Old Storrs Barn…

Last week Greg, Olive and I took a ride down to Connecticut in search of barns.  Well, they just went out for the ride.  I was in search of barns.  Our ramblings took us to Storrs, Connecticut where the University of Connecticut is located.  But before we got to the campus, we came across this beautiful old building and Greg graciously turned around so that we could get a better look at it.

There is a sign on the building that says “Storrs Barn” with a date that is unreadable but I imagine it is something like 1860.  But I can’t be sure.  An internet search turned up nothing about this particular barn but did have lots to say about the barns on the UConn campus.  So I know nothing about this building other than I think it is pretty cool.  We were passing right at the golden hour so it really stood out in that beautiful light.

The sign over the door definitely says "Storrs Barn," but I can't read the date.

We'll be heading out in the morning.  See you when we get back.  Meanwhile, take it easy!

Linking to Barn Charm at Bluff Area Daily.

Sunday Hunt…

It was another challenging week on the Scavenger Hunt…at least it was for me.  But I managed to get them all in.  And here they are:

Crossed:  I have been doing counted cross stitch for quite a few years now.  Here is a shot of one of my samplers completed in 1999.  I do finish a project occasionally.  This one was done, I thought, but at the very bottom of the sampler are four or five stitches that I forgot to cross (not shown here.)  I didn’t notice it until after it was framed.  Oh, well…

A Glimpse:  Here is a look into the Brookfield, Massachusetts town cemetery.  Isn’t this entry arch beautiful?  It is one of my favorite cemeteries to wander around in on a beautiful fall day

 as it is full of maples.

Handwritten:  I have terrible handwriting but manage to make it legible enough here.  This is one of my favorite quotes from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows.  I will let you know here that we are off in a few days to travel the world again.  That’s what gave me the inspiration for this photo.  I might have time to post one more time before we leave but I have laundry and packing to look forward to so I might not be spending a lot of time with my camera and the computer.

Bliss:  Every morning my bliss comes in the form of organic, fair trade, dark roast coffee except when we’re on the road when I will drink any coffee as long as it contains caffeine.

Gray:  Here’s my grey Baggallini.  I love this bag!  I love its jaunty hot pink lining.  I love Baggallinis in general and carry nothing else these days.  I own one in each size for different occasions.  They never wear out and they keep me organized.  Well, sort of...  So here’s to my grey Baggallini!

Linking to Scavenger Hunt Sunday.

A trip to the tropics…

This winter the days have been grey and dreary here in Central Massachusetts (USA).  We don’t even have the sparkle of snow to brighten things up.  It sure is nice to have a friend like Donna S., my gardener friend, who has a greenhouse.  Yesterday she invited me over to take a look at her Birds of Paradise plant who has decided to bloom.   So I loaded Olive, the pug, in the car and we took off for a little visit to the tropics.

Donna also has a banana plant or two in her greenhouse that she and her husband Don pulled out of the ground to winter over.

And some kind of citrus fruit that tastes a bit like a lemon.

Olive was rather partial to the cyclamen and had to spend quite a lot of time sniffing it.

It was a lovely afternoon.


I almost forgot.  In today's comic Rhymes with Orange, Hillary Price pays homage to the clever and fiendish squirrel.  Click HERE to check it out.  It's very funny.

Barns in need of paint…

I am just about to finish off my barn collection from our trip to Roanoke, Virginia (USA).  The barns I’m posting today are a little on the rough side and definitely could use some paint, but I like them.  They are utilitarian and beautiful.  So here’s the last of my road trip barns…  Since I was feeling a little panicked, Greg decided that it was such a beautiful day we would take a ride down to Connecticut so that I could get a fresh supply of barns to work on for next week.

Will be linking up to Barn Charm on Bluff Area Daily.

Hunting Sunday…

The prompts this week for Scavenger Hunt Sunday were pretty darn difficult for me.  But they were also fun.   I’ve managed to come up with something for each and here they are:

Love:  This is the face of unconditional love.  Any of you who are dog lovers know what I mean.  One thing that is great about Olive (and pugs in general, I think) is that she is an equal opportunity lover.  She loves me as much as she loves Greg and she loves our kids when they are around as much as she loves us.  She even loves strangers who come to the door.  A curly-tailed, bug-eyed bundle of love…that’s our Olive.

Duplicated:  Here are two Sharpies for the Cure.  I’ve had too many friends who have had to deal with breast cancer and wish it were as easy as buying Sharpies to find a cure.

Trend or Trending:  I figure this meant to suggest something that was trending on Twitter.  I tried Twitter for about three months a couple years ago but found that I had a hard time keeping my tweets to the allotted length.  I talk too much.  So I don’t tweet anymore or go on Twitter.  I’m also not into pop culture so would probably not know who the trend setters are these days, anyhow.  I don’t watch American Idol or Dancing with the Stars.  Heck, I didn’t even know who Adele was until she won the Grammy last week and she was all over the news.  But I do have the Dictionary.com app on my Droid.  And they have a list of trending words.  Words…that’s my kind of trend.  So that’s where this came from.

Paper:  Most paper comes from trees.  Save the trees.  Recycle please.  Earth Day Every Day.

Plastic:  I can’t believe what a hard time I had coming up with something plastic.  I mean, everywhere you look, there’s something plastic.  Duh!  I didn’t need to look any further than my camera bag.  Wish I had thought to dust them first.

