Tristan’s and David’s birds and fish were in the mood to pose today. Guildenstern fetched himself a beer this morning before we left the house in preparation for lounging on the couch all day. Tristan prepared the Thanksgiving menu from Fine Cooking for Thanksgiving dinner, which was quite ambitious, and turned out really well.

As some may recall, I won a giant 55″ HDTV and blu ray player in June. We’ve not even watched a dozen movies on it so far, but Guildenstern likes to zone out in front of the big screen. I was doing photos of Romeo the other night and he finally got mad at me for sticking my camera in his face, but before that he was a great model.

 

Entering the forth, but not final, week of Movember I decided to do the wet look. My Movember site is http://mobro.co/Elcheo.

 

A lady at Costco was putting out chanterelle mushrooms in the refrigerated fruit and vegetable section on Saturday. I thought they looked interesting both for eating and photographing. I looked up recipes on Fine Cooking’s website and found a recipe for Mushroom & Asparagus Shepherd’s Pie that called for a variety of mushrooms, including chanterelle. The last photo is the resulting shepherd’s pie I made from the recipe tonight. I made the mashed potatoes yesterday, so all-in-all it took three and a half hours to prepare and  40 minutes to bake. Although one could boil the potatoes while preparing other ingredients and mash them while cooking the mushrooms. That could cut an hour out of the prep time.

The Sandias had interesting clouds on them tonight. While they went through their pink phase as the sun set, this photo shows the clouds at their most interesting point.

 

 

 

 

My place holder when I first set up Photo of the Day, Etc., getting ready to switch from Caring Bridge, was a photo I call Cranes in the Mist. A year later I got geese in the mist. On December 1st, Photo of the Day, Etc. will be a year old.

I went for a walk at 6:30 this morning and the river had a nice mist rising off of it in the pre-dawn light. A great blue heron was perched like an undertaker on the far bank of the river. It stayed in place in the thick mist coming off the water, which made it difficult to get a clear photo. Then the mist thinned out for a few seconds, giving me enough time to get a fairly clear view of the heron before it noticed me and flew off. I’ve been trying to photograph the herons for a couple of years, but they are very skittish and usually fly before I have a clear field of view.

The temperature read 18 degrees F on the deck this morning, which means it was 13 or lower  in the garden. The garden was frosty white, but the morning sun melts the frost on the roses almost as soon as it hits them; however, the frost puts up a fight on the strawberries.

I walked out of the house shortly after sunrise, and hadn’t quite made it to the middle of our frost covered garden, when I got buzzed by a couple of low flying cranes. Since I have learned not to leave the house without a camera in hand, I was able to get a couple of photos of the kamikaze critters. If you were thinking a Flying V is a guitar, well, you were right; however, nature has its feathered version, which is just as noisy.

 

Entering the 3rd week of Movember, my ‘stache doesn’t look a whole lot different from last week. But no matter how slow the mo is, onward, downward and outward it grows. My Movember page is at http://mobro.co/Elcheo.