While out and about today, the late afternoon sun lit up this towering stray branch of a young Japanese maple.
Even though school has started, it’s still technically summer. Indeed, the last few days have even been among the hottest of the season in these parts. (Where were you in August, sunny 80-degree days?) But the nights have started to cool down, and the trees know fall is coming. One thing this means for me is that my phone and my camera will be filling up with colorful leaves. (I mean, pictures of them. It probably wouldn’t be good for my camera to be stuffed full of leaves.)
During my visit to Dublin back in May, I took a few short daytrips to nearby towns. One day before the conference started, a friend also in town for the conference and I took the DART out to Howth, a small fishing town on the coast.
A short walk from the train station brought us to a small harbour sheltered by a breakwater with a walkway. We caught glimpses of a lighthouse as we walked.
We walked out to the end of the breakwater, and enjoyed the views of the harbour, nearby rocky islands and cliffs, and this little lighthouse. Then we turned around to wander more around the town and hills.
One of the paths we took led us up to the short round tower that can be seen atop this hill. (The tower is a Martello tower a type of lookout tower/fort that the British built around many locations along the coasts of the British Isles and beyond.)
The hilltop offered great views of the harbour.
And my trusty telephoto lens brought me close to the lighthouse once more.
This little excursion to Howth turned out to be one of the high points of my trip, and I have lots more photos from that day. (Happily, I indeed still have them, because I nearly didn’t. This was the town where I almost lost my camera. I’d left if slung over the back of my chair in a dimly dark little cellar pub below the train station, and I didn’t realize the fact until on the train heading back to Dublin…Perhaps a story for another day?)
This week’s friday foto finder theme was “lighthouse.” To catch glimpses of other lighthouses, pay a visit to the fff blog.
It’s been a while since I’ve been so fixated on a changing series of distorted reflections. They still catch my eye here and there, but aside from when I’m travelling, I just haven’t been taking as many photos lately. (I should work on that.)
These photos are from The Fishing Well, a game at Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire. It was one of those games where you paid your fee, and then were guaranteed to win a prize.
In this case, the object was to catch a metal fish on a hook inside a big spinning well of water. The water was murky and dark, and it was impossible to see the fish at the bottom. You’d just drag the hook around, hanging from a chain on a big metal pole, until the hook latched onto one of the fish.
The prizes in this case were brightly colored little stuffed animals with an aquatic theme: alligators, crabs and fish. I like the way you can sort of make out the eyes of the rows of colorful crabs reflected in the swirling water.
The surface of the water was constantly swirling and rippling, from the motion of the motorized tank bottom as well as the various poles and chains being dragged around by kids trying to catch a fish.
The rippling surface reflected back an ever-changing picture of colors and patterns.
I feel like I should have something pithier to say here, but really, it’s all about the “oooh, pretty.”
These are 3 photos I’ve taken of amusement park rides in recent years. The photo I posted yesterday from our visit to Canobie Lake Park a couple of weeks ago reminded me that I have had this little set collected and ready to post for ages.
This photo was one I took the weekend before last, during our trip to New Hampshire for a day at Canobie Lake Park, an old and old-fashioned amusement park. It has become a tradition for us to go there the last weekend of August, to finish up the summer with a big bright and shiny adventure of lights and rides and noise and sugary treats and junky souvenirs. One last hurrah before the school year starts and the days start to grow noticeably shorter and darker.
I considered using a post title with some sort of sky, cloud or storm idiom, and even briefly considered titling this post “Post title with some sort of sky, cloud or storm idiom.” But not having much to say, I figured I would just post the photo along with a title that describes the photo. Wow, I have now typed a lot of words that don’t say much of anything.
You see, whenever I go a long stretch without posting, I find myself struggling with what to say once I start up again. Somehow, I managed to post only once all last month. It was one of those cases when I found myself so overwhelmed by the many things I felt I should say here that I instead said nothing. With heavy world and national events weighing on my mind, I found myself unable to post the fluff that most easily flows.
