Tag: NaBloPoMo

poppies

Since I seem to be on a run of posting old photos of flowers (and flowers from my in-laws’ house, at that), I figured this would be a good day to post these photos of poppies.¹ The top photo with the close-up of a poppy bud, with its fuzziness glowing in the sunlight, is one of my favorites. These photos were taken in May of 2011.

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¹I only learned of the symbolism of poppies for Remembrance Day in recent years. Poppies seem to have a very complicated and often controversial coexistence with humans.

flower, bee, ants

Here’s another flower I came across when hunting for a rose to post on Friday This bright pink flower is another from my in-laws’ house, this time from out in the yard. More interesting to me than the flower, though, was the activity that was going on inside it: a shiny green bee and a bunch of tiny ants were hanging out, collecting pollen, or nectar, or whatever goodies the flower had to offer. (Maybe it was really free beer and pizza. I’m not a botanist, though, so I can’t be sure.)

the bloom is off the rose (but the fruit is on)

After I posted yesterday’s relatively un-rosy photo of a dandelion, I realized that while I don’t have many photos of roses, I do have some photos that I quite like of rose hips. These berry-sized red fruits are packed with vitamin C and other valuable nutrients. They are also quite pretty. I came across these particular rose hips in September three years back, in Boston alongside a T stop at BU.¹

¹ FYI, the T is Boston’s subway (though it’s not always underground) and BU is Boston University.²
² And FYI is “for your information.” OYVMWS?³
³ OYVMWS is a meaningless string of capitalized consonants. At least as far as I know.

take it or leave it

Time ran away from me, as it so often does. Among work and appointments and grocery shopping and a dozen other things big and small, the hours of my day were eaten up. I find myself once more at 11:00 rushing to put up something to post. I had been planning to go all retro and post a ThThTh list, it being Thursday at all, but it was not to be. I still have more work to do before bed, and I can barely hold my eyes open as it is. So, here are some photos I took this morning before the school bus came. These large leaves on some roadside plant caught my eye across the street. Like so many of the plants I photograph, I haven’t the slightest clue what it is. But I liked the shape of the leaves, and the way they dangled from the stems, making a sort of garland.

This oak leaf interloper also caught my eye, trapped in the tangle of twigs over the big stems, and appearing suspended in mid-air.

I would also note that some of these leaves were impressively large. If memory serves (though frankly, at this hour, that’s a big if), I believe the front leaf in this photo is about a foot long. That one had flipped around in the wind, making the patterns of its leafy veins more visible.

That’s all I have for tonight.

indigo oak leaves

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of photos showing a range of colors that can be seen in the fall foliage of my neighborhood. My wise and astute friend Magpie chastised me for leaving out part of the spectrum:

Red, orange, yellow, green, BLUE, INDIGO, violet. That is, you’re missing two. :)

It was a tough order, but I think I found some indigo leaves in a photo taken a year ago today. While the leaves in front are of a more expected rusty orange hue, the leaves showing up behind them appear to be a of a deep indigo. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Maybe.)

fall, falling, fallen

Here are a few photos I took this afternoon in Boston.


Bay State Road in its full fall glory.


A group of students standing among the fallen leaves while a fire alarm went off in their building.


A BU brownstone residence, wearing fashionable fall colors.


A sculpture I’ve never noticed before. (It was on a route I don’t typically walk.)

I had this goal of finding photos each month taken on the same date in a previous year, but my available November 3rd photos of years past fell short of my expectations. (The only 2 I really liked are ones I already posted, and that’s not as much fun.) So instead I am sharing some largely unplanned photos from today. Now I need to get to work lest I fall behind on my work goals.

found faces

The wallpaper in the bathroom of my grandmother’s house was a repeating marbled pattern with blue and white, looking a bit like swirled paint. There were no clear shapes in the swirls, but my eyes found faces in them. Sometimes the faces would scare me a bit when I was little, especially when I’d need to get up to use the bathroom in the night. In my memory I can still make out the faces (2 men with beards, one young and one old, and a young woman) though the house is no longer in our family, and the wallpaper is no doubt gone. (I really can’t imagine that the new owners of the old house would have kept that wallpaper.)

I sometimes still see faces in other places, and I know I am not alone in this.¹ Here are a few of the faces that have appeared to me in the blotchy or peeling paint of various surfaces.


A column in a subway station in Boston.³


A wall on an abandoned building in a town outside Boston.


A wall in Providence, RI.

Do you see the faces in these photos? Do you find faces in other places yourself?

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¹ I have a friend who started a tumblr to share photos of the found faces that she has come across. And Archie has mentioned his own found faces a couple of times.²
² For that matter, the face finding feature of iPhoto has also been known to find faces in other objects.
³ This photo was from November 2, 2012–one year ago today. After finding a photo to post yesterday from November 1st of a previous year, I went poking to see what other photos I had in my library from November 2nd when I looked to find something to post today.⁴
⁴ And the reason that I was looking for something to post today is that I have decided to do NaBloPoMo again this year for November, and post daily for the month. I think this marks the 7th year that I done this.

I actually miss posting every 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.

Photos from the Musée D’Orsay (friday foto finder: station)

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?