Hello, dears!
“Day in the life” posts are so fun to read, aren’t they? Since I enjoy reading them, I thought I’d better get on it and make one myself. 🙂 Instead of documenting an actual entire day, I reconstructed what a normal day looks like for me. Well, okay… many days I’ll do errands, go to church-related events, get together with friends, etc. but this is what I usually do on “stay at home days.” 🙂 I hope you guys enjoy!
Hello, dears!
It’s been AGES since I made the last “Moving On” post, but I wanted to wait until I could finish up this mini-series. And now I can! We are all moved in to the big house now, except for one room of unpacked boxes… yeah, that might take us a while. XD But now, enjoy this account of the most recent phase in our moving process! I can’t go over every single part in detail, so I’m just going to highlight some major chunks: packing and unpacking the house, packing up Dad’s shop, and taking down the old log cabin. Enjoy!
Packing up our old house was exhausting and kind of sad. I can’t remember the rooms ever being empty, since we moved there when I was one. However, it WAS exciting to finally be ready to move into the big house! One day while we were packing I saw this box which used to hold bittersweet vine found on our farm, and I had to get a picture. Moving really is…
Often when I got up in the mornings, I would step between this curtain and the window…
and look out at this view, to see what the weather was like, and wonder what would happen today.
The last evening at our old house was gorgeous. It was sad to think I’ll never see these views from the upstairs windows anymore. I’ll miss them. *sigh*
Some of our family as well as people from church helped us pack up, which was wonderful! Dad got a (not the most beautiful) trailer for our semi, to load up all our stuff. We fit practically our whole house into one trailer. It was strange to see all our familiar furniture stacked together in an unfamiliar place like that.
And then we left. We can come back again, of course, but it will never be the same since the house and the farm are no longer ours. *sigh*
Goodbye, old farm. ❤
The semi trailer got to our new farm a couple days later, and since my Dad and brothers weren’t available to unpack as soon as we hoped, the girls decided to start in ourselves! We got probably 2/3 of the semi trailer unpacked with just my mom, my grandmother, us three girls. 😀 It was great. I didn’t get too many pictures of this, but I got a ton of videos! I want to make a fast-motion video of us unloading the trailer. 🙂 Here’s a picture of Logan helping us, at least:
It took us two days, I believe, to get to this: AN EMPTY TRAILER!
After we unpacked our dining room table + chairs, we sat down to the first “official” meal in the big house, with delicious food that some of our friends from church kindly brought us. ❤
HA HA, here’s one last bonus picture for this section. XD Gram was like, “Allison, where’s your camera? You need a picture of this!” And I hurried off to get it. 😛
In case you’re wondering, the package is a fridge. One of many, sadly. Dear me, the first fridge we got from Lowes wasn’t the right kind, the second one didn’t work, the third one leaked, the fourth was the wrong kind AGAIN, and we’re still waiting for Lowes to bring the fifth one and HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE RIGHT THIS TIME. Goodness gracious, WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH LOWES?
Once we got the house stuff moved, we went back to our old farm and packed up Dad’s entire shop (which he uses for fixing farm machinery). Let me tell you, that was a job! Over 40 years, the shop had accumulated enough nuts, bolts, screws, paint, ratchets, wrenches, etc. to seriously open their own hardware shop. XD Only it would be an extremely dusty hardware shop.
For some reason I think this looks really neat…
As you can see, Dad has SO many tools in all different sizes, particularly wrenches. I really like this picture. 😀
The best part of packing was having pizza for lunch. 😛
Remember this old, fallen-down log cabin in our backyard?
Well just a few weeks ago, we took it down the rest of the way. I was hoping to find some more neat old letters or other interesting artifacts, but sadly we mostly found… a lot of junk. It was a bigger project to take it down than I expected, but it’s nice not to have to stare at it from half the windows now. 🙂
First, Dad and the boys pushed it over with the telehandler. Next we all clambered up on the roof with a couple of hammers and started extracting the nails so we could peel off the metal. The tar paper under the metal was covered with dead ladybugs and stinkbugs. O.o That was nice.
After we dragged away the roof skeleton, we had to pick out all the leftover boards and junk. That took quite a while.
Thankfully we had the skidloader to help!
Like I said, we didn’t find many valuable old things, but we did find some interesting junk! Including…
We are keeping the second half of the aforementioned items. Also some of the century-old heart pine wood.
