September 24, 2020 at 12:39 am (Links, Lists, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Bloomsbury, British Museum, California, Cee Neuner, Garden, London, memories, photography
Happy to join Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week!
- 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:
- Travel with Intent – London Mural Festival, 2020
- 100 Country Trek – Bogota, Colombia
- Lin’s Doodles – The Palace of Pena in Sintra, Portugal
- The Life in My Years – San Francisco, California
- My Camera & I — Burano, Venice, Budapest, London, Szentendre (Hungary), old Hong Kong
- my guilty pleasures — Hong Kong Island, Vienna, Istanbul, Costa Nova (Portugal)
- Lillie-put – New England
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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September 7, 2020 at 8:18 pm (Flowers, Food and Drink, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links, postaday, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, websites
Inspired by viveka, whose adventures on my guilty pleasures self has been following for years! Though forced to spend 2020 sheltering at home, viveka’s posts make self incredibly thirsty!
Here’s the reason behind the week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge:
- People all over the world honor their workers in a variety of ways. In the U.S., we honor those who labor by setting aside the first Monday of September as Labor Day. But world-wide, people pour themselves into their work — paid or unpaid — with commitment, ingenuity, and a sincere desire to make a difference. For them, work has become more than just work. It has become a labor of love.
Here are a few of self’s own Labors of Love.
Self grew tomatoes, and planted more flowers.
The California fires are still blazing.
Take care of yourselves, fire fighters! Hope you have big pitchers of ice-cold beer waiting at the end of your shifts!
Stay safe.
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August 23, 2020 at 3:56 pm (Food and Drink, Links, postaday, Sundays, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, lens-artists photo challenge, patti moed, summer
Patti Moed: Take “a fresh look at ordinary, everyday objects — things that you see and use in your everyday life . . . “
For this challenge, self decided to go outside and see what she could see. Fires are raging in her county, but three things stand between them and her neighborhood: the I-280 freeway, foothills (at this time, dry as dry) and of course FIREFIGHTERS. The fires are at this moment 10% contained; it took firefighters almost a whole week to get there.
Since it is summer, her backyard is in fruit. She has three fig trees, one plum tree, one lemon tree, and two cherry trees. Busy, busy time. Because of this photo challenge, she decided to take pictures of homely garden furniture which she’s had for probably decades:
Here are a few peeks at the Everyday Objects of others:
Stupidity Hole
My Camera & I
Photographias
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 22, 2020 at 12:10 am (Weather)
Tags: Fridays, poetry, Swedish writers, translation
The sky is whitish haze and it is intensely hot. The nearest fire is 0% contained. Stay inside! the radio says. Until we give the order to evacuate.
Self is reading Tomas Transtromer.
(Also, praying. Does she feel lucky?)
Excerpt from The Clearing
— translated by Robin Fulton
Deep in the forest there’s an unexpected clearing that can be reached only by someone who has lost his way.
The clearing is enclosed in a forest that is choking itself. Black trunks with the ashy beard stubble of lichen.
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August 19, 2020 at 1:43 pm (Books, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, COVID Reading, historical novel, history, Napoleon, novellas, reading lists, summer, war novel
From Andrew Brown’s Introduction to Colonel Chabert
The Battle of Eylau, fought under a heavy fall of snow on February 1807 between two rows of frozen lakes, set 80,000 Russians against 60,000 French. The French infantry, subjected to heavy Russian cannonades, fell back in disarray . . . What saved the Grande Armée from complete defeat … were the French cavalry charges repeatedly launched straight at the centre of the Russian and Prussian lines. One of these charges was led by Colonel Chabert: the troops under his command broke through the Russian lines, but . . . Chabert himself was cut down from his horse by a Russian sabre, and disappeared under the hooves of the 1500-strong cavalry charge led by Murat.
Colonel Chabert is a fictional character. But — what a point of view!
(Fighting for the other side: Prince Andrei Bolkonsky of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Literature is amazing.)
Today the skies are smoky from wildfires. Wind is blowing from the east. (California just can’t seem to catch a break) Governor declared a state of emergency.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 14, 2020 at 5:38 pm (Links, postaday, Surprises, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Cee Neuner, Fridays, Garden, New Mexico
This Foto Challenge was hard. Nevertheless, self persisted, going over every inch of her front and backyard. Check out the other pictures on Cee Neuner’s blog, starting with hers. Amazing creativity this week!
This was a picture self took this morning: she’d been cutting dead twigs off her trees.
Backyard This Morning
Self took this picture a few weeks ago:
Hosta sprang up from a pile of dead holly leaves!
Finally: here’s a picture from December 2019, when she spent the holidays in New Mexico. She was on Santa Fe’s Museum Hill, and was fascinated by the deep snow:
Museum Hill, Santa Fe, December 2019
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 12, 2020 at 8:52 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Flowers, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, summer
This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is UNDER THE SUN.
Read to the very end of the post about the theme. The quote from E. M. Forster.
It is still summer. Can you believe it? Summer came. And stayed the usual length of time, despite pandemic and politics.
At the end of July, self visited Filoli Gardens, in Woodside. It had been decades since she’d last been.
Filoli Gardens, Woodside, July 2020
Here’s another picture of the gardens. Visitors wore masks and maintained social distancing. Lines to get in are long, because soooo many people want to get in, and those in line must stand six feet apart.
In contrast, here’s self’s own garden (sad, dry as the foothills). She took this picture just a few minutes ago:
The Backyard Today
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 10, 2020 at 3:00 pm (Books, Lists, Places, Surprises, Weather)
Tags: biographies, COVID Reading, humor, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, summer
The Lazy B got about ten inches a year, barely enough, and in some years not that.
— p. 9, First: Sandra Day O’Connor
The first female justice on the US Supreme Court grew up on a cattle ranch called the Lazy B in Arizona, and the ranch hands (most from Mexico) named their horses Hysterectomy, Hemorrhoid, Idiot, and in one case, Swastika (in jest, self is sure)
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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July 13, 2020 at 5:45 pm (Flowers, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, postaday, Weather)
Tags: Garden, Mondays, Redwood City, seasons, spring
It’s summer, but the Lens-Artists Challenge this week is Spring.
So, nostalgia?
In spring, it’s all about the flowers. Her roses were blooming! Everything was blooming!
New Planter Basket, from Whole Foods
Front Yard: mid-May
Backyard: mid-May
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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June 15, 2020 at 6:25 pm (Books, Conversations, Personal Bookshelf, Weather)
Tags: causes, climate change, COVID Reading, environment, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, science writing
Self is reading fast as none of the arguments are new.
- “We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast.” — p. 198
There is a big, big elephant in the room, which is the impact of Greta Thunberg, who is never mentioned. (She shows up, finally, on p. 257)
- “Any number of dead is a tragedy, but more than 10,000 die each day, globally, from the small–particulate pollution produced by burning carbon.” — p. 203
Never in a million years, at the time this book was published (2019) could anyone have imagined that a pandemic and the need to find a vaccine would soon eclipse climate change in urgency.
Back from picking up prescriptions (which always require a doctor’s visit: $162). She catches a Gavin Newsom presser. He’s addressing the ongoing need for masks. This morning, self asked the doctor if he had a test. He did, but it cost $150. He reassured her that all of the patients he’d tested had tested negative.
“Do they all live in the area?” she asked.
“Some of them,” he said.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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