More of the Blues…

I am continuing my 52 Week Project – 52 Weeks of Blue – but it hasn’t always been easy.

Week 31 was a challenge so out came my blue marbles.  I decided to manipulate the photo by layering a copy of the inverted photo on top to create the bright shadows.  I messed with it for quite a while, but eventually liked the way it looked.

We were in Vermont during Week 32 and I came across this rustic old blue door in downtown Rutland.  I think it has a lot of character.

We actually passed this old place in Brimfield, Massachusetts, home of the famous Brimfield Flea Market, on our way home from Vermont and I made a special trip back there to take a photo of this old door for Week 33.  This used to be Joe’s Package Store, but it is obviously closed these days.  I’m glad they didn’t tear it down until I had a chance to snap at it.  

The Brimfield Flea is going on as I type this right now.  While it wreaks havoc in our town traffic-wise and in the local hotels and restaurants, it is a fun experience, which I often liken to going through your old aunt's attic.  Not that I've ever had an old aunt with an attic full of treasures, but some of you must have.

Week 34 was a busy one for us and it culminated in a trip to Bangor, Maine for a wedding.  I thought it would be easy to find something blue on that trip, but when I looked through my photos, this was the best I could come up with.  It was a disappointing blue week.

I had to get creative with Week 35, too.  I have a lot of blue glass and took some pictures of a few pieces of it in the bright sunlight.  I wasn’t pleased with any of the results, but started messing with this one and layered a photo of flowers on top of it.  I like the idea, but I think I will play with it a little more in the future and see if I can do it better.

In other news, I'm heading to Ohio tomorrow morning to help my sisters and brothers with my mother's estate sale.  They have done so much work getting ready for this, that it's the least I can do.  My mother, who was very reluctant to go into assisted living, seems to have settled in at this point and has not tried to escape recently.  There's no doubt that getting older isn't for the fainthearted and dealing with loved ones getting older is almost as difficult, but it is the way life goes.

Time for the Blues…

Here are the next installments of my 52 Week Project:  52 Weeks of Blue.  I think that these may show you that I’m have had some moments of desperation with this, but I’ve managed to get something every week.  Look around the next time you’re outside and tell me why, except for the sky (which I hope is blue where you are), there are so few blue things in nature.  Clearly, if I had been given the box of crayons when the world came into existence, there would be way more blue out there, particularly of the Robin's Egg variety.  But too late for that now.

Week 26:  Woohoo!  Halfway through!  I deserve a Blue Ribbon for that!

Week 27:  For Mother’s Day this year, my daughter Carrie gave me a set of origami Peace Cranes that she folded.  I tried to take their photos on a number of occasions and finally came up with one I could live with.  I love these Peace Cranes that she brings around now and then.  They make me happy and hopeful.

Week 28:  Truly a week of blue desperation.  I save the fortunes from the cookies when we go out to Dynasty, which is our favorite Chinese restaurant around here.  They sit in my wallet.  I find the fortunes to be pretty funny in general and picked the one in the picture because, on that particular day, it made the most sense of the ones I was carting around.

One of the ones I rejected said, “Anything you do, do it well.  The last thing you want is to be sorry for what you didn’t do.”

  I'm thinking that maybe it should have said, "If you're going to do something, do it.  The last thing you want is to be sorry for what you didn't do."

  Or maybe it should have said, "Any thing you do, do it well.  The last thing you want is to be sorry for doing a shirty job."

  Those original sentences seem to be disconnected to me.  They should have separated them and saved the second sentence for a different  cookie.

  Of course, if you're one of those people who automatically add the words "IN BED" after your fortune, then they all make sense, but most especially in the third case.

  What the heck!  It’s all for fun, isn’t it?

...IN BED.

Week 29:  Greg and I went out for a quick lunch at Applebee’s that week and I was saved by this vehicle in the parking lot.  Thank goodness it was blue!  What a contraption!  It’s a motor scooter with a car-like body on it.  I picked the first photo for my project, but will put up another one here so you can see the inside of this buggy.  It's actually a better photo anyhow.  In any case, this buggy is kind of cool!

Week 30:  had me seeing yellow, because that was the week we went down to Griswold, Connecticut to see the sunflowers, but on the way down to Buttonwood Farm we stopped at Sweet Evalina’s Stand in Woodstock for lunch.   They have this neat old retro sign on their building and I decided to pick out the blue elements of it and do some selective coloring.  I’ll post it both ways.

So in  closing:  Anything you do this weekend, do it well.  The last thing you want is to have a blue weekend...IN BED.

