The Things You Notice When You Open Your Eyes

This is another one of those times when I am sewing, but I don't want to share photos. I'm making a couple of postcards as "prizes" for a trivia question I threw out on an email list I manage, plus I'm making another one to send to someone as a sort of thank you. And I know that at least two out of the three people these are going to read this blog, so...no photos! Instead, here's a couple of photos from my walk last night. You know how sometimes you can go past something a thousand times and never pay much attention to it and then one day some detail about it just kind of jumps out at you? Sure you do! I can't be the only one. Well, last night I was on the return leg of my walk, heading for my house when I reached my "whew pole". Yeah, yeah, I know...."huh?". Here's the scoop. My driveway (which is where I walk most of the time) would be more properly called a farm lane. It's a half-mile long (making it easy to keep track of walking distances) and most of it --- the 2/3 or so closest to the road --- is a VERY steep hill. I don't know enough about geometry to tell you the grade of the hill, but it's steep enough that people who come here and aren't driving either front-wheel drive or four-wheel drive vehicles have trouble making it up the hill. If you're in a rear-wheel drive car, you pretty much have to sort of aim at the driveway from the road and gun the engine, giving yourself a big burst of speed to carry you past the worst, steepest part of the hill. Usually. Hopefully. Ahem. But the last 1/3 or so of the driveway, the portion closest to the house is much more level. It eases off to a mere gentle rise and then eventually you dip down and are heading ever-so-slightly back downhill toward the house. As I'm walking uphill, there's a particular utility pole that marks the part of the driveway where the hill starts to go from "omigawd I can't breathe" to "ok I think I'll live". On days when I'm particularly hating the exercise thing, I'll sight in on that pole and tell myself "ok, Deb, if you can just make it to THERE, after that it gets easier". And sure enough, when I get there, I can feel the strain let up a bit and I mentally (or sometimes literally!) go "whew!". Thus, it's the "whew pole". So anyway (yes, yes, there is a point and I'm finally getting to it, honest!) last night, I'm walking past the whew pole and suddenly did a double-take and thought "Hunh! Never noticed that before!" I have no idea what caused this, but take a look at the pattern on the lower end of the pole: Doesn't it look like someone painted or stamped a plant shape on there? Pretty cool, huh? I may have to play with this in Photoshop later. I still can't believe I never noticed that before. Anyone else want to take a look around and see if they can spot something "new" about something they've seen a thousand times? I bet you can find something if you look. As a bonus, here's the sunset I saw as I was just getting back to the house. I thought it was rather lovely, especially as we usually have much more spectacular and beautiful sunsets in the winter than we do in the summer here. Ok, back to work for me...