It was finally cleared away about supper time. We were planning to make a patio around the chimney, but it’s not in the best shape so we might take the chimney down later after all. 
And there you have it! A VERY abbreviated account of some moving-related things that we did recently. We are all enjoying living in the big house immensely. It’s just so huge and beautiful! Maybe once we get it decorated I can give you guys a tour. 😉
What was your favorite section of this post? Do you think Megan should fix up the flamingo? Ever have troubles like we did with our fridge? And what is your favorite kind of pizza?
Thanks for reading, dears, and have a lovely day!
***Allison***
Hello, dears!
I hope you had a great Easter! I sure did. 🙂 We had a great time going to our old church again and seeing friends, as well as having family celebrations.
Once Easter is past, it seems like it really ought to be spring, heh heh. So today I’ve compiled some recent farm photography from various rambles – mostly springy ones, but a few from the last bits of winter too. I hope you enjoy “walking” around the farm with me!
I love how the soft light polishes the smooth gnarls of this twisted tree.❤
If you peer into the woods here, you’re bound to see drifts of pale leaves on small trees all over the place. We didn’t have beeches at home, so it’s fun to see leaves here even in winter!
There’s a little island of trees in the pasture behind the Cedar House, some of which are pines laden with cones. I think pine cones are just so satisfying and pretty to take pictures of and hold. 😛
I love finding bright spots of color among the gray!
Another common tree here that isn’t common at home is the sweet gum tree. The seed pods always have bad hair days, heh heh. XD
Plush cushions of velvety green moss make me happy. 🙂
Now we get to the wintry part, but it’s just a few pictures. 😉 Quite a while ago, the smaller pond was frozen enough to walk on, so of course we did so, hee hee. Don’t you love finding things frozen into the ice, like this oak leaf? Such a cold bed for the bright little thing to be sleeping in.
The ice crystals were GORGEOUS. I love the delicate, fleeting strength of ice.
Jellyfish bubbles floating, frozen…
Isn’t the crystallized texture so fine and pretty? At the bottom left I think it looks like an ice feather.
The very top of the ice melted, but it was still solid underneath, don’t worry. 😉 The reflections… ❤
Alright, enough of the cold. How’s this for a warmer picture? That little ridge is a cow path. It always amazes me how straight and narrow the paths are, especially for such big, clumsy animals. XD
AHHH THE LIGHT. How could anyone not love golden hour? Hmm… maybe everyone does.
It looks like the foxtail head is floating. 😛
Okay, we’re switching topics again. XD Now we’re walking down to the big pond, which is NOT frozen, as you may notice.
The deep sapphire blue water contrasts so nicely with the pale cattails, don’t you think?
Here’s a different kind of blue. For some reason there are SO many vultures floating around, and even though I don’t particularly like the birds themselves, I like to watch them glide (or wobble, on windy days XD).
The fields are neon green on sunny days and it looks like SPRING, YAY. Except there are still no leaves on the trees…
This really reminds me of the default header on… the Hemingway theme, is it?
SO. PRETTY.
And here’s the big house… which is still being worked on. *sigh* The moving date is getting pushed further and further away, and right now it would be great if we could even move in before my birthday in the beginning of May.
Goodness, this post is all over the place… here’s a random photo of those strange cedar apples again! O.o
Next I have a few pictures of our smaller creek, which we have nicknamed “Little Runny.” 😛 I absolutely love it! The twisted roots of overhanging trees, tiny sandbar beaches, mossy stones, and clear bubbling rivulets weave together an enchanted atmosphere. ❤
I really want to make this into a fairy house. Isn’t it perfect?
Look, it’s a little rainbow lens flare!
Water fascinates me. Always moving, always changing, always twisting and rippling under the light. I think water and light together are especially beautiful and interesting to watch.
We found several pools along the creek that are pretty heavily populated with minnows and crayfish. (What do YOU call them? Crayfish? Crawfish? Crawdads?) We didn’t have a net, so we made do with a colander and metal strainer bought from Dollar General. XD
HA HA, it looks like he’s raising his claws in surrender. XD
My cousin kindly allowed me to take a picture of her, splendidly modelling the colander as a hat. 😛
And last but not least I have a handful of black and white edits that I quite like for different. 🙂 This one is pond ripples, but I think they look like tiny sand dunes too.
❤
I really like this one too! I always find pictures of hands, by themselves or holding something, appealing; I don’t quite know why.
I love how the round clusters of sycamore seeds hang from the branches like ornaments.
