Category: photos

looking up

To follow up on yesterday’s post of spirally gates and grates in Boston, here are some spiral-adorned balconies in Sevilla, Spain. While walking through the streets one evening during my visit there in 2009, I looked up to admire the shadows of the balcony gates.

This particular building had lights shining in several directions, producing a pleasing tangle of spirally shadows.

I also enjoy the contrast of the bright orange walls and the dark metal.

Today was a much better day, by the way, and I did not have to fight the urge to stay curled up in a little ball. Things are definitely looking up when I have gotten a bit more sleep.

curled up

It’s true that I’m a sucker for spirals. They are a frequent motif in my doodles. I love the spirals are also a frequent motif in the gates, grates and railings of some of the older buildings around Boston, especially those at BU. Over the years (because I have been a student for so many, many years) I have found my eyes drawn to many such spiralled details, and have quite a few photos to show for it. Here are a few of them.

This is one of those days when my biggest accomplishment was to keep myself from staying curled up in a ball all day. I need to do a better job getting enough sleep, eating properly, and getting some exercise to help get me through this really stressful time.

shrivelled

These Japanese maple leaves curl up so gracefully as they shrivel.

After another hectic week, and being up too late, I’m feeling rather shrivelled myself today. Also like I want to curl up into myself. (I just don’t think I am doing so with the same grace as these leaves.)

Green grass, red leaves

If I say I am going to post every day, by gum I’m going to do it.

Even if it means doing so on my phone from my parked car at 11:30 at night before I drive home.

To distract from the complete lack of content, here are some fallen Japanese maple leaves on my lawn.

thought police tow zone (friday foto finder: notice)

I confess that when I first read this sign, it made me think about blocking the loading dock. Thank goodness they didn’t catch me and tow me away! Even now, so many months later, when I read this sign, I find myself thinking about ways I could block that loading dock. I try to come up with creative ways to block it. I could set up a lemonade stand in front of it! Or maybe sculpt a statue of a clown in front. Or make giant origami installation. My thoughts are in clear violation of this notice. If you don’t hear from me for a while, you’ll know why…

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “notice.” To see what other notices have been noticed, haul yourself over to the fff blog. (But whatever you do, don’t think about blocking this loading dock.)

a pair of pears


A pair of unpared pears on my kitchen table one morning.

A few years ago, my research group did an experiment that involved eliciting productions of phrases with specific intonational patterns. We were interested in examining the differences in realization of a pair of contours that are superficially similar, but convey different nuances of meaning. To answer our research questions, we elicited and recorded a set of phrases two different times with each subject, one for each of the contours. The recordings were then looked over carefully, and a number of preparations were made for the analyses, including cutting up and labeling the longer soundfiles into phrase-sized chunks, which were then labelled according the intonational contour elicited. Each phrase produced by a given speaker with one contour was then paired up with the same phrase produced by that speaker with the other contour. If for some reason we did not have both successful productions to pair up, such as if one was produced with another intonational contour altogether or contained a disfluency in the region of interest, we would pare out both the unsuccessful production and its would-be pair from that subject’s data. This process of pairing and paring the soundfiles henceforth became known among us as “pearing.”

orange among the apples

This was a photo from 2011, from late-ish November. That fall was a particularly mild one, and one of my favorite local places to pick apples was still open for pick-your-own. The afternoon was a beautiful one for both picking apples and taking photos. (I posted quite a few photos from that excursion back in 2011, but this one seems not to have made the cut.) The late afternoon sun made everything glow in warm and bright hues, living up to the promise of the golden hour. In this shot, I love the way the lens flare made orange blobs over the image, which echo the glow of the orange leaves on the apple trees.

smashing pumpkins (or smashed pumpkins, really)

It is an American holiday tradition to decorate with pumpkins for Halloween, and carve them into jack-o-lanterns. Some pumpkins never quite make it that far…

This pumpkin was not the belle of the pumpkin patch.

There is also the less widely appreciated tradition of stealing pumpkins of other people’s front steps, and smashing them onto the ground. The closest I have come to this tradition is taking our post-Halloween pumpkins to the compost pile, and throwing them down.


Pumpkins actually don’t tend to smash in these circumstances. A compost pile is a rather soft bed of leaves and other squishy organic materials.


These pumpkins are more smushed than smashed. (I confess I am amused by the distorted faces of the decomposing pumpkins.)

These are from 2009, 2012 and 2013. It is totally normal that I have accumulated a collection of photos of smashed and/or rotting pumpkins over the years. I’m sure you can say the same, right?

pumpkin carving, take 2

Remember how cute the kids’ pumpkins looked a few days ago? Wouldn’t you know it, time got away from me, and I left the pumpkins sitting there in front of the fireplace. Come Friday, I thought I should bring them out and figure out how to light them up. Unfortunately, the jack-o-lanterns had not fared well. Even though our house is chilly, it is apparently not chilly enough to keep a carved pumpkin from rotting and molding:

Oops.

On the bright side, we still had more uncarved pumpkins. I hadn’t found time to carve mine, nor John his, and there were a couple more smaller pumpkins that we had gotten from my CSA. (I’m sure they would have been great for pie-making…) The kids and I had a bit of time after school on Friday before we were joining friends for trick-or-treating, so we knocked these guys out (and set them out) on Halloween night.

I would also like to note that we didn’t have any tea lights, candles or otherwise. We had to get creative to light these up. Two have LED head lamps, one has a small flashlight, and another a keychain light. Each of the lights was wrapped in a layer of a yellow napkin, and the placed in a plastic sandwich bag before being placed in the slimy insides of the pumpkins.