Parking Lot (WP's Post Number 2500)

Torrington, Connecticut

This afternoon I set this picture to go up tomorrow, after I'd put up the Steep Rock damage post this afternoon. Then I realized that I'd been meaning to check the Dashboard because in the back of my mind I recalled that the count of Working Pictures posts was nearing 2500 when I was putting up posts at the library from my MacBook and returning to a frigid house. Pretty good timing. It turns out that the Steep Rock post was number 2499. So this is 2500. This quiet picture has been in my Current folder since July. I never quite picked it to post until yesterday, but liked it—for reasons I don't understand in any precise way—enough that I never dropped it out of the folder. Quite a few pictures get processed out to the current folder, then go so long without being chosen for posting that I decide I must not like them after all. I never considered dropping this one, just never posted it. The quietness of it is very appealing. Perhaps it was just waiting to cooperate with my subconscious to make a landmark post for this little blog. Quietude, and subtlety, are far more often the subject here than fireworks and bombast, except when I post about political action. But the coincidence of choosing this picture for this morning before knowing it was a mile-marker post seems to have worked out just right.

A Short Walk at Steep Rock

Washington, Connecticut

I finally went up to Washington and found that most of Steep Rock Reservation is still inaccessible, but one of the walkways has been cleared for a mile or so in from the parking area. There's a lot of damage, but not really terrible. A problem to clean up, but not, at least in this area, a devastated environment. It's been through worse, though I don't know how other parts of the land came through.

ICE

Naugatuck, Connecticut

TAX-SHL

Torrington, Connecticut

Some Blog Notes:

The point of this blog is generally to post recent, or "current" work, the pictures I'm making right now. Most of the time, current will mean anything from yesterday to a few weeks ago. For the next few days though I'm going to use some pictures from late summer and early fall. These files had been adjusted for web viewing, run through my "make blog post" batch action, and filed in my For the Blog--> Current folder. Then my September midwestern drive-in theater expedition produced a lot of things I wanted to post here and pushed this material out of the way.


Then we were plunged into the deep freeze. A week before the Big Storm, our steam boiler showed serious signs of imminent demise. A service tech declared it unsafe to operate. The company's head service tech then declared that it could be put into shape, but we spent five days without heat before it was back in operation. Then less than 48 hours later the Big Storm knocked us back into the cold and this time also the dark for eight full days. When you spend hours each day out working with a chain saw, partly in order to warm up with the exercise, you can bet you're running up a metabolic deficit. The power and heat have been back for three days, but I'm still exhausted and haven't been making new pictures. I've been working on files and doing a lot of work-prints and paper tests partly to make the big printer happy—it definitely did not like being shut off for eight days, and sitting in the cold didn't make it any happier. So for a few days WP will be less "current" than usual and those late summer files prepared for posting and then shunted aside will come in handy.

ONE WAY

Brattleboro, Vermont

Red Bush

Woodbury, Connecticut

Rain

Woodbury, Connecticut

From back in October, before the big storm.

Cloud

Woodbury, Connecticut

Source of One Problem

Woodbury, Connecticut

Here's what caused us three extra days of cold and dark after the main lines were restored in our area.

detail

Comfort Food

New Milford, Connecticut

By Saturday we were so cold and tired we decided to go have lunch at a nice Italian restaurant.