Colorful Building. Any size or type of building or structure is allowed as long as it is colorful. Be creative and mostly have a lot of fun.
Self loves color. Color in buildings, especially.
Starting with right in her own backyard: Below, a picture she took last week. The skies were still pretty murky. The closest fire, the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, the largest ever to hit San Mateo County, was 81% controlled. She painted the door to the shed herself. It’s not a very good job, but so what. She liked the color. Hanging next to the red door is a photograph son took when he was in high school.
Her front door is the same bright red:
Last, a bright red storefront on a corner of self’s favorite London street, Great Russell in Bloomsbury. She took the picture with the British Museum right behind her. The side streets have bookstores, antique booksellers, teashops, Korean take-out stores, fish’n chips. But when self took the picture (last April) it must have been a Sunday. Because everything appears closed.
Thanks once again to Cee Neuner for creating such interesting and FUN Foto Challenges.
Have fun looking at other bloggers’ take on this week’s Fun Foto Challenge:
Yesterday, self dropped by Lyngso in San Carlos. It’s THE place for everything “natural” for your landscaping needs: pebbles, stones, rocks, flagstones — you name it.
She’s been hearing about Lyngso forever, since son was in primary school at St. Raymond’s in Menlo Park. Every single one of his classmates lived in the area, all of them had beautiful homes, and all of them got their stone from Lyngso.
It just so happened that when self dropped by yesterday, there was an abundance of boulders. She was so happy, it reminded her of the time her friend Helene took her to a field of rocks near Yorkshire (very Wuthering Heights).
She asked an employee about the different-colored rocks, and he told her that a customer had put in an order for 18 boulders, and hadn’t picked them up yet. “So this is a pretty special assortment,” he told self.
Wowowowowowow
Just lookit. Self wanted to use these rocks for Lens-Artists Photo Challenge 115.2 (Inspiration) but she ended up using a different set of pictures. Still, she went bananas and took 20 pictures of rocks yesterday. Here are a few:
These blue flowers are so pretty. Every year, they come back, and this year the blooms have been especially profuse. They wind through the branches of the cherry trees and drape the sidewalk. No one seems to mind.
Front yard, September 2020
Self is a writer. As a writer, she finds inspiration in books. These are a few books she recently checked out from her local library:
Finally, a very special place, one that self would spend every moment of every day in, if she could: the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. When she sees the orange couch, she knows she’s home.
“Saying he did more for blacks than any President since Abraham Lincoln is the biggest lie he ever told . . . Mark my words, we’re gonna turn the mother out in North Carolina.” — Rep. Alma Adams, representing the 12th District of North Carolina
“People here just love the way he (Trump) is able to speak directly about the issues . . . without anger,” — young man near Raleigh, North Carolina. “He really cares. He’s been here three times in the past few weeks. We haven’t seen Biden in at least six months.”
Self decided to join the American Rose Society this year, and was so happy to receive their magazine.
The July/August issue has a very interesting article about Memorable Rose Gardens by Mike and Angelina Chute.
“All great gardens are dynamic, constantly changing over time . . . “
She’s never heard of any of the gardens. There’s one called Roseraie de L’Hay, “in the municipality of Val-de-Marne, five miles south of Paris, and only 30 minutes by train.” From the train station, it’s “a short bus ride to the little rose garden.”
There’s one in Rome, Il Roseto, “located on the slopes of the Aventine Hill, a short walk from the Colosseum. Il Roseto is built on a site once home to a Jewish cemetery. In memory of the cemetery and those that had been buried there, the garden’s paths are laid out in the shape of a menorah.”
There’s Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park in northwest London (also home of the London Zoo) and there are “approximately 12,000 roses on display.”
And there is Austin Roses in Shropshire, “an agricultural area in England’s West Midlands.”
Next time she’s in Europe, she’ll make it a point to see some of these fabulous rose gardens.
In the meantime, there’s a pretty fabulous rose garden in Filoli, less than 10 minutes’ drive away. And here are a few pictures self took of her own roses:
Capitola-by-the-Sea is your quintessential beach town, not as glitzy as Carmel and Monterey, and the pastel-colored cottages are so pretty! Who wouldn’t want to live in a pink cottage by a beach, even if just for the summer, come on!
No one knows the exact date when the Philippine Revolution began (Because it was a secret rebellion!). But the place has never been in doubt.
At some point in the last week of August 1896, Andres Bonifacio (a self-educated warehouse clerk, she posted some of his poetry a week or so ago) gathered his followers and led them in tearing up their cedulas. A cedula is a form of identification, issued by the Spanish colonial government. It was a document that formed the basis of tax collection.
Pugad Lawin was deep woods when Andres Bonifacio and a thousand followers (which is quite a large number, for a secret society, but was no match against the Spanish, who in the city of Manila alone numbered at least 10,000) gathered there. The rough translation of pugad lawin is ‘hawk’s nest.’ Today, it has been swallowed up by Metro-Manila, and lies in one of the most densely populated cities in Asia.
Another REALLY interesting Foto Challenge. Self has tons of pictures of old buildings in her archives. But, looking over the pictures in Cee’s prompt, it is not enough that the structures be old, they have to be old in a certain way, a weathered kind of way.
She bought a sheet of first-class stamps commemorating the Harlem Renaissance. Aren’t they beautiful?
She receives all her literary journals through the USPS. Here’s the latest delivery: the Win/Spr 2020 issue of Calyx Journal, one of the oldest women’s presses in the United States, founded by her friend, Dear Departed Margarita Donnelly (She put the whole thing, she told self, on a credit card):
Cover Art: Dale Champlin’s “Mother Nature.”
Finally, Filoli Garden, in Woodside, is one of the area’s most beautiful gardens. The current art installation is by Kristine Mays. Here’s a picture self took on a visit to Filoli in July.
