Monday, November 30, 2009




I found some more of my farm animals. The cow in front was always a mystery for me.  It must have come from a state fair adventure as I never knew why I had one totally different cow.  It didn't stop me from keeping it with all the other cows.  I did have another goat that was grazing with it's head down.




I think this is the total crew from my box of wonder.  The rooster I see is missing as I must have set it out somewhere already. The plastic bale of hay was also a part of my set.  How now only one brown cow?  I could never figure that out why there couldn't have been a brown horse rather than all white but one.  Thus concludes my farm memories for the day. 

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Pink and greeen day......



I brought in my impatience plant and it is giving me a few stray blooms.  I thought the color would be a cheerful sight with a lot of us having gloomy weather. I can see this plant isn't going to last much longer though but a few last blooms will be nice.





I took this about a month ago before we got cold.  It is a "remember when" picture as it doesn't look like this now.  
I am blogging later each day, but I will be glad to get a day off on Sunday.  I hope you have had a good Saturday and that your Sunday will be a good day.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Not at my house.......



No, we didn't have Thanksgiving at our house.  The dining room table has been sent to the basement, and the living room is full of spare furniture. This doesn't look so bad now after this picture was taken.  I put the last coat of sealer on the floor today.  I thought the above photo qualified as a little edgy and surreal in subject matter.
Fortunately the garbage men were willing to take my dumpster full of fallen old plaster with them. I had bags of old ceiling squares that are now gone. Above this fake ceiling, created by a previous owner, one foot above, is the actual ceiling.  When I opened this up, I found that the old plaster ceiling had collapsed down onto this grid. Almost a third of it had given way.  I spent an entire afternoon breaking it up and putting it into the dumpster, and two nights with the effects of asthma, because of the awful dirt that was up there.



Here is another gutsy photo of a floor.  I may like this floor someday, but not today.  I need to get some steel wool, fine grade, and some paste wax and put my antique furniture finish on to this floor.  If the floor weren't so shiny you could think we were looking at a book about abandoned towns in Colorado.  I finished the sealing of the floor, three coats, at 10:45 am today, so in 24 hours I can put the final touches to the work of art. 

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving Parade......




I didn't have a snow storm to share with you so I will give you a sample of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.  Spiderman is always in the parade hovering above everyone.

 

Kermit the Frog is busy greeting everyone.  He gets to be on a float later and sings to us.





My camera kept flashing so I had to adjust the angle of the camera in order to take these off of the television.






This is a float of very large fruit and vegetables and gourds. The singer is singing a song to Kermit the Frog who is sitting on the giant gourd.






Here we are with a song about believing in Santa Claus.  Following this float was a large group of girls with pom poms  rooting for the upcoming float of Santa and his sleigh. The giant gourd just fascinates me as it had to be big enough for the puppeteer to sit inside of and to give Kermit all of the right moves.  Enjoy your day all over the world.


Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Three views of subtile........



Artemisia



Field lilies



Phlox

A few photos of what is left over from the cold and the wet.  I took these on Sunday and it was a lot brighter then than it is now. 

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Abstract Visions.......



I brought in an oxalis plant from outside and it sits in the kitchen next to the window.  I don't know why the camera didn't want to take it clearly, I suspect the light was low.  This still gave me an opportunity to have an abstract day.





I like how the oxalis plant closes up at night.  It is a tough plant and if it doesn't like the inside weather, it will still retain  it's life in the bulbs in the ground.  I water it in the spring and it comes back.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Monday's Images




I was able to go out and stroll the garden to see what is left to see.  There are some nice textures out there to appreciate.


 


These apples turned out to be disappointing. I had to peel five to get one good one.  The great thing is that the squirrels are enjoying them. It is a comic situation to watch them try to take them back to their tree.  They walk on top of my fence, jump onto my house roof,  go to the other side and jump up into their silver maple tree.  I find a lot of them that they have drop out of their mouth while running the course.





The ornamental pear is still hanging onto it's leaves.  Some are still very green while the rest are changing from yellow, to red and to orange.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

A box of memories......


