ABC Wednesday: T is for Tired

I shot this too tired traveler from a distance while going on a lunch break walk. I guess it may be an infringement of privacy but since he was in a city park garden and not in his own bed, the expectation of privacy may be less. I think he was on his lunch break too. I took the shot on one of the few chilly days last week which made it a good walking day for me.

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Combined Nature Notes and ABC Wednesday: S is for Shade

We are moving into the shady time of year where I live. The deciduous trees lining the streets are wearing their new leaves.

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ABC Wednesday: R is for Rip

Rip Roaring Rushing Rambunctious tide

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ABC Wednesday: Q is for Quaint

Quintessential Quaint Quilt Barn

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ABC Wednesday: P is for Pairs

Proud Pretty Preening Primping Pairs

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ABC Wednesday: O is for Ordinary

As I mentioned when I featured creative mailboxes for M day, I have an ordinary mailbox. However, now that my oversize, outlandish, opulent, some might say outrageous, azaleas are in bloom they create a flower wall around my mailbox making it photo worthy for O this week.

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ABC Wednesday: N is for Northclift

Northclift Drive is a street in Northclift subdivision near where I live in a North Carolina town in the triangle area and this road ends on North Hills Drive.

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ABC Wednesday: M is for Mailbox

  
There are as many different decorative mailboxes in my neighborhood as there are minds to come up with them. My mailbox isn't included because it isn't anything special until May when my azaleas bloom and cover it with blossoms. I think my favorite of these is the top far right hand one where they built a little stone house to surround the mailbox. That mailbox house also has a small garden bed which will be pretty when the flowers bloom.

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ABC Wednesday: L is for limb

Linger limb let loose lightly leaving leeward

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ABC Wednesday: K is for kindred

A couple of kindred spirits sharing a sun kissed part of the deck on a cold morning. It must be kismet that put the mourning doves in view of my camera when I was wondering what to do for K week.

Be they kith or kin the pair of cardinal girls look kind of cute facing each other on a forked branch. 

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ABC Wednesday: J is for Jar

Just a jar jostling for a spot front and center where jocular Carver may photograph a J word for J Day. Ends up looking a tad junky not to mention justifiably cluttered.

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ABC Wednesday: I is for Inside

My imagination infers a fairy tale family must live inside the NCMA's Cloud Chamber for Trees and Sky.

In reality this work by British artist Chris Drury is a camera obsura devise that projects the sky and trees onto the interior surfaces.

Above is the ceiling and below is where the ceiling meets the inside walls.

Next is a shot I took inside looking out. By the way, I've been inside the Cloud Chamber for Trees and Sky many times but I've never seen anything projected on the interior surfaces, perhaps because of the light during the time I was  at the NC Museum of Art Park.

 Below you can see the irregular stones on the exterior walls. 

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ABC Wednesday: H is for Human

I recently noticed that a few houses down from me, a neighbor had added a human male statue next to their mailbox. I think one of the dumber ideas that humans came up with around 1530 was to add a fig leaf to ancient and Renaissance sculpture to cut down on nudity in art. Even before that, when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, heroic nudity disappeared from Roman art and in the middle ages only the damned were usually shown nude. Note- I'm paraphrasing from wikipedia which I used to refresh my aging memory on this subject. How humans can be so silly about the human form is beyond me. I think my neighbors use of a nude with the fig leaf is a joke and lets face it this is a cheap plaster garden copy not an original or even a good reproduction of a work of art. Even so, I have the impulse to go down with a chisel and remove the fig leaf, sort of the opposite of the trend of adding fig leafs that went on in the 1500s.  However, I bet money that if I removed the fig leaf I wouldn't find an anatomical correct human male underneath.  I do like the hand painted flowers on the mailbox and I'm pretty sure they include pistils and stamens. For that matter I think the fig leaf guy is fairly hilarious once I fall off my soap box.

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ABC Wednesday: G is for guessing game

My guess from a distance was that the neighborhood children had drawn a hopscotch board on the sidewalk for a hopping game.

When I got closer I wasn't sure what the game was but it definitely wasn't hopscotch.

The first two shots are from last week and are only a small portion of the drawings I spotted along the sidewalk.

The third through last shots were taken this Monday and this group looked like perhaps they were playing a safety game.

The children and parents weren't outside when I spotted these sidewalk games so your guess is as good as mine as to what game, if any, they were playing.

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ABC Wednesday: F is for Frozen

Most of the snow and freezing rain we had last week has melted but low night time temperatures have refrozen some areas and shaded places still have snow.   For F week I decided to find something frozen to photograph this Monday and I settled on a field which is used for a variety of sports children play. I was surprised by how much of this field was frozen because a near by baseball field only had a little snow around the edges where the sun didn't hit it.

I stepped through the gate to get a better position to take the shot above and I cracked the frozen ice as you can see below. I had my camera around my neck and didn't want to fall on it so I held the fence with one hand and took the picture with the other hand. By the way, a bad fall which would injure me is of even greater concern than my camera but in the past my automatic attempts to protect my camera have resulted in my having worse falls than I would have if that wasn't my first instinct. I don't plan to put my camera above my safety but when it comes to reflexive actions, I find that my camera is what I go for first rather than protecting my own fragile bones. 

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ABC Wednesday: E is for evergreen

Evergreens excel in providing color in the winter.

Even though I like the green provided by evergreens I think they especially exude beauty when covered by or dusted with snow.

I encountered snow on evergreens at the end of January and the beginning of February this year.

We are expecting snow and freezing rain this week so eventually I will probably have even more photographs of evergreens having winter encounters with the white stuff.

I considered going through my archives because I've taken better evergreen shots with larger amounts of snow in past years but I decided to restrict myself to shots I took this year.

Warning, the last sentence will not make a lot of sense aside from providing extra E words.

 

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ABC Wednesday: D is for dog

A desperate dog dropped through the icy lake not too far from the shore and began shivering drastically. I took the shot from a distance and realized the dog was in trouble so I headed down to the bank to help. My idea was to drag a log from the bank and push it to the puppy but a quick thinking young woman sloshed through the ice and scooped up the darling dog who was shaking uncontrollably. I donated my jacket to be used to wrap up the freezing dog. The dog had run away from home but his collar had his family's phone number and his human mom came and picked him up. He continued to shake uncontrollably and I hope his family took him to the vet if he didn't get better quickly. The day before this happened the dog could have probably walked along on the frozen lake but he picked the day when the sun was melting the ice and the temperatures were rising which resulted in him falling through the ice. That said, the lake was still very cold a fact that the daring young woman who went in after him attested to.

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ABC Wednesday: C is for Caution

Careful at the crossing cause the train is a coming . . . 

I'd hate to crash and be crunched cause I lacked caution.

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