Taking over the view

OK, this is sort of a silly photo shot, but I was wondering if I would be able to catch my shadow on a the window during a sunset. Not only did I do so, but I also caught the reflection of my camera. I was 40+ feet up in a hotel, looking out a plate glass window over Dallas… and well, it’s sort of startling.

One shadow menaces the Comerica skyscraper across the way, while an even larger hand with a camera is reflected off to the right. It isn’t good photography, but it would make a marvellous scene from a sci-fi story. Debbie only Did Dallas… she didn’t menace it with gigantic shadows.

Latest news from people who don’t have to get up early in the A.M.: so far the Phillies are doing better this game (10:42 PM on a Monday evening). Go Phils!

 

Goin’ West

For Project Spectrum, I headed West to the land of tall buildings and the fictional home of JR Ewing. Back again, without extra yarn. I’m hoping the pictures I took will come out and I’ll be able to show you the few blue skies I got to see during a short visit to Dallas. There was great food, I got to see people I see once a year, and I wasn’t in the office. The bad part — I’m exhausted, I’m not sure I have something appropriate to wear tomorrow morning, and the cats were very very angry.

No, I did not go to the museum about Kennedy’s assassination. I did get to see an amazing Asian art museum (if you’re ever in Dallas, check out the Crow Asian Art Museum to hear calming beautiful music while getting to look at some of the most splendid jade from China and interesting marble temples from India). It’s weird that I got to go West to see mementos from the East. But here we have East brought to the West by avid collectors; and the old within the modern world of skyscrapers.

Rowboat and boat on banks of Lake Champlain

There are lovely places to hike near Lake Champlain. These boats were pulled up on a rocky ledge on the banks of the lake. I’m going through my pictures of sunsets over the water, woodsy trails, wildflowers, and interiors from the Inn I stayed at. All very lovely. Some of them are appropriate for Project Spectrum and I’ve put them up on my flickr account on the sidebar. Some may show up on these pages when they seem appropriate.

I guess it’s the sign of a good trip if you’re already hoping to go back again and figuring out ways to avoid lots and lots of driving.

Red berries in the north woods

It’s hard to believe these were real — but they were. Lovely red berries that captured the light and made me think of beautiful, clear jelly. This photo was taken during a short trip to the woods surrounding Lake Champlain. We saw many many rowboats as well as sailboats on the water. Dodged a couple of rainstorms, and survived one huge thunderstorm. Luckily, not that many mosquitoes saw me.

BTW: Lake Champlain is skinnier than I remembered. I must have been near it in the past and just thought it was a wide, huge river. Of course, that would have been riding with the family in my teