Hunting Season…

This week’s prompts for Ashley Sisk’s Scavenger Hunt Sunday are Water, Empty, Fresh, Weathered and Ordinary.  Here are my entries.

I took this photo of WATER in Brookfield, Massachusetts.  This is Quaboag Pond one of my favorite photographic subjects.  The day I took this shot, the sky was just plain fantastic!

I don’t think I am alone when the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of EMPTY is a chair.

I also don’t think I’m alone when the first thing that pops into my head when I think of FRESH is a lemon. Here we have lemon fresh and fresh lemon…

This old WEATHERED barn door sits in our front yard and I put a couple of old, weathered hydrangeas in front of it.

Here’s an ORDINARY No Parking sign.  I didn’t notice until I began editing this photo that there is quite a bit of ordinary dog poop sitting under it.

Random 5 Friday...

I jumped into my Way Back Machine yesterday and went back to Santa Barbara, California, and there abouts where Greg and I spent some time in 2011.  I found five random pics from California that I liked and decided to post them today.  For no particular reason other than I just kind of felt like it.

To go along with the five random photos, I'm also hooking up with Random 5 Friday at A Rural Journal.  Thanks, Nancy!

1)  I was cruising around Pinterest the other day and saw one of my flickr pics pinned.  It was a photo I took of some tile work in Morocco.  At first I didn't realize it was mine and thought, “Oh, someone else has been there.  That’s cool.”  Then I realized it was me who had been there.  I don’t mind that someone pinned my pic, but it’s just kind of funny to see it there pinned by a complete stranger.

2)  It felt a lot like spring here today.

3)  Until the day I die, I will never understand why women wear stiletto heels.

4)  When I write, I almost always finish my sentences.  When I talk, I have a heck of a time finishing a sentence.  What’s up with that?

5)  I stayed up too late reading last night but I finished my book, Black Seconds by Karin Fossum.  I enjoyed it.  I also enjoyed watching Syracuse U beat Indiana in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, which is really why I was up so late.  Go Orange!

Archive dipping...

I dipped into my archives today and messed around with a photo I had no intention of leaving on my hard drive.  It is a challenge that I like....trying to turn something mediocre into something that I actually like.  Here it is for Tuesday Muse.

Scavenger Hunt Sunday…

Another week gone by and here we are at Scavenger Hunt Sunday.  Prompts this week were:  Asian, Wavy, Draw, Soft and Texture.  Here are my entries.

My son Evan, who is now working at Quinnsigamond Community College (YAY!), was on Spring Break this week so we went out to lunch at one of our favorite Thai restaurants, The Thai House, in East Brookfield, Massachusetts.  Here’s my cup of tea for ASIAN.

Nice WAVY, green lettuce:

A few years ago, Greg got me some drawing lessons for Christmas.  I went faithfully for about six weeks until I ran out of the free-to-me lessons and then I quit.  I enjoyed the lessons a lot and worked fairly diligently while I was taking them, but I just couldn’t keep up the discipline of practicing once I stopped taking the lessons…sort of the way I was with the piano as a kid.  Oh, well…  Here’s one of my practice DRAWings that I dug up for this Sunday.  Note that I decided to draw one of my favorite things,

 implements for coffee making.

SOFT yarn…I am in the middle of making an African flower afghan.

I brought these forsythia branches in last week to force and they are a nice bit of cheery yellow in our kitchen right now.  I took them back outside this morning to take their picture and used a bokeh TEXTURE that I found on picmonkey.com to jazz them up.

Multi-tasking Friday…

I decided to kill two birds with one stone today and participate in Friday’s Fences and in A Rural Journal’s Random 5 Friday.  Damn, I’m good…

Taken last year in Charleston, South Carolina

My Random 5 

1. I found out earlier this week that Worcester, Massachusetts, which is the closest city to where we live, has received the dubious honor of winning The Golden Snow Globe Award for being the U.S city with the most snowfall this winter measured in inches.  At 108.9 inches, they beat out the runner up Syracuse, New York by about 12 inches.  Yes, it’s been one of those years…

2. When I’m on Facebook at four in the morning, I’m always amazed that I’m not the only one.  You people need to get some sleep!

3. I looked out the window this morning to see turkey tracks in the snow.  That made me smile.  You know, their feet are almost as big as my hands.

4. I miss my cats terribly.  But it is not time to replace them yet.  Well, special little beings that they were, they can never really be replaced, but you know what I mean.

5. I am currently involved in a discussion group about Voluntary Simplicity using the curriculum from the Northwest Earth Institute.  This week, one of the things we talked about was multi-tasking and how it is not necessarily such a good thing.  But apparently, old habits die hard.

