Donna's Week 21

Car Detail

This picture was taken in, you guessed it Yellowstone park.  I love the reflection of the trees and sunset in the fender and the mini self portrait in the chrome.

Hair

My Blake has the best hair.  We dyed it red, not that long ago and it looks awesome.




"E"

This is my "E".  It is actually a horse tie stand (turned on its side) on the trail in shorthills park.




Silly

Hank is only six months old (five months in these pictures) but he has the most expressive face and such a silly personality.  He makes everybody smile.

Flower

I couldn't choose, so here are two different flower pictures.  Both were taken at Sunshine Express last weekend.

Curves

The curves in the rock formed by this waterfall are kind of interesting.  This waterfall was in shorthills park.




Wild Card

This heron flew over, last week when Sharon and I were at Charles Daley Park.

Have a Great Week.

Sharon's Week 21: Beautifully Blooming

Good Sunday morning.  It looks like it will be a rainy one so I am glad I got to enjoy so much of it outside yesterday.  It began with a sunrise trip to Whitefish Island.  After lunch, Pam and I spent some time at Bellevue Park with Riya and after supper I headed out to St. Joe's Island to stalk the trilliums.  I luckily evaded any sunburn but sadly I was food for the blackflies and I have a few bites that make me look like I have had an encounter with a vampire.  Let me just brag for a moment about how productive I was yesterday...in between all my photography outings, I got groceries and made some very yummy stuffed peppers, a crock pot full of sesame pulled chicken and a decadent apple berry crumble.  

Today will likely be lazy as I have to prepare myself to work a five day week.  I know, I know, that's what everybody works but due to a weird coincidence of my surgery, a few stat holidays, my every-other-Fridays off and a couple of vacation days, I haven't worked a full Monday to Friday week since the middle of February.  That might, perhaps, explain why I am so far behind with my paperwork.

Let's get on to the photos so I can get on to my laziness...

car detail

My friend Carol has a gorgeous old truck.  I am not going to try to tell you what it is because I never can remember (cars are not my thing).  It's a beautiful colour with some really cool shapes and I always smile when I see it driving around (which would NOT be on a rainy day).  I stopped by her place the other night and although I had high expectations of the ideas in my mind, I couldn't make them work.  I do like the angle in this photo of the truck but it isn't really a detail shot.

hair

I harassed Levi all week, telling him that I was needing to take a picture of his hair.  He kept telling me that cats have hair.  I insisted that cats have fur and we never did come to agreement on that.  I did convince him to let me put a ponytail in his hair a take a quick photo but I prefer this photo.  My dad loves dandelions so this is for him.  I think the anthers (if that's what they are) look like spiky hair.  The background is blurred forget-me-nots.

For those of you who haven't seen him for a while, this is Levi's hair currently.  It is long not because he prefers it that way but rather because he doesn't care at all and in the absence of haircuts, this is what you get.

E

Looking up into the trees to check for bald eagles, I saw this.  I want to go back and check how many of my letter pictures are found in trees - I'll wait until the end of this project, count and let you know.

silly

I had absolutely no ideas for this - zip, zilch, nada!  Then on Thursday I was talking with one of my younger students and I called him a silly goose.  Voila, an idea.  This teenager goose was at Bellevue Park yesterday.  It wasn't doing anything silly but it is a goose.

flower

I love trillium season for it's beauty but unfortunately it coincides with blackfly season.  My Deep Woods Off didn't keep them away, it just made me smell like bug spray.  The light shining through from the back of the flower was so pretty.

curves

When I arrived at the Island yesterday morning (5:50 by the way), there was a rainbow over the bridge.  It's pretty faded here but if you look carefully you can see a bit of the rainbow reflected in the pond in the bottom left of the photo.

wild card

The Canada 150 tulips at Bellevue Park are in full bloom.  Here are two views of some of them.

And finally, we have a pretty boring shot (the sun went behind the clouds and refused to reappear) of one of my favourite views on the Island.  Millions and millions of forget-me-nots line the walking paths.

See ya next week.

