While swimming in the creek is usually the highlight, she’s lately been obsessed with fetching sticks. She’ll chase any stick, but she’s training me to pick out the perfect one. It needs to be big enough to offer resistance, sturdy enough for a little tug-of-war, and soft enough for munching on.

Bonnie captured this amazing action shot with the airborne stick in the foreground. In the original you could barely make out the brown stick in front of the brown leaves, so I grayed out the background.

It was about a foot off the ground then. When I returned later after forgetting about it, my head bumped into the gravel piece. A spider on the roof must have been trying to pull in the thread. I bet he was getting tired.

Last fall, the powers that be at Duke Forest (presumably the Forestry department at Duke) re-positioned the rocks on the downstream side of the concrete bridge as shown in the first image. While New Hope Creek is usually gentle, I couldn’t imagine the piles holding up long during the heavy flow periods. The images below show the same view over the winter.

December:

January:

February:

Though the piles are lost, it’s interesting that the few big rocks held their approximate locations.

Here is a current image. It looks like a new arrangement is being tried.

The water is at least a foot lower than before and the small pool in the background is about the only water in that section of the creek. Here is the creek bed away from the dam site.

It looks like it’s so dry that the sub-flooring of New Hope Creek is showing through, but it’s really the base of the old dam at Johnston’s Mill Nature Preserve.

Most of our yard is covered in ivy. It makes a nice green ground cover, and we just have to trim it back from trees, beds, and paths a few times a year, which is a lot easier than mowing grass every week. Vinca is a little more insidious, so I try to remove it entirely when it shows up in flower beds.

When I saw some vinca in the ivy a couple years ago, I decided to let them fight it out. I thought the ivy had won a while back, but it must have been a seasonal surge. Now it looks like the vinca is not only holding its own but has spread out within the ivy.

While walking in Duke Forest, I took a series of photos of this stone wall from slightly different vantage points. The idea was that I could then overlay the images in Photoshop and keep the good parts of each one, removing the foreground small trees and branches.

It worked OK once I got the hang of layers, but there were still a couple of problems. Some of the vantage points were too different — I needed to be more careful about keeping the angles parallel. The other problem was that some rock parts were covered in all of the photos, so I had to fill in that area from other parts of the wall.

Bill tells me that’s what I should have done in the first place — just take one photo and use fake/duplicated rocks to replace the foreground material. My way seems more honest, even though the cleaned up image is still a fake.