Why not throth?

unidentified puffball fungus
That’s the word that means, “all three,” right? You know, “both” for two, “throth” for three. Makes as much sense as just about anything else in English…

Ignoring that, it’s the end of November, and so we come, reluctantly and with grave trepidation, to the abstract image. Except I couldn’t decide on which of the three (extremely weak) choices would make the cut, so we’re going with all three. This has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to set a new record of images posted in a year.

[Which really isn’t too shabby – as of this post, we’re presently at 680-some-odd, and I say that because there’s a post in the works which will appear before this but I haven’t determined how many pics it will have yet – I’m doing the easier one to schedule it in. And while some posts are admittedly trivial, that’s still a lot of images for a year, so I don’t think I’ve been slack, or padding too much either. But then again, this is me saying it, you know, the most handsome and intelligent guy you’re likely to meet…]

First up, already well out of sight up there now, is a collection of tiny fungi sprouting from a fallen limb, as they are wont to do, taken during an outing to Eno River that we’ve already seen a bunch of images from. In fact, all three were taken during the same outing, because I did more abstract (in the loosest sense of the word) images then that any other time of the month; later efforts were mostly leaves in autumn colors, and we’ve got posts dedicated to those already. And it gets a little close to that with the shot below, but it’s not really fall colors, is it? Could have been taken anytime.

stark tree against unidentified clouds
I couldn’t really define why, but I’m fond of the types of branches seen here, resembling tributaries of the main river, almost-random but with just enough symmetry to be efficient for the tree itself. The blue-and-white sky is merely icing. But yeah, I’d like better examples, naturally – this is just what I’ve taken this past month, so chill out. Sheesh.

And then, a slightly bizarre one.

snail trails through silt on rocks in bed of Eno River
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such extensive examples of this, and I suspect it was a confluence of events and/or timing to find it, but what you’re seeing here (if you’re looking at the right bits anyway) are the trails of snails through the silt deposited on rocks in the riverbed, another mostly-random thing. I would have thought I’d see more of this, but somehow don’t, so I think either I caught a moment in time between the deposition and the snail-scouring, or the silt doesn’t settle like this often and the snail trails are thus much more obscure. It actually took me a while to find some snails in the act, and then I was shooting from above the surface, so there isn’t a lot to see, as much as you might have wanted to check out those frames. If you ask nicely, though, I’ll look into showing this in more detail, snails-eye-view as it were.