Apparently I think trees look really good in black and white. 🙂
And I saved one of my favorites for last. ❤ The vultures and cows together look so rural and free.
I hope you enjoyed this longish, scattered post, dears! Which picture was your favorite? Which was your LEAST favorite? Are you ready for spring?
Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful warm day!
***Allison***
Guys, I have SO many extra photos. And that happens pretty much all the time. So I decided to make a new little series: these “Etcetera” posts will have random photography as well as recent life, thoughts… etc. XD (kind of like monthly wrap-ups, but different). I hope you enjoy reading them!
Now, where to begin? I have SO much to cover. Aha, Maggie is a good subject to start with.
I was trying to take a picture of Maggie’s eye but she kept MOVING. XD I did get this one good one, though:
I also got some other, less close-up shots of her. I just love all of Maggie’s expressions, hee hee. It looks like she’s saying, “Aww, you shouldn’t have,” don’t you think?
Such a pretty pup. ♥
It looks like she’s praying. 😛
Dad just finished combining (harvesting corn) for the year. WOOHOO! Now maybe we can jump in the grain bins…
Speaking of fields, Megan and I (and Maggie) did a little mini photoshoot in the soybean field while it was golden green and brown. Isn’t the lighting AMAZING?
If you guys like my photography/lifestyle posts, you should totally check out Emmaline Figura’s blogs, Lucillian Photography and Crystal Ice Studio! Her photography is AMAZING – she deserves so many more followers!
I love this picture, but it sure took a while to clone out the soybean that so rudely butted in front of Megan’s chin. XD Humph, I shouldn’t have said that. Now you’re all probably inspecting Megan’s chin…
Megan got a few pictures of me but most of them didn’t turn out or I had a weird expression, heh heh. This is probably the best one. Still have a weird expression. XD
Guess what? My younger brother and I were driving to piano lessons today, and when we got there we found that one of my car’s tires was completely flat. O.o But guess what again? My brother changed it himself, while I was having my lesson! I really want to learn stuff like that – I’m much better at art than mechanics. XD
The sunset did capture well on my camera, but it did make for some neat silhouettes and bokeh!
Singing hymns is one of my favorite things at our church. The congregation sings beautifully, and it’s glorious when we do an a capella verse. ♥ I like singing for things like that, but not enough to take voice lessons or anything. I usually just hum and whistle at home. 🙂
Do you guys have any special plans for Thanksgiving? We’re having three different celebrations because we have a rather large extended family. 😉 Are you traveling? We aren’t – most of our family lives quite close by. But if you are, here’s a tip: salty snacks like chips really take carsickness away. Well, I mean they help if you eat them. They won’t do much good just sitting there by your seat.
Dad and the kids always pick out a hanging flower basket for Mom for Mother’s Day, and it lasted all the way into late fall this year! Isn’t it pretty?
Ugh, I have to write a 15-30 page research paper for school. *Long sigh* At least we’re taking this week off for Thanksgiving!
We also have a rose bush (well more like a rose vine) by our door, and it’s a weird mix of knockout-type roses and “real” roses, as we like to call them. There are usually only a few “real” roses a year and this was one of them. ♥
To find the rose you must first get past the thorns. To find the rainbow you must first walk through the storm. Bad things make the good more beautiful. And always remember, my dear, there is beauty even in brokenness.
GUYS. LOOK AT THIS PHOTO! I just pressed the button and the moth behind just happened to fly in at the right moment. I LOVE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS.
Pretty butterflies + pretty zinnias – my photobombing car = a mildly pretty picture.
We have one very old apple tree that usually produces nothing but food for worms. XD However, this year it actually grew real apples and they were DELICIOUS! I don’t know what kind they were, but they were stupendous. And I found this one extremely large apple – see? (The one on the right is a more normal-size one.)
It weighed 15 OUNCES. ALMOST A POUND.
These might be some of my favorite pictures ever! I just love the golden lighting so, so much, especially with the golden tones of the flowers. ♥
Sometimes I feel wise and knowledgeable, and then I wonder if that simply means I still have so much to learn. I guess that happens when you’re a teenager, huh? 😛
(Side note: I rather dislike the word “teenager” for some reason. Don’t exactly know why.)
And would you look at all that bokeh? AHHHHH.
This picture seems relaxing, like you can feel the sun and hear the breeze through the willow branches. 🙂 I can sort of remember planting this willow tree, even though it’s quite a good sized tree now – it’s a curly willow so it grew SUPER fast.
