You may find it a little hard to believe that these pictures were taken indoors, but it’s true. They aren’t just indoors; they’re indoors of indoors. This is the butterfly exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History – to get to it, you have to go through a sort of air lock at both the entrance and exit. After all, nobody wants butterflies all over the building – do they?
And welcome to the delights of English spelling; it’s not enough that it has very little to do with the way words sound, it has to vary from place to place just to confuse us further. Anyway, Ailsa of Where’s My Backpack, She Who Invents Travel Themes, is from Ireland, so she spells this week’s theme “grey”. But I was taught to write “gray”, so I will.
As colors go, gray has a bad reputation, and this first picture shows why.
These are houses for iron workers and glass makers at Batsto Village in New Jersey. When they were newly built, I suppose the unpainted wood was various shades of light brown. Not any more. They’re gray now.
On the other hand, this building in Venice is much too exuberantly baroque to look even a little bit depressed, no matter how gray it is.
Moving forward a few centuries, there’s the architecture in Center City Philadelphia – if these office buildings didn’t have so many windows that insist on reflecting the blue sky, they’d all be thoroughly gray.
The meeting room in Independence Hall (Philadelphia, too) is painted gray and cream.
And then there’s artistic gray –
A lady from an Impressionist painting, turned three-dimensional to visit a sculpture garden…
Gray stone, cut into two parts that seem to be trying to rejoin…
And gleaming gray metal.
So many grays, all so different.
(What we have here is a photo in reply to Ailsa’s Travel Theme…for last week. Oh well, I was traveling when I took the picture, and I took it specifically so I could post a picture of Grass.)
Tomorrow or the next day I’ll see if I have anything that fits the current travel theme. Meanwhile –
here we are: fox grass, taller than the trees.
Or, of course, grass photographed from a low angle. Is this how it would look to a mouse?
It’s Travel Theme time!
Sometimes the world seems to be full of trees, tree after tree, all the way to the horizon, and you might think they all look pretty much the same.
You’d be wrong. I don’t know for sure how this tree grew legs, though I suspect it sprouted on top of a fallen log that has disappeared into the soil.
But that’s nothing compared to this tree, only a few miles away on the southern shore of Lake Superior, which keeps itself moored to the crumbling shoreline with a thick bundle of roots.
(A belated and close-to-home response to last week’s Where’s My Backpack travel theme.)
Crocuses
Three months now, and its been so cold.
So much cold. We’re tired of cold.
Spring should come soon, or so we’re told
But it’s still cold. We’re tired of cold.
But maybe there’s hope, at last, today.
Flowers are a good sign, they say,
Though crocuses bloom even when it’s cold.
Ailsa – remember Ailsa? She has a really nice blog about all the amazing things there are to see in this world – is asking for pictures this week about “Industry.”
Oddly, my industrial photos all seem to be related to transportation.
There’s a nearly endless freight train…
And the Camden docks, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia…
And even though these grain elevators aren’t going anywhere soon, there’s actually a train track running next to them. So the wheat can be loaded up and move on to the flour mills.
This time around, Ailsa at Where’s My Backpack is asking us to illustrate “minimalism”. What a coincidence! I’ve been reading various blogs about it as I get ready to start my hundred days of crazed decluttering, and here’s my concept:
Mountains – snow – thin high altitude air
Snow – rock – July meltwater
Ailsa’s Travel Theme this week? Colorful. So here’s a rainbow for you. (Flowers are my fallback choice for color…but I tried to find photos of other types of things.)
Ah, yes. Autumn. When else would the house next door look like this??
Well, all right. I only traveled about twenty feet (forty feet? – I’m not good at estimating distances) to take this picture. But, in the right lighting, it’s reasonably scary. So there. 😉
Wow, it has been a long time since I posted anything. Back then it was still March, and if you parked anywhere along our main street, you had to clamber over piles of ice to get to the sidewalk. And now there are daffodil buds, and occasional flowers.
I’m still kind of disorganized, so I’m going to post an overdue reply to one of Ailsa’s travel challenges – statues – just because I happen to have various photos of statues.
A Number of Things 