roots.




I have lots of pictures, in fact, of the dogs sniffing and nosing and climbing around at the base and roots of these trees. But why? What's so compelling about tree roots for a dog like Cayenne or (especially) Pepper?



I had my suspicions, especially given the number of small holes in the ground I've turned up in various parts of this park, including some right at the roots of the trees that interest Pepper the most. But until this summer I didn't know for sure what the dogs were looking for. I tend to take the dogs to the park in the late afternoon, if at all; lately our attendance has fallen off to almost nothing. At that time of day, whatever critters the dogs are after seem conspicuously absent, aside from certain birds.



But one morning this summer I decided to beat the heat with a morning visit. That's when the dogs and I finally saw what had burrowed all those holes near the roots of olive trees. We never got very close, but I did manage a few shots.

Now let's go see what roots the other Robins have decided to show us:

Linking List



Vicki - Posted!
Maraca
http://mymaracas.blogspot.com/


Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com


Linda - Posted!
Mommy's Treasures
http://mommystreasures.blogspot.com 


Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com


Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com


Monica
Shutterly Happy =)
http://monica-frameofmind.blogspot.com/


Gemma
Little Tiny Pieces
http://www.littletinypieces.co.uk


Suzanne R - Posted!
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com


Sherrie - Posted!
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/


Julie - Posted!
Julie's Web Journal
http://www.barrettmanor.com/julie/journal.aspx


Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/


Peggy - Posted!
Holmespun Fun Memes and Themes
http://holmespunfunmemesandthemes.blogspot.com

Karen

EMPS: Testing With Trees

In the latest Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, Carly is asking for pictures of trees. Oh, that's easy. I could do a week's worth of postings just from archived photos of Reid Park - but I won't. It's taken me all week just to put together this one entry!

There are more than a few trees there that I've photographed a lot, because they're photogenic, because they frame a sunset, because they have birds in them, and, well, because I see them rather often, while holding a camera in one hand, the dogs' leashes in the other. But for this shoot I'm going with all new photos, taken late Monday afternoon. As an experiment, I'm not even editing them, except for resize and sharpen lightly, with a few exceptions.

California Pepper Tree(?) in Reid Park,
originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

This first shot, as best as I can figure out from my research, is of a California Pepper Tree. It stands near the north entrance of Miko's Corner Playground. I've always thought of it as a willow tree, because of the general shape - but I always knew I was probably wrong in that identification.

Now for the learning curve. After years of dragging my heels, I signed up for flickr a day or two ago. I'm testing the "blog this" function, which seems designed to post one photo only, with no provision for saving it to draft. So if you see this in a feed with just one photo, please click through, because I'll be editing it! There are definitely more photos on the way! You can see the full set at here.

Oh, that looks rather nice. Let's try it again, pasting the HTML from the first photo and changing the particulars:

Arizona Sycamore and Friend, Miko's Corner,
originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

Pretty good. I had to do some fiddling, but it works okay. Anyway, this is also in Miki's Corner. In the past I've photographed it for the leaves, and especially for the bark. I'm pretty sure it's an Arizona Sycamore. And every time I try to type the word "sycamore," my fingers want to turn it into "Syracuse."

The Sunset Tree, Miko's Corner,
originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

I'm not sure what kind of tree this is, although I have my suspicions. It's been featured in many of my Reid Park sunset and dusk photos.

An Olive Tree near the Rose Garden,
originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

Here's one of the trees in the olive grove near the rose garden. I'm fascinated by the twisted trunks and roots of them. The olive grove is riddled with the burrows of rock squirrels. I guess they must like olives. Cayenne and Pepper are always sniffing at the base of these trees, trying to figure out where the squirrels are.

Why did I photograph this tree by the northern duck pond?.
Originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

I photographed several other trees for this, but let's finish off with one that isn't photogenic in itself. If it stood alone it might look rather nice, but it's all tangled up with two other trees, and it's hard to get a handle on its shape. But that's not important. Can you tell from the photo above what is significant about this tree?

How many herons are in this tree?
Originally uploaded by Karen Funk Blocher.