This isn’t really a garden, but it’s golden. Even dust is beautiful when the sun shines through it.
I think cameras can make anything beautiful. In fact, here’s a challenge: find three things you think are ugly and try to take a beautiful picture of them.
We also have two black and two English walnut trees in our yard. I strongly dislike the bitter taste of black walnuts, but English walnuts taste great! (They’re the kind you get in stores.) We don’t usually shell these though, because it’s a lot of work for not much result. Have you tried black walnuts?
This is rather random, but I wanted to take a picture of a begonia blossom from my grandmother’s hanging flower pot because I noticed the beautiful, intricate curlicues in the center of the blossoms. I love the little things like this. 🙂
I got a picture of my youngest brother pressure-washing one of the wagons. 🙂 His birthday was today, actually! The frame was supposed to be transparent but it’s showing up black here…? I hope it works once I publish the post, but I’m doubtful.
I like the way shadows look on this barn. 🙂
And now we have come to the end of this post. Wow, Allison, what a moving conclusion. *clap, clap*
ANYWAY, I hope you enjoyed reading this gathering of orphaned thoughts and photos. 😛 I know it was an enormous post, but I’m only half-sorry because phew, I now have a large chunk of my random photos squared away. XD I don’t think Etcetera posts will usually be this long, though, if I do them in the future. Which category/picture/random thingy was your favorite? Do you think Etcetera posts would make a good series or are they too random and scattered (because I would kind of agree with you on that XD)?
Have a wonderful day, dears, and thanks so much for reading. ♥
***Allison***
Hey, guys! I’m participating in Carol‘s lovely Cameras and Pens writing challenge, so I wanted to show you the first story I wrote for it. What makes this particular writing challenge special is that you can make art to illustrate your story or take photos that pertain to it for bonus points, as well as earning points by using the prompts! So I did all three.
***All photos are mine except the first one, which is a prompt photo. All artwork is mine period. ;)***
Prompts used: 2.
Photos submitted: 7
Artwork submitted: 3
Total points earned: 22
~ t i m e ~
Maybe it was just one minute. Or one second. Or one microsecond. It whipped past my memory WAY too fast.
I’d been looking forward to summer – the laughter, the friends, the pool, the freedom – for practically the whole year, and now here I was, sitting on the edge of the lake, absently spinning my bike pedals with my fingers and thinking about how school started in three days. Where had time gone?
Where had Time gone? I dangled my feet in the water and thought about it.
Maybe he was taking a vacation after all the hard work of making summer go by so fast. Maybe that’s why everything seemed to suddenly slow down – Time was tired.
We have made many faces for Time – some square, some round, some oval, some hardly a shape at all, with skin imprinted with numbers and evenly creased with lines.
But I think his real face is filled with thousands of wrinkles, one from each year he has seen.
Sometimes his eyes are greenish-yellow slits as they peer at you from the alarm clock on your bedside stand and wait, ready to shriek at you to get up, get up, to not waste anymore of him than you already have.
If that doesn’t work, he uses the sharp cane he carries to jab those who think they can waste him away.
He has one long hand and one short hand. He was born with a sort of nervous tick that he can’t seem to get rid of.
His clothing style is rather eccentric; a mish-mash of fashions picked up from many eras.
Fickle, wayward, unaccountable… and yet what would we do without him? You have to admit, he’s pretty diligent at his job, and there’s really no one that could replace him.
I sighed. I guess Time did deserve a break after all that work, and besides, summer would get old if that’s all we ever had. And how would I learn all of the stories Time has collected over the years without History class?
I stretched and stood up. The sun was setting like an egg the moon had cracked for breakfast, the deep orange-yellow yolk spilling all over the sky. The moon ate it all up and then began its long night’s work.
It was right on Time.
_____________________________
The End. 😀
I had a lot of fun with that, as you can probably tell. 😉 I hope you had fun reading it!
What artwork or photo was your favorite? Would you like to read my future CPC entries or would you rather me post normal stuff? I’d love to hear your honest (but courteous) opinion!
Thank you for reading, dears, and have a lovely day filled with plenty of Time. 😉
***Allison***
P. S. Oh. My goodness. I ALMOST HAVE THREE THOUSAND FOLLOWERS?! Eeeee! I’d probably better start planning something, which will probably include a giveaway. Any suggestions?