I finally brought this box home from my parents place.  It hasn't been dealt with yet but I am anxious to dig in to see what I can do to clean these things. I know that there are two older locomotives in here. One hasn't worked for years, it was my older brothers' train. The other locomotive belonged to my brother and me when we received it from Santa together back in 1957.  It  worked back then and I hope I can get it back to working now.  One other train, that I didn't know my folks still had was an old metal train, that had a wind-up locomotive.  It was a cheap think that ran on a small circle track. I see the front face of that is gone and a set of wheels on the caboose is gone, but I thought the whole thing had been thrown away.  I see from the picture that there are old tinker toys in there and a few plastic farm animals.  The cloth was thrown in and I think that is from France, that my Dad had sent to my mom, a handkerchief, during the war.
Maybe tomorrow I can start to dig in and clean some of these things.  Right now it looks like a mess ready for a remedy.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Barberry Shrub......





I took this photo about a month ago of my barberry bush.  It really has quite a nice pattern of various colors. On the color wheel that would be called an analogous color scheme.  When I was a kid, we had these bushes at the school in the yard.  The students would play around them in spite of the  thorns and every fall everyone would throw the little berries at each other.  They were so trampled out that they didn't really look like a very nice shrub.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

A thing of beauty.....



A photo of the rosebush that I  moved from southern Iowa to our home.  It has been in the ground over a week now and the weather has held out good to give it a chance to root.  I will cover with leaves soon and hope to see it bloom next year.  A thing of beauty I share with you today.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Moss in Maine.....


One of the nice things about Maine is that it is very green.  Also as you hike through their woods you can see a lot of moss growing on rocks.  This was an really nice area as the sun was shining through the trees and the green of the moss was so lush. That  isn't a path but just a ledge above the carriage road that we were on while hiking.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Penguin weather.....




I am really not ready for cold weather, but I bet this guy is looking forward to the weather that we are having.  Snow will make him very happy.  He lives at the zoo, which means he could really live at my house.


These guys look attentive to what is going to be happening, but I don't think there was anything going on across the water.  I think they were contemplating feeding time.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Orchids Revisited.....




The two orchids I bought a month or so back are still alive.  I am having a slump day today, so be patient. I am not repeating photos, senile, but I am repeating a theme.  I had taken close-ups of these and was so anxious to share them, but now I will show you the larger forms.  I have a blogger friend across the seas who has numerous orchids so I have some resource person to cry out to for help to keep them alive.  Another friend of mine said that she treated them like African violets, and I can do that too.

I don't want a large collection of these but I would like to see them through at least another blooming cycle.  I am going to mess with these on photoshop and make them my creative thing for a day.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Great Escape......


Jack Sparrow, our cockatiel, has been giving us trouble lately.  We have a couple of these wise guys who like to get out of their cage on their own.  I have had to move the birds out of one room into another for a temporary time, so they get a little more frisky.  Jack Sparrow and his female, Canola, had a hole made in the back of their cage, cut by me, so I could hang a nesting box on the back of the cage. They successfully raised a liter of two birds, and before I took the nest off of the back, they started another brood and had three more baby birds.  So at one time we had seven cockatiel birds greeting us each morning with all of their calls.  I gave two of them away, but I still have the parents in one cage and the three young ones in another larger cage.
Jack Sparrow has figured out how to undo the cover over that nest hole, and escape on a number of times.  He likes to get out and look at us and screech.  I was in feeding them today and looked up and there is sat on top of the cage looking down at me.

As you can see he can be indifferent to me and really doesn't want to be put back in the cage right now.  I have to take a dish towel and capture him from behind. He will walk up to me and turn around so I can pick him up, but traditionally he has to try to bite the heck out of my hand if I don't put the towel in just the right location.  The first time he bit me, he clamped down on that soft part of  the skin on my hand between thumb and first finger.  They use their beak as a tool to crawl around so when the clamp down on you, it really, really hurts bad.
I have two males and a female in the other cage, and each of them like to play with the doors of the cages, lifting them and letting them fall to make a clanging sound.  Sometimes when they would do that the door would stick open and out one of them would come.  Each of them has escaped at least once until I started paper clipping the doors so they won't open.


