Category: photos

10 birthday candles

Remarkably, I started this blog 10 years ago today. 10 years of blogging. Over a thousand posts (this one is 1333), over a million views (1,156,038 at the time I’m writing this), over 3000 photos shared. It has been a wonderful creative outlet for me. Additionally, through this blog and by connecting with others on their own blogs, I have made strong friendships (haven’t really counted how many). In the process, I have grown in my worldview (which I also can’t quantify).

Tonight, I am grateful for blogging. Both for this blog, and for connecting with others. I am so grateful to the friendships I have made through blogging. I am very glad that I have returned to blogging after largely neglecting it the last few years. I appreciate having the creative outlet once more, and the place to share my thoughts. As current affairs have been stirring me to take action, I hope to use this blog as a sounding board, and a way to hold myself accountable.

In case you are wondering, I didn’t light candles for the blog. Conveniently, I have a daughter who is just a few months older than this blog, and so had easy access to photos of 10 birthday candles. In case you were wondering what happens when you put 10 birthday candles into a mini cupcake and light them, you get a tower of flame that threatens to light your daughter’s hair on fire, and melts the candles down to stubs in seconds. Happily, this blog is mostly flame retardant.

bittersweet

These are some photos I took of bittersweet back in September. I first saw the unopened yellow berries, and didn’t actually recognize them. But then I saw the open ones, with their characteristic red berries in the open yellow shell, and realized that they were bittersweet. (I guess that makes it a bittersweet realization.¹)

I’m finding myself too tired tonight to write much. I am barely holding my eyes open. I was going to take a rain check on the gratitude enumeration, but I thought of something bittersweet for which I am grateful. I am grateful to have known amazing people who are now gone, but not forgotten.

¹ Honestly, I did not come into this post intending to make a pun. It’s like they come to me unbidden.

seeing the forest for the trees

Today, I am grateful for trees. I love them for their beauty, their shade, and shelter they provide to wildlife. I am also rather partial to breathing the air that they add oxygen to. I am very lucky to live in the woods, where I have only to look out the window to see trees. I find it calming to walk in the woods, too.

Here are a few photos I’ve taken of trees. (Most of these are near me in Massachusetts, but one photo is from New York.)

information overload

Today I finally decided to delete the Facebook app from my phone. It was using more and more space on my phone, until it was gradually crowding out everything else. It turned out that the version of the app I was using was caching every single thing I was reading. So each article I opened through app was taking up space on the phone. (I was using an older version so as to avoid some privacy issues that people had complained about with the introduction of a separate Facebook messaging app.) In the last few days, I was reading more and more articles, until my phone reached capacity. I couldn’t take new photos without deleting apps. And then I’d run out of space again, and delete more apps. Finally, I decided that I just needed to break from it, and delete the app.

I realize that this is a good allegory, as all the articles I’ve been reading have also been crowding my brain, and I may be effectively deleting other mental applications as I work to process all of the election news. (Of course, I can and do still check Facebook on my laptop, and have continued to read articles and follow links there, but it’s a bit less all-the-time-always-in-my-pocket-always-in-my-face.)

Now I can take photos with my phone again without regularly running out of space. And taking photos is one of the things that brings me enjoyment. I like it that I have a pretty decent camera always in my pocket. (I like taking photos with my big camera, too, but it isn’t generally as handy. Also, the hard drive on my laptop is so full that I can’t import the larger files the camera produces without deleting stuff from my laptop. Sigh.)

The photos in this post are some I took a few weeks ago at our local diner. (A few weeks ago, my phone still had room to take photos, and my head was still full of optimism about the election.)

 

And on to my daily-ish gratitude. This post reminds me that I am grateful for photography, and the accessibility of digital photography. I love being able to so easily capture moments from my life. And I especially love being able to document the beauty that I see in the details of the world around me.

And since I skipped my enumeration of gratitude yesterday, I will offer a second serving. I am grateful to be alive in this age when so much information is available at our fingertips. While it is a double-edged sword at times like this, which overload us with news and opinion, on the whole the web (or the internet, in all its incarnations and implementations) offers us the power of knowledge.

a little fried

I’m too tired tonight to write, and am turning in early. I had an extra 3 children last night and today, and am feeling a bit fried. Instead of anything of substance, here is a photo of some of the pancakes I made this morning.

I find myself feeling grateful for some of the things I have already enumerated (especially the sleep one), so I will attempt to serve up a double helping of gratitude tomorrow. (I didn’t want to skip posting, though, as I know it is too easy to let one skipped day turn into…months. And there is still too much to say.)

oxygen mask

Tonight, a wise friend sent me a message that I really appreciated: “I want to remind you that you should put on your oxygen mask before assisting others.” I have been spending a lot of hours the last couple of days thinking of ways that I can do more to help more people. So many people are hurting and scared right now. But I shouldn’t beat myself up for taking a bit of time to regroup and recoup. I can only help others if I have not passed out for lack of breath.

Tonight I am grateful for friends. It has been immensely helpful to me to talk with like-minded friends (and family members) in the shock of these election results. And I appreciate that friends, even those who don’t share my political views, have checked in with me to express their compassion and concern. I am very lucky to have so many wonderful people in my life, near and far.

perchance to read

I have a confession to make. One of the things that has kept me from blogging this past year is that I have reconnected with a past love: reading books. Before I started grad school, I used to always be reading something for enjoyment. Once I was in grad school, I felt like if I had time to read, it should be dedicated to reading journal articles or dissertations and other papers related to me studies. I would occasionally indulge while traveling, but I read very few books for fun. Fast forward to last fall, when my graduate studies were finally finished, and I picked up a book for fun. And then another and another. If I didn’t have so many real-world obligations, I’d happily sit around and read 12 or 14 hours a day. But, the reality is that I have the real-world obligations, and I feel obligated to tend to them. So, I mostly only read at night. So, tonight, instead of writing more here, I will keep this short, and go to bed and snuggle up with a book.

And because I hate to post without photos these days, I will leave you with a few images from my visit to the Trinity College Library in Dublin from May, 2014.

Tonight I am grateful for reading and for books.

a new leaf

It is November once more, and I find myself reminiscing about my daily November blogging of yore. I have much to say, but don’t know whether I will manage to find the time and motivation to say it. However, as with many things in life, if I don’t try, I know I definitely won’t succeed. So, I will start. And I’ll start with a leaf, because fall in New England brings many leaves to my path. (Also to my lawn, my driveway, and my gutters…) This particular leaf was striking in its colorfulness.

I have also been thinking about how I would like to take stock of the many things in my life for which I am thankful, and share them here. I’ll start by saying how thankful I am for the fall, and for living in a place where the fall brings dramatic and dynamic displays of color and light.

In case of fire, ignore punctuation.

I think it’s pretty clear that the sign below is not well-punctuated:

The question is, what would the better punctuation be? Would a semicolon be amiss on a sign advising emergency protocol?