
portrait & group photo by Elspeth



We had a few days at the beach in early August. We all rode bikes, we walked, some of us went running at sunrise, we sat on the beach, played in the sand, ate and drank. Wore plenty of sunblock and needed lots of insect repellant for the wildlife refuge. No sunburn or shipwrecks and nobody drowned. We also saw a big NASA rocket launched (see separate page). Various photographers. You can hover on the edge of a photo to a show description and pause the slideshow — then un-hover to resume the slideshow.

Here’s our new three-legged table, created by our next-door neighbor Jack Murray and presented to us as a gift. I had been saving that hunk of oak in the garage for 15 or 20 years, intending to try some woodwork myself. Deciding I was never going to get around to it, rather than put it on the firewood pile I asked Jack if he’d like it for his own woodworking hobby. Thank you, Jack!

The wildlife camera took a thousand pictures over three weeks in June. We were looking for shots of the deer eating the snowball flowers. Only just noticed this one. Red-shouldered hawk? Hawks have often nested in our tall trees and we hear their screaming regularly, but don’t as often see them clearly, or near the ground.



April 24th in the woods just behind the house, almost our only fringe tree, aka old man’s beard. (Only sometimes attacked by the Emerald Ash Borer. See https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/chionanthus-virginicus/.) We do have one other. They’re hard to identify without the blooms. A long shot six days later:
