Crashes + ashes

Here it is the third day in the holy season of Lent already. While Christmas and Epiphany do seem miles past, one does get rather a shock when realizing that Easter Sunday is a mere 43 days away. And that gets one expecting {rather vainly} for flowers and warm weather to appear. Of course we who live up North won't see such things for another ten years or so {or so it feels}. Meanwhile a 'dear' friend in the sunny South coolly dropped mention to me of crocuses now in bloom along her sidewalk. How nice.

 However, I did not come here to write how it hurts my heart not to be able to run barefoot over lush grass, or how I shed more tears over a Burpee seed catalog than I did when I believed Cadvan (the books of pellinor) to be dead. 

No, not those things specifically.

 What I came to say was that for the next 43 days I will be conspicuous by my absence. I'm giving up the Internet for Lent, you see. Ideally I should have begun the strike on Ash Wednesday, but at the time my mind was rather more occupied by something else....

This is my sister's Jeep, Oliver. Or what's left of him. On Tuesday night, as she was returning home from work, she was struck broadside by a {and I quote} one ton Ford duly pickup truck at an intersection. The vehicle traveling behind her {a Ford F150 crew cab} was 'unable to avoid collision' and T-boned the duly, smashing into the passengers' side and further driving Oliver off the road. If it hadn't been for the rain we've had the last week and warmer temperatures contributing a mud factor, my sister's Jeep could vary well have rolled down the steep slope as well.

  As I hope you have deduced already from the lightness with which I write this post {Thank the Lord I can write this lightly!} amazingly and inexplicably {if you're an atheist} there were no serious injuries. My sister, who quite honestly could have been killed, escaped with only a jammed shoulder, a bruise on her head where it struck the windshield {you can actually see where she broke the glass in the photo}, and minor lacerations. The driver of the duly was unharmed, his wife a few broken bones. The F150 driver, a few bruises.

 Waiting for Mum and Da to get back from the ER was.... well, it was a long wait. After they came back and everything was okay, I guess I kind of went into a delayed shock. The next day I was distracted and could not make myself focus, which lead to a slow piano lesson. Today I feel almost the opposite, sort of hyper-sensitive and on edge. So I spent the day scrapbooking and writing and listening to lots of Emmylou Harris.

 It's funny, we're reminded everyday that Man is mortal, and yet we seem to believe we're invincible. Until of course Death's hollow eyes stare us in the face and visions of a life without someone manifest themselves in our minds like the Ghost of Christmas Future.

like some old silent movie frame // zoom in close, then fade to black

 A humbling experience.

 My sister is already back to work and, if it weren't for her having to sort through drifts of Insurance papers, you wouldn't think anything at all interesting had happened to her in the last few days, let alone having her Jeep totaled. And here I am just beginning to hit my stride again. There's a definite downside to being a writer: Emotional instability. It comes from immersing yourself in your characters'  feelings on a daily basis. That's my theory, anyway, as I only began tearing up in movies and books after I started to take writing seriously.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoices; and with my song will I praise him.

Ps. 28:7

I suppose that is all for now. So I will bid you all a blessed Lenten season and expect to see you again on Easter!

Dia,

-Gwyn

p.s. If you really must contact me for whatever reason or are feeling particularly friendly towards me, you can dash off a note to my email, which I will allow myself to check on Sundays.

What the horses taught me

Patience must have no limits | Love deeply but do not shirk justice | Discipline and respect are are meant to be two sides to the same coin | Confidence is dearly won but easily lost | Scaries are better faced together | A bad day today doesn't mean rain for the rest of your life | Everyone deserves a second chance... and a third | Miracles happen | Life isn't always beautiful, but it's a beautiful ride | Expect the best from one another, but don't be shocked when you receive the worst | The Lord listens to arena-side prayers | The hardest ones to love often need love the most. 

Don't you ever, ever, ever give up.

Happy... yeah, whatever

taken via Photobooth

Happy St. Valentines Day!

 I hope your candy favors to your siblings are nicer than the ones Little Brother and I traded.... 

To Gwyn From LB: Happy Valintines Day! Open for chocolate. You: (drawing of a fat stickman) ...if you eat it all. Triple stapled and plastered with packing tape to prevent entry.

To LB From Gwyn: Happy Valentines Day! (drawing of an olive) Olive you! Stapled in such a way as to only allow for one piece of candy.

 I guess we are both concerned about each other's sugar intake.