Pam's Week 21: Little Red Corvette

I might as well warn you right from the start - there are no little red corvettes in this blog.  For some reason, that is the song that popped into my head though as I looked at the topics for the week.  If only it had occurred to me earlier, perhaps I could have searched out a little red corvette, or at the very least, a corvette in another colour....

While I am looking at photos and writing blog posts, I figured I might as well do my best to get this past week's blog done too and then I can start fresh next week.  Hopefully I can finish getting the suitcases unpacked and the laundry put away and then my whole week will start anew tomorrow!  Looking at the time, though, it looks as though that may be a good plan for the anticipated rainy day of tomorrow.

Today was a beautiful day.  I was up bright and early to have breakfast with a friend of mine who was in town very, very briefly (as in approximately 16 hours and was sleeping and working for about 14 of them).  Then I returned home and decided to have a power nap before I took the kids to their swimming lessons.  After lunch, Riya and I met Sharon at Bellevue Park to take some photos.  After a couple of hours there, I returned home and promptly returned to my bed for nap number two.  I actually feel a little guilty about it but I was honestly too exhausted to do anything else.  We just returned home from our vacation at 2 am on Wednesday morning and I promptly returned to work.  Each night then had me in bed much later than I would have liked as Duncan was in the Wizard of Oz play that his school was putting on this week.  It was actually a fantastic production; I was quite proud of him and all the kids really.  The downside, though, is not being able to catch up on some much-needed sleep until today.  Oh well, hopefully it isn't the only nice day to come this spring and summer...

Car Detail

So, I had a plan for this and was intending to do it yesterday evening and then forgot.  I tried a couple of other things today but wasn't happy with them.  I might want to add that it's a tad awkward trying to take photos of other people's cars without them thinking you are looking to steal it.  Needless to say, I headed back into the California archives to find a photo of a car.  It's perhaps not the detail Sharon intended, but it's a car the kids were rather excited to see at Universal Studios.  Does anyone else recognize it?

Hair

Had I bothered looking at this week's assignments while we were still in California or en route home, I could have surreptitiously taken a picture of the dandelion yellow hair (no word of a lie) on the woman in front of us on the plane.  No one would really believe it otherwise.  You will just have to take my word for it.

The reason we actually went to California was that Robert's cousin's baby was being baptized.  Check out the head of hair on her!

E

This was one of the photos I was successful at finding today at the park.  I actually had a couple of options to choose from even!  I will give Sharon credit where credit is due as she made a few suggestions.

First up - a park bench.  Now this is where I have to give props to Sharon.  I had actually looked at the bench and then decided there wasn't an E to be found on it.  We continued walking and Sharon pointed out the bench and the E just popped out at me this time.

I actually flipped this photo around as I thought the birch bark made an E but it was facing the wrong way.

For some reason I had my head tilted as we climbed the hill and I saw an E in the way these 3 trees grew out of the grass below.  Clearly I rotated this photo.

Silly

Unfortunately none of the photos I took of the play turned out well as those were some fanciful and silly costumes.  Today at the park, though, Riya was definitely playing the silly card.  Sharon and I were trying our darnedest to get her to sit or lie in places that we thought would create particularly nice photos.  I swear she lay down everywhere else!

 This was the best one I got...

This was our failed attempt at having her lie in the forget-me-nots...Apparently squirrels and geese and other dogs are way more interesting than your owner, her friend, and treats.

This one also made me chuckle as she is not allowed on the furniture at our house.  As soon as I sat on this bench, she jumped on up as if she owned the place.

Flower

I took a whole bunch of flower photos today while at the park with Sharon, but since she took photos of the same flowers and I don't know which ones she's planning on using, I decided to bust out the California archives again.  On the day we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway, we stopped for a picnic lunch at Aliso Beach.  It was rather chilly and windy but it was so beautiful that we decided to walk along the beach a bit anyways.  On our way back, after getting in trouble from the lifeguard for standing on the rocks that were apparently off limits that day, I noticed a bunch of discarded roses on the beach.  It made me wonder if an episode of the Bachelor was filmed there...haha.

Curves

You will never guess what I did for this topic - I delved back into the California photos!  Quelle surprise!  Honestly, though, I haven't been anywhere else to see interesting curves.

