Just up the road a piece from Taylor is a friend’s family ranch. I visited there tonight. These photos, not my real focus, were pretty serene. So here they are, friends. A Waxing Gibbous moon shines above the ranch road. 
This is an early 1980s photo taken in downtown Atlanta on a warm day. A group of very young kids enjoyed a field trip together. The daycare staff, knowing how, despite best efforts, little ones can bolt pretty fast, devised a long rope, attaching loops for each child to grasp as they made their way through the busy downtown streets. 
Longhorns! While ambling around tonight, I drove by the home of friends Debby and Mike Lannen. This wasn’t where I was headed, but plans change. It’s very hard for me to pass up longhorns. That’s even more so for baby longhorns! The younger of these two is only a week old, the other about 2 months old. They are adorable. The calves have different mamas, but the same daddy, a 30-year-old called Sancho. Sancho is shown in one of these photos, overseeing the little one. I do love where I live. 
A few evenings back, I was driving along Lake Drive in Taylor a few minutes beyond dark. That view was so good, I decided to give it a go. One thing that helps this night scene: a little league baseball field a little bit east of there. When the night lights are on, it adds just enough texture to a fine blue night. That, plus a sturdy tripod.
Spring wildflowers come and go quickly here in Central Texas. They arrive, elevate our senses, then get swallowed up by not-so-pretty weeds. With that in mind, here’s a couple I shot this last weekend while covering the Red Poppy Bike Ride. Wildflowers aren’t exclusive to Texas, but we seem to do them well. 
I wasn’t sure what Saturday morning’s weather would be for the Georgetown Sertoma Club’s 14th Annual Red Poppy Bike Ride, but all was good. It was cloudy, sometimes drizzly, but conditions were pretty much fine. Our Texas winds, which can play havoc on a bike, were calm. Temperatures at the 8a.m. start were upper 50s. Nobody was complaining that I could see. Cyclists could choose their ride lengths through the beautiful sections of East and North Williamson Counties: 100, 62, 40, 30 and 12. These photos also give out-of-area friends a sense of the land where we live. Or at least I hope so.
On a morning outing to get a Sunday paper, the clouds in the west looked particularly inviting. Normally, I’d not spend much time on a landscape in broad daylight, but it’s Earth Day. It seemed right to snap a photo. For this scene, presented in both black-and-white and color (my preference is b/w here), this windmill, and the field in front of it, are just over a mile from our Taylor home. I’ve photographed that windmill quite a few times, but not at this time of day, not in monotone, either. Just something to mark the date. Earth Day was created on this date in 1970, the Spring I graduated from high school. Be kind to our planet, friends.
Tonight’s post doesn’t really have a theme, except that the photos were made in and around the Georgetown area. The first couple were taken Thursday evening on the Georgetown square, an effort to stay busy (focused) while waiting for the start of dress rehearsal for “My Fair Lady” at the Georgetown Palace. The first photo is a variation of an earlier effort, that beautiful Masonic Lodge building, now home to Gumbo’s North, an area restaurant. In the time since I last photographed this regal structure, a tree has grown taller, making the original photo a thing of history. I do like the swarm of birds flying by. Another square photo presents an Austin Avenue structure, its second floor home to a barber, reflecting the Williamson County Courthouse, opened in 1911. The last photo, taken on this cloudy morning while on a paying assignment, is a nifty structure, adorned with our state flag. At first, I thought it was a barn, but a closer look leads me to consider it a residence, one of those hybrid things, part-barn, part house. Not many states display their state symbols in such interesting ways. This and that, friends. 
This little exercise, taking photos with my phone camera during those daily walks in Taylor, is still plodding along. At some point, I might back off on trying so hard. Either that, or get a small, more powerful camera, one capable of RAW formats and better telephoto capabilities. But it’s been good to have at least something on hand to record what’s around, like that white elephant atop a long-vacant building on Main Street. What’s up with that? You can, it seems, teach an old dog. The “old dog” is seen in the last photo, by the way.
Even though most of the photos from the Georgetown Palace are posted on social media, I try to include a few here, too. “My Fair Lady” begins its run tonight in Georgetown, Texas, continuing weekends through May 20. Like all their musicals, tickets go fast! Don’t miss it if you’re in the area. These photos were taken for my friends at the Williamson County Sun.
