Willy Nilly Lighthouses…

1.  If you like lighthouses, Prince Edward Island is the place for you.  There are 63 lighthouses listed on the brochure I picked up about PEI lighthouses – some are still active (37 according to the brochure), some decommissioned, some private and some are non-accessible by car.  The brochure states, “With 63 lighthouse and rangelight buildings, this averages one lighthouse for every 34 square miles, which we believe is the highest concentration of lighthouses in any province or state in North America.”  So if you like lighthouses, PEI is most definitely the place for you.

I never really identified this one.  I think it is one of the Malpeque Outer Range Lighthouses.  Correct me if I'm wrong.

2.  Actually, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like lighthouses.  I can’t put my finger on the reason for the appeal, but they definitely do have a romance about them.  It’s interesting to me because my understanding is that the life of a lighthouse keeper back in the day was pretty rough and very lonely.   Of course, these days, modern working lighthouses are automated.  There are no rugged, haunted characters in residence in those stalwart buildings nowadays whose mission is to weather storms and winds and the wild rages of the sea in order to warn others about the sea’s potential dangers.   Computers do it now.  Pop! goes the romance.

North Rustico Lighthouse...with wires.

3.  If you would like to read a book that has a lighthouse keeper as a character (albeit, a short-lived character), I would recommend The Bird Artist by Howard Norman.  Here’s a description that I found on Goodreads:  “Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime--a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women. “   I liked this book quite a lot.  It was a five-star read for me.   It’s a moody and interesting piece that is definitely engrossing.

Seacow Head Lighthouse on a very rainy day.

4.  Point Prim lighthouse is said to be the oldest on PEI.  It was built in 1846 and is one of only a few there that is constructed of brick.  These days, as you can see, it is covered with wooden shingles.  But you can still see the brick if you go inside.

Point Prim Lighthouse.

Point Prim again.  Wouldn't this make a cool Fiat commercial?

5.  I thought that this quote I found might give you a little chuckle.  Conan O’Brien said, “I’ve been described as a lighthouse in the middle of a bog:  Brilliant but useless.”  Kind of like my blog…lol.  Although I am not sure about the brilliant part.  And by the way, I am not an expert on identifying these lighthouses, so if you happen across the blog and know better, please let me know.

Cape Egmont Lighthouse.

Linking up to Tanya's Willy Nilly Friday 5

on Around Roanoke...a Daily Photo Blog.

Keeping a sharp edge…

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
  That doesn’t happen much though.

~J. D. Salinger, A Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger said it much better than I could although it seems to happen to me more often than it did to Holden Caulfield.  Because I sure wish I could call George R. R. Martin, Haruki Murakami, J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Henning Mankell, Kate Atkinson and the list goes on and on and on and on…although I would be too tongue-tied to say anything that made sense.

LINKING TO A RURAL JOURNAL'S 

TUESDAY MUSE!

Photographic experiment or expediency?

The other day, the Red Sox were playing a day game and I sat down to watch.  At the same time, I was teaching my daughter Carrie how to crochet.  All of a sudden, I realized that I had done nothing for my
Flickr 365 Project and had to do something quick before the light went away.  What to do…what to do?  I didn’t have a clue.  I happened to walk past the bookcase and spied an old dictionary.  I took it outside and put it on the table and started looking for inspiration.

I found inspiration but wasn’t satisfied with just that, so I started tinkering with the dictionary.  I tried one of those “heart” pics that you seen now and then.  Nah, too trite, although I do heart books and dictionaries a lot.

Messing around some more, I thought about a sort of fan or peacock tale.  Still not right…

Then I started fooling with the focus and came up with these.

I picked the second one of the two as my 365 and called it a day.

Now, here’s the funny part.  It’s an old family story of ours about a conversation that was overheard between my two of my little brothers one day when they had returned home from school.  One of them was in the process of learning to read and learning how to use the dictionary.  According to him, Sister Mary Whoever stood up in front of the classroom holding her Webster’s high over her head and declared to all her students, “You know, children, your dic is your best friend.”  My brothers, it seems, were not too young to understand double entendre.  And we’ve chuckled about that over the years.

But, you know, people, sometimes your dic really does save the day.

It’s actually a different Queen Anne…

I just finished a book that I am going to recommend to anyone out there who likes historical novels.  The book is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and it is the story of Henry VIII from the viewpoint of Thomas Cromwell.  I liked this book very much and am looking forward to reading the next installment Bringing up the Bodies.  The first book Wolf Hall takes you through the machinations it took to get Henry married off to Anne Boleyn in 1533 but drops you before he drops her…and of course, before her head drops as well.

Well, it’s just a coincidence that I have always thought that Queen Anne’s Lace was named after Anne Boleyn.  I guess that’s because she was always the most famous Queen Anne that I had ever heard of.  But on doing some research, I found that Anne Boleyn is not mentioned at all in relation to Queen Anne’s Lace but some think “it was Anne (1574 - 1619), the first Stuart Queen Anne, who was brought over from Denmark at fourteen years of age to be a Queen to King James of Scotland.  Others argue it was Anne (1665 - 1714), the daughter of William and Mary, and the last monarch in the Stuart line.”  Both apparently were expert tatters and lace makers.

 

Well, regardless of which Anne is involved, it seems to me that we have more Queen Anne’s Lace around these parts this summer than I can ever remember.  It is a beautiful flower and it deserves to be treated like royalty now and then.

Heading out for a long weekend.  See you all next week.