I liked the curve of this guy's surfboard on the curve of the wave (I realize that's not surfer lingo but I'm not a surfer).

This is the curve of the Ferris Wheel and Roller Coaster on the Santa Monica Pier.  Apparently it is called the Pacific Park and was actually conceived and built back in 1916, almost torn down in the 70's and then restored in the 80's.

Wild Card

I decided to plant tulips in my flower bed last fall, having never planted a bulb in my life, thinking it would be nice and festive to have some of the special edition Canada 150 tulips growing in my front yard.  Because our house is North facing, our tulips are budding but are not yet open.  The ones my mother planted seem to be coming up yellow instead of white and red.  Today at the park, though, the Canada tulips were in abundance.  I particularly liked this one; I thought the markings did look maple leaf-like.

And that's it for this week.  I don't have any immediate inspiration as I look at next week's assignments but hopefully something will come to me after a good night's sleep....Have a great week everyone!

Pam's Week 20: Music Makes the People Come Together...

I am slowly but surely catching up on all the things I haven't finished since our arrival back home.  A nap this afternoon after a couple of hours spent with Sharon at the park, however, did nothing to help me get any of my to do list accomplished.  Maybe it will spur me on to be productive this evening?  Doubtful, but we can pretend.

In reviewing this week's topics, I realize that I did think of them while we were on vacation.  I just didn't always successfully find the inspiration I was hoping for or I tended to get distracted and forget I was looking for a specific photo once we were out and about.  I could blame it on the rain like Milli Vanilli did so many years ago now but it was more of a drizzle and really only plagued the first couple of days of our vacation.  I think it's more likely that I sometimes have the focus and memory of a goldfish (perhaps the pregnancy brain lasts a decade).

Anyways, let's see how many vacation photos I can fit into this week's assignments...

Music

This is the one topic I for sure had every intention of snapping a photo of.  While we were in San Diego, I tried to see the Spreckles Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park with this very photo in mind.  Unfortunately, there was no parking nearby and after walking the zoo for 6 hours, I wasn't particularly motivated to drive through the park again to find the parking lot we'd passed a while back and then walk more, in the heat I might add, to snap a photo.  Instead, we elected to head to the beach.  Then while we were at Universal Studios, I was on my way to the restroom when I saw a man playing a piano outside one of the shops and thought I would take his photo upon my exit.  Guess what?  He had covered up his piano and gone on his merry way in the quick little break I took.  I meant to return to see if I could catch sight of him later, but I forgot.

Perhaps a photo of the ocean as the sound of the waves lapping the shore is "music to my ears"...

Although we didn't drive all the way out to the dunes and try it (the extra time in the car and my overwhelming fear of any snakes let alone rattlesnakes convinced me we could take their word for it), it is said that if you run down these dunes, the shifting sand makes music.

Or a photo of Michael Jackson's star on Hollywood Boulevard?  I tried to take a photo of his hand and footprints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre but it was dark out so the photo didn't turn out well.

Leading Lines

I once again knew exactly what I was going to do for this photo but it just didn't work out as planned.  I wanted to take a photo from underneath the Scripps Pier in San Diego.  The problem - I forgot to write down the address and our GPS had no idea what we were talking about.  I tried under a couple of other piers but the tides weren't working in my favour and the extra supports some of them needed for all the buildings atop just didn't have the same appeal.

Here is one of my attempts.  This was a pier along Pacific Beach in La Jolla, California (just outside San Diego).

I also thought I would include a very literal interpretation.  This is the aerial tram at the San Diego Zoo.  Those lines lead you from one area of the zoo to another.

Pastel

Other than the pastel coloured M&M's, I don't seem to have any pastel photos.  Since I posted a photo of the M&M wall in yesterday's blog post, I figure I should try to find something different.  This doesn't seem to be as in focus as I would like (disappointingly seems to be a trend in many of my photos as I look at them on the computer), the inside of Honeyduke's was the closest I could find to pastel colours.

N

I did take a couple of photos this afternoon that I could use for this topic but decided to search high and low through the vacation photos to find one.  The first one was taken at the San Diego Zoo; again, I wish it was in better focus...

