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!

Posting Some Quick Blues…

Well, folks, it’s that time of year.  Today is Greg’s birthday and it’s a big one!  We also have a graduation party to attend.  I talked to my sister Cindy this week and she reminded me that summer has only twelve weekends so it’s best to make the most of each one.  Well, we will be doing that today.

I want to get a little caught up on my “52 Weeks of Blue” project and post five more photos.  Meant to do it yesterday and to hook up with Willy-nilly Friday 5, but ran out of time.  So without further ado, here they are.

Week 16:  Here is a little bunch of Striped Squill.  I love these little flowers.  They are so cheery.  Even their name is cheery to me.

Week 17:  And here is the Striped Squill’s sister – the Siberian Squill.

Week 18:  I took this photo while floating through the car wash.  It is in memory of a friend, Steve Morse, who passed away in April from cancer.  Steve was the leader of our photo group at the Massasoit Art Guild.  Steve was a professional photographer.  His unbounded enthusiasm and willingness to share his photographic talents with us amateurs was so appreciated.  He is missed.

Week 19:  Periwinkle and ajuga from our yard.  Why is it that many spring flowers are blue, but few summer flowers are?  I wonder.

Week 20:  And here’s an ajuga up close.  I love seeing these come up in the yard, but the minute the grass is cut, there they go.  They are as fleeting as spring…

So there’s my next five weeks of blue.  In reality, I’m going to post week #23 on Flickr today.  I’m a little behind.  One of these days I will catch up with life, but I’m not holding my breath on that.  If I did, I might turn a bit blue.

Willy-nilly Friday 5: Recycling the Blues…

1.  I’m posting the last five weeks of my 52 Weeks of Blue today and since Willy-nilly Friday 5 is back, I’m being otherwise random.

2.  When I was a kid, I remember my Grandpa Oscar playing music.  He could play pretty much any stringed instrument he picked up, but my favorite was the banjo.

  I still love listening to banjo music to this day.

3.  Last night, I got a real treat.  My son Evan drove over from Worcester and we piled into the car and joined my daughter Carrie for dinner in Northampton at a nice tapas place called Ibiza.  Then Carrie left for her photo club meeting and Evan and I went to the Calvin Theater in Noho and got to hear the great banjo player Bela Fleck and his equally talented wife Abigail Washburn.  What fun!  Mark Twain said, "A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't." If that’s the case, I’m glad I wasn’t in the company of gentlemen last night.  The opening act was Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.  They were fab, too.  A terrific night all around.

4.  When I looked at my calendar today, I saw that it was my cat Clouseau’s birthday.  Clouseau was the first cat that Greg and I adopted after we got married.  I loved that cat!  He was a gorgeous Tuxedo cat with a great personality.  He would have been 35 today.  I don’t suppose any domestic cat has ever lived that long, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t missed…still.

5.  The snow is gone almost completely.  Spring has sprung.  Still waiting for the forsythia to pop, but that should happen any day now.  Have a great weekend!

Linking up with Tanya's Willy-nilly Friday 5!

Just for grins, I thought I would throw in an old photo of my Grandpa and his twin brothers Hobart and McKinley.  Grandpa is the one in the middle.  I love this old photo!

And here's one of me and the birthday boy.  This was probably taken in 1981.  He was the best cat ever! Even though he doesn't look too comfortable in this pic, he never complained.

Willy-nilly Random Stuff: Time for the Blues

1.  I’m continuing on with my 52 Weeks of Blue challenge.  This is what I am doing.  I am taking a photo once a week that has something of the color blue as its central theme.  Those are the chosen photos I’m posting today.

Week 6:

2.  Day before yesterday, I felt really weird.  After getting up at 7:30 am, I went back to bed at 10 am, slept until about 6 pm, got up watched the news, ate dinner and watched a couple of other TV shows and went back to bed around 9:30 and slept through the night.  Could this be payback for losing that one hour this past weekend or am I just catching up in some other way?  Who knows?  Weird, eh?

Week 7:

3.  Speaking of time, I still have that crazy atomic clock that sits next to my bed.  It is exactly 11 minutes slow, which means that it lost another minute in the last year or so.  It has no knobs or buttons for changing the time because it’s supposed to adjust to the atomic clock all by itself.  Every fall, it faithfully falls back and every spring, it faithfully springs forward.  It’s just 11 minutes off.   It may be something about me and time.  We apparently don’t mix.  I can’t wear a watch either.  I kill them.  So, if you want to stay current, I’d say you had better stay away from me.

Week 8:

This was taken in the window of the department store Faces in Northampton, Massachusetts,
which is closing after 40 years in business.

4.  My son Evan and I joined some friends yesterday evening and went to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail on the big screen at our local movie theater Cinemagic.  I haven’t laughed so much in a very long time.  The movie is forty years old this year, but I was surprised to see that easily half the audience, including my son and  four others in our little group, hadn’t been born yet when the movie was produced.  That must make the movie timeless in a way.

Week 9:

I have yet to lose my marbles completely.

5.  I was saddened to hear about Terry Pratchett dying.  In case you are unfamiliar with him, he was a writer of fantasy books and creator of the Discworld series.  I’ve spent many very entertaining hours with him over the last few years.  Pratchett had a rare form of Alzheimer's disease, which killed him at age 66 which was too young, in my opinion.  He said, “So much universe and so little time.”  He sure was right about that.  RIP, Terry Pratchett.

Week 10:

Happily hooking up with A Rural Journal's Random 5 Friday:

Around Roanoke's Willy-nilly Friday Five:

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!

Some Random Photos & Some Random Thoughts…

I've got the blues...

Pug Cam

1)  I have always thought that I have a problem with summer doldrums, because there gets to be a point in the summer when I just can’t wait for it to be over.    But I am beginning to realize that I get this way each season around this time.  I think I just love the change.  Right now, I am heartily sick of green and wanting the more variegated autumn tones.  At some point in the autumn, I will be looking forward to the blues, greys and browns of winter.  Then, of course, it will be the spring pastels…  While most people’s lives revolve around the sun, apparently mine revolves around the color wheel.

2)  But with the doldrums, comes a distinct lack of creativity, which is why I haven’t been posting so much lately.   I need to turn that around.

3)  I went to the grocery to get a snack to take down to the beach tonight for our regular Friday Cocktails at the Beach.  My intention was olives, pita chips and humus.  I forgot the humus.  As I was trying to figure out if it is worth another trip, Greg called and said he would pick some up on his way home from playing golf.  Yay, Greg!  The traffic is pretty horrible today.  People are getting their last summer vacation licks in.  The Mass Turnpike is a mess so that means there are strangers wandering around our town trying to figure out how to get where they are going using alternate routes.  Bah humbug!

4)  You know, the weather here in Massachusetts has been just fabulous since we got back from our trip to Ohio.  Here’s to that!  Earlier this summer, I wouldn’t have wanted to spend any time outside…not even for Friday Cocktails at the Beach.

5)  I am doing something creative actually.  I’m crocheting two little monsters.  They don’t have personalities yet since I haven’t put on their faces, but I will show you how they turn out.  I hope to be done with them early next week.

LINKING TO A RURAL JOURNAL'S

RANDOM 5 FRIDAY!