They’re fun to see ridden but, they were fast, and dangerous. With the exception of the railways nothing was faster on the roads.
They were dangerous because the risk of falling was great. Heading over the handlebars was problematic. So makers tried making the handlebars so riders knees could clear them. They had design changes that included reversing the large and small wheels but, that proved dangerous as well by being thrown off the bike backwards when going uphill.
It got its name from the size of its wheels-the front was large like the British penny, the smaller back wheel was the farthing.
The Penny-farthing fell out of favor when the safety bicycle was invented in the 1890’s.
I saw this bicycle and a few other odd ones in Sonoma, CA back in 2011.
Later that evening I saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever. That post is here. It was glorious.
Friday morning I birded with my usual birding group and we had a great morning seeing 40 species of birds. Along with the birds I noticed some spooky Zombie Pirates lurking by the pond. Here’s one.
Saturday morning I was up early and met up with two girl friends to do my first Big Day. It’s a 24 hour global birding marathon put on by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We didn’t sign up as team or register our day but we, birded from 8AM until after 4PM. I saw 45 species. It was pretty fun day. We posted our sightings on ebird.org so they’ll have our record for their counts and information. Unfortunately, the next afternoon I got sick, and shortly afterwards I was hearing from my companions from the day before that they where also sick. We think the deli we stopped at to have lunch is where we picked up food poisoning. I brought home half my sandwich which I shared with He-Man and yep, he got it too. UGH.
Monday still weak, and very tired I was determined to locate and see Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) but, I wasn’t in shape to drive anywhere so I just stepped out on my back patio and photographed it there. It’s so cool and it has a great long tail!
What a week! What a month it’s been so far! The Aurora, and the Comet really made my month. Everything else has been icing on the cake.
My tummy is still sketchy, but I’m on the mend and so are He-Man and my friends. I plan to be out photographing Halloween things, birding, and maybe the Comet with a better composition soon. I hope your week is going well. Oh, and watch out for the Zombies and Ghoulies! 👻
PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
I was recently in Pinellas County, Florida visiting my Mom and Step-father and I did some birding too. While birding I always keep my eyes open for other things in nature like this Dragonfly.
I think it’s a Tawny Pennant-Brachymesia herbida. It’s in the Tropical Pennant family. If I’m wrong and you know what it is please let me know!
PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.
Here’s some of what I’ve been up to lately starting at the beginning of the month with a birding walk up in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. The wildflowers were in bloom. Here are a couple of favorites I saw.
There were all sorts of juvenile birds being taught how to forage that morning. I saw Young Cassin’s Finches begging their parents for food, and the parents trying to encourage them to forage on their own, and young White-crown Sparrows foraging with their parents, but the highlight for me was the juvenile Rufous Hummingbird perched on a branch. That was a first for me.
On Monday I got up at 2:45AM to go on my back patio to see if I could spot and photograph any Perseid Meteors. I very nearly went back to bed as there were still clouds from the day before in the sky.
I saw 3 great fireballs streaking across the morning sky, but one was completely out of my frame. One just looks like a streak with no fire ball that was disappointing, but it has a green tail, and one was just partially in my frame. The others I photographed are pink and green. Which I think are from the Aurora Borealis that was visible here. I missed the peak of that. I slept through it.
Here are two images of Perseid Meteors I photographed.
Look how close that fireball came to being in my frame! See it left side bottom edge? There’s another meteor below center as well.
And, I’m still painting. I just finished a big painting for me at 9×12 inches of the Le Moulin de L’Abbye in France. I used a photo from a book called Hotels de Reve en France that I picked up years ago from a Little Free Library. I’ve been sketching from this book for years, but have been afraid to actually add paint out of fear of messing it up. I drew it freehand which took me hours, because drawing is so hard for me, but I am improving! Practice really helps. Anyway, I transferred the drawing to drawing paper so if I did mess it up I could half the drawing time by tracing it. This time I was determined to add paint!
Here’s that painting.
watercolor painting
The reference photo from the book Hotels de Reve en France.
I also made the boys some little handmade sketchbooks. I hope they fill those pages up!
The weather is cooler and the smoke from the Calif. fires has cleared so I’ll be out birding later this week and getting my morning walks in outside.
This is getting long so I’ll close with I hope your week is going well.
Circadianreflections Blog 
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