Here's the cropped version. How many black-crowned night herons can you find? This tree is right next to the northern duck pond, and people sometimes go fishing (illegally) and flip their tiny catches onto the sidewalk for the birds to snatch up. So naturally the birds hang out here, waiting for the opportunity.

Update: Carly counts 4 herons, but I swear there were five last night. Perhaps one flew away? Let's try the other picture, one that I saturated a bit to make the herons more visible:

How many herons do you see now?

And now I've found the easier way to do a flickr link!

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis each month for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot!

Karen

The Teenager in the Tree

Rani's up a tree again.

I'm sorry, but I had to do it. Again.

After days of trying to reorganize my photo files and clear enough junk off my hard drives to enable the backup to work, I gave this computer its first Windows-based defrag in, well, possibly ever. It took hours and hours. (Norton does an Optimize that takes hardly any time at all.) While I was waiting, I thought about researching agents or starting work on revising and finishing Mages of Mâvarin, but ended up opening Chapter One of Heirs of Mâvarin instead. I figured I'd give my first novel a nice, relaxing read through. I'd double-check that it made sense when read all at once, and catch any lingering typos. Within the first two pages, I found:

• a sentence that ended in a comma,
• a paragraph so choppy that it failed to lead the reader coherently from the previous paragraph to the following one, and
• a paragraph with a really, really long sentence about the view from Rani's tree, followed by a sentence about Rani's view downstream not being nearly as good. Nearly as good as what? The paragraph no longer mentioned that the other view was upstream.

Yuck. And these are the two pages an agent or editor must get past before deciding to give the rest of the book serious consideration? I may as well not send it out, if I'm just going to sabotage my book with a sloppy final edit!

I think I know what the problem is. The last time through, I was working hard at bringing down word count. I frequently revised and combined sentences, trying to make things clearer and less wordy. But in doing so, I apparently failed to notice the occasional artifact left over from the old sentences, or references back to text that no longer existed. Aargh!

Wrong kind of road, wrong kind of trees, wrong kind of river,
and a modern sign in the background; but this is as close
as I can come to visually depicting the scene without ripping
off someone else's photo of a riverside beech tree.

So that last, take-it-from-the-top edit that I had decided not to do on the grounds that it would be just an excuse not to send the thing out, turns out to be necessary after all. So I'm back in Chapter One. Rani is out of the tree and I've fixed the three problems I've listed above, but I still have half the chapter to go through. Maybe the later chapters will be cleaner, but do I really want to take that chance?

As for the backup problem, I've just about decided that it's Picasa's fault, with a little help from me. Picasa shows every folder containing picture files on either my C: drive or my backup I: drive, most of which is from Norton's backup. In working with those files, perhaps even just displaying them, I probably messed up the compression. Now the backup only gets up to 2007 before the backup drive is full.

So I'm going through the pictures on my hard drive, and rearranging them by subject instead of by date. It seems silly to have, for example, a folder nearly every month containing anywhere from two to thirty Doctor Who-related pictures, or to have to search by month for that shot of the pink bison, or to hunt through a zillion folders in a zillion places for that one remembered shot of Tuffy. The new scheme will continue to have a folder for each camera to keep the eras separate, but within each of those will be a master folder for dogs, one for sunsets, etc. And for subjects I tend to obsess on, there will be subfolders sorting the contents by month. I've already crashed Picasa at least once - its cataloging routine was overwhelmed with the changes - but I'll keep going anyway. In the end it should be worth it, both to make things easier to find and because I'll be able to eliminate more dupe files.

Gee, it's a good thing I'm unemployed. It means I have more time for this stuff! (Yeah, right.)

By the way, do any of you live in an area with one or more beech trees beside a river? If so, will you let me use your photo thereof on this blog and the Mâvarin web site? It would be with full credit to you, of course.

Karen

Meanwhile...

As I compiled the two Weekend Assignment entries last night, I considered the possibilities for also reporting the news of the day - my day, that is. I could have added an aside at the end of one of the existing entries, or written a third entry in one day, or put it off until tonight. Guess which option I chose.

Meanwhile...

Blogger was up and down, delaying my collection of quotes from people's Weekend Assignment entries. So I watched a little Doctor Who as I waited. It didn't take long, and soon I was able to resume writing the entry.

Meanwhile...

I worked on Chapter Two of Heirs, and managed to cut about 100 words from the first half of it (which is as far as I got). I have a major decision to make about my lead character Rani, but I'll save that rant for Saturday night.

As I edited and watched Doctor Who and compiled the wrap-up entry, I was also refining my idea for the new Weekend Assignment. When the wrap-up entry was done, I dug through my photo archives for an appropriate photo.

Meanwhile...

my computer was busy downloading something else, but I didn't know that yet.

I finished the entries, washed dishes and went to bed without telling you about my day yesterday (Thursday). But now it can be told. I had my job interview in Oro Valley on Thursday afternoon. I arrived early, which was a good thing, because the address I was looking for did not seem to exist. As I drove up and down the block, I repeatedly passed what looked like a trailhead for Pusch Ridge, and a building with the wrong address. But the name of the company I wanted was on a door of the "wrong" building. When I asked for directions, I was told that the building I had been seeking no longer existed. I was in the right place after all.

I had the job interview, and it seemed to go well. The person who interviewed me even looked up the address of John's nearby place of business, so I could drop in on him there for the first time in the five years or so he's worked for them. What can I say? It's not my part of town. Heck, I'm not sure it's even technically in Tucson.

So I drove over to see John. Had a little trouble finding it, but that's all right. After a brief visit, I decided to treat myself to lunch at a place on Oracle Rd.

Meanwhile...

I was waiting to hear from my recruiter whether the prospective employer - let's call them Interesting Manufacturer (IM) - had called her yet, and if so, what they said. I ordered some food and called the recruiter. She was on the phone, so I left a voicemail.

When she called me back, she had not yet heard anything. I gave her my impression of how it went, and told her where I was eating. She joked about how she'd like to join me there. (Hint: this was not McDonald's.) I told her that if I didn't get the job, the meal was by way of consolation. If I did, it was a celebration. She laughed and hung up, with a promise to call back when she heard.

Meanwhile...

The food arrived. It was very good, except for the vegetables, which were both charred and undercooked.

As I was eating, my recruiter called back. "I suppose you want to know what kind of meal you're eating," she said.

"Yes, please."

"It's a celebration! You got it!"

I don't start until Wednesday, so I will have been out of work nearly 2 1/2 weeks. But that's okay. I needed the time off.

As I drove home, two different people called from the recruiter's office, asking me to stop by about some paperwork, and to get the correct address for IM from me. So I headed over to see them, filled out a new I-9 with my expired passport for ID, and accepted congratulations for several people. There.

It was a good day.

So today I slept in, to make up for the late night. Around 1 PM, which is when I planned to get up anyway, Tuffy started barking at the front door. I looked out the window by the front door, and what I saw led me to grab my camera and go out to the driveway.


For the second time in two years, a neighbor was getting a tree hauled away. The previous time, back in August 2006, it was because a tree had fallen over, and put a big hole in someone's roof. But I initially saw no evidence that that was the case this time.

Meanwhile...


The flatbed truck that was going to do the actual hauling was parked in front of out house. Hence the barking.


I got properly dressed and took pictures intermittently through most of the afternoon. (I also took a number of video clips, but I don't feel like dealing with them tonight/this morning.) At first they were trimming excess fronds off the palm tree.

Then they moved it out of the street.

The truck that had been in front of our house pulled up beside the tree. But before putting the tree onto it, they offloaded four large what bags of something-or-other. Dirt, maybe?

Meanwhile...

Once the tree was moved, the roof of the house behind it became more visible. I didn't notice it until I edited the photos (much) later, but if you doubleclick and look at them, you'll see definite roof damage.


Once the white bags were off the truck, they lifted the tree, maneuvered it around to face the other way, and gently lowered it. By that time, they had tied the palm's remaining fronds together, presumably to keep them from blowing around or falling off when the tree was hauled away. If the neighborhood had to lose a tree, it was good that they were taking good care of it, and not just sawing it to bits. That presumably means it will be replanted somewhere.

