day of the bloom....

work is always busy at this time of year and it starts to take over every waking moment... wednesday it all came to a head.

as bad as the day got, i think of it now as one of the best years of 2010 because i now know that i do not want to go through it again. and primarily, it was a result of my own choices...

on monday, i had found a bud on my mother's Christmas cactus, decided i was going to shoot it as it bloomed but then let work take over my life and lost the plan... then today, i went to shoot it and it already had bloomed, i almost missed it.

LESSONS - every day matters and when you check out for a day, you may miss a lot...don't let busyness get in the way of living...sometimes little things are really big things...

luck of the irish...

wednesday's word to photograph was animal. i could have taken the easy way out and photographed any one of the 10 cats that i have easy access to, but decided to take a walk to my new favorite spot, my puddle-pond where i found my green on sunday. maybe my duck friends would be there...
the water was still, with reflections of the sky and trees - but no animals were in sight. but it was pretty enough, so i took a few shots.
as i was doing that, a stranger's voice called out from the nearby building, asking me what i was photographing. kind of embarrassed, i yelled back 'nothing, but it's pretty, isn't it?' and he answered 'yeah, but there's deer over on the edge of the parking lot, maybe you could get a picture of them.'
deer?? this is a parking lot of a big medical building, with a big puddle, on the edge of a busy road. deer?? so i run over and look, and there they were - 3 deer.
i watched them as they watched me and we played this game for at least 10 or 15 pictures.
in my excitement, i started to move too fast and spooked them. they ran away and as they left, they spooked a hawk who flew right over me.

i was twice-lucky. it sure is good to be irish...