• Menu
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Before Header

  • About Us
  • Lexicon
  • Contact Us
  • Our Store
  • ↑
  • ↓
  • ←
  • →

Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

This fight is for everything.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

This really is a full service blog.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Republicans do not trust women.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Mobile Menu

  • Seattle Meet-up Post
  • 2025 Activism
  • Targeted Political Fundraising
  • Donate with Venmo, Zelle & PayPal
  • Site Feedback
  • War in Ukraine
  • Submit Photos to On the Road
  • Politics
  • On The Road
  • Open Threads
  • Topics
  • COVID-19
  • Authors
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Lexicon
  • Our Store
  • Politics
  • Open Threads
  • 2025 Activism
  • Garden Chats
  • On The Road
  • Targeted Fundraising!
You are here: Home / Photo Blogging / On The Road / Barns / On The Road – JanieM – The Barn, #2

On The Road – JanieM – The Barn, #2

by WaterGirl|  September 23, 20215:00 am| 25 Comments

This post is in: Barns, On The Road, Photo Blogging

FacebookTweetEmail

On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.

From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.

Submit Your Photos

JanieM

Having worked at home even pre-pandemic, and being a homebody in general, I’ve spent many hours looking out my windows, watching Maine’s changeable weather, the days and seasons passing, and the endless play of light and shadow.

This long contemplation of one intimately familiar landscape makes me think that if I went to sleep, like Rip Van Winkle, and woke up at some random hour on some random day, I would be able to tell you the time of year and the time of day to within a very small margin, from the foliage, the state of the fields, the length of the shadows, and the quality of the light.

It’s probably not true, and anyhow, the seasons are so clearly differentiated in Maine, it’s not much of a test. But that meditation in turn made me think about the sun’s path, and one day I realized (astronomers feel free to correct me) that the sun passes through any given point in the sky only twice a year – once on its way up to the summer solstice and again on its way down. Hence the shadows are different every single minute of every single day, even if the change from one day to the next is imperceptible. Never mind that living things constantly grow and change, so each maple tree’s shadow will reach a little further next year.

This is the background of my habit of taking lots of pictures of what seem to be the same scenes, over and over. You can never step into the same river twice….

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 7

Almost sunset, looking north

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 6

Behind the barn, looking south

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 5

Just after sunrise, an unusual light for me since I’m a night owl

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 4

Not long for this world

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 3

Loft

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 2

Space

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2 1

Reflections

On The Road - JanieM - The Barn, #2

Early spring

FacebookTweetEmail
Previous Post: « Open Thread: Our Failed Media Would-Be Celebrities
Next Post: COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Wednesday / Thursday, Sept. 22-23 »

Reader Interactions

25Comments

  1. 1.

    eclare

    September 23, 2021 at 6:30 am

    The reflections photo is cool!

  2. 2.

    The Golux

    September 23, 2021 at 6:53 am

    I can almost smell the interior of that barn.

  3. 3.

    Betty

    September 23, 2021 at 7:10 am

    @The Golux: I was thinking I could smell early spring in the last one. So serene.

  4. 4.

    RedDirtGirl

    September 23, 2021 at 7:12 am

    Lovely! What part of Maine? I have family on MDI.

  5. 5.

    LiminalOwl

    September 23, 2021 at 7:16 am

    JanieM, thank you for the pictures and for your thoughts. I had never thought before about the shadows being different every day!

  6. 6.

    Wag

    September 23, 2021 at 7:28 am

    What an amazing meditation.  I love the mysteries of the dark loft, as well as your reflections photo.  Thank again for sharing your photos and home.

  7. 7.

    LiminalOwl

    September 23, 2021 at 7:46 am

    I learned today
    from JanieM in BJ

    that shadows shift daily
    as the earth orbits the sun
    and intersects light rays at different points.

    Last week, as I read Babel-17,
    a starship captain solved a navigation problem
    with an understanding of geometry
    as her ship orbited the earth
    whose gravitational field
    rayed out to the orbit’s foci
    and rolled a child’s marbles.

    And recently, in a news article
    that a type of synesthesia
    leads to perception of time in circular motion
    so that synesthetes locate their memories
    by seeing their timelines
    as the years pass through.