This next one is perhaps a bit of a cheat.... It wasn't like I discovered an "N" in the lines of the photo.  It happens to be explicitly written out for me.  The sea lions were so cute though, I couldn't resist.

Hooded

I would love to say that I got a fantastic photo of a hooded animal or even hooded eyes but alas, 'twas not to be.  We're going to go with the literal interpretation...

This Wizard's robe at the Tri-Wizard Tournament was hooded.

Baby Animal

We were at a zoo.  You would think we would have found some baby animals in my photos.  Okay, there are some baby animals in my photos but they're awfully hard to see.  We also went whale watching and were hoping to see mother and calf grey whales migrating north but that did not happen either.  If you look closely, you can see a baby giraffe (or at least a young one) behind Duncan and Danica.

Wildcard

This is a photo from the Sunny Jim Cave in La Jolla.  It's a sea cave that you can enter via The Cave Store.  Apparently, two Chinese men dug the tunnel from the land into the cave back in the early 1900's.  Later, a set of stairs was added so that people could enter the cave.

Now I guess I am caught up on the blog posts from my time away.  I should probably get started on this week's too!

Pam's Week 19: My Star on Hollywood Boulevard...

I realize that I am posting late but you will have to forgive me as I just returned from vacation on Tuesday night, well, early Wednesday morning to be exact, and it's been a crazy week since my return.  I did intend to keep up this blog well away, however, I also decided to reinstate my travel blog for the vacation and just could not find the time to write two blogs.

I will also readily admit that most of these photos were not carefully planned to fit into the week's topics but rather examined after they were all uploaded to the computer to determine which ones may work with the given topics.  As a result, some of the interpretations may be even more creative or farfetched than usual.  Since art is completely subjective, though, there are no wrong answers!

Here goes....

A Circle

This is one of the topics I was able to remember while on our adventures so I actually took photos of multiple circles.  Here are a couple of my favourites:

 A view through the porthole of the Finding Nemo Submarine Ride at Disneyland

 The Ferris Wheel at Newport Beach

The circular window on this house in Newport Beach caught my eye.

A Pop of Colour

While researching things for us to do while we were on our vacation, I came across a street in Long Beach that had Jacaranda Trees lining both sides of the street, forming a tunnel.  It looked amazing but alas, Robert's aunt broke it to me upon our arrival that people who live there actually hate the trees because the flowers or sap apparently ruin their cars and make a huge mess.  I was so disappointed but was quite pleased to still find the trees growing all over, offering a "pop of colour" in the midst of all the luscious greenery.

Starts with H

I was wracking my brain trying to figure out which picture might fit this topic before I just had an "a-ha" moment as I typed in the title.  

Huntington Beach Pier!  

Hollywood!

Hogwarts!

Hogsmeade!

Motherhood

This may not be a creative interpretation but let's face it, these two are the reason I am a mother.  I guess I can't take responsibility for this photo either since I am in it but I think it captures one of the things I think of when I think of motherhood - making memories, spending time together, and having fun.

Multicoloured

Is it just me or did Sharon assign a lot of "colour" photos this week?  This one was a no brainer for me as while in Vegas, we spent time in what may just be Danica's favourite store of all time.  It was floor to ceiling colour!

Green

Now I feel like a bit of a liar having said that I didn't actually attempt to take photos to fit the topics but did it the other way around as I now realize that I did try to find photographic moments that were assignment-appropriate.  On the way to Vegas, there were such lush, green mountains.  Unfortunately, the photo taken from the window of the moving vehicle doesn't quite do them justice.

En route, we detoured through the Mojave National Preserve. It was stunning.

Wildcard

There are so many photos that could be included as a wildcard this week....I decided to use two...The first was taken on a day when we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway.  We stopped at Aliso Beach for a picnic lunch, in spite of the cold.  This house perched atop this cliff just appealed to me.  Actually, I think it was the cliff I was particularly attracted to.

While driving through the Mojave National Preserve, we stopped at the Kelso Depot which is an old train station.  It was a beautiful building but I really liked the desert through these arches.

Two more weeks and I will be caught back up!!!