Peace, love, and chocolate,

-Gwyn

Sweet, golden hour of sunset

What is the first thing you do when you wake up {a strange question considering the title of this post; perhaps implying that I arise at sunset - not true.}? The very first thing you do after you face the cold, bitter facts that it really is morning and you really do have to get up.
 I myself check the weather. I do this by viewing the position of the horses {my wards} and the chickens {Little brother's dominion} from my window through which they gaze, willing me too wake and hurry up with their breakfast. From this I can glean a much more accurate idea of the weather than the meteorologist on tv to which my parents subscribe in the morning, therefore better preparing me for the imminent moment when I must bundle up and join the afore mentioned creatures {the horses, you understand -- not my groggy coffee guzzling parents who are far too cheerful to face at this unholy hour} in the dawn's early light.
 This morning the horses were standing about in an almost frozen state, exposing as much of their bodies to the sun's rays as possible at one time. The chickens were doing roughly the same thing -- basking. This tells me two fundamental things: 1. It is cold. 2. There is no wind.
 How can I tell?
 If it were not cold the animals wouldn't be standing about like taxidermy, soaking up any feeble warmth the winter sun has to offer.
 If it were windy their mains, tails, and feathers would be waving in said wind.
 If it were both cold and windy all animals would have retreated to shelter to bask out of the wind.
Pretty deep stuff, right? Somehow my mind blunders through this every morning in order to tell my limbs how to dress sufficiently.

 Now, since we've suffered through that unreasonably long mental demonstration on how I begin each day, lets move on to the actual subject of this post, which, if you haven't guessed, has to do with my animals and their eating habits, therefore making the paragraph above you just read almost completely irrelevant! *face collides with keyboard* You know what, just leave me here to die.

I took my camera out this day because 1. the sunset cast a beautiful golden glow over everything, and 2. I felt especially good-natured that day and wished to convey a sense of the pleasure one feels when serving fellow Creations.

After that soppy introduction this photo makes me laugh out loud. Perhaps it was not the best one to start with. However, I believe I captured the essence of Wilber in this photograph: Large and slightly intimidating, with a vacant expression that hints at the theory {which I believe, but other members of the household call preposterous} that he was dropped at birth. From a great height.

Double Stuff has taken to squirming through fences in order to escape the tyranny of Shyanne in the other pen. For some reason she has taken a sudden and enormous dislike to him, driving him to live with Roanie {who doesn't mind him one bit} and Wilber {who occasionally plays cat-and-mouse with him}.

I just had to snap one of the Symbol of Farmers Everywhere: the lowly, but extremely helpful pitchfork.

Inevitably there will be one skeptical pony who comes up to wondering why the heck you just took a picture of a pitchfork.

Bane of my existence! I hate ice. With a passion. Because there is nothing that sinks the soul down to your boots quite like chipping away at ice in -1,000* weather,  snow blowing in your numb face, with a modified metal pipe {read: smashed flat at one end and ground to a point} searching for water only to discover the bottom of the tank. It then dawns on you that you have spent the last 20 to 30 minutes of your life chipping at a solid block. of. ice.

.... a picture of ice.

I will not bore you with the details of hauling water some hundred snowy yards from the spigot to the tank in five gallon buckets. I will tell you that it is at those times when you appreciate having an able-bodied Da and brothers around.

 It seems I will never be able to write a proper closure for a post, for heavens above it is that Sweet, Gold Hour already and the creatures call me. However, I flat-out refuse to leave as abruptly as I did last time {"so, i'm doing this. good-bye." what a disgrace!!}

 So I'll leave you instead to try and comprehend what this post was about, and a watercolor I did for a friend's baby-shower card. I like it.

Dia,

-Gwyn

Kicking the sticks

Is it -- is it working? Yes? Ha! *happy dance*

This, my friends, may look like one of my average photos, but I tell you it's not!
 "How?" you ask, rolling your eyes upward a little even. {"Besides the watermark. That might be new."}
 Well, once upon a time - last week to be exact - I was relaxing on a dreary afternoon day, enjoying a cup of lemon-ginger tea {well, not really. Turns out I don't like lemon-ginger.} while browsing the vast Interwebs. Grown bored with that, I decided to check my email before signing off for the day. When lo, I had received a missive from Picnik, my favorite and frequently used online photo editor warning me of its imminent closure on April the 19th! Shock and horror! The scum Google has bought them out and reduced them to an app on Google+. Disgusted at having the rug pulled out from under me {Or having the bomb dropped, if you like} in such a manner, I vowed right then and there to bite the bullet and learn Photoshop.
 I had always planned to learn the ins and outs of Photoshop photo editing, but as long as Picnik preformed as I wanted it to, I never tried that hard. Well, my crutch is being taken away so I might do well to learn to walk before it is. As this photo proves, I've already got some of the basics; contrast, cropping, text, hue, saturation, etc.

So with Photoshop 4 Dummies in one hand and camera in the other, I must bid you all good night.

-Gwyn

p.s. I am planning a post featuring animals, hay, and ice soon. Sound interesting? It may well be. So keep your ears pricked.