Saturday, November 14, 2009

Bradford Pear, an ornamental tree......





I bought this bradford pear, really not knowing what I was buying.  I was actually getting a flowering pear tree, I thought, that had been marked down seventy five percent, to clear it off the lot.  I was hoping I would get the spring flowers but I thought I would get pears too.  So I looked it up a couple of years ago and I became an educated man.  It is a non-fruiting variety.
Regardless of my lack of knowledge about all of this, I have a beautiful specimen tree and the leaves are the last to fall this year.  I like the shine and the color.  It is just great.
















 





 
Have a great weekend....

Friday, November 13, 2009

Otter Cliff......



Otter Cliff in Maine has a lot of nice shoreline. Most of the rock is actually granite and trees and grass seek out small cracks in the rock to grow.  A day of rest for me.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

An everyday scene with meaning.....



This is a shot I took in our art gallery. My wife's oak commode is our entry piece when customers come into the shop. I had taken the shot as the ceramic donkey pulling a basket on wheels has a plant that has really done well in it. It was my Mom's planter and she always had a vine of some sort, sitting it on a large doily. In a blog in the past, I shared how I hadn't seen this planter for twenty years or more so I was surprised to pull it out of a cupboard at my parent's house.

Also on the commode is a partial view of a magazine my wife had been published in a while back. The magazine was called Animal World and her painting of the fox is on the front cover. She was the featured artist for this issue.
The lamp was one that I had given my parents thirty years ago and I am glad to have it in our home. I like the hand painted design on it.
There are business cards laying there, some that should be put back in their holder, as I see they have fallen out.
The framed flower painting was one that was created by one of my teacher friends, Steve, a few years back. He died of cancer and his wife had the painting reduced and put on thank you cards. We immediately framed it in his memory.
What does a photo mean, not much, but the things involved always have a history. Sometimes it is just common stuff and it can be treated as such. A photo also presents itself as a reflection of a scene, many parts are sometimes required. You can be sure that those in the future will look at things and want to know what is with all that stuff?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Old photos of a Veteran, my Dad, Jesse T. Burgus.....

I don't know who took these photos, but my Dad sent Mom pictures as often as he could. He was brought into WW 2 at the end of the war. He was first shipped into Belgium and it all seemed like a European vacation.




Before he was shipped to the front, the Battle of the Bulge, to carry a radio for scouts, in front of the front, he had sent casual pictures of the things around Belgium. Some of the area had been bombed and the train is one of the things that had been put out of commission.





I have a large envelope full of these pictures. Some of them seem to be polaroids and others were some that his buddies processed in the field. He spoke about the guys who liked to develop photos everywhere they would travel.





This last photo is from a place unknown, probably Belgium also. The war had left a lot of personal scars on my Dad's life. He was reliving the horror one more time, the last time that I took him to the emergency room, a few days before he died. He emotionally had to talk about it and we all tended to be deaf afterwhile as he told and retold things. I know it was his way of coping.

I regret that he didn't live long enough to see the new WW 2 memorial in Washington D.C. He would have cried and smiled and he would have been proud.
It's Veteran's Day and we take things way too much for granite.

Hey dad, I need a haircut.....



While I was working outside today on the window installation, I kept seeing a little over-furry dog stick it's head up and watch me. He doesn't like the sound of the saws and all the junk that is all over the patio, so he doesn't come out to see what is going on. Barney of course is helping me by keeping the killer cats in the neighbor's yard in their place. He patrols the fence and makes sure they don't come into our yard.


Monday, November 9, 2009

Four photos, one bush......

The snowball bush in my backyard, bloomed this year for the first time and also it's leaves are putting on quite a show. I just will show them all instead of just one.













The leaves are looking dead at a distance but when the sun shone through them I got these great colors.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Sunsets in Iowa.......

as I am driving home the sun actually sets, but becomes exposed to us all.














Our fall skies are always changing and the clouds come and go. The formations seen here are fall clouds, with their puffy shapes and low hovering movements.

Blurry Blue Cup Day.....

 It is Monday and I am a little blurry eyed today. It is fitting then my blue cup is blurred a little because it is in low light. I was too ...