Lake of the Isles

7

Cedar Lake Cairn - Stacked Stones

Someone has been making Cairns in my neighborhood, there were several on the Northwest point of Lake of the Isles a few weeks ago and I found this one on Cedar's Hidden Beach last weekend. I wonder if it's the same person that was making labrynths around here. If you are the cairn-maker or know who it is, I'd like to meet. Whoever it is sure seems to be having fun. I did some research on cairns last year when I found a bunch of them at Afton State Park, you can read that article here. I think what makes a carin so interesting is that it is so simple in design, yet completely unseen in nature. Animals (lacking thumbs) don't stack rocks, so it's a purely human behavior and the skill required is pretty impressive, seriously, take a look at how complex this one is!

0

Lake of the Isles Bridge Repair

The last of the winter blues are on the run. This spring, the renovations around Lake of the Isles are almost complete. The shoreline fences are gone, the waterplants are doing well, the paths are all in place and they are currently cleaning and regrouting the bridges. Next on the schedule is the roads. They will be repaving the parkway which is in terrible shape. The dump trucks used to landscape the lake really beat up the road, so they waited to fix the roads after they were done,  so sense in damaging a new road.

3

The Lagoon

Just got back from visiting my parents in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I'm running behind today, so you get to enjoy a backup photo of my lagoon. One block from my home is this lagoon between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles. I think the lily pads are new this year. Stay tuned! I came back through the Wisconsin Dells area and took photos of the great missing Lake Delton; I even walked on the bottom of the lake. Last week, the damn collapsed and the whole lake washed down river leaving a mucky whole in the middle of a summer resort town — very tragic for the people and businesses there. I suggest they change the name the Delton Dry Lake, like Groom Dry Lake. It might draw a new, if interesting crowd. If you don't know where or what Groom Dry Lake is, you probably sleep at night.

0

Cell Phone Sunday

Snow can make a great projector screen — the sun was playing shadows across the park along the East shore of Lake of the Isles. What's Cell Phone Sunday?

2

Change is in the Air

Spring is in the air, the woodpeckers are on the wing, snow is trying to melt, and mitchster.com has a new theme! I am working on changing the look of mitchster so that I can add a lot of new stuff, like the recent comments and posts on the right, and articles about other things besides photography. I was having fun with the old look, but this one is bigger and gives me more flexibility. I have plans to bring back the glow-in-the-dark duck (that's him in regular light above), but I needed to make this layout work first. Let me know what you think! This Downy Woodpecker was singing and fluttering around Lake of The Isles with a friend of a feather. Can't tell if they are mates, I haven't figured out the difference between the males and females. Good thing I'm not a Downy Woodpecker eh? I found a neat factoid on WhatBird.com — A group of woodpeckers has many collective nouns, including "a descent of woodpeckers", "a drumming of woodpeckers", and a "gatling of woodpeckers." I have a big list of animal group names, I'll have to find it and post it soon. I'm pretty excited to be working on Mitchster.com a little more now, I just completed a few websites and have some more time during the day. If you are curious, here's the three jobs I just finished:

• Carolyn Francis Studio - Fine Art Landscape Oil Painter
• Kathi Tunheim - A Leadership Speaker and Coach
• MJ Marketing Group - A retail marketing services company who works with Mass Merchants, Food Wholesalers.

8

Eating Crow

The most complicated exposure yet. Black crow on white snow in flight. Got it!

2

Fire and Ice

Time to attack the Buckthorn. The Minneapolis forestry department is setting the islands on fire this week at Lake of the Isles. Well, actually they are only burning the buckthorn, which is an invasive species that does really well here. I enjoyed walking around watching them work and chatted with a few of the guys as well. They were really friendly and seem to enjoy their work. I heard somewhere that the guys who run wrecking cranes have the highest job satisfaction, I wonder if cutting down trees and setting them on fire has the same effect. Note to DCPBers, the bigger your camera, the more likely people are to think you are from the news and want to talk to you. There are some perks to getting older too, when I was a kid out exploring, I'd get chased out of places, now I'm doing the same thing, but people want to talk. Maybe it's the camera — like Rodney Dangerfield's routine about tying a pork chop around a kid's neck so the dog will play with it.