August 16, 2019 at 2:26 am (destinations, Links, Places, Plays, Traveling)
Tags: Cal Shakes, Cee Neuner, Cornwall, England, Fowey, Mendocino, summer
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is TREES.
This is self’s second photo challenge post today. She spent a long time poring over her photo archive and came up, finally, with these three:
Early Morning Fog, Mendocino, April 2018
Cal Shakes Grove, Orinda, CA, September 2018
Monterey Pines in Fowey, Cornwall, England, May 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
August 10, 2019 at 2:13 am (Conversations, Food and Drink, Places, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: Fridays, India
Tim Dee’s gorgeous book – about gulls, and human waste, and interdependence, and evolution – is making self think about India.
She’s back in Old Delhi, the night market. She has a guide, but everything is just TOO. MUCH. The people, the open vats of food, the crowding, the muddy gutters, the smells.
She couldn’t resist buying food (Someone told her cooked food was okay): she tried some samosas, wrapped in an old newspaper. Delicious!
When she had finished, she looked vainly around for a garbage can. She clutched that oily piece of newspaper in her hand, alley after alley after alley. Finally, she asked her guide where she could dispose of her trash. The guide pointed straight down.
Self was confused. “Where?” she asked, looking at her feet.
“Just throw it,” the guide said. Meaning: anywhere. Throw it anywhere. Right here if you want.
Self looked around, and saw that other people were doing just as the guide suggested: eating and then dropping the containers on the street as they walked, never breaking stride.
She truly felt as if she was in a nightmare. The idea of eating something and then just dropping the wrapping or container ON THE GROUND while walking around. Oh God. She almost heaved.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
August 9, 2019 at 4:44 am (Artists and Writers, Books, destinations, Filipino Writers, Lists, Places, Traveling, Weather, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, horror, Ireland, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress, writing process
from the Dictionary of Birds (1985):
from Birds of the Western Palearctic (Unforgivable, in self’s view, that Dee fails to provide a date of publication):
Self’s horror story The Rorqual (currently 51 pages — self is so out of control!) uses exactly these kinds of dictionary definitions (in self’s case, pages long) to describe her ‘pagos’ and her ‘longnecks’ and her other what-not. She birthed this horror in Tyrone Guthrie. She can’t seem to write any of it until she returns to Annaghmakerrig. California is just too dry, too intensely hot, too savagely suburban.
Stay tuned.
August 1, 2019 at 3:35 am (destinations, Links, Niece, Places, Recommended, Relatives, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: Cee Neuner, discoveries, memories, Prague
The prompt is WATER IN NATURE.
Clearly self hasn’t been spending much time outdoors because she had to go all the way back to May, in Prague, to find pictures of a body of water.
So, here are three pictures of Prague’s Vltava River, from the trip she took with her niece, Irene, end of May. All these pictures were taken during one beautiful Sunday. She wouldn’t have thought of posting them (She likes to post her travel pictures IN REAL TIME. Which is to say: as they are occurring) but she was going through her photo archives and, well, a river is a natural body of water.
A local told her that in Prague one could never be lost. And he was right! As long as you see a bridge, you can orient yourself. Luckily, the city’s not that big.
And besides, the city is so beautiful. So why be in such a hurry to get to your destination? Just relax, enjoy discovering new streets.
Families Enjoying Sunday on the Vltava River, Prague, Late May
Hiring Pleasure Boat on the Vltava River
The Vltava: Giving the Seine a Run For Its Money
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
June 18, 2019 at 11:02 pm (destinations, Food and Drink, Links, Places, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: Cee Neuner, desserts, indulgences, London, memories, Prague
It’s a good day whenever self can participate in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge. The week’s Fun Foto Challenge is 2 ITEMS OR THE NUMBER 2.
Here are a couple of pics with ‘2 Items.’
Whipped Cheesecake, Drury Lane, London, May 2019
Bridge Near Prague’s Jewish Quarter (No time to look up the name of the bridge, self will just wing it!), May 2019
These two windows were directly across self’s in Hotel Aria, Prague, May 2019
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
June 16, 2019 at 7:44 pm (destinations, Family, Links, Niece, Places, Sundays, Traveling)
Tags: discoveries, memories, Prague, spring, vacation, websites
Self is joining a new Photo Challenge: Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #50 : TREES.
