Out With The Old ...

As the finial hours of the year 2013 wind down, many people are thinking "out with the old... in with the new". For Brian & Tish Hopkins it's out with the old house and in with the new house.

Photos of Brian using an excavator to remove their old house to prepare the site for construction of a new home in 2014.

Joyce Road Christmas Card

Ice and Snow

The temperature dropped to 2 degrees overnight followed by a light snow this morning. At our barn I found this teasel seed head covered with snow.



A close-up view of ice crystals clinging to dry grass.

 

Making water freeze on demand

I stopped at our cabin today to check on a couple of things and was surprised to find unopened bottles of water hadn't froze with the cold overnight temperatures. I picked up one of the bottles of water and it instantly solidified as I watched. I grabbed another bottle of liquid water and watched it freeze from top to bottom in seconds.

Here's a video of making the water freeze by just hitting the top of the bottle. This is not a time-lapse, it only takes a second or two.

Fisher and Foxes

The first week of PA deer season has pasted and I haven't had any luck finding a buck but I did shoot some animals with my camera. On the fist day of hunting I caught a glimpse of a fisher (Martes pennanti) run between two brush patches. The fisher is a member of the mustelid family, commonly referred to as the weasel family. For the past several years I've only caught glimpses of this fisher but this time the fisher climbed an Autumn Olive bush and spent the next half hour eating berries as I snapped pictures.





While not as rare as a fisher, I had two red foxes stop by my deer stand to check out the hunting.