So here I am once more, starting in with posting something with light and bright. A bright fluffy cloud.¹
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¹ Of course, the lightness of a cloud is deceptive. A fluffy floating cloud can actually be quite heavy, being as it consists of hundreds and thousands or even a million pounds of water.
A few years ago, a doctor wanted Phoebe to go on a clear fluid diet for a day as a part of a medical evaluation. In addition to clear juices and broths, she was allowed to eat Jello. Jello is not something we tend to eat in our family, but under the circumstances, I decided to go all out. I picked up packages of cherry, orange, lemon, lime and grape Jello, and I put together a dish of rainbow jello for my rainbow-loving girl.
The process involved making the different layers of color separately, letting each chill and gel, and then adding the next layer. I honestly don’t remember how long the process took. But I do remember that the result was quite striking to look at!
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When Theo was a baby, maybe a year or so old, I came across a link someone had shared of Andrea Bocelli singing to Elmo. We were travelling at the time, visiting my in-laws, and a super-tired baby Theo was sitting on my lap long after he should have been asleep. I clicked on the video, and Theo was entranced. What’s more, he was lulled. By the end of the video, he was asleep in my arms.
This is not the sort of magic than an overtired parent easily forgets, and this video was revisited quite a few times over the next year or so. (Not always with exactly the same magic.) I also bought the song (not the Elmo-directed version, but the original Italian version), and found that it was effective at getting Theo to nap on car rides. When Theo was a little bit older, he would request the song. However, the name he had for it was “Rainbow Jelly.” I’m not sure how long it took us to figure out what he meant, but eventually we realized that it must have been how he’d misheard “Andrea Bocelli” in the video.
And so it was that I was inclined to call the rainbow layered Jello “rainbow jelly.”
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Last week’s friday foto finder theme was food, and given my recent run on rainbows, I couldn’t resist sharing photos of this. It is somewhat debatable whether this treat counts as actual “food,” but Phoebe had fun with it.
To see what other potentially more nutritious food items have been shared, pay a visit to the fff blog.
Today’s plans were a bit of a washout. The kids’ swimming class at the town beach (on the lake) were cancelled due to thunderstorms, and the playdate we’d had planned for after the class as well. The day’s weather pretty much ranged from dark skies and heavy downpour to blue skies with scattered fluffy clouds. After a couple failed attempts to set up another playdate, we headed briefly to the playground. We stayed for a good while under the cheery blue skies, but left upon overhearing talk of thunderstorm and tornado warnings. Happily, the weather in our town was fairly calm, and tornado-free, but we did have a few more thunderstorms in the evening. Then the sun came back out for a bit before setting. This time, I knew exactly which direction to look for the rainbow. We looked out over the back deck, and were rewarded with some faint stripes of color between some of the trees. We watched for a few minutes, and then caught a glimpse of a lower and brighter arc of another rainbow, barely visible through the leaves. Then the colors faded. I didn’t get any photos. But wouldn’t you know, maybe 15 or 20 minutes later, there was a shift in the light again. This time, when I looked out on the deck, I could see quite a bit of rainbow. I grabbed my camera, ran out on the wet deck in my bare feet, and had time to get a few photos of the rainbow before it faded away again.
I was quite impressed by how bright the photo turned out. That top photo was not edited at all. Here’s another photo, a bit zoomed in, and with the brightness and contrast and such mucked with a bit.
I found it interesting that as I mucked with it, I could make out more repetitions of the rainbow. Whereas the previous double rainbow of earlier in the evening, as well as that of a couple weeks ago had arcs that were quite spaced apart, this version had tight stack of rainbows. I can actually make out a faint third repetition of the color bands, and even the barest hint of a fourth.
A supernumerary rainbow—also known as a stacker rainbow—is an infrequent phenomenon, consisting of several faint rainbows on the inner side of the primary rainbow, and very rarely also outside the secondary rainbow. Supernumerary rainbows are slightly detached and have pastel colour bands that do not fit the usual pattern.
Sweet.
(Apparently, seeing rainbows is a good excuse to post.)
collecting tokens 