Archive for January, 2007

Had an inadvertent adventure in the Poudre Canyon today when I got my truck stuck in the snow, and I was all by myself. After about 45 minutes of digging and rocking I managed to drive out of the drift. I did destroy one floor mat and Mark’s yoga mat, but hey, I got myself out!

I had been hoping to maybe get some pictures of big horn sheep in the canyon when I went up this morning. And I did see lots, and lots, of fresh tracks in the snow, but no actual wildlife. So, I came home with pictures of pretty snow covered trees and mountainsides, and a few of the dog, but no sheep.

Found this guy hanging out by one of the few bits of open water left in Ft. Collins last week. I was really surprised to see a actual wild bald eagle less than a half mile from my house! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any of the great close-ups that I’ve gotten on other birds, because this eagle was on private, fenced off, property. I think I saw another bald eagle in a tree behind this one, but she was just too far away to shoot. I’ll keep an eye out for them though, maybe I’ll find them on some of the surrounding public land someday.

While St. Louis is getting a heck of an ice storm, we’ve gotten another couple inches of snow in the last day or so. It would be nice if we could get back to our usual sunny and dry weather for a typical January. I doubt that’s going to happen any time soon though. This is a shot I took of the moon yesterday, just before it was swallowed up by these thick snow storm clouds.

So, I think the models missed this one by quite a bit. Until this afternoon, the temperatures below this cold front weren’t supposed to get below freezing. It was just going to be a heavy rain event. Well, now, as you can see below, the NWS forecasters in St. Louis are calling for a “crippling Ice Storm” and CNN is predicting it is “threatening chaos”.

Well, whatever it turns out to be, I have enlisted the help of a guest Blogger On The Scene, Kevin T, to help bring you the story as it unfolds! Check back for more reports!

So, last night I had a great time, and I finally put together the Mark vs. Wild video that I’ve had laying around for the last two months. I put it up on the video page, check it out! I apologize now for the constant girl-ish giggling of the camera-woman. I was just having too much fun, I guess.

It is a rather large file. Evidently adding the soundtrack, while lots of fun to do, made the file bloat a bit. Just be patient during the download, I guess.

I am aware of the fact that Mark and I are probably two of the total maybe 10 people in the world who Tivo Man vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel. We find it hi-larious, and fully entertaining. Poor Bear, he puts himself through so much trauma just in case we might someday get lost on a volcano in Hawaii.

Thus, if you’ve never seen the show, the video clip may not make a ton of sense (or be nearly as funny as it was for us to make it). There are clips of the show on the fansite, and here are a few more from You Tube: frozen Lake in the European Alps, bad night in the rainforest, and silly fun in the Moab desert.

More shots of my pretty friend.

Update: All the “looks tastey” comments urge me to boast of new camera equipment. For Christmas, I got kate a Nikon Zoom lense with vibration reduction . It is responsible for brown food and all the hawk pictures. The VR features is awesome. One doesn’t need a steady hand when there are 3 gyroscopes in the lense to take that quiver out. Sweeeeeet.

I’ve been reading a book called Heat and the author makes constant mention of “Ragu” which by the way has very little to do with the red stuff in the jar. He also has a cute little bit about Tuscan food and how it has so many shades of brown.

Seeing as I’m getting over a cold, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I endeavored to make something Italian that took at least a half day to cook. I picked a Ragu Bolognese. It lacks mention of how much stock to use so I blended in a Mario Batali recipe (halfway down the page) which let me feel good about substituting pancetta for the ham and bacon. I invented a lot of steps, so I wouldn’t say I followed either recipe. I did discover a can of tomato sauce in my cabinet which expired in 2005. It must have moved twice to be that far gone.

The hard part was getting the red wine on a Sunday here in Colorado. Liquor stores aren’t open and grocery stores don’t carry wine. It turns out that if you buy a bottle and are served one glass, you can take the rest home with you. It involves re-corking and lots of masking tape. Anywho, 3 hours later we had a very savory spaghetti bolognese and it was pretty good. Now it’s time to finish off that bottle of wine.

As I’m currently recovering from that nasty flu of last week, I decided that the snowshoeing trip we had planned for this weekend would not be good for my health. Thus, today I missed out on the super-cool snow-shoe yurt trip that we’ve been planning for months. I’m so bummed! In order to make up for it, I tried to get out this afternoon for some shots of the river and neighborhood in the snow. Turns out the river is completely frozen over.

HOWEVER! The local raptor rescue center had several of their birds out for feeding. This gorgeous golden eagle was enjoying a whole prairie dog when I came by. She’s HUGE, and absolutely beautiful.