Blue, blue, blue…

I have been continuing on with my 52 Weeks of Blue project.  Here are the next five in the series:

Week 21:

This is yet another great sign we saw on our trip to North Carolina.  I am finding it very hard to believe that we’ve been home from there for a month already.  Where does the time go??

Week 22:

When we got home, the Bluets were in bloom.  I think they are just wonderful, cheerful little flowers.  They are gone now that it has gotten warmer, but they are not forgotten.

Week 23:

I was beginning to get desperate during Week 23 because nothing was flipping my blue switch so I decided to take a ride in the country.  I found this beautiful old colonial house, Deer Meadow Farm,  that was built circa 1780.  Being close to an antique myself, I am way past wanting to live in an antique house.  Our fifty year old home has enough problems, thank you very much.  But it never fails to send me back to Memory Lane when I see a beautiful place like this.  When we first moved up to these parts, a house like this was just what I wanted, although I have to admit to being a bit more partial to the style of the Cape house than to the traditional Colonial.  I have to admit that these days all I want is a two bedroom condo that was built within the last ten years with all the modern amenities and none of the work.

Week 24:

“No water, no life, no blue, no green” is part of a quote from Sylvia Earle.  According to Wikipedia, Earle “is an American Marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer.  Since 1998, she has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.  Earle was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and was named by Time Magazine as its first Hero for the Planet in 1998.”  I’ve seen two versions of this quote, the one I quoted above and used in my photo and this one:  “No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.” Regardless of Earle’s exact words, I think the message is clear.  The ocean and water, in general, is our most precious natural resource and we need to remember that every day.

Week 25:

Isn’t it so nice when someone gives you something out of the blue?  This beautiful little vase of flowers was a wonderful gift from the two lovely women who come to help me keep some order in this house every other week.  The charming pink roses have gone by now, but I have vowed to fill it with wildflowers all summer long and right now, it is filled with wild yarrow.  I love it!

Normally, I would be linking up on Friday with Tanya's Around Roanoke Willy-nilly Friday 5, but Tanya is taking a little break for the month of July to move houses.  Hoping Tanya has a easy and uneventful move and that all of you in the USA have an easy and uneventful Fourth of July!

Willy-Nilly Friday Five: 52 Weeks of Blue…

Week 1 – I have been kind of directionless with my photography since I finished my 365 Project on Flickr.  So late last year, I decided I would take up another project but not one quite so intense.  I decided that a 52 Week Project would be a more reasonable idea.  That means that I would pick a theme and take a photo using that theme at least once a week.  I thought about it for a while and came up with a few ideas:  black & white, square format, up-close, food, texture, coffee, numbers & letters and so on.  But what I decided on was simply the color blue.  Blue is my favorite color but when I took a look at my Flickr photostream, I realized that I had almost no blue in it.  That made me think that coming up with 52 Weeks of Blue would be a challenge.  I was right about that.

This is the one I decided on for Week 1:

But I rejected these:

Week 2 – I decided not to put too many parameters on the project other than that blue has to be a main color of the subject of the photo.  In other words, I can’t consider using a picture of a red house with the blue sky as the background as my Blue Shot.  But if the house were blue and the sky red, that would work.

This was the only one I liked for Week 2:

Week 3 – Something I also thought about was that there are many shades of blue.  Most likely, some things I consider to be blue, someone else may think of as green or purple or even grey.  A Google search revealed that there are actually sixty-five shades of blue with names, but I’m not going to try to capture a different blue every week.  I’m not that anal.  I decided that if it looks blue to me that will be good enough for me.  I’m going with my own interpretation of blue.

Here's the one for Week 3:

But I rejected this one.  Do you think the trim on this house is blue?

Week 4 – I got off to a pretty good start because we were traveling and there were blue buildings and signs there for the taking.  But once we returned home, it definitely got harder.  We’ve had some blue skies, but the snow has covered a lot of the blue stuff around here.  But not to be discouraged, I got some of my blue things from around the house and took pictures of them.   I have a lot of blue things.  I even have a cobalt blue bottle that I can’t bear to recycle because of the way the sun hits it in the morning.  But I sure don’t want to use all of my blue things up at the beginning of the project.

Here's Week 4:

But I considered this:

Week 5 – So now I am almost a tenth done with the 52 Weeks of Blue.  With my last 52 week project (52 Weeks of Purple Monkey) I was one week short.  I just couldn’t figure out that 52^nd thing to do with my Purple Monkey.  Surely there are enough blue things lying around so that I will be a success this time.  We’ll see.

This is it for Week 5 and yes, that bigger blue bottle is a gem in my book, but I might just keep the smaller one, too.  That blue is heavenly to me.

Linking up to Tanya's Willy-Nilly Friday Five!