A Bloy and his Blog

There’s nothing like a walk in the woods, even in winter.
Taken at the UW Arboretum today.

Yesterday I headed over to Vilas Park to hike around a bit. I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of winter recreation there.

read the rest of: Winter in Vilas Park

A few random thoughts inspired by the brutally cold weather we’ve been having…

1. I saw a few finches hanging out and chirping in a tree outside the building at work this morning. When I see small creatures like that surviving in sub-zero temperatures, I’m just amazed. How does such a little, warm blooded animal generate enough heat to keep from freezing to death?

2. Do you ever wonder about the Native peoples that populated this area hundreds and thousands of years ago? How on Earth did they get along in their wigwams during bitter cold spells? Makes it hard to complain when you imagine what they had to deal with, doesn’t it?

3. Often during bad winter storms, or below zero temps, some people invariably proclaim they’re ready to move south. When I hear that I think, “no thank you.” Moving in that direction means more heat and humidity in the summer. As bad as winter can get in Wisconsin, I’d rather deal with extreme cold and snow than extreme heat and humidity.

In spite of the hassles that come with the record amounts of snow, it really was quite beautiful this morning. I decided to put on my hiking boots and get out there with my camera, before all the snow blew off the branches. Below is a shot looking east down Schroeder Road.

read the rest of: Hiking in a winter wonderland

Despite the continuing below-normal temperatures, I needed to connect with the outdoors today. Late this afternoon, I visited a frozen Lake Monona.

read the rest of: Frozen Monona

read the rest of: Icicles

For a while now, I’ve been looking for a decent method to display larger photos on this site (some pictures look so much better at larger sizes). I finally settled on Highslide JS, a very nice javascript thumbnail viewer. Just click on the photograph to zoom out to a larger version. It also lets you drag the larger image around, and open up multiple images at once. Pretty slick, huh?

read the rest of: Now with photo zoom