    The circles of knowledge are intersecting
    as do my social circles:
    perhaps this creates
    the music of the spheres
    and we are at most 180 degrees away.

  8. 8.

    OzarkHillbilly

    September 23, 2021 at 8:01 am

    Very nice photos and meditation JanieM, but that that barn looks suspiciously clean.

  9. 9.

    arrieve

    September 23, 2021 at 9:18 am

    A lovely set of pictures to do my morning meditations by. I’m a sucker for reflections, and it is one of the things that I take hundreds of pictures of, so I especially love that one. The paired windows make such a nice frame.

  10. 10.

    bluefoot

    September 23, 2021 at 9:26 am

    Thanks for these; they are beautiful. I love your comment about how you can tell time and place by the quality of light. It’s so true.

  11. 11.

    cope

    September 23, 2021 at 9:46 am

    Thank you for the soothing images.  When I was in my arty photography phase in college, these are the kinds of shots I was always trying for but never quite got right.  You got them right.

    As for the passage of the Sun through the sky in the course of a year, it actually doesn’t follow the same path coming and going.  It’s a complicated concept that can be explained with an analemma.  As the Wiki shows, the location of the Sun at any particular time of the day through the sky over a year traces out a figure eight, an analemma.  You have probably seen analemma represented on a globe and wondered what the hell that thing is.  When I was still teaching astronomy, I always wanted to do a project where a rod or stick is planted firmly in the ground and have my students go out every day at the same time and mark the end of the stick’s shadow.  The effect would be analogous to those pictures of the Sun taken at the same time every day during a year’s time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

  12. 12.

    JanieM

    September 23, 2021 at 10:02 am

    [ETA: piled one comment on top of another and created confusion. Hopefully this will come out right.]

    Thanks to everyone — a few responses now that I’m out of bed.

    @The Golux:, @Betty:   I’m with you on the smells. The barn definitely has its own reminiscent scent, no matter how many years it has been since this land was farmed. It includes the aroma of old wood, of course. And springtime has a glorious smell around here, I suppose mostly emanating from the ground as it thaws.

    @RedDirtGirl: I live not too far from Augusta, in what the Kennebec Land Trust has informally dubbed “The Kennebec River and Lakes Region,” aka central Maine.

    @LiminalOwl: Nice poem! It *is* an intriguing thing to think about the shadows, and the sun’s path.

    @OzarkHillbilly: Possibly you missed the backstory. The barn — actually the property in general — is my ex’s hobby. The barn houses a woodshop, a smaller shop, a weight room, a full-length basketball court, a kids’ playhouse, a  room where the guys from “big guy basketball” used to sit around and drink beer, and an endless amount of storage and junk-collecting space. And yes, it’s about as clean as anyone could expect given the uses that are made of it, and the limited human resources there are to keep it tidy and (sort of) clean.

    @eclare: @arrieve: I love reflections too. There will surely be more of them in my BJ posts as time goes by.

    @cope: Thanks for the analemma link. I’ve already got a headache from trying to follow it….

    When I was a teenager I thought I wanted to be an “astronomer,” though what I really wanted to be was an astrophysicist or cosmologist and think about cool stuff like black holes, the Big Bang, and the expansion of the universe. I took a half-credit course first semester in college that was just planetary astronomy, and … it gave me a headache. :-)

    Ended up studying literature.

  13. 13.

    JanieM

    September 23, 2021 at 10:13 am

    PS — Thanks as always to Steve from Mendocino for editing the pictures. They’re a joint production.

  14. 14.

    cope

    September 23, 2021 at 10:13 am

    @JanieM: Well, the upshot of the analemma stuff is that your instincts were correct that shadows every day of the year are slightly different.  The exceptions are the two days when the path of the Sun crosses the figure eight of the analemma at the same point in the sky.

    Thanks again for the calming pictures.

  15. 15.

    TheOtherHank

    September 23, 2021 at 10:50 am

    In the just after sunrise picture, what is the vehicle to the right of the van?

  16. 16.

    JanieM

    September 23, 2021 at 10:52 am

    @TheOtherHank: It’s a scissor jack. Long story….if I get time I’ll explain its presence a little later. There’s never a dull moment around here.

  17. 17.

