Old Road


This is the old road that follows the ridge featured in previous photos this week. Below is the end of the line; the ridge comes to an end and the road drops down into private land along Copperas Creek. I think that particular plot is in part being operated as wetland refuge. Some of it may, for now, still be open to future subdivision and development, though. I'd just as soon prefer it stayed untouched. I better start buying lottery tickets so I can buy it up...

Looking Out


This photo brings together the three major trees of the Lost Pines: Loblolly Pine (center), Post Oak (left), and Eastern Redcedar (right). To be sure there are other native trees, Blackjack Oak and Yaupon Holly for instance (if you consider Yaupon a tree, which is a stretch). This photo is also taken from an area that burned in the 80's. You can tell the pine in the center made it through the fire. At lot of the old pines in this area have a charred fire scar or two at the base of their trunks.

Comments
As promised, I have transmogrified this site into something that will except comments. Very primitive comments. CSS is close to non-existent on the comments page. But why use a slick easy-to-use blogging program when you can "relax" by hacking up a little weakly-typed PHP with little concern for performance, schema details, etc? Well, I do believe it to be secure, anyway. To those that offered help setting up real blogging software, I appreciate the offer - that day may still come.

For the moment, I am going with a topic-based comment scheme. The comments link for a post may link to a topic which has been previously visited. Thus perhaps bringing a little more continuity to the conversation. Assuming I get any comments. Anyway, comments are "moderated." I've gotta approve 'em before they show up. I doubt that will be much of a chore as I don't expect many comments. I've retroactively added comments links to two posts below.
And now I can still "proudly" claim: This lame site written with EMACS.

Looking Down


In the proximity of my personal refuge in Bastrop, there's a few old road beds (some abandoned, some dormant) that make for peaceful walks through the woods. One completely abandonded road bed runs along a nice narrow ridge. This area burned in the 1980's, so the trees are generally smaller as you look out at them from the top of the ridge.

Looking Up


This photo was taken this Sunday in Bastrop. This particular pine isn't particularly tall, even for the Lost Pines. Still, I'm a sucker for any scene where you're looking up at pines reaching for the sky.

Moved
As you can see, I've moved this site to somewhere I can have more space. Thanks to Fletch for the hosting reccomendation. Now that I am hosting this somewhere that allows scripting, etc, I expect, when time permits, to transmogrify this thing into something that allows commenting.

Tadpoles


I was out in Bastrop Sunday morning. I was quite pleased to see tadpoles, maybe on the order of 50, cruising around the now-smaller pond. At this stage it's not possible for me to say whether they are Houston Toads or another species. It's nice to see a batch of tadpoles in there either way.

Of course, I had not been planning to take pictures of either small things or water on this excursion. As such I had brought neither a telephoto lens nor a polarizing filter. So these bigfoot-crackpot-esque photos you see are the heavily cropped results of photos taken with a wide-angle lens with just a UV filter. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, you go tadpole photographing with the lens you have (of course, I had other lenses for such contingencies but didn't bring them... ok, I better stop now). Anyhow, I did also take some nice forest-oriented photos which you can count on being posted here in the future.