In response to the Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Trio
The Three Pawskateers
7
Tag Archives: weekly photo challenge
WPC: Pet Victory
The theme for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge is Victory. Victories come in so many shapes and sizes, we probably experience them in one form or another on a daily basis.
Some examples of victories:
Getting your human trained to carry you wherever you go.
Finally achieving that yoga pose you’ve been working on.
Succeeding in laying that Grade AA extra large egg.
Acing puppy kindergarten.
Mastering the piano.
And the real biggie… being rescued and finding your forever home.
“Ornate” 1880s Style
When I saw that this week’s Daily Post photo challenge was on the theme “ornate,” the first thing that came to mind was the Captain George Flavel House in Astoria, OR. Built in 1885, the home is now a museum.
I visited recently and took some photos, but I wish I had taken many more. Good excuse to go back.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Ornate
Trick? or Treat?
The Daily Post’s theme for this week is “Treat.” We are invited to share a photo of “something that you consider a marvelous treat.”
For me, tackling do-it-yourself projects is a fun treat. Usually.
I live in a modest house built in 1955 in a housing tract. I can walk for blocks in most any direction and find row after row of houses that are some rendition of the same floor plan as mine. It’s interesting to see what others have done to personalize their homes. Shutters, brick facades, porches or decks, remodeling to convert the attached garage into more living space…
Maybe if you didn’t know it was a housing tract you wouldn’t recognize that you were looking at the same house over and over and over. But, nah… I think you would.
When I purchased my house, it had previously been used as a rental property. I continually find areas where slipshod repairs and fixes were made on the cheap. No “pride of ownership” is evident.
The good thing about that is that the less-than-pristine condition of the house gives me confidence to attempt do-it-yourself home improvement projects.
Nothing elaborate. Yet. But things that I have not done before: replacing light fixtures, patching drywall, adding tile to walls, replacing ugly rubber baseboard with much better looking wood baseboard.
Not long ago, I was painting (pre-existing) baseboard in my living room, and came to a spot where I had patched my carpet.
Yes, that is duct tape; the “patch” was mostly to keep the ripped seam from spreading while I decided what to do about it on a more permanent basis.
As I was pushing the carpet edge out of the way of the wet paint, I thought I saw…
…was it?
Did I just win the “old house lottery?” Was there really a hardwood floor beneath that natty carpet? Did the value of my home just increase significantly?
Was this a trick? Or a treat?
I was cautious at first, pulling up a small corner of the carpet.
Yep, that was hardwood. Next question… what condition was it in, and how far did it extend? Given the nature of the previously discovered “repairs,” I could imagine all sorts of “tricks” that might be hidden beneath the underlayment.
So I pulled up a two foot by 10 foot strip of padding. This is what I saw:
Yikes! I got a damp washcloth and wiped at the white stuff covering the floor. Now, this was promising!
Ultimately I pulled up all the living room carpet, and now there’s no turning back.
So I guess I’ll learn how to refinish a hardwood floor. I may find it easy; I may find it troublesome.
But just the doing of it… that’s the treat.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Treat
WPC: Crossing Over, Carefully
Slow Critter Crossing(Extra)ordinary Construction Worker
I was having some windows installed in my home last week, and one of the construction crew members, while walking through my living room, stopped and pointed to the wall behind me.
“What’s that?” he asked in a way that made me wonder if someone had perhaps snuck in a boar’s head and mounted it on my unsuspecting wall. I turned to look. Oh, that.
“It’s a dulcimer,” I told him, and proceeded to answer his questions about the instrument. Where it originated, what type of music one played on it, etc.
“Wow!” He continued to stare at it with that boar’s-head-on-the-wall type of fascination. “That’s a real conversation piece!”
This week’s Daily Press photo challenge asks, “What’s mundane yet meaningful to you? What’s a beautiful everyday thing?”
I guess my dulcimer would fall into that category. I think it’s beautiful. It does carry special meaning for me. And yet – to me – it has become rather “mundane.” I see it hanging on my wall each day. I dust it occasionally (okay, rarely). And very rarely, I take it down and actually try to play the darn thing.
It’s interesting to think about how the term “mundane” is such a personal concept. It’s quite possible that I could walk into that construction worker’s home and see a boar’s head hanging on his wall. My reaction would likely be, “What’s that?” and he would reply, “Oh, that’s Reggie. Or what’s left of the little tyke. He was one helluva pig.”
