For this week’s friday foto finder, we’re on the hunt for animals. My photo library is full of all sorts of animals: furry, feathery, scaly, slimy or otherwise. But here’s one animal photo I’ve been looking for an excuse to share. These two prairie dogs live in our local zoo.
This photo cracks me up, and it seems like it’s screaming for some sort of caption. Any suggestions?
To see what other animals people have captured, please pay a visit to the friday foto finder blog.
It was bound to happen one of these days. Archie picked a theme for this week’s friday foto finder that is not well represented in my photo library. This week, he chose “mailbox.”
I suppose I could just run outside and snap a photo of our home mailbox, but it’s really not a very interesting one. Instead, I dug out this photo of a standard US mailbox outside the post office in Beulah, Colorado, that I took in 2005. (Perhaps I should disambiguate. I took the photo in 2005. Not the mailbox. I did not take the mailbox in 2005. It would not have fit in my luggage.) Okay, the photo is still not all that interesting. However, it is fun to see what standard mailboxes look like around the world. At this point, I believe that the other participants of friday foto finder are in Europe & Australia.
Actually, I think that the photo below is also of a mailbox, but I don’t entirely remember. I took this one (the photo, silly) in 2010, and if memory serves, it’s the top of a mailbox outside the karate school. In any case, I find the photo more interesting.
To see what other mailboxes people have posted,¹ go check out the friday foto finder blog.
Coincidentally, I just this week came across a collection of photos of mailboxes from around the world at the Postcrossing Facebook page, where Michele, of Voix de Michele, shared a photo of a mailbox in Abu Dhabi.
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¹ Ha! Posted!
Here are 3 butterflies I’ve encountered in the last 3 years.¹
Butterfly in the butterfly garden at the Boston Museum of Science, Boston, MA. June, 2010.
Butterfly on a window, in The Butterfly Pavilion outside Denver, CO. April, 2011.
In the wild on the grounds of the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. August, 2012.
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¹ I don’t come across butterflies in the wild nearly as often as YTSL of Webs of Significance, whose photos of her hikes around Hong Kong regularly include butterflies (among her other critter sightings).²
² I looked back at my photos from the hike we had together when I visited Hong Kong in August of 2011, but it would seem that I found no butterflies that day!
30 posts had November. NaBloPoMo came and went this year, and I hardly whined about posting at all. Well, there was that brief bit in the middle. And maybe I’m forgetting some whining. Mostly, though, it felt like the posts flowed.
I posted a lot of photos, both old and new, thanks in part to participating in friday foto finder. (I do love me a theme.) I got on a roll with the tomatoes, and had quicker flings with baskets and doors. (I do love me a theme.) Fall offered up a host of pretty leaves to share, and even some snow. I celebrated the 6th birthday of my blog with pants, which are always a comfy fit. I had some things to say relating to the US election, and to the Sandy recovery efforts.
I didn’t even come close to running out of things to say. I even had 2 nearly complete Themed Things Thursday posts that weren’t quite finished enough on the Thursdays for which I’d intended them, and they join the 43 other unfinished ThThTh posts that I’ve poked at now and again. (Those things take a long time to get together, what with the links and the images and the formatting and the commentary. I can whip off a list of things in a few minutes, but without the fleshing out, they aren’t as satisfying to me. But I do love me a theme)
And there are still a number of posts that have been brewing in my head for months, years even, that I’d expected to get around to. Hopefully I still will. (Plus there are all those various promissory notes I’ve left around the internets: things I said I’d post, or write more about, etc. Anyone want to call me on any of those? I respond well to external stimuli…)
This is all to say that I enjoyed the daily blogging, so I was glad I did NaBloPoMo. On the flip side, I had trouble keeping up with the blog reading, even with my much-diminished blogroll, but I’m still planning to catch up.
These are butterflies that Theo and I made one morning when Phoebe was at karate. Theo made his first, and then instructed me to make a bigger mommy butterfly using the same colors and patterns. I didn’t have any particular reason for choosing this photo for this post. Or maybe there were several vague reasons. I’m feeling rather wistful this evening, as today would have been my father’s 91st birthday. Butterflies, for me, symbolize both the ephemerality and continuity of life, especially these, given that they represent 2 generations. And Theo himself is part of that continuity. Also, we’ve had a plethora of lepidoptera, in the form of a weirdly unseasonal profusion of moths around our neighborhood. The laptop symbolizes my laptop, which is now atop my lap. It is also the means by which I post things.
The Musée D’Orsay in Paris is a remarkable building. It was built as a railway station around the turn of the (last) century, but only used as a rail station for a few short decades. The large and impressive building was converted into a large and impressive art museum in the 1980s, and it houses, among other works, a very large and impressive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces. (Most of which are impressive, but not very large.)
