Time for a new post

Okay, I'm really having fun with my camera. We have skylights over the kitchen. This time of year the sun actually shines in them.

As I was putting dishes away a few days ago I noticed a neat rainbow effect on the wine glasses. I decided, hey, why not try for a shot.

Here's what I got.

Photos from my Summer Solstice

Well, of course I took pictures on Wednesday. First are the pictures from a friend's yard.

This rose had some rust on the edges, but it was so beautiful otherwise that I took the picture anyway.


Here's another rose. As you can see, there was quite a good rain that day.


Then a big, lovely clematis.


And she found that there were five baby bluebirds in the bluebird house. They're a little easier to see if you check out the large version.


Then, after I got home, Ichabod and I took a walk around town.





And I even found wildflowers in town. :)

Happy first day of SUMMER!

Today is officially the first day of summer. It begins at 8:26 am EDT this morning.

I'm taking today off from work because I feel the Summer Solstice is as good a reason as any. Anybody else out there have any solstice plans?

Just walking around town, Part II

After we left the place with the beautiful flowers, I just had to go back and check something I thought I'd seen on the way over. Sure enough, there was a smoking trash bin. It was enclosed, it wasn't out of hand, and there was nothing else close by to catch fire. So I decided to just take some pictures of it.





The alleyway was between some old factory buildings. I don't know if these turned out as well as I'd have liked, but it was the rust pattern that intrigued me.




There was a pretty good-sized tree of heaven growing here.



And somebody'd been hanging out back here.



Then we went over to a spot where feral cats were living. We'd seen them in there with empty cans and paper plates from people feeding. I was disappointed when we got there and all of the cats were gone. They were being live-trapped and taken to a shelter. But here are some pictures of where they had lived.




The little pink spot on the door was the note to not feed the cats anymore.


I think this is kind of a neat mural.



This place calls itself a Bar & Grill, but it's mostly a bar where the girls who work there wear bikinis, hence the name Tini Bikini's.



I just liked these old Liquor/Food signs.



Dodd's is the only going concern in this building. He's ancient and has had this business forever. He sells CDs but he also has hundreds of vinyl records. As old as he is, he's really sharp, and knows a lot about the music he has there. The Downtown Market, mostly a liquor store, on the right was in business when we moved here but hasn't been for quite a while.



I hope you've enjoyed the rest of my walk through town with me.

Just walking around town

Last Saturday Ichabod and I decided to go for a walk. As we walked by the UICA we saw this Otterness statue.



Then we walked past St. Mary's hospital. There's a house that's surrounded by wonderful plants. The time before this walk when we went by we finally saw the owner. He's 80 years old. The hospital bought all the property around him and will own his when he dies.

He built this house twenty years ago. It's got solar panels, and is really efficient. He's been growing the plants for probably that long too. At one time St. Mary's told him that were going to redo the (perfectly fine) sidewalk around his house. That would have meant ripping out most of those wonderful old plants.

Since that was ridiculous, he went to the newspaper. The hospital got really bad press from this. They backed down and also told him that he can live there for free for the rest of his life.

So here is his house and a few of his plants. I could've posted more, but it was really windy and most of the plant pictures were blurred.











And just before we moved on, Ichabod looked up and saw some balloons in the sky.


I will continue the rest of the walk in the next post. Stay tuned...

Peectures

Well, flowers are coming out now. My camera is always on hand, of course. And here is the result of the two together.

Here are some Columbine


An iris


I'm not positive what this is. A spiderwort, maybe?


Wigeria


Dahlia


Pansies


The next three are Clematis




This is one that I saw for the first time last year. They call it Spooky.


And this one is my favorite. I decided to lie in the grass, under the tree. Of course, I picked the spot that would have the sun shining through the leaves. So, I decided to take a picture of it. It really looks cool in the large version.

Don't sleep in the subway darling, don't stand in the pouring rain...

In my previous post I mentioned that The Festival of the Arts was in downtown Grand Rapids this weekend. It's supposed to be about music and arts of different kinds. But most people go there for the food.

Yesterday I had a hankerin' for (absolutely no snickering here now) a foot long chili dog. I finally decided to go get one and Ichabod said that he didn't want one but he'd accompany me.

When we started out the door it was sprinkling a bit. No big deal, it was supposed to rain, off and on, during the day. Then the drops starting getting really huge.

We'd past a number of awnings and doorways to shops/restaurants, but I figured, hey, it's only rain. Then the wind kicked up, the temperature dropped and it was miserable.

We quickly ducked under an awning of the restaurant, Louis Benton. While we tried to wait it out it also started to hail. Crap! The wind kept whipping and the rain and hail were not fun.

Finally it slowed just a little and we decided to make a run for it. We stopped at almost every place that we could in order to get away from it for a few minutes. The last stop available was the big overhang at the police station. It had slowed a bit by then and we decided to run the last block and a half. We were probably only about four-five blocks from home when we'd had to make the first stop.

I never did get that hotdog until this evening. But I did take some pictures yesterday that I'd love to share with you. Hope you had a great weekend!















I really like this last one in the large size.