Apropos of nothing in particular, this turned up on my desktop at some point today.

Concrete whimsies. Not a place I would like to be at night. I could imagine some of them becoming animated, malicious and resentful of their half-finished state. After all, what do they represent if not some kind of distorted image of ourselves?

Back in Florida

It is cooling down a bit - Danielle is long gone, Earle is active but elsewhere, Fiona's still out there (Hurricanes, you know...)

Opening day panorama - click on the image and then you can scroll left and right.

Spent the day gardening (or a large part of it).

Kipling's cure for indolence:

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,

    Or frowst with a book by the fire;

But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,

    And dig till you gently perspire;

Folding a hakama.

There are many ways to train.

Still in Seattle

Mount Rainier from the Puget Sound.

People on a ferry.

The Washington State Ferries are some of my favorite things. They are very utilitarian but very comfortable, there is always such a sense of purpose about them, yet every ferry crossing is timeless. I seem to take this picture every time I go on one.

Seattle Light

A nice place to stay

More Seattle ambiance

Mist on lake Washington.

That beach again

Low tide this time, earlier in the day.

Seattle moon - harvest moon perhaps, I don't recall. Very difficult to photograph the moon because there is such a contrast between it and the surrounding night sky.

One of my favorite songs, Shine on Harvest Moon. My father used to indulge in what my mother referred to as "mindless whistling", he would aimlessly slide from one tune to another. I seem to recall this was one of them. Here's the lyrics in case you don't feel like listening to it - really, quite charming.

Oh, Shine on, shine on, harvest moon

Up in the sky;

I ain't had no lovin'

Since April, January, June or July.

Snow time ain't no time to stay

Outdoors and spoon;

So shine on, shine on, harvest moon,

For me and my gal.

Though it's not yet the end of the hurricane season here in Florida, going back to Seattle tomorrow will feel like flying into the beginnings of autumn.

 My favorite time of year (if such a thing weren't such a silly idea).

Monkey's wedding. Rain in the sunlight. Not sure where the idea came from, but the children in Africa always used to say it was a monkey's wedding if it rained while the sun was shining.

Oddly enough, some years ago, I did a trip to Japan and was told that there it's called a badger's wedding. Even stranger, I had just been visiting an office in Tokyo. The reception had a single flower in a vase on the desk; it was a flame lily. A flower I'll bet you've never heard of unless you came from Southern Africa. Local gardeners used to say they're impossible to domesticate. A new superlative perhaps, "unusual as a Flame Lily in Tokyo", as unexpected as a badger's wedding. 

A week for random stuff perhaps. I don't recall why I took this, but looking at it I realize it is a very strange photograph. A picture of a building taken through partially closed, quite opaque, non-reflective blinds. I can't make head or tail of it.

Beach in the evening. This beach, I took the photograph from the point overlooking the beach, just where the path turns and disappears into the trees.

Wonderful combination of light and location.

One last squirrel - actually a squirrel collage (as you may remember, click on the image to see a much larger version).

Makes me laugh.

Top left: going down
Bottom left: looking down
Bottom center: looking up
Bottom right: looking at you
Right: going up
Top right: having a rest
Middle: posing (twice)

At the risk of being annoying, here's the squirrel again. I caught so many funny images, I can't resist putting up some more.

Not entirely sure what he was doing, other than just being a squirrel perhaps.

There I was, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for some code to check itself in, then I noticed the squirrel. He was scuttling up the Bank of America tower located just outside the apartment. I have diddled the image a bit. You can see him enlarged in the inset on the upper left, gazing up at the tower above him. 

If you look very carefully at the middle balcony, you can see him resting on the hand rail. The really funny thing about it is that I regularly see people traipsing up the tower only to discover it's shut off right where the squirrel's taking a rest. Typically, there's some eager beaver up front on the way up enthusiastically looking forward to a magnificent view of the fair town of Celebration. Typically, there's some not so eager beaver trailing behind on the way up and leading the way on the way down, looking much more cheerful.