    TheOtherHank

    September 23, 2021 at 10:56 am

    @JanieM: Thank you for the quick response. I was never going to figure that out. I stared at it for a while, it’s not a tractor… It’s not a pickup with a lumber rack…

  18. 18.

    dnfree

    September 23, 2021 at 11:19 am

    @cope: ​  When my daughter took astronomy and photography (combined class) when she was a senior in high school, the instructor sent them out to the same location every day at the same time to take a photo. You could clearly see how the location of the sun changed over the semester. It was a great lesson (from a revered local physics teacher).​

  19. 19.

    dnfree

    September 23, 2021 at 11:22 am

    Thank you so much for sharing the beautiful photos, and the backstory. One of my favorite places to visit in childhood, in the 1950s, was my grandparents’ dairy farm in Iowa. The barn was considerably less clean, but a fascinating place to play.

  20. 20.

    cope

    September 23, 2021 at 11:28 am

    @dnfree:  There is another classic astronomy project in which students make a pin hole camera from an empty can or film canister and place it where it can track the Sun’s path through the sky every day for some long period of time, say a semester. The result is a series of bright lines across the photo paper showing that the Sun’s path is slowly rising or sinking over time depending on the season. Sadly, I never had my students do that one either.

  21. 21.

    cope

    September 23, 2021 at 11:32 am

    Hmmm, couldn’t edit previous comment to add a link to a good explanation and pics.

    https://www.alternativephotography.com/solargraphy-catching-the-suns-path-pinhole-camera/

  22. 22.

    JanieM

    September 23, 2021 at 1:01 pm

    @cope: Thanks for that link, those curves are beautiful! That’s the kind of image I was groping for, not the analemma framing. But my mental image was cruder — i like being reminded of how the curves slope.

  23. 23.

    JanieM

    September 23, 2021 at 1:05 pm

    @TheOtherHank: A smaller scissor jack originally came to live here to help in snow removal; there’s a roof gully where ice dams build up and can cause leakage and expensive-to-fix damage indoors. It turns out that on a property where the projects never end, a scissor jack comes in handy in a variety of ways.

  24. 24.

    way2blue

    September 23, 2021 at 1:20 pm

    Very cool. You have a great eye for engaging geometrical patterns & juxtapositions.

  25. 25.

    stinger

    September 23, 2021 at 2:59 pm

    Goodbye, red door!

    What wonderful photos.

Comments are closed.

Primary Sidebar

If This Doesn't Make You Feel Better, Then Nothing Will
Image by WG’s niece (6/16/25)

Recent Comments

  • Archon on Monday Evening Open Sportsball Thread (Jun 17, 2025 @ 2:52am)
  • Archon on Monday Evening Open Sportsball Thread (Jun 17, 2025 @ 2:47am)
  • Jay on Monday Evening Open Sportsball Thread (Jun 17, 2025 @ 2:28am)
  • Jay on Monday Evening Open Sportsball Thread (Jun 17, 2025 @ 2:21am)
  • Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom on Monday Evening Open Sportsball Thread (Jun 17, 2025 @ 2:10am)

Balloon Juice Posts

View by Topic
View by Author
View by Month & Year
View by Past Author

Featuring

Medium Cool
Artists in Our Midst
Authors in Our Midst
No Kings Protests June 14 2025

🎈Keep Balloon Juice Ad Free

Become a Balloon Juice Patreon
Donate with Venmo, Zelle or PayPal

Calling All Jackals

Site Feedback
Nominate a Rotating Tag
Submit Photos to On the Road
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Links)
Balloon Juice Anniversary (All Posts)
Fix Nyms with Apostrophes

Social Media

Balloon Juice
WaterGirl
TaMara
John Cole
DougJ (aka NYT Pitchbot)
Betty Cracker
Tom Levenson
David Anderson
Major Major Major Major
DougJ NYT Pitchbot
mistermix

Keeping Track

Legal Challenges (Lawfare)
Republicans Fleeing Town Halls (TPM)
21 Letters (to Borrow or Steal)
Search Donations from a Brand

Site Footer

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Comment Policy
  • Our Authors
  • Blogroll
  • Our Artists
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2025 Dev Balloon Juice · All Rights Reserved · Powered by BizBudding Inc

Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!