I took some photos of my oak leaf hydrangea on Friday.
I bought this plant several years ago. At the time I really had in mind the type of hydrangea that has the blue or pink clusters of flowers. But the plant nursery did not have any of those, and the man recommended this one. The truth is, I find the flowers, which show up in the spring, not as exciting as the ones on the other types of hydrangea. The real beauty of this plant is the leaves. And now with autumn they are exhibiting lovely shades of red.
Apples Growing Up in the Sky at Lee Turkey Farm in New Jersey
We visited Lee Turkey Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey last Sunday. I took a mere 150 pictures that day. I’ve already posted apples, pumpkins, and a girl pulling a cart.
1802 Home at Lee Turkey Farm, East Windsor, New Jersey
I love old nineteenth century homes. This one at the Lee Turkey Farm entrance, built in 1802, has such pretty details on the top cornice.
The fields of Lee Turkey Farm in East Windsor, New Jersey
In the distance in the above photo, where there are itty bitty signs of scarecrows, is the corn maze. My son, his friend and my husband did the corn maze while my daughter and I hung around the playground. They only got six out of eight clues. It wasn’t easy, but they enjoyed it.
Above are the “scarecrow” signs at the entrance to the corn maze.
Pulling a cart of apples that is twice as heavy as me
Thursday Challenge: the theme for this week is “LARGE” (Big Things, Tall Things, Buildings, Cars, Airplanes,…).
I’m not big on photographing cars or airplanes or skyscrapers, but I did enjoy watching my daughter dragging that cart around when we went apple picking last Sunday.
My friend Jientje of Heaven in Belgium loves awards. It is fun to live vicariously through other people’s photos; recently, she traveled to Portugal, and anyone who visited her blog got to go along. One of my favorite of her recent posts was her poppy photos; she found them in every nook and cranny in Provence! One of the photos she took was a of a fish head; since I need a fish head for a post on Rosh Hashana, she said I could use it (and I will be sure to link back to her!). Somehow a fish head from Portugal seems authentic, like one that might have been used back in the 15th century by the Jews of Portugal. Jientje is not Jewish, so she probably wasn’t looking for traces of the Jewish community on her trip, but I did get interested in exploring Portugese Jewish history.
This wasn’t the first time she gave me an award. I’ve already given blog awards to some of my daily favorites (including Ilana-Davita, Gail (I just linked to one of my favorite songs), Mom in Israel (who’s in your neighborhood?), Daniel Saunders, Robin (bougainvillea alert), Batya (she’s got my garden!), Michelle (a Paul McCartney tidbit here)).
I’m going to give this award to a category I’m going to call the late-night mommy bloggers. This are women who write late night posts amidst their busy lives:
I’ll Call Baila – I did call her, when I was in Israel, but we didn’t manage to meet. I had fun working on this post of her town with her. She recently started working full-time again. And she wants you to send funds so she can see Paul McCartney (or did that happen already? Oh, well).
SuperRaizy – Her latest has been to draw attention to those protecting child molesters instead of exposing them. Yes, it is outrageous. She also would like to see Paul in concert, but for her, you’ll have to pay for the airfare, too, as she’s in New York. Unless Paul is playing in New York soon?
HaddasahBo – Her latest post really touched me. An excerpt:
Of course when I got home I had a complete and total meltdown. What was I thinking? That I could manage to work and run the house and be a good mom and have some me-time? Hardee-har-har! … But I managed. My nap energized me. I woke up, the kids got home, we cooked supper, we did homework, we ate together, laundry got done, I even cut the boys’ hair, I managed to get them all showered and pajamaed and bedded – and ended off the evening with a lovely conversation with a new friend (that’s me-time right?) .
A Living Nadneyda – Always striving to keep the balance. She’s got some great posts on therapy that I am planning to read carefully, after I finish this post.
Juggling Frogs – Yup, the blog name says it all. I loved her post about worm boxes. She brings lots of enthusiasm to all her posts. And to her twitterings, too. Did I mention she was the very first person to comment on my blog?
So, thanks, Jientje, for another opportunity for hakarat hatov (recognition of good).
Received in a synagogue announcement late last night:
This Thursday, September 25 at 7:30 there will be a rally at the corner
of 3rd & Raritan Avenues. The purpose of the rally is to express our
disappointment that the Mennonite Central Committee, the parent
organization of the 10 Thousand Villages store, is hosting the
president of Iran for dinner while he is in New York, and to protest
Ahmadinejad’s calls for genocide against Israel.
Ahmadinejad is basically a modern day Haman. He has threatened to destroy Israel and has held a Holocaust-denial conference. One of the hosts is someone named Penny Pritzker. I’ll let you do the research.
One traditionally eats pomegranate on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and thus I have been working on a watercolor of a pomegranate as part of my series on the food symbols of this holiday.
The prayer that one says, the yehi ratzon, is as follows:
“she’nirbeh ze’chu’yos k’rimon”
“…that our merits increase like (the seeds of) a pomegranate.”
I finished my pomegranate watercolor. But I will post the watercolor in another post. This post is about the process. After printing the photo of a pomegranate from Wikipedia (thank you, Ilana-Davita), because I haven’t yet seen one in our supermarket, I taped some watercolor paper down to a board and made the painting just a little bigger than the original photograph. I like doing small watercolors because they fit in nicely in my scanner. I put down a bit of masking fluid in the spots where I want the paper to stay bright white. And I drew with pencil an outline of my painting.
It is important while working on the beginnings of a painting to squint. One needs to know where the darkest darks will be; we are now looking for values. Before applying any paint to the pomegranate, I painted the darkest areas with a blackish-blue color. Where I needed the dark to be lighter, I put it in more water. In watercolor, one often uses water to tone down a color.
Here I painted some of the leaves and branches. How to get the blues of the sky was a little tricky. I watered down some blue paint a lot, but I had to be careful it did not mix with another color. Also, once I have darker colors around the light color, that helps the light part look light.
Finally, some red paint is applied to the pomegranate. But one could see the shape before I added the red, correct?
I added some yellow to the pomegranate, because I saw some yellow in it. But you will see in my finished product that I toned down the yellow, because in this version I felt it was too strong. I also removed the masking fluid with an eraser.
I hope you will come back tomorrow (Tuesday) when I post the finished watercolor.
I took this photo last month while waiting for my son’s bus to arrive. We were in the parking lot of a girls’ high school, and my husband (he can be a bit of a joker) was asking my six-year-old what she thought of the school. It is down the street from the high school that my son is now attending. It is nice that someone at the school cares enough to have pretty flowers in front!
Today’s Flowers is hosted by Luiz Santilli Jr. Thank you, Luiz, for featuring flower followers who share photos in a fun fashion.
My friend Jientje of 
You can read more about the pomegranate in this 
