Bucky's Friend Pays a Call / Color Games

It was the coldest night of the year, followed by a frigid morning. The thermometer said 9 when I went downstairs, with an overnight low of 8. Yikes! Those are some pretty cold numbers!

You'd think that I'd want to run right out and blow some bubbles, but I'd already gotten two frozen bubble episodes under my belt the day before, including an ultra-rare, first-ever bubble shoot in darkness. So I waited till it warmed up a few degrees to go out.

A young buck showed up in our woods, and it just stood there soaking up the morning sun, trying to decide what to do with itself. It was not Bucky, as Bucky's horns are bigger than this, but a young spike buck with just one antler who is probably Bucky's friend or relative. Eventually, he settled down in the sun in the nearby rhododendrons.

Around 10:30, I took some colorful plastic containers (it's actually a screw-together plastic pill bottle with multiple compartments) and my bubble mix and camera, and went outdoors to blow bubbles (hello, Episode 6!). 

The temperature was 18 degrees and it felt SO MUCH WARMER than the 18 degrees that I'd had the night before while shooting in darkness that I had to open my big coat! Imagine that!

I brought the table with the red berries on it from yesterday and the colorful containers back to my tree stump slice area, and had some fun in the morning sun. One of my images - starring the rainbow of plastic pieces - appears in the extras.

The plastic pieces were fun to mess with but they were also (not unlike those snails in the film Pretty Woman) slippery little suckers, and once covered in bubble mix, they quite easily flew out of my hands and into the snow. But once my bubble was blown onto one, it was sort of portable, if I moved it around slowly and carefully; I now had transportable bubbles, if I could just hold onto them!

I don't talk a lot about the mix I use, but it is a combo of dish detergent, corn syrup, and water. I have had the experience of having my bubble mix go flat part-way through a bubble session. This happened the other day, and for a few minutes, I could not get a single bubble to form. So frustrating.

I had the bright idea of taking along a small Tupperware container of extra dish detergent to beef it up; so now I've added that to my retinue of bubble-blowing supplies. Lordy, we're going to need a bigger boat - I mean vest - with even more pockets!

Much later on in the day, as we were watching Die Hard, which is one of our favorite Christmas movies, I was sharing my recent day and night-time bubble-making experiences with my husband. By the way, his comment was this: "You're really strange. And coming from me, that's impressive." I'll take that as a compliment!

Anyway, setting whether I'm strange or not aside (I hope I am! Barb would be so proud!), I told him that my el-cheapo headlamp had really sucked the night before, and that I could not believe that has been my main nighttime light strategy, even for backpacking.

He brightly said, Gee, why didn't I get a headlamp like his, which is marvelous. So before the evening's end, I went ahead and ordered myself a brand new red Black Diamond headlamp from Amazon. It'll be here in a week or two. Ha! Take THAT, darkness! (And to think, I decided to make this big improvement because of . . . frozen bubbles in the dark!)

We have two photos so here are two songs. First, for the photo of Bucky's friend above, standing in a sunny spot in the woods, we've got John Denver, with Sunshine on My Shoulders. And for the colorful plastic containers and their bubbles in the extras, I'm pulling out an old favorite: Cyndi Lauper, with True Colors. Here is a second version, as well.