Enjoying our New England summer

Last week, we headed to Marconi Beach in Wellfleet for the afternoon.  The Cape Cod National Seashore is practically in our backyard so it only makes sense to take advantage of our location.



While the beaches of the National Seashore are beautiful - soft sand, clear water, huge dunes - they aren't the most ideal for swimming.  These are the beaches most likely to be closed due to shark sightings.



The water temperatures run on the colder side.  This summer we've seen readings between 58 and 65 degrees.  Chill-y.  The girls could get past that cold water if it weren't for the threat of sharks.  It doesn't help either when a seal pops its head up 10 feet from shore.  The girls saw that and they were all like, nope, not going in that water.



I do have a little bit of photography talk to include today.  All of the photos (except for the last one) in this post were taken with my Nikon 105mm lens.  This is such a versatile lens, great for distance, portraits and close-ups.  It's a prime lens, which means zooming in and out with your feet, and with such a long reach (105mm), sometimes you need a lot of space to do that zooming.  I hadn't planned to even mention the lens until I was editing the photos and cropped some of them.



We think this was a shark spotting plane.  It kept flying up and down the shoreline, circling out into deeper water.  The next photo is a crop in Photoshop of the above photo.  The lens is so sharp that even after a super-cropping, the photo doesn't lose its sharpness and you can read the plane number.



And at 105mm, I can sit in my chair and take photos of the girls in the water paparazzi style.  Ha ha.







A couple of beach portraits.  Summer freckles are out in full force.







Last Sunday, we ate dinner at Marshside in Dennis.  We eat there once or twice a year.  It's pretty tasty.  We decided to head over to Cold Storage Beach afterwards for a walk at low tide.



Lots of exploring going on.



The next photo is a crop.  Look at that little guy!



Don't worry.  All hermit crabs were returned to their natural habitat.





I told Rich to hold out his hand and close his eyes.  Nope, not happening.




Another crop.








Sand turtle!



Photography equipment used in this post:
   Camera - Nikon D750
   Lens - Nikon 105mm, f/2.8


Okay, so now for a painting update and how things sometimes kind of work out.  This was last weekend and I wanted to get the edging done on one wall before I went to the beach.  Rich had packed up lunch and he and the girls drove down to the beach.  The plan was for me to paint the edges, shower and then walk down to meet them.


iPhone picture

I was in the shower when I thought I heard someone knocking on the front door.  Weird.  When I came out I heard chainsaws.  Turns out some guys had shown up to take care of the tree that had fallen across the neighbor's backyard during the tornadoes.  Rich and I had attempted to pull down that huge branch hanging over our driveway (it was really the top of a tree) and hadn't had much luck.  Rich thought the entire tree needed to come down and we were dreading 1. trying to find someone to do it and 2. the cost.

So I walked down to the beach and told Rich he should drive back and talk to those guys about taking care of our tree.  He did and it turns out they've been picking up a ton of business by undercutting other tree removal companies.  Our neighbor was quoted $2,100 to have that big tree cleaned up from his yard.  These guys did it for under $1,000.  They took down our tree, which did have rot in the middle of it, and we had a large branch out front that had cracked after the fact, so they took care of that too.  Turns out, our other neighbor, who lives out of state and doesn't come up here very often, uses this company as well.  I'm glad I stayed back to paint because now we found tree guys.

I've been trying to squeeze in painting here and there between beach outings, meals, meal cleanups, etc.  This room has been challenging but it looks so much better than before.  I can't wait to share it when I'm done! (But seriously, so much painting.)  



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