Bird on a Wire
Budding Branches with Winged Warbler
Bent Buoyant Bystander Watching Waning Water
You can see the Blue Heron in blue at my prior post about Portland, Oregon’s “Blue Heron Day.”
Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CB&W) topic this week is “Starts with the Letters B or W.”
Sometimes,
facing life’s challenges
makes you feel as though
you’re trying to fit
through the eye of a needle.
The way to make it through is
one thread at a time.
Daily Post weekly photo challenge: Eye Spy
We made it! It’s the last day of November, and the last day of the 2015 National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) challenge. I succeeded in posting to this blog daily for 30 days and — as promised — I didn’t resort to regaling you with endless photos of my cat and dog. Well, maybe I did. But they’re so stinkin’ cute!
Most of the time it was fun, sometimes tedious. It certainly did force me to crank up my creative juices, and to acknowledge that I don’t have to wait around like some mutt underfoot begging for table scraps, hoping my muse tosses a few ideas my way.
Okay, so it’s never been that bad. My usual writing process is that some notion begins buzzing around my head like an annoying insect. I roll up a metaphorical newspaper and swat it. When it falls to the ground, I poke at it to see if there’s any life left in it. If there is, then maybe I write about it. The metaphorical insect, that is.
If it’s a real insect, I try to get the dog to catch it and either escort it outside or ensure its demise. He usually just sniffs at it and walks away. As does the insect.
Outdoors: live and let live.
Outdoors, my bug philosophy is “live and let live.” Indoors, the rule is if it won’t go away or if it creeps me out, it dies. Kind of like a blind date. But I digress.
There aren’t many insects flying around my part of the world at this time of year. Except stink bugs. And who wants to write about a stink bug, metaphorical or otherwise?
Indoors: sic ’em, Chules!
The point of all this is to say that I will write with less frequency from now on, that I’ll try not to write if I have nothing to say, and that you probably shouldn’t go on a blind date with me.
Thanks for seeing me through this month, and for reading each and every one of my posts. You did that, right?
serendipity: uncoincidentally coincidental
This week Cee’s Compose Yourself Photo Challenge focuses on diagonal lines, with extra credit for a couple of photos illustrating things for which we are thankful.
Here are my diagonals:
First up, these clever weeds who had the wherewithal to grow in rows.
A tree splintered in a windstorm.
These branches reaching toward one another remind me of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” frescoe. They also remind me of the rose hip jelly my granny used to make.
A caterpillar makes his escape across a railroad tie.
And my two “thankfuls:”
I am thankful that nature hasn’t given up on us. And thankful that there are numerous people and organizations working to preserve nature and repair the damage we’ve done to this planet.
I am thankful that humanity hasn’t given up on itself, and that there are multitudes of kind, caring people despite what we might see to the contrary in our newsfeeds.
Cee’s Compose Yourself Photo Challenge: Week #8 Diagonal Lines
I’m counting my blessings, and giving thanks for all. I hope you, too, find much in your life for which to be thankful.
I try to not get sucked into social media: Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr… whatever else is out there with cute misspelled names. I have a love/hate/hate/hate relationship with Facebook, and I probably definitely give it much more space in my life than it deserves.
And Instagram? At first I couldn’t see any point in taking photos with a cell phone, formatting them into tiny little squares and then posting them to… exactly where was it they were posted to???
When I finally got a cell phone that had capabilities beyond conveying conversations, however, I simply couldn’t resist the urge to document all the minutiae of my daily life. And of course once one goes to all that bother of snapping a photo, they need to share it with someone, right? Enter, Instagram.
I see it as my photo “junk drawer.” Junk drawers don’t really contain junk. They hold any number of useful things that just don’t have a designated spot to hang out. Sometimes I take photos that I simply find amusing or pretty or whatever, but don’t really want to share on Facebook for the whole world to see.
Today I thought I’d pull out a few items from my Instagram junk drawer to share with you, but don’t show them to the whole rest of the world like Facebook does, okay? Promise?
Instagrams seem to fall into certain categories. We have…
A gate held shut by chains and a padlock, but there’s no fence. Anyone see a security risk here?
A glove balloon in the shrubbery outside a hospital. Bored interns?
Summer flowers, autumn leaves, winter snow, spring flower and leaf buds and melting snow…
The obligatory sunrise/sunset taken through power lines.
“I think I’m lost. Has anyone seen the ocean? Big… blue… wavy…”
Rare sighting today: the yellow-bellied sap maker.
I wanted to continue our walk today, but Chules just wanted to leaf.
When you forget where you packed your utensils, you have to get creative.
Taking selfies isn’t as easy as it looks, kitty.
Now I’ve shown you mine… What’s in your junk drawer?
What Rhymes with Stanza? 