Here are a handful of photos I picked out that I’ve taken over the past 5 years.
March of 2010.
June, 2012.
Also June, 2012.
October, 2010.
From about a month ago, when most of the ground was still covered in ice and snow. These spikes of green have since proven themselves to be daffodils.
None of these are technically flowers, but I did find something about each of them to be flower-like.
A tissue.
Ice cream.
Water bottle.
Playground equipment bolt.
Clementine.
A gate in Barcelona, with stylized blooms and thorns.
For somebody who is not especially partial to flowers, I sure do take and post a lot of photos of flowers. I guess that’s why this week’s friday foto finder theme of “floral” made me think to find something floral that wasn’t actually flowers. Turns out I also did that once when the theme was “flower,” what with my iron flowers of hardware on a rusty vintage tractor. This time, though, I have a range of metal flowers from near and far that were actually designed to depict flowers.
Close-up of the Barcelona blooms.
Another fence in Barcelona.
Flower-shaped window grates at Boston University.
A Dublin streetlamp with shamrocks. (More leafy than flowery, but still flora if not actually floral…)
An iron bench with a flower pattern (and a lion face) at a Massachusetts farm.
To see what other flowers have been picked for the theme, and/or to share your own, check out the fff blog.
As I was walking back to my car after my lab meeting in Boston last Friday, my eyes were drawn to the patterns, colors and textures of the bark of one of the trees growing along the sidewalk. In this case, it was the range of rounded blobby shapes, in muted greens and oranges, that attracted my attention, and made prompted me to take a photo. Of course, this is not an isolated incident. Tree bark has caught my attention far and wide, and over many a year. Here is a sampling of some bark to be found in my photo library.
More bark at BU, but clearly from a different tree. April, 2010.
Another tree in Boston, this time in March, 2012.
Boston, 2012, March. (Again. It was a good year for tree bark.)
Oakland, CA, January, 2011.
May, 2014, Malahide, Ireland.
Massachusetts, May, 2014.
I actually have no idea what kind of trees any of these are, come to think of it. I’m pretty sure not oak and not maple, but beyond that, I have no clue…
Here are three completely unrelated photos I’ve taken over the last decade.
Parking garage. Providence, RI. 2005.
Window blinds. Oakland, CA, 2011.
Porch and railings, Massachusetts, 2014.
Among the other various and sundry candidates for yesterday’s photo theme of “cute,” I considered some other baby animals. In particular, these teeny tiny toads came to mind.
The nearby zoo includes, in addition to the various animal enclosures holding non-native animals, large open areas that are home to native flora and fauna. There is a deer park that stretches over many acres of woods that includes a pond. From late May through maybe early July, visiting the deer enclosure also gives you the chance to see these little guys.
Sometimes the pond edges are positively teeming with tadpoles, lining it with dark blotches that can be many feet across.
They are a constantly moving mass.
I find it fun to look for tadpoles that are transitioning. Zooming in, you can see that many of these guys have legs as well as tails. Some just the back legs, some back and front.
And apparently once they are finished growing their legs and losing their tails, they feel compelled hop on out of the pond.
The path alongside the pond is sometimes hopping with them, carelessly crossing paths with oblivious humans with their big stompy feet. (Or others perhaps less oblivious, with their giant hands and their cameras.)
Winter is finally over, and a sunny spring day is a fine time to wash the road salt and grime off the car. (And if you, like me, enjoy taking photos of patterns and ripples and drips, inside the carwash is a good place to take some photos of patterns and ripples and drips.)
Suds.
Still sudsy.
Rinse.
A magnificent rivulet.
Last clinging drops.
Beware of rabbits lurking in the shadows, leaving behind baskets full of belly ache.
It has become a tradition for me to bake gingerbread in the winter. On more than one occasion, I have been quite taken with the way the various dry ingredients compose themselves the bowl: the various spices making dark patterns on the lighter flour mixtures. Here are photos from three different times I made gingerbread in recent years. 
Here, I seem to have added the spices from lighter color to dark, with ginger, then cinnamon, then cloves.
Here, the spices clumped up, looking like miniature boulders on a bed of sugar gravel.
Here, the cinnamon perfectly held the shape of the measuring spoon.
(And no, I haven’t had time for baking yet this year. I’ve been too busy cooking up perception experiments and writing abstracts. Which are not nearly as tasty.)
collecting tokens 