A black and white night…

Like many people in the world today, I struggle with bouts of insomnia.  The magic hour for me is usually right around 4:00 a.m.  My eyes spring open and I lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling thinking, “WTF!  Not again.”  Normally, I just pick up whatever book I’m reading and read for a while.  Between five minutes and an hour later, I am back in dreamland.   But now and then, it just doesn’t work.  I can’t shut my mind off and I just have to get up.  That happened to me the other night.  I decided to get up and work on editing some photos…a practice I find very relaxing.  In the light of day, I checked out what I did the night before and here is what I saw:

I almost deleted it without a thought.  To me it looks like an illustration out of an Edgar Allen Poe story or something sinister like that.  But I guess, I was just in the mood for black and white in the middle of the night because I did a couple more, although these seem a little cheerier.

Personally, while I have nothing against black and white photography, I really like color.

  So here’s to a good night’s sleep!

Can you believe this??

I have to look at the calendar again and confirm that it is the middle of March.  Can it really be that we are expecting another snow storm this late in the game??   The answer is, yes, indeed, we are supposed to get 5 to 8 inches of snow tonight and a wintry mix tomorrow that will probably freeze it into an unworkable mess.  What can one do?  One certainly can’t fight Mother Nature.  Well, the only thing I can think of doing is to post a few more flower pics that I took in the Smith College greenhouse and sit back and ride it out.

So here you are.

It’s sprung!

Well, I guess spring hasn’t sprung officially yet but yesterday I got a really nice spring preview.  Carrie, my daughter, and I went to the Smith College Annual Bulb Show and we got enough spring there in one dose to take us through the next few days of winter.

 

Though we have been to the Smith College Annual Mum Show a couple of times in the fall, this was my first time at the spring show.  I must say, it was a wonderful color and fragrance blast after the gloomy winter we’ve had.

 

Of course, I took a lot of pictures.  But the ones I like best are the ones of the tulips and that is what I am posting today.  Here’s to spring!

Here we are enjoying the show.  This was taken in a gazing ball so we are a little distorted.  Well, at least in real life, Carrie's nose doesn't quite lean so far to the right.

I have a problem…

I don’t know about you, but when I need to reach into my photo archives like I did last week, I have a tendency to get lost.  The problem is that I take far too many photos.  And while I try to keep up with them by deleting the obviously bad ones and loads of mediocre ones right after I upload them,

 I always have a backlog.

When I had my knee replaced last October, I thought I would be able to sit around for a while and really weed out more photos but I had no idea that I would have no attention span post-op for about two months  and I surely didn’t realize that sitting for any length of time would get really uncomfortable.

  So I never got to all those photos.

Well, last week when I was searching around for my ten best shots for my Art Guild night, I got ensnared by the beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.  Greg and I visited there a year ago January and I was too busy around that time to really look at what I brought back digitally.  So the other day I just got stuck.  Here are a few photos pulled from my archives of some doors and windows from Charleston, South Carolina.

I have no idea why there was a red dot on this building.

Textures are us....

I decided to jump on the texture bandwagon today and join Texture Tuesday at the Kim Klassen cafe.  It's fun playing with texture.  

And while I'm at it, why not hook up to Tuesday Muse at A Rural Journal?

Scavenger Hunt Sunday is here again…

I found this week’s prompts for Ashley Sisk’sScavenger Hunt Sunday particularly challenging this week.  Well, cookies were easy and it gave me an opportunity to do something I haven’t done in months, which is bake.  Other than that the prompts were:  #5, Word of the Day, Sharing, Wiggle and, of course, Cookies.  Here’s what I came up with…

#5:  I wracked my brain to think of something around here that had the #5 on it with no success.  So I gathered up five books that I like and took a photo of them.  I also put five stones on top of the five books.  Why...I don't know.

Word of the Day:  I took this word from Dictionary.com.  I like checking the Word of the Day on there when I remember.  Usually it's a word that I would never use because I can't remember it five minutes after looking at it, but I enjoy the practice anyhow.    Of course it's up to you to decide whether or not I interpreted bibelot properly.

Sharing:  I made cookies for this Hunt and there were plenty to share.

Wiggle:  I had nothing for this until Greg got a plate of spaghetti for lunch the other day.  Spaghetti wiggles, doesn't it?

Cookies:  An excuse to make my very favorite kind of cookie - the plain, old fashioned oatmeal cookie with lots of nuts.  They may not be much to look at, but they sure tasted good.  I wish I could have shared them with you.

By the way, this is what it looked like outside while I was baking those cookies.

We ended up with close to 20 inches of snow when they had predicted 8 inches.  I can tell you that there is a BIG difference between 20 and 8 when it comes to snow.  But that was Friday.  After two gorgeous days, the snow pack is less than half of what it was.  Spring is on its way.