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| Spider web dusted with pollen |
It starts with a tickle in the very back of my throat... almost subconsciously the back end of my tongue starts rubbing back and forth in an almost failing attempt to sooth the itch (giving me the look of a croaking frog, I imagine. You know how their throats bulge out when they're croaking?... now put my face on the frog and you have a pretty clear visual of what's going on here). Then my eyes start watering, and then the sneezing starts. One sneeze. Two. Three. Four.... the sneezing usually lasts for at least 5 mintues. Once, it lasted for 23. Minutes. 23 mintues. With an average of 10 seconds from one sneeze to the next, that gives an estimation of 138 sneezes. In a row, my friends. And after every single one past 10 or 12, Miles said, "Mom, what you do-een?" "Mom, what you do-een?" I couldn't even answer the child because I was already inhailing deeply for the next burst. And, too bad for me, I was in the car (yes... driving... talk about a hazardous driver) with no tissues, no water, and no escape. By the end, I was a mess... tears running from my eyes, snot dripping from my nose, drool seeping out from the corners of my mouth... sorry... realizing this is a little TMI. Moving on.
Regardless of the pollen infestation, we decided to take our family camping. I tried to photograph a bit of the pollen craze, but turns out pollen is a bit hard to photograph with my amateur skills. It was quite amazing, though... every time we took a step, a puff of pollen rose and swallowed our feet. You have to look pretty hard at the following picture to see it, but you can see a little bit of said puff at the base of the trunk in front of Brian's toe. And the second picture is at the edge of the lake. That's a little easier to see. Yes. All the yellow is pollen. Wet pollen.
Miles sure had a fantastic time. Didn't even seem to notice the pollen at all. His favorite part was throwing rocks in the river. (Side question for anyone who might know... I took about 20 pictures of Miles here, and in every single one of them, the focus of the picture is a couple of feet in front of him. I was changing focal points the whole time depending on where he was standing, and made sure the selected focal point was right between his eyes, yet all the pictures are focused far front of him. I've noticed this before, but not super consistently... I notice it more when I open my aperature wider than about 2.2 or so... what am I doing wrong? Please say it's not my lens...)
I think Brian's favorite part was throwing rocks in the river, too. He's pretty much a master when it comes to skipping rocks. Look how far this one jumped... then it skidded several more times before finally accepting its fate of being a Bottom Of The Lake Rock.
My favorite part? This moment:
Love this girl.
Eating hot dogs is my favorite, too.
Actually, that's not true. I don't really like eating hot dogs very much... but roasting hot dogs is my favorite. And so is roasting marshmallows.
We played Uno and Phase 10 after dinner,
and then cuddled up in the tent to read several books by flashlight after the sun went down. There was an owl close by and the kids refined their owl cries until they could get him to respond to their calls. After two weeks, Miles still says, "Rember da owl? An he say, "Whooooo, whooooo!"" It was quite exciting. Also exciting was the fact we were close to the airport and had a steady stream of airplanes flying over our tent for most of the night.
A little less exciting was the rain that started at around 11:00 pm and didn't stop for about 24 hours. Hooray for waterproof tents!
Boo for waterproof tents that need to be packed up through the rainy morning.
But, hooray for the rainy morning that settled some of that blasted pollen in the air...
Our pollen is killing me already and it's not nearly as visable or extreme as yours is! Yuck! It's weird to think of camping in April. You couldn't do that here. I guess there are perks to living in the south. I miss you!
ReplyDeleteOh Linds- I can't imagine. We are all blessed with pollen resistance (hopefully my saying that won't jinx it), but I keep seeing it and thinking- I feel so bad for people with allergies! Like my friend Tracy who actually once rubbed a blister onto her eyeball because they itched so badly (knew you'd appreciate that:-).
ReplyDeleteugh.. I don't miss that pollen. It's the worst! This spring has been great because Aaron can actually go outside without paying for it for 3 days!
ReplyDeleteI'll tell you how to fix that focus issue. I never change my focus point from the center. The outer focus points don't do a good job of grabbing focus. I press my shutter down half-way grab focus, and then recompose the photo with the shutter still halfway down. It's hard to write out and explain.. just call me and I can explain it better. :)