Upcoming in Highland Park: library book sale and the annual street fair (see my post from last year of the street fair)
Elsewhere in the Blogosphere
Robin of Around the Island is starting a new photo meme called Summer Stock Sunday. First edition will be Sunday, May 31. Get those summer pics ready!
I want to wish my friends recovering from surgery the strength and patience to heal. Ilana-Davita wrote a bit about her experience with recovery in this post. For another friend, who is here in Highland Park, I wish recovery and healing and growth and renewed energy.
Inspired by Mottel’s riddles, I decided to write one of my own, but in prose. (Here’s Mottel’s latest poetic quiz).
Someone is coming to visit me today. Someone I once interviewed for this blog. The name is in my Twitter stream.
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In other news, the jury duty I mentioned in my Twitter stream got called off. I called last night, and my number was higher than the ones that had to show up. I felt like I had won the lottery. I could write a whole post on jury duty, but I don’t think I want to commit some of ideas to writing. I feel un-American if I say I don’t like the idea of a jury. Really, it’s that I don’t like the idea of my having to serve on a jury and listen. Besides, I have too many other responsibilities to be a good jurist. I think next time I get called for a jury, I will work on the elderly father excuse. My father (finally) got a new computer; I set it up for him on Sunday, and every time he touches it he has another tech support question.
And my brand-new 75-300mm Canon Lens had to get returned to Adorama yesterday, because I was getting an “err_99.” Taking a pencil eraser and rubbing the gold points on the lens did not do the trick. This was the lens that allowed me to captured the robin and swallow in my Nature Notes this week. I hope a new lens comes, without any error messages appearing soon after I get excited about how wonderful the lens is.
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And in yet even more news, #themethursday this week is Typography. You don’t have to have a Twitter account to benefit. Go to http://search.twitter.com and put #themethursday as your search term. Enjoy the typography links! Love well-done typography. Something I’ve always wanted to learn in greater detail.
I am going to challenge myself and hopefully you to take a look at nature. What is going on in your area? Is it spring in your part of the world or are you heading into cold weather. Take a little walk….. look at something you might never had paid attention to..a flower…a plant..an animal…What changes are taking place?..Is your garden starting to come to life again?..Step outside and close your eyes. What do you hear? …take a deep breath…What do you smell?
I’d really like to know how my blogger friends feel about what they observe in nature. Post a photo..a poem..artwork or a even few words about what you see and how it made you feel…
Robin Red Breast, photograph taken in May 2009A Sparrow Sings to Me, photograph taken May 2009House sparrow in the tree, photograph May 2009
I finally got a 75-300mm zoom lens for my camera, and I can photograph…BIRDS! I sent my “exotic” bird photos off to Michelle, and she told me I had captured a robin and a sparrow. Well, at least now I know what an American robin and a house sparrow look like. Thank you, Michelle, for your inspiration! And a local birder expert just informed me: “The house sparrows are both males. Females don’t have that black in front.”
In honor of Lag B’Omer, which starts tonight, here’s a post about the previous Jewish holiday, Yom HaAtzmaut. Maybe by Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, I’ll have something to say about Lag B’Omer.
Two weeks ago was the annual RPRY (Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva) march around the block for Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut). This “little” parade isn’t so little; with parents and neighbors in attendance, the numbers in the crowd may have reached 800.
One of people who came to the parade was Mayor of Edison Jun Choi. Here is RPRY Principal Rabbi Gross introducing Mayor Choi (wearing tan suit), as he calls Edison “best city in the world outside of Yerushalayim” (Jerusalem).
And here is Mayor Choi declaring Rabbi Gross his favorite Jewish day school principal, possibly his favorite educator. You could tell they were both enjoying each other.
There is an upcoming mayoral primary in Edison: you can find out more by visiting Jun Choi’s website and Antonia Ricigliano’s website. One of my son’s RPRY teachers, “Morah” Rachel Callen, is on Jun Choi’s campaign signs (it doesn’t say “morah” – teacher – on the sign, but that is how we think of her).
Not everyone who marched was a human being. This dog was quite popular.
Who would have thought that chives up close can produce such pretty purple flowers? I look forward to my sage plant blooming as well; it also produces lovely purple blooms.
This was what I photographed of my columbine plant one week ago.
Here’s the same plant one week later, with an open white bloom.
The bleeding heart plant (dicentra spectabilis) on the side of my house is showing its little pink hearts. After a while, the greenery of this perennial plant dies down, and one has to be careful to leave it alone so it will bloom again next year.
I spent a little more time working on the design I started in this post. Lots of opportunities to utilize a variety of tools (pathfinder, burn and dodge, subtract, blend, drop shadow to name some) in both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop came up because I followed Chris Spooner’s tutorial.
So what do you see in the design? What could one use a design like this for? For example, if you replaced the text with something other than hello, what would you say?
A Design, For Fun! (more of this design, coming soon PLUS can you answer the question I asked in that post? Dhaval got the answer.)
Upcoming in Highland Park: bring your used books to the Highland Park Public Library starting on Monday. And in Edison, there’s an upcoming mayoral primary.
I was playing with the ideas in this tutorial by Chris Spooner last night, and I thought, why not post what I did. Not sure what I am going to do with this design, but at some point, making those fun swirly objects will be useful! I used Illustrator to create the vector designs (the rounded blobby things) and Photoshop to put it all together in a collage.
Below is the same exact illustration, but one thing is different. Can you guess what it is?
flower of an andromeda shrub, photo taken March 2009
This week’s Thursday Challenge theme is SPRING (Birds, Flowers, Puddles, Trees Budding, Spring Cleaning, Young Animals,…). Click to enlarge.