So if you’re looking through the other entries to the photo challenge and you come across a picture of a boar’s head mounted on a wall, it’s probably a photo of Reggie that my construction worker posted on his blog.
I just hope my construction worker is as good at installing windows as he is at photography, blogging, taming wild boars, and taxidermy.
Wow! He’s a busy guy! I guess it’s no wonder he never found time to take up the dulcimer.
Weekly Photo Challenge: (Extra)ordinary
Finding Happy
The theme for this week’s Daily Post photo challenge is “happy place,” and the question is “where do you go to get your groove back?”
I don’t so much have a “happy place,” as I do a “contentment place.” When life gets a bit too chaotic, here are three of my “retreats”:
Walks with my buddy.
Getting lost in creativity.
Nature
I actually have many happy places. In fact, I’m in one right now. I call it “home.”
Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy Place
Boundaries of the Dead
Low fences of concrete and iron
in varying degrees of sturdiness or collapse,
delineate gravesites and family plots
of a long-established and
long-neglected pioneer cemetery.
Whether they are meant to keep the living out,
or the spirits in, I’m not sure.
They seem inadequate for either task.
As a child I wandered this place of the dead,
on Sundays, after I had escaped the
torturously long church service,
and before my parents finished
drinking burnt coffee and eating stale cookies
and were finally ready to take me home.
Ever careful to avoid the mounds and divots
that belied a coffin underneath,
my imagination jumped at the chance
to interpret any slight cold breeze
that made the hanging moss sway, and
any crooked dead branch that
pointed at me like a bony accusatory finger,
as some displaced spirit,
disgruntled at my presence there.
Was it disrespectful to enter the gates
of those family plots since I did not
belong to the family?
Was I overstepping the boundaries
of the long-departed when I
stepped over the fences
that parceled out their final resting places?
I guess I won’t find out the rules
for graveyard boundary etiquette
until I depart to my own final resting place.
If you come to my gravesite
to pay your respects,
look for a bony tree-branch finger
beckoning you to draw near,
and wait for that cold breath of air to
whisper in your ear.
I will give you the answers
about the boundaries of the dead.
And then I will cross that final boundary,
where long-winded sermons,
burnt coffee, and stale cookies
can haunt me no more.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Boundaries
Turnaround
Let’s Go Literal
I am literally challenged by this week’s Daily Press photo challenge. I am challenged by literalness.
I grow uncomfortable around ambiguous phrases or terms, like questions that begin with “How do you like…” As in “How do you like your job?”
What is the actual question here? Is it like the phrase “How do you take your coffee?” I like my coffee with cream and sugar. I like my job with very little supervision and an extremely high salary. I seem to drink a lot of black coffee. Guess we don’t always get how we like.
But maybe the question simply means “Do you like your job?” In which case, the answer might be “yes” or “no.” But when “how” is tacked on at the beginning of the question, single-syllabic answers seem no longer appropriate.
In a question format, “how” becomes an adverb (I think; don’t quote me on that), which suddenly makes it all complicated with the need for nouns and adjectives and such.
“How do you like your job?”
“Yes.”
It just doesn’t work that way.
The Daily Post’s photo challenge theme this week is Grid. “We often superimpose a mental grid over things we photograph to help with composition,” the post begins. “This week, let’s go literal.” Michelle the Daily Post person suggests, “This week, let’s take the humble grid out of the shadows, and make it the star.”
Go literal? Suddenly I am compulsively pulling up dictionary.com to look up the literal meaning of “grid.” And since a “grid” is defined as a “grating,” I have to look up “grating,” as well.
This whole thing is, indeed, grating. On my nerves. Guess I’ll have to just grid and bear it. (Ahhhh, she breaks under pressure…)
Definition of “grating” and hence, by inference, also the definition of “grid” ~
a framework of parallel or crossed bars, used as a partition, guard, cover, or the like.*
*Emphasis mine. Mostly because I’ve always wanted to say “Emphasis mine.” **
** And also because I like to use asterisks.
After all this grate research, I have determined that my photos this week are in fact literal depictions of “or the like.”
How do you like them?
What Rhymes with Stanza? 