It has been a very mild start to winter so far. Looking back at my posts from last November, the first snow storm had already fallen and I wrote about having layers of frost and ice in the garden, yikes. And emergency alert about snow squalls? Double Yikes!

This year, though, there’s been one rainstorm so far, nothing like the ones I experienced last year, and a lot of the garden is still alive. The plants are probably very confused. “Do we go to sleep now?” I can feel them asking.

Still, I have been keeping most of the garden covered whenever the night time temperature drops below freezing to prevent the soil from freezing. I do this to (hopefully) get a jumpstart on next garden season. I hope, if I can keep the soil from freezing, I can begin indoor seed-starting cold-season brassicas like broccoli as early as January and transplant it in February after day-length surpass 10 hours again.

Yesterday, when the temperature was forecasted to be in the 60’s, I went out to uncover the garden but found this little guy clinging to the frost blanket. Photo time! I have been trying to master my new macro lens and this looked like a great opportunity.

After taken enough pictures, I decided, “Okay, little guy, time to go, get off my frost fabric.” I attempted to flick it off but the moment one of its arms left the fabric, it flew back onto the fabric. Two more tries later, it was on the ground, staring back at me, probably angry. I looked back at it and muttered, “Sorry, I did what I had to do.”

I am still going through the photos from my trip to Japan – editing the ones I like while discarding the ones I don’t. I’ve edited over 100 photos so far – probably about 15% of the total photo I’ve taken. I’ll move on eventually but I’ll admit, for a trip where I was in pain and frustrated for most of the time, quite a few good photos came out of it. Strangely, I also found quite a few photos with the color brown in it.

After a lot of scrolling, I found these 2 photos to be my favorite photos to represent the color brown. The photo of the tree made me re-think when I wrote that I rarely use the photo composition of “Filling the Frame.” Maybe I use this composition more often than I think.