As Mr Bennet so rightly observed, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

In honor of this portentous date.

I don't think anyone does graveyards quite like the Deep South (well this is Savannah - not quite Deep perhaps). Anyway, respectably creepy. plus which, this one happens to be the main city park. Savannah's equivalent of Central Park, think "Hyde Park with corpses", "the National Mall as a mausoleum" (perhaps it is anyway). One wanders around in momentary expectation of a "Don't feed the zombies" sign. Very droll.

Back to where I started from (this week anyway)

This image was taken on the same evening as the first in the series I've been going through this week. I love the intermingling of the colors and the shadows and the way the shapes bleed into each other between the flowers in the vase and the flowers in the picture. I feel myself drawn into the light of the sun the same way the flowers are drawn into the picture frame. Wonderful stuff...

Red again. Reminiscent of some images of the surface of the sun.

Actually a lacquered box. Again predominantly red with a touch of green to it. This color has some blue as well. The light as well as the fire.

More red - some sartorial advise I noticed in passing suggested it is a recommended color for men as women find it attractive. The idea of "scarlet men" is somehow rather entertaining. Here we are, more red.

The histogram for the image is interesting

There is a surprising amount of green in it, I wonder if that is where the lush, velvet tone comes from?

Same again - only lacquer and an anonymous artist this time rather than propinquity and the setting sun.

I have to believe that he (or she) saw the same thing I did. I will have to go to China one of these days to look at the light and see if it's the same.

The image doesn't lie, it really looked like that. Astonishingly beautiful.

Another way of looking at the same thing

Living on the North side of life

love trickles through his fingers

as bright light shines through the trees.

Sunrise, sunset are behind him

here in the Northern world here

on the North side of life light

shines, but not directly on his face.

Light is on the faces looking to him

though for what he cannot say but

living on the North side of life

light shines through the end of the day.

Bryony's orchid - a second flowering. I never realized that orchid blooms last for such a long time. This one lasted for well over a month.

Mind you, orchids are a famously prolific family with over 800 genera and something like 26,000 species. I bet there are some that only flower for a day.

Just to be clear, the orchid belongs to Bryony, Bryony is not an orchid, nor, in this case an English wild flower.

Shadows

I find it interesting that, at least in my vocabulary, there is a plural bias in the word "shadows". An exception is where the shadow is my own, then it becomes personal, singular, even if it's the shadow of the airplane I see as I look at the ground. Otherwise I am surrounded by shadows. Sometimes they are very welcome, especially here after another appallingly sunny day in central Florida.    

A last look at the V&A staging area (for now). An incredibly poignant image. They are so alive, yet so far beyond our reach, which I suppose is part of the propriety of the thing. We are looking at nothing more than cold, dead stone. Or are we? How alive is the image?

Pygmalion...

Am I held to distant admiration,

Permitted just a mental passion?

Or will she one day

Step down and say,

“Enfold me, embrace me

Hold me close and love me.”

What price must I pay for that moment of bliss

When this statue I made steps down to a kiss?

Figures in a staging area

Great art is all about limitations. I thought it simply wonderful to see such tangible evidence of it. Victoria and Albert, in case you were wondering. 

Say, "Happy birthday Bridget!"

Also our 36th wedding anniversary. This will get me into quite enough trouble as is, so I won't say too more, other than she knocked me out with that smile when I first saw her. KO's are still a common occurrence.

Lace making cast in iron.

I find the shadows almost as fascinating as the artifact itself. The intricacy of the things is breathtaking (by the way it's big - 12ft by 8ft as far as I remember).

Real Victoriana; cast iron was the plastic of the 1800's, this is the height of the art. I don't suppose our descendants will look gaze on Tupperware with such a fond eye.

Self-portrait. I defy anyone to figure out what the picture is really about.

Hint - the ripply stuff is not water.