Weekly Review with Iris

On My Blog

A quiet week on my blog: I plan to publish on Sunday a post on illustrators, some famous, some you can access now via blog, Twitter, website or Flickr.

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere

• Jewish Blog Carnivals: Batya has reported that Blog Carnival isn’t forwarding links. To participate in Haveil Haveilim, send links to shilohmuse at gmail dot com (today only). If you have a recipe for Kosher Cooking Carnival, send links to shira at seymourpr dot com. If you are a Jewish photo blogger, please send links to jpixcarnival at gmail dot com (you have until December 24).
• Jew Wishes is back to writing book reviews. Here’s one: Letters to My Father, by William Styron – letters written by Styron to his father, William C. Styron, Sr.
• Record Numbers of Turkish Jews Moving to Israel
• G6 asks some interesting questions about blogging and writing to your audience.
• I wrote a post on how to make fancy colored boxes in CSS – feel free to ask questions on my tech blog.

Doors and Windows of Allaire

We visited Allaire State Park back in early November. Here are some of the doors and windows of that pretty park. The above building in the historical village was closed, but many were open.

Strictly speaking, this is not a door or a window, but it is OPEN – so it’s like a gateway to the bakery. I enhanced the saturation of the colors in Photoshop.

We were able to visit the original home of the Allaire family. As I said on a previous post, we were not allowed to photograph inside, but here’s the doorway to that interesting home. It was said to still be inhabited by a descendant of the original Allaire founder in the 1950’s, and that 1950’s owner kept a horse in his kitchen. Eccentric.

This was a vertical photo, so I increased the canvas size to make it horizontal, and then I used the clone stamp tool and the blur tool to get the main part of the photo to extend a bit into the side areas.

What is that white board that looks like a door but is curiously up too high to be a door? Where there once steps there? I didn’t notice this until today, when I was looking through these photos. Does that happen to you; do you find mysteries in your photos that you didn’t recognize when you were on the scene?

These are windows in the train of the Pine Creek Railroad, which is next to the Historical Village. The train ride just goes around in circles, but we did get to see some deer as we circled about.

For more windows and doors, visit Window Views (hosted by Mary the Teach):

First Thanksgiving Dinner Ever

This was what was written above the drawing of the ship:

Note the spelling with a hyphen: G-d.

Red Foliage of New Jersey

Most all the leaves are now brown. Above is a multi-colored branch from East Jersey Olde Towne in Piscataway, taken two weeks ago.

My oak hydrangea (photographed last week) is even redder than it was a few weeks ago. What color.

For more photos with red, visit Ruby Tuesday:

What’s in the Drawing?

Can you tell me what is going on in my daughter’s drawing? I will post the text above the drawing by Wednesday in a different post. Enjoy chatting about the drawing.