Linking to Scavenger Hunt Sunday.

Hanging around…

I have a bunch of pictures hanging around on my hard drive that I just decided to look at yesterday.  They are shots from walks I’ve taken with my pug, Olive, over the last few days.  I decided that some of them weren’t so bad so I am going to post a few today.

Open water on Walker Pond in February.  We live in Massachusetts in the northeast United States.  This is something that is not normal.

But now and then on our walks, we came across some ice, usually in the shade under a big tree.

  We’ve seen very little ice this winter.

Here’s a close up of my favorite tree who lives down by the pond.

On one of our walks, we witnessed a horse kiss.  Now you don’t see that every day.  Or at least, I don’t.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Weaving the Blackstone...

Last week, Greg, Olive, the pug, and I went down to Pawtucket, Rhode Island (USA), to take a look at an art installation called Weaving the Blackstone.  This project is the work of sculptor, Donald Gerola.  It consists of colorful polyester, nylon, and polypropylene cords that are stretched across the Blackstone River in the area where the old Slater Mill sits.  It is a tribute to the city of Pawtucket and pays homage to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the textile industry that began there in 1790. 

I realize that art installations like this one aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.  But personally, I envy the person, in this case Mr. Gerola, who can look at a rushing river in the shadow of an old mill and imagine something like this.  And I admire even more the ability and stamina to carry it out.  The article from The Boston Globe states:  “It took two archers with high-powered bows - normally used to hunt bear - to get the cords from one side of the river to the other. Vandals cut them twice, forcing Gerola back to the drawing board. He says he spent countless hours with a machete and chain saw clearing brush and trees along the river to make the installation possible.”  Now, that’s dedication to public art, which is so important to our humanity. 

My photos don’t do it justice because I couldn’t get a good shot of the scope of the project.    So my suggestion is that if you find yourself in Pawtucket, RI, take a ride down to the Blackstone River and check it out.  I’m pretty sure you won’t be sorry.

The  cords are woven at three spots in the installation through over-sized heddles in order to emphasize the weaving theme.  Heddles are the part of the loom through which all threads pass.

Looking across the Blackstone River to the Slater Mill

Drive by shootings: Red Barn Red…

If you gave a kid a box of crayons and told him/her to draw a barn, I imagine that the kid would draw whatever barn is the vernacular in the area where they live.  Like the low metal roofed barns that TexWisGirl shows us from Texas or the white barns in Southern Pennsylvania that I posted last week.

But when I was a kid, if someone had handed me a box of crayons and told me to draw a barn, I would have drawn a big, square building and colored it in with whatever the closest crayon to red barn red was.

 

I love that color.  Red Barn Red! I even talked Greg into having our house stained a form of that color from the dull brown it was when we moved in.  I sometimes think of barns when I drive up our driveway.  I like to imagine some goats grazing nearby because goats are my farm animals of choice.  It takes some imagination though because we do sort of live in the woods and I’m not sure the goats would like that.  I actually know very little about goats, but I like them and I think about what fun it would be to have goats around now and then.

 

Here are some of the red barns I collected on our recent trip to Roanoke. For me, they are just the right kind of barn.

I used texture from Nancy @  A Rural Journal in this last shot.  Thanks, Nancy.

I'll be linking up to Barn Charm.

Sunday Scavenger Hunt: The results are in…

I made the commitment this week not to reach into my archives for any of the Scavenger Hunt photos. These were all taken within the last week.

Facial Feature:  Olive, the pug, and I went to visit the horses this week.  They are funny creatures, I think.  Even if they are way across the field, they have to come over to say “hi” to us.  I think this little blackish horse is very handsome and he posed very nicely while I took some pictures of him.

Shadow:  Well, you have to have light to have shadow.  This week I was either outside with my camera when the sun was behind the clouds or inside when it was bright and sunny so I didn’t get a very good shadow pic.  You were right, Debbie.  I should have saved my shadow picture from the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Spicy:  Greg and I took a ride down to Rhode Island last week to see an art installation on the Blackstone River called Weaving the Blackstone.  I was very impressed and will be posting some pictures from that later in the week.  On the way home, we stopped at Sam’s New York System & Restaurant and had a couple of hot dogs.  Please don't ask what "New York System" means.    I have no idea.  As long as it doesn't have anything to do with the Yankees, I'm ok with it.   Not terribly spicy but a little spicy.

Gold:  Of course, you can tell that these aren’t really gold nuggets but are actually Jelly Bellies.  

Fabric:  I like taking yarn and looping it around itself until it makes fabric.  This is a scarf I just finished crocheting for my daughter, Carrie, whose favorite color is orange.

Fence Friday: Take me home, country roads…

On our recent trip to Roanoke, Virginia (USA), we got off the highway and did a very nice stretch of road in West Virginia (WV State Rt. 259, I think) before we got on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I saw lots and lots of fences along the way on that road and on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  I’ll post the ones I like best today.

 

The John Denver song “Country Roads” kept going through my mind as we traveled down through West Virginia.  He calls it “almost heaven.”  They call it “wild and wonderful.”  I just call it beautiful.   There is another place I need to get back to with my camera and time to spare.

And, of course, the Blue Ridge Parkway is just one of the most extraordinary country roads in the whole USA. 

So here they are…fences along some country roads.

Either in Virginia or West Virginia

West Virginia

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway

I'm cheating.  This one is near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania

Linking to Friday Fences.