a couple of weeks ago, the meadow behind our house was freshly mowed, and our cats were playing. it was beautiful weather, and i grabbed my camera to watch them playing a bit:

also on last weekend, we did an excursion around the zürcher oberland. we started by taking the historic steam locomotive train (the same as last time) from hinwil up to neuthal, were we continued to a lake to barbecue. later, we continued by the same train to bäretswil and walked down the kemptner tobel to kempten, ate some ice cream there and finally continued home. the weather was fantastic (even though the forecast warned that there might be rain), it was sunny and warm the whole time.

here are some impressions:

today, after the rain stopped and the weather eventually turned out to be beautiful, we decided spontaneously to take the dvzo steam locomotive ride from hinwil via bäretswil to bauma. due to some technical problems the train ride took somewhat longer than planned, but since the weather was nice, we didn’t mind that at all. here are some impressions from the trip:

it’s still less than a year since we first saw some little kitten, and some months less before they joined us at our place – one of them, miukumauku, at our home, and the other two at our neighbours’. last weekend, on the day we returned from tyrol, it was the not-anymore-kitten’s first birthday!

(it was not so simple to get all three of them into one picture and make them look at the camera. in fact, they never did that when i was ready to take a picture. so i ended up looking for shots where they were not half busy eating or presenting their butts, but somehow looking nice.)

we don’t think they actually noticed that this day was somewhat special for them, but then, who cares if there’s food and good weather:

so we watched them play for some time, trying to catch each other, crawling through the grass, looking for food, etc.

finally, here’s a nice portrait shot of miukumauku:

while we now had snow for quite a while, most of the time it was either good weather, or we were home. so some days ago we were quite happy that four things coincided: the weather was great, we were home, the little cats were playing outside, and we noticed and joined them with my camera :) so here are some photos of miukumauku and her friends enjoying winter. and two photos of pantone.

just for fun, i turned one of the snow fall shot series from this morning into a little video. sorry for the perspective change at the end, this was not intended. i aligned the shots with hugin, scaled them down with imagemagick and converted them to a mp4 video and an ogg video using avconv. (if you’re interested in the commands i used, mention that in the comments, i’ll then post them.)

despite the not so great weather forecast, the sun came out this morning and bathed my surroundings in beautiful sunlight. i grabbed my camera, put on my winter gear, and went on a nice long walk. i essentially walked around the area from the first half of our easter walk, with the difference that this time, everything was covered in snow.

something very beautiful with snow is the effect when snow randomly falls off from trees. the effect is best with sunlight:

some more impressions:

anyway, shortly after arriving back home, the sun was again covered by clouds and the landscape bathed in grey. by now, it’s snowing again.

today, while shoveling snow, the sky suddenly cleared up a bit. i got my camera and took some photos, sometimes with more and sometimes with less shade. here are some of the nicer pictures:

afterwards, when we were in the shades again, i enjoyed playing in the snow a bit, for example by jumping into the snow and by creating a snow angel:

one of the best times of the year seems to have started ;-)

yesterday, we finally had sun together with the first snow. unfortunately, i didn’t have much time before i had to leave to work, but i managed to take some nice shots. i would have loved to walk into the forest and take some pics there. i decided to do that today, but today no sun was around…