Hello, my friends! 😀
I know some of your were looking forward to seeing my fair entries and what prizes I won, so here you go! This is for you. 🙂
Here’s a picture of all my entries except the photos. It’s… kind of hard to tell what’s what, so let me show you a little more clearly…
A strange little octopus. 🙂
I like this one! Two little gnomes in a flower house. 🙂
Look how tiny he is!
A doughnut turtle! She’s so cute. 😀 (Also note you can find this and the previous three clay things at my Etsy shop.)
This is a lil’ hippo I made for my little sister’s birthday to hold trinkets and such. She said, “No, Allison, do you have to enter it? I need it to hold my things!” XD 😀
I also won a sweepstakes ribbon for ceramics, so that was really exciting!
I made this tissue paper flower from a DIY book.
These didn’t win a prize because I accidentally grabbed a falling-apart one from my collection. XD Oops.
I made this cute little elephant in a sewing class. It was rather hard to make, but I love how it turned out!
Just a bonus picture of a butterfly that was passing through. 😀
Here’s the picture of my friend Aria from the last post. Sadly, it didn’t win a prize. Oh well! I like it anyway. 🙂
Strangely enough, this won third prize, even though I think the portrait was a lot better. Perhaps they were judging by creativity?
Okay, now for the photos I entered. I entered this in “Abstract,” but it didn’t win a prize.
This was for “Action.” It also didn’t win a prize.
I entered this in “Close-Up,” and it won first prize!
“Architecture,” and no prize.
“Artistic,” and it won third prize! 😀
“People,” and no prize.
“Pets” – isn’t Clemmy so cute? Sadly, no prize.
“Landscape” – no prize.
“Rural _____,” with third prize!
“Wildlife,” and no prize.
“Humor,” and first prize! Heh heh, isn’t it funny? XD
And that’s all for this year! Altogether I believe I got 12 prize ribbons out of 21 things entered, plus one sweepstakes ribbon. Not too bad!
Well, I hope you enjoyed looking over a summary of the stuff I made and photos I took in a year’s time. 🙂 Do you like to enter things in your fair? Did you win any prizes?
Thanks for reading, my dears, and have a lovely day. ♥
***Allison***
P. S. Guys, please pray for the people in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and the ones possibly in the path of Hurricane Irma. I can’t even imagine how hard it must be. We’ll keep you in our thoughts and prayers, friends! ♥
After reading Rebekah’s post the other day, I was like, “Ooh, I want to do that!” So I did. 🙂 I went for a walk around our farm with Maggie and took looots of pictures. Thankfully none of our barns are falling down or anything, but some of them do look beautifully old and worn.
This is somewhat of an experimental post. I don’t usually do B&W (black and white) or architecture photography, but today I’m doing both! Let’s see how the experiment turned out…
I think the experiment was a success! At least it was fun to conduct. 🙂
Do you like B&W or architecture photography? What is your favorite thing to photograph?
***Allison***
P. S. Thank you guys sooo much for entering my giveaway and taking my survey! I enjoyed reading your suggestions and opinions. I’m going to do a post soon that Clara suggested in the survey!
On Friday we went fishing at our uncle’s pond with some friends and family. Here are a few pictures of his pond:
I love fishing! I caught two fish (a bass and a perch), but the bass was too small so we had to put him back and let him grow. 😦 But my brother got a nice big bass, and my grandaddy got a humongous catfish! It was so exciting! It took a long time to reel him in, but we finally did (with the help of a metal rake since we didn’t have a net XD ). And guess what? He was almost two feet long!! Seriously, he was about 22 or 23 inches! Catfish may get a lot bigger than that, I don’t know, but it was sure huge to us. We normally just catch little 6-8 inch perch.
And now you’re waiting for the fish pictures, right? *Sniff* I didn’t take any pictures of the fish. WHAT?! I know, I know, I’m with you there. But it we were so excited when we got the catfish, and by the time we thought of taking a picture, he was already cut up and cleaned. Megan got a picture of the fish head just for proof, but it wasn’t too pretty… so… okay, let’s move on, shall we? XD XD
I DID get some pictures of the pond at sunset, however.
And these are two edited versions – I especially love the first one:
Ahhh… sunsets are delightful, aren’t they?
***Allison***
P. S. I have so many photos I want to post, but it seems that’s like all I’ve been posting about lately. That’s okay with me because I love photography… but I don’t want to post photos so much that you start yawning from boredom. 😉 I’m working on a survey so you can tell me which your favorite kind of post is. Until then! XD ♥
Allison Marie 