Moonset - 21 February 2008 - the snow that interrupted my eclipse viewing was only a dusting and when I arose before dawn I had an excellent view of the full moon setting in the west. This is not a very good photo but, like the eclipse photo below, was done with only a 70-300mm zoom lens and a 2x teleconverter.

 

Total Lunar Eclipse - 20 February 2008 - seen here toward the end of totality with the planet Saturn and the bright star Regulus only 3 degrees east and west, respectively, of the Moon. It was bitterly cold and I had to keep retreating to the house to warm my fingers. I had to quit before the eclipse was entirely over because the wind picked up, clouds rolled in from the west, and it started snowing a little before midnight.

 

Grey Tiger Kitten - best portrait yet for this one. It was done at night, but I resisted the temptation to fiddle with the brightness and contrast.

 
Bad hair day! Nothing works so well as a little rain to make a long-haired cat look as miserable as it feels.

 
Snow falls while this kitten takes shelter under my van.

 
Cat behavior never ceases to amaze me. Here is a kitten licking my van. This went on for several minutes of alternately licking, resting, finding a new spot and licking some more. What's so tasty about my old Chevy?

 

Kitten pauses from licking my vehicle to stare at me and my camera.

 
Grey Tiger Kitten - Not quite ready to try crossing the threshhold into my house, but the warmth must have been awfully tempting on that day of deep snow.

 
Mourning Doves feeding in the snow. Before I started taking pictures through the storm door, there were a dozen of them gathered over the food supply, plus half again as many Dark-eyed Juncos and several other smaller birds. I make sure to keep a good supply of seeds on top of the snow each time it falls so the resident birds don't have to go very far for a good meal.

 
Friedens UCC on Old US Highway 22 just east of the borough of Lenhartsville on a recent afternoon.

 

Sunset - 16 February.

 
Mourning Dove alighting on a roof after a dusting of snow as fog rises from the ground in late afternoon two weeks ago.

 
Dandruff? No, that's snow on the back of a Miniature Hereford come up to the fence by the lane to feed. If you want to see a hereford in deep snow, don't look here. When the snow is deep I can't get over the hill to photograph them. But there is a movie about the introduction of Hereford blood to Texas longhorns called The Rare Breed and starring Maureen O'Hara, Jimmy Stewart and Brian Keith.

 
Mertztown Cornerstone Church - a rather imposing edifice for a small country crossroads, but fairly typical of the style of church architecture here in the period it was built whether the structures were frame, brick or stone.

 
Barn in ruins on Mertztown Rd - I shot this as a passenger in a moving vehicle and later enhanced it in such a way the reflected image of trees on the glass was accentuated.

 

Billboards on I-78 announce some of the major attractions of our corner of Pennsylvania "Dutch" Country. The sign on left mentions a schoolhouse. That one is brick and was once in Lenhartsville. Several years ago, it was moved intact to Kutztown by a firm of Amish house movers. They have to hire someone who is not Amish to drive the truck, but their own people do all the manual labor associated with such jobs. As it happened, the day they were moving the schoolhouse south on PA-737, PennDoT had also given us a permit to move an over-width mobile home north on the same two-lane road. When we got to the the Kutztown By-Pass we had to pull onto the shoulder and wait about two hours for the schoolhouse to clear the road. By that time, our daylight-only permit was about to expire. But, rather than leave my new home by the side of the road overnight and apply for another permit the next day, we forged ahead and got the thing home about an hour after dark without getting stopped by the PSP.

 
Skunk at the cat food dish about 4:00 AM on 6 February - a lousy photo taken through the storm door, but I wasn't goig to risk getting close enough to get sprayed. A few shots were in better focus than this one, but they showed only the tail.

 
Water droplets on a door latch of my Timpte refrigerated semi-trailer caught my eye on a recent damp morning, so I tweaked the color a bit to give it more interest. If you are wondering why I own a semi-trailer, it is my store room where over half the stuff from my former mobile home is still in storage. In the trucking business, these are known as reefers, but there is nothing illegal or narcotic about this kind of reefer.

 

Friedens UCC at Lenhartsville lights up at night. Here I boosted both the brightness and contrast to better show details of the unlit parts of the facade. The effect on the tree at right was a bonus.

 
Snow came and went yesterday. There was a half inch or more already on the ground in late morning, but in less than five hours it had vanished with hardly a trace. These icicles came with the snow we had on 1 February, just three days befor I spotted the bug below.

 
Blue bugs are a bit in short supply this time of year, so I altered the color on this lone ladybug I found on the side of the house on 4 February. Even in the warm months, the only blue bugs I can think of are the blue darners and maybe some other of the dragonflies.

 
Maine Coon is, I believe, the proper designation for this cat. Also called American Barn Cat, they resemble the Norwegian Forest Cat and may well be linked to the Viking settlement in New England a millenium ago. They are exceptionally large for domestic cats and have long coats that are shaggy rather than sleek like the Persian variety. This particular cat appears to be about half again as large as any others around here except for the long-haired grey cat I call Furball.

 
Maine Coon in a full-length view during one of its unharacteristic daytime visits to my house. On this occasion it allowed me to get within ten or fifteen yards without the storm door separating us.

 
Shelter during the day often means cats sleeping under my vehicle where they can keep an eye on the food dish and their bolt hole to hide under the trailer. The dog Cooper - a Great Dane - gets very frustrated when they do this because he is way too big to get under there with them. They must be light sleepers - I haven't run over one yet.

 
Amenities like a scratching post are not among the benefits I provide to the cats, although I did give them a tennis ball to play with. Here one of them has decided to use my right front tire as a scratching post.