I could've easily doubled up on yesterday's image for some thing fast, but since this is the eighth day in a row I've posted fresh photos (I'd intended to get through one week submitting to a different challenge each day), I wanted to wrap it up with another new shot.
-----Wealth is abundant -- and flaunted -- on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
Much of New Orleans remains devistated, but in otherwise flattened neighborhoods, there are a scattering of new houses. In some cases, the new homes are the only ones on a block -- or a series of connected blocks -- to which the owners have returned: New Orleanians in a neighborhood without neighbors.
I was thinking of talons or teeth for something sharp, and then I came across this big guy. I wouldn't want to face that beak without a cage between us. I'm shuddering a little just looking at it.
Minor league baseball -- a cheap afternoon or night out and, often, cheap eats. (Ironically, the beer isn't usually that cheap, but I guarantee you that it's cheaper here, in Trenton, than it is in the Bronx or Queens.)
Winter hasn't quite hit New Jersey yet, but it's on the way this week. We're due for steady temperatures in the 30s, and that first snowfall can't be too far behind. We've barely had so much as a flurry. Other than a light dusting on December 26 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the last time I saw snow was in May in Wyoming.
Beyond winter lies spring, and with it the perfume of a new beginning, the smell of the lilacs that sprout up all purpley in yards and gardens and remind us to air out the house.
On an overcast late-May day in northwestern Wyoming, the clouds hang low over the Grand Tetons, which dwarf the bison grazing in the fields. I have no shortage of images that would fit the category of "peaceful," but most are stored away on negatives in albums on a shelf in the spare bedroom. My grand plan to sort through the vast -- albeit mostly mediocre -- archives and try my hand at scanning them in has yet to begin.
I can already picture some of the, well, pictures that would work for this theme. There's one of me sitting on a rock, looking out over a frozen pond deep in the Maine winter. There's Notre Dame's grotto at night, the candles illuminating the rocks in the alcove in a soft, yellow light. There are numerous snowscapes in which you can feel the cold and sense the silence of the muffled scene.
Just one more item for the to-do list.
Every spring, everyone talks about the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., but Newark's Branch Brook Park actually has more of them. Or so I'm told. They're gorgeous enough, but we didn't actually get to all of them on this day, so maybe there was a nicer setting. But I don't know if any location can compare to Washington's Tidal Basin. Still, Newark's park is pretty nice, and on the trees that didn't hold their white blossoms, they carpeted the ground like an early spring snowfall.