When we visited Paris in 2007, I made my first visit to this museum. It might seem surprising that I had not been there before, especially given my love of art and the fact that I had lived outside of Paris for 2 years. However, the first year I lived in France was 1980, and the museum would not yet be open for another 6 years. I’m pretty sure I heard of the museum when I lived in Paris again in 1988, and I’m not sure why I never made it there then. I certainly remember going to other museums. (I particularly remember the Rodin Museum and the Orangérie.)
In any case, I was very taken with the museum, as much (if not more) for the building as for the art. I loved the grand arches, interesting use of glass, and many other details.
I love the tunnel-like effect of the main hall.
This gigantic clock faces inward.
This gigantic clock faces outward, and can be seen from inside the café.
People and sculptures.
Looking up.
Multiple levels.
High vantage point.
My rosy-cheeked little one in front of some of Renoir’s famous rosy cheeks.
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This week’s friday foto finder theme was “station.” Given my love of rail travel, it might not surprise you that I have many photos of train and subway stations in my photo archives. However, this was the station that came to mind first.
To see what other stations are being shared, please visit Archie’s friday foto finder blog. Won’t you consider participating, too?
We had a bit of a snowfall Tuesday night, and while there wasn’t much in the way of accumulation, the wet snow stuck to every leaf and twig such that almost everything was outlined in white. Occasional water drops had also frozen, adding some sparkle to the scene. I took a few photos around the yard before the school bus came, and then a few more later in the morning during a short walk with a neighbor.
Here are a handful of my favorites from the morning.
A tree in our front yard that hasn’t quite given up all its leaves.
Along our house’s front path.
A neighbor’s rail fence.
This stone wall is at the dairy farm that is a half mile from my house.
Snow and ice on the shrubbery.
White snow, red berries.
Ice drops on pine needles.
(Those last two were ones I posted on Instagram, with filters. I posted a version of the stone wall there, too, but without filters.)
Once again, my trusty iPhone did some nice work. I’m sure my camera would have done a good job, but I am less likely to throw it in my coat pocket. Especially given that it doesn’t fit in my coat pocket. Maybe I just need bigger coat pockets.
Here are 3 storm drain grates I’ve come across in the past year.
Sidewalk, New York City, NY. March 2102.
Parking lot, Milford, MA. May, 2012
Parking lot, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. November, 2012.
Tonight finds me cranky. There are a number of things contributing to my crankiness. A pinch of irritating interactions that struck a nerve, a dollop of research frustrations, and some generous quantities of life things have combined to make a recipe for a simmering stew of crankiness. I am the crockpot of crankiness.¹ I’ve spent much of the last few hours trying not to boil over.
We came home last night from my in-laws’, aiming to beat the Sunday end-of-holiday-weekend traffic. (We also had some projects we needed to take care of, including something Phoebe had to do for school for Monday). That all went well, but I was up too late, my sleep was further peppered by a nagging cough I’ve had for over a week.
Today, I spent a ridiculous number of hours trying to tame the gigantic pile of art supplies, craft kits, and kids’ art projects in various stages of completion that has taken over the breakfast nook² portion of our kitchen. This is not the first time I have spent hours trying to tackle this mess, a fact which is also seasoning today’s stew of crankiness. I actually took a break from this task to do some work. And now I have to get back to it. I will tame the beast, or go down trying.³
Here are some other odds and ends that surfaced on our visit to my in-laws’. Phoebe and I had a little sewing project, and we needed to dig out a needle. This image has nothing to do with anything that I just wrote about, but I was amused that this sewing tray contained both a tomato (in the form of a tomato-shaped pin cushion) and a basket, thus handily tying together two of my recent themes. (cf. basket, basket, tomato, tomato, tomato)
¹ The crankpot?
² Really, I don’t know what to call this area. It’s the part of the kitchen where we have our table, and where we eat meals, including, but not restricted to, breakfast.
³ Should I toss the beast into the stew?⁴
⁴ Wow, this is totally not the post I thought I was starting to write. In fact, I changed the title. And then even deleted my original first paragraph. I was going to write about various things I’ve said I’d do but haven’t yet done. Which is often a source of crankiness in itself. But I won’t go there tonight. Hopefully I will have simmered down by morning.⁵
⁵ Happily, few things cheer me up more than getting carried away with a metaphor.
We’re down at my in-laws’, and interesting things to photograph have a tendency to pop up here. Phoebe found this little handbasket down in the basement, and brought it upstairs to transport some blocks. She left it on the floor, where caught the afternoon light coming in through the window.
(I was on the fence about whether to post these yesterday for friday foto finder, but I tucked them away in my basket for today, instead.)
collecting tokens 