This red beach chair photo may make it appear that there is hardly anyone at the Asbury Park Beach on July 4th, but in truth it was quite crowded on the beach. I hope to write a pictorial, historical post on Asbury Park in an upcoming post.
I was in the mood to do something creative this morning, so I took a photo of an American flag (similar to this U.S. flag photograph, both shots were taken at the Asbury Park boardwalk last year) and imposed it over a recent shot that I took of the rudbeckia in my garden. I used a mask in Photoshop to get the background of flowers to appear under the flag. The difficult part is the edges – one carefully has to go around and eliminate all the sky edges from the original photograph.
Happy Fourth of July.
Here are the two original photos used to create the image above:
The top one of rudbeckia or black eyed susans was taken in my front yard. The bottom one depicts a U.S. flag flying on the Asbury Park boardwalk.
What kind of a bird has a speckled breast? I found out that some thrushes do, but this bird is a juvenile robin. Makes sense, since last summer I asked the same question about the speckled breast. Thanks, Michelle, for identifying my young robin.
Just last week I saw baby robins in a nest; when my daughter and I checked on Saturday, they were still in the nest, cawing away, and just a bit bigger. She counted four baby robins.
Do you know of a bird with speckled breast?
The photo shows a blue robin egg. Then the robin babies are born, and they depend on mama and papa robin. After a while, the baby robins get more feathers and fly off from the nest. A young robin is a bird with speckled breast. The mature robin has a red breast. I’ve seen robins with worms in their mouths. I’ve also seen them eating my raspberries.
The skies were glorious the morning I photographed Raritan Avenue traffic.
I was driving down to Manalapan, NJ (carpooling my teenage son and friends to a counselor orientation) and decided to drive by the Battle of Monmouth. This battle was fought on June 28, 1778 between the British and the Americans. There is not much to see other than this pretty field with a wooden fence; somewhere nearby there is a visitor center that is open on the weekends. Supposedly, every year on the last week in June, the battle is re-enacted here in Monmouth Battlefield State Park. I think I may have seen the Sutfin House in the distance from my car. My previous post showed purple vetch growing in the field. I did find orchards (Battleview Orchards) nearby.
Due to the wooden fence, I get to share my battlefield adventure as part of Thursday Challenge.
And I just discovered another meme: Rural Thursday. (If you saw the rest of Manalapan, you would say, gee, this battlefield park is the only rural area left).
I caught this squirrel with a strawberry in his mouth (is it a wild strawberry or one of our garden strawberries – not sure, but it looks like the wild kind). So I grabbed my camera and decided to do Nature Notes. I confess, I haven’t been doing much observing of nature, though I have been gardening. My peas did very well in their cage this spring; I saw a deer walk right past the gardening cage (but the deer did take a chomp out of the tomato plants that were outside the cage).
I did not plant this tall lily in this spot behind my pink rose bush. I used to have similar lilies in a different part of my garden; I probably pulled them all out by mistake when I was weeding. Or they died a natural death. So I was surprised to see a lily blossom elsewhere in my yard.
The raspberries that grow on old can are now ripening in our backyard. The ones on new cane are usually more abundant, and we get to enjoy those in August. Last year wasn’t a great crop; maybe this year will be better? I read somewhere that one should prune the raspberry bushes so they have space in between them. I tried to do some pruning last year. It is hard to photograph a raspberry – the camera doesn’t realize you want to focus on that tiny berry.
For more Nature Notes:
My daughter and her friend worked very hard on this diorama for her school’s Torah Fair. It’s sort of like a science fair, explained my husband, except the subject matter was all from the book of Breishit. My daughter’s project depicted the wedding of Yaakov and Leah. Or was it Yaakov and Rachel? In any case, for those of you who don’t know the story, Yaakov first had to work seven years to marry Leah. He thought he was marrying Rachel, but Lavan, Leah and Rachel’s father, tricked him into marrying Leah. After seven more years, he got to marry Rachel. Poor Leah – I once did a painting of Leah crying.
In other news, my eldest son graduated from high school, which emotionally is charged for me – how could my first baby be a high school graduate? We discussed in the car on the way home what is the meaning of “real life” – does being a high school graduate mean one has entered the real world? According to my niece who just finished her first year of college, college is not real life.
My blog workshop went quite well – Blog Workshop slides are now up on slideshare. Planning to write a post about the workshop soon. Meanwhile, Valeri Weidmann wrote an amazing summary of the Highland Park Public Library blog workshop: Thanks, Val!
The school art assignment was to draw oneself as an older person. This was my daughter’s execution, which she proudly displayed at her school art show last night.
As for myself, I’m trying once again to take a breath by blogging. I admire Robin’s style, in which she both displays nuns in tan and discusses her plumbing traumas. My events of the week involved two down servers, both effecting sites that I work on, both now back up and running again. Is it the season to upgrade PHP perhaps? In one case I called the help desk; the line declared a fifteen minute wait. I hung up, then called back a few minutes later, thinking, I can wait fifteen minutes to find out what the problem is. The line then declared a one hour wait. I waited until the next day, until it was fixed. But then the other server went down, and that one I had to report about ten times before they fixed all the issues. Such as is the life of a webmaster (webmaven?).
Upcoming News: Blogging Workshop at Highland Park Public Library on June 12th – OK, experienced bloggers, what shall I cover? The public is invited.
I scheduled the next JPiX for June 24th (originally had been the 17th). You can learn more about JPiX and submit your posts here.
I just made these black bean cookies, courtesy of Laura’s Double Chocolate Mocha Bean Gluten Free recipe. Question is: will my kids eat them?
Book Review of Septembers of Shiraz
In my front yard many pink Mexican poppies are in bloom. My husband remembers the days when he had to mow the front lawn – no more.
There is also purple salvia growing behind the pink Mexican poppies.
The tall green plants behind the Mexican poppies in this shot are lambs’ ear. I originally planted a few that I transported from my mother’s garden in Newton, MA. That was in 1998, so these have been reproducing for over ten years. I’ll probably pull most of them out soon and replace them with summer plants, maybe cucumber plants that I grow among the flowers.
These flowering chives are growing in a pot in my backyard, but since they are in a pot, I could easily transfer them to the front.
For more Nature Notes:
