Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

Any colour – so long as it’s black.
- Henry Ford -

I haven’t felt much like blogging for a few months now. Have I been Blue? Yes, some days. Other days, I’ve been seeing Red (but that is a post for another day). Very occasionally, I’m Mellow Yellow - (white wine can do that). For the past week or so I’ve been kind of Grey though – I’ve got a cold.

I perked up, however, when I saw the Photo Challenge this week was Color (or Colour). Just click on this Tag – Colour – and you will see just a few of the Colour themed posts I’ve done in the past few years.

So, what to choose for this theme?

In the creepy crawly department, I found a scorpion in the bathroom the other day, but in my hurry to remove it from the house, didn’t get a photo. I did, however, find this very handsome Large Milkweed Bug a few days later – well, actually I found lots of them and they were very absorbed with mating, so I had to wait for some time to take a picture that wouldn’t compromise their right to privacy.

A recent visit to Goldfield Ghost Town (see Two Subjects for a few words about this Arizona destination) offered many opportunities to photograph the bright yellow flowers, blue skies and Superstition Mountains, all while eating ice cream in a freshly baked waffle cone. Life just doesn’t get any better than that.

Another bug – a honey bee in a the bright pink flowers of – well something. Arizona plants and insects are still pretty much a mystery to me.

Things happen fast here in the Sonoran Desert. These Wolfberries are already a deep red orange in colour and I expect they will be a welcome food source for something very soon. I have read that the berries are people food too, but Arizona berries are pretty much a mystery to me too.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.
- Samuel Butler -

Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

December found us far from home, though at a place we are learning to call home – our Snowbird place in Arizona. The gathering of the clan at Christmas was, therefore, a smaller event than usual and Christmas morning was a quiet affair. At least it was until a stranger appeared in my Christmas stocking. He said he was just a Businessman, but there was something about his bowler hat that hinted he had a secret agenda.

Well – seven can play at the Spy Game! Armed with only our cameras and our wits, we syrupti… serrepti… surreptitiously followed him around for the next few days. Here is what we found:

Businessman spent a lot of time investigating a bowl of oranges.  On the surface, they all seemed innocent enough…

But apparently there was one bad one in the bunch. Businessman coldly bisected it and skewered it with a cocktail fork.

Later that day, we found him up on the roof of the house with the stalk of another orange in his hand. We heard him whisper, “This is one body they are never going to find.”

Businessman’s behaviour was unsettling, so we quickly juiced the rest of the oranges and hoped he would leave. And leave he did. With only a cursory glance at the GPS and a stare that told us we should forget we had ever seen him

he left in as mysterious a manner as he had arrived.

Days later, we read that a Businessman had lost his life in an unfortunate accident involving a paper shredder. It happened in Orange County, Florida.

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The photos for this story were the result of a challenge. Each of us had to photograph the Businessman – no one else could see the result until all the photos were taken.

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.

G.K. Chesterton

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Another LEGO story: Work and Play with LEGO – the Fruit War

WWI Memorial – A Brooding Soldier

Canada entered World War I as a colony and came out a nation…
- Bruce Hutchison, Canadian Journalist -

We’ve been to Europe a number of times. (I know that sounds like a big deal, but we were living in England at the time.) On one of our trips we visited a number of  WWI cemeteries and monuments in Belgium and France. I was looking for a cemetery that contained soldiers who had died on the same day that my Grandpa’s brother, Henry, had been reported missing in battle. (Read In Flanders Fields for the story of my family in WWI.)

Near St. Julien we found the Canadian Memorial of The Brooding Soldier.  The bowed head and shoulders of a Canadian soldier with folded hands resting on arms reversed was carved from an 11 metre high piece of granite. It appears to be meditating about the battle in which his comrades displayed such great valour – a battle where the Canadian, British and French Armies met an enemy that launched the first ever large-scale gas attack.

Each fall I am reminded of that visit to Brussels and the St. Julien Soldier when I see the drooping heads and leaves of my sunflowers. The first light dusting of snow makes the large flower head bend – a Brooding Sunflower.

A heavy frost assaults, but doesn’t quite kill.

But as the weather gets colder, the sunflower admits defeat. Winter wins another war.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Foreign Street Scenes

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
- Dave Barry -

America has solved the problem of foreign languages. Want to see the Eiffel Tower without the inconvenience of all those foreigners in France? Just go to Las Vegas!

How about raw meat hanging in front of a shop, cabbages wilting in the heat, and dead animals floating in the canal nearby? Seems foreign to me, but this scene was relatively common in Cairo, Egypt. (Except for the dead animals floating nearby. That was only if there was a canal for them to float in.)

This street in Doha, Qatar seemed foreign when I first encountered it, but became normal after living there for some time. (Well, not right there. A few miles away.)

This is a street in Munich, Germany. The buildings, the statues, the floral window boxes – all so foreign in my part of the world but absolutely beautiful!
Do you ever ask yourself why you live where you do, and not somewhere else? I do…

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More from Germany: Weekly Photo Challenge: Arranged