Category: photos

the glow of a sunny fall morning

After a stretch of rainy days earlier in the week, Friday’s sun was a welcome change. While waiting for the school bus, my eyes were drawn to the glow of leaves every which way.


Most of the maple leaves had been knocked off the trees by the previous days’ wind and rain, and the few remaining hangers on appeared to float in the bright sunlight.


A few hovering maple leaves.


Can you spot the lone red maple leaf that caught my eye, appearing to float among the pine needles?


The kids, standing among the many freshly fallen leaves on our driveway, and enjoying the bright morning rays.


Even the pure evil that is poison ivy glowed enticingly in the sunlight.


I love the confusing patterns formed by the mingled orange and green oak leaves and their shadows.


The view up our street.

I do really love the fall, especially living here in New England.

a scurry of squirrels

Following up on yesterday’s joy in learning a few new terms for collective nouns in English, I found myself wondering whether there were any interesting names for a group of squirrels. Indeed, squirrels did not disappoint: one say “a scurry of squirrels.” I find this especially pleasing, given that squirrels do tend to scurry.


This member of a scurry appears not to be in a hurry.


A furry member of a scurry, showing off the fluff of its tail in the sunlight.


A blurry flurry of a departing scurry.

In fact, at least 2 of these photos are of the same squirrel, so perhaps this is an insufficient quantity of squirrels to form a scurry. (Does anyone know the requisite number of squirrels for a scurry?)

A few shy of a parliament (friday foto finder: rook)

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “rook,” which gives me the excuse to post these photos of this little guy I met in Howth, Ireland back in May. After pecking around on the ground scavenging for crumbs from my snack of oatcake, this rook hopped up on a railing and posed for a few photos.

I was not entirely sure that this bird was a rook, and not some other type of crow, but according to the Wiki entry for rook, he seems to fit the bill:

Rooks are distinguished from similar members of the crow family by the bare grey-white skin around the base of the adult’s bill in front of the eyes.

This one does indeed have that telltale gray skin about the beak.

In my research, if skimming through a Wikipedia page counts as such, I also came across this tidbit:

Collective nouns for rooks include building, parliament, clamour and storytelling.

Such a lovely bit of information to come across. I had certainly heard of a murder of crows, and would have guessed that a collection of rooks might be similarly called a murder. In a delightful coincidence, my friend at Mouse-traps and the Moon shared a post today as part of a series on beautiful books about collective nouns:

…four collections of visually witty takes on those delightful and often improbable collective nouns for animal groupings: A Drove of Bullocks (animals) A Filth of Starlings(birds), A Shiver of Sharks (sea life) and A Crackle of Crickets (insects).

Clearly, there are many more collective nouns out there for me to learn!

To see what other types of rooks have been sited, and maybe even a whole clamour or storytelling of them, flock over to the fff blog.

fire and water

Today was a wet and rainy day, and once more I found my eyes drawn to the water drops that collected on various plants. At the farm where I went to buy eggs, these bright red and yellow flowers caught my attention, with petals that looked to my eyes like raindrop-covered flames.

a tomato a day

This year has been a bountiful year for tomatoes where I live, and given my CSA membership and friendship with a successful gardener, I am certainly supplied with an abundance of tomatoes. But this post is not actually about that kind of tomato.

The tomatoes I’m talking about are chunks of time: I’ve been using the Pomodoro technique to get my work done. I’ve mentioned before that I have found this method of working in timed stretches to be helpful to my productivity.

A little more than a year ago, July of 2013 to be specific, I started to meet regularly with another PhD student from my program to commiserate and work on goals together. One goal I set was that I would work at least one tomato, that is a 25-minute stretch of time focused on the task, on my own research.

With all my other obligations for group research as well as parenting and home commitments, my own research had been regularly getting pushed to the back burner. While I’d work in impressive bursts for upcoming deadlines, such as when preparing for conference submissions and presentations, l would regularly go days or even weeks without looking at my own research when the other obligations had their own crunch times. I might make reasonable progress during the week, but a busy weekend or school vacation would come up and push all thoughts of my research out of my head. A family crisis or even a fun time like a family trip would come up, and even longer would go by. When the time would come for me to dig back into my research, it would feel alien to me. I actually had the experience of reading papers I’d written almost as if they had been written by someone else. (I’m happy to say that I did at least find them to be interesting and well-written!)

Since making the commitment to myself to do at least a tomato a day on my own research, I have made much steadier progress. There is much greater continuity, and I feel connected to my projects. Some days I manage to put in more time on my research, but I’m happy to say that I have always managed to get in at least one tomato before bedtime. (I had to give up on getting the tomato in before midnight at some point–there were days when I was travelling when it just wasn’t feasible.) Friends and family have come to know about my daily tomato.

Over the past year, there have been times when I have really wanted to just go to bed, or at least just goof off, at the end of a full and exhausting day, but I have not let myself off the hook. Even when travelling. Even when falling asleep at my laptop. 25 minutes is always an amount of time I can fit in. Even when the work is not my best or most focused, the gains to my sense of continuity have been immeasurable. I can much more easily pick up where I left of the day before.

I am feeling connected to my research every day in a way that I haven’t before.

flagging

This sculpture is in Larkspur, California. I have vague memories of seeing this regularly while growing up, as I lived in this part of Northern California for many of my childhood and teen years. I never actually knew anything about the sculpture, but its stark silhouette caught my eye during my trip to California earlier this year while we drove towards the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge one evening after an excursion to the Marin Highlands.

The wonders of Google allow me to learn that this is a statue of explorer Juan Batista de Anza, something I hadn’t known. Really, I just picked this photo for the flag because the word “flagging” had popped into my mind to describe the way I am feeling. In my tired state, I can see the statue as the pose of a weary traveller.

It’s been a really hectic stretch, with even more rushing around than normal, and tonight my energy is flagging. I will keep pushing forward, but I really just want a break.

balloon ride in the rain

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve never actually been on a hot air balloon, though I really hope to some day.¹ I have, however, been on an amusement park ride with cars shaped like hot air balloons.²

These photos are from my family’s 2010 trip to Story Land in New Hampshire. It was rainy the afternoon we arrived, but there was still fun to be had, and photos to be taken.

This trip was during my participation in Project 365 for which I committed to taking (at least) a photo a day to share online. I further decided to have monthly themes. This was still in my first month of the project, for which I chose reflections for my theme.

Amusement parks provide lots of shiny surfaces, so it was a good place to find reflections. I wasn’t actually too sorry that there was rain that day!

¹ I came really close to going on one when I was 13, but the weather conditions were wrong the day I was scheduled to go. Here we are 30 years later, and I still haven’t managed to reschedule…

² You might recognize these balloons from the set of amusement park ride silhouettes I posted a few weeks ago. ³

³ And once more, I am enjoying running with a theme. Or perhaps getting carried away with a theme, in this case. This past Friday’s friday foto finder theme was balloons and I found I couldn’t stop with just one. (Or even with the 3 I posted on Friday.)