Thanks to viveka of My Guilty Pleasures for making self aware of this photo challenge.
The pictures below are from a trip to Prague that she took in late May with her niece, Irene.
1. Trees, Prague, May 2019 (next to the Spanish Synagogue)
2. Last Sunday in May 2019: Walking by the National Theatre, Prague
3. Afternoon Cruise Along the Vltava River
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
June 4, 2019 at 6:48 pm (Family, Food and Drink, Links, Places, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: Cee Neuner, favorites, humor, London, Miami University Press, restaurants
Self just got back from a trip to Ireland and England.
The last week of May, she met up with Amy Toland of Miami University Press and took her to her favorite London restaurant, Chez Nous, 22 Hanway Street. Self has been coming here since 2014, Julie is an amazing cook!
Julie, chef of Chez Nous on Hanway Street in London; Amy Toland, Managing Editor of Miami University Press
This cheeky picture of Harry and Meghan was hanging on the wall of a wee cheesecake shop on Drury Street:
Son was in London for work. Self spent time with her daughter-in-law, Jennie. Here’s Jennie in a London cab:
Love the prompt from Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge!
Stay tuned.
May 31, 2019 at 5:06 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Explorers, Recommended, Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: discoveries, English writers, exhibits, Fridays, history, inspiration, London, museums, novel
Self spent the morning at the Charles Dickens Museum on 48 Doughty Street, checking out the house where Dickens and his wife spent probably the two happiest years of their marriage. The house offers fascinating glimpses of the man’s domestic life, and the audio tour is highly recommended. She came away with a small fridge magnet showing her favorite painting of Dickens: he sits in his study, surrounded by a cloud of his inventions.
She saw a very distressed copy of David Copperfield and read that this copy “travelled with Robert Falcon Scott and his men to Antarctica in 1910. When half of Scott’s men were stranded in an ice cave for 7 months, they read to each other every night for comfort and entertainment. After 60 nights they finished David Copperfield and, as one of the men wrote, they were very sorry to part with him.”
Dickens also exists in manga form!
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
May 30, 2019 at 9:09 am (Links, Places, Traveling)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Cork, Ireland, London, museums, spring
It’s been a while since self participated in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge. This week’s is FEET AND LEGS!
Here are some pictures from self’s current trip that relate to the theme:
Socks from the V & A Gift Shop: Saw the Mary Quant Exhibit
Cork, Ireland, May 2019: Her ballerina flats have gotten very tattered on this trip, she may have to discard!
Paradiso, Cork, May 2019: She bought the Converse sneakers in London within days of her arrival. They have taken quite a beating since this picture was taken: scuffed and smudged everywhere.
Trips really do a number on her shoes.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
May 29, 2019 at 3:49 pm (Books, Conversations, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, London, mysteries, novel, reading lists
Self decided to buy the hardcover yesterday, from London Review Bookshop. Then she toted it all over London, from Bloomsbury to Victoria Station to Waterloo Station to the National Theatre etc etc and, once back in Bedford Place, read until well past midnight.
Today, she’s toted it around further, from Bloomsbury to the Victoria & Albert (to see the Mary Quant exhibit — four stars!). That should prove how vested — how thoroughly enthralled — she is by this story’s beginning, about a hideously disfigured man stumbling into an inn on the Thames.
A midwife/nurse is summoned to treat him, and the nurse has to turn her back while the man is laid out on the table and all his clothes removed. When he is finally ready for examination, someone has discreetly preserved the nurse’s modesty by dropping a handkerchief over him.
The nurse “palpated bone, ligament, muscle, her eyes all the while diverted from his nakedness, as though her fingertips saw better than her eyes.”
Her white hands stood out against his darker skin.
“He is an out-of-doors man,” a grave-digger noted.
Truly masterful storytelling.
Stay tuned.
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 | viveka on Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #… |
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