The last step was to strap it down. But wait...where was the crane going now? I had a bad feeling about this.


Uh-oh. They were pulling the other, shorter palm out of the ground. I briefly had hopes that it would merely be replanted, perhaps more securely or farther from the houses...

...but soon my fears were confirmed. A second tree, one of my favorites, was also leaving Calle Mumble. It's been featured on my sunset photos for the last time.

I didn't bother filming the tree removal process a second time.

Meanwhile...


Sometime during the tree hauling process, a little notice in the corner of my computer screen told me that Windows wanted to install something it downloaded last night. Windows Vista Service Pack #1 took over an hour to install, and I couldn't use the computer during that time. But that was okay, because (one last time!)

Meanwhile...

I watched Doctor Who, of course!

Karen

A Tale of Two Trees

Tree #1: It Definitely Made a Noise.

When he got home tonight, John pointed out that I'd missed something important about the crane photos he took Tuesday morning. Below is one of the photos. Can you tell what I failed to notice and mention in last night's entry?


Take a closer look.


It's not just that our neighbors needed the crane to lift the tree. They needed it to lift the tree off the smashed-up corner of the roof!

Tree #2: Hope is Green

Two weeks ago, I showed you my favorite tree at St. Michael's, and told you that it was dying. Nearly all the leaves on it were cinnamon chocolate in color - which it to say brown, which is to say dried up and useless, at least to the tree. The landscaping guy I talked to as he swept up the fallen leaves did not deny that the tree was as good as dead.

Since then, I've said a few encouraging words to the tree each morning, expecting nothing. After all, there were basically no green leaves left on the poor thing. I think this was true as recently as a week ago. But look at it now!

My tree is making a comeback! There are lots and lots of tiny leaves now on lower limbs and outer branches, places where there aren't any of the dead brown ones. Yay! It's going to live!

Oh! They're so cool, these chlorophyll-rich little beauties! I did boost the color on these shots, to make the tiny leaves nice and visible and the overall pictures prettier. The brown leaves are a bit lighter than you see here, and a bit less red.

Many years ago, I read about talking to plants, that a scientific study showed that expressing affection for a plant does have a positive effect on it. Evidently Madeleine L'Engle read the article, too, or one like it, because she incorporated it into a scene in A Wind in the Door. I'm not taking credit for this tree's miraculous survival. More likely the gardener guy did something that helped the coolest tree at St. Michael's. I'm just glad - thrilled, really - that the tree is going to survive after all.

Happy Half - Anniversary

On February 23rd, 2006, at 10:22 am, the U.S. Postal Service recorded a certain large Priority Mail envelope as having arrived at a certain address in the Flatiron Building, New York, NY 10010. It was probably logged in by someone at Tor Books, who then added it to the slush pile. That's what happens to unagented work, and alas, it's been several years since I even tried to get a literary agent. Today is that envelope's six month anniversary on the slush pile. Maybe. It may not be there any more. It could be that someone has finally looked it over, seen that it's not utterly illiterate, and put it in another pile for further perusal. It's possible that someone liked it and wrote a little report on it, and now it's on yet another pile, awaiting Patrick's or Teresa's attention (or someone else's). It's even possible that it was rejected and mailed back months ago, and the post office lost it. But I hope not!

So now it's time to follow up with a query. The Tor guidelines say the following:

Please allow at least four to six months for your manuscript to be considered. If you haven't heard from us after four months, and wish to make sure your manuscript got here, please write a letter stating the genre, the date of submission, and the title of the manuscript, rather than calling. We will respond promptly.

I know it got there, and I know that Patrick Nielsen Hayden has described the movement of the slushpile as "glacial." Still, I'd like to know: has anyone actually looked at it yet?

So anyway, I'm tinkering with my email asking about this. Those of you who helped with with the cover letter in the first place, I'd appreciate some advice on the follow-up email. I just posted it over on Inspirations (my LJ). Take a look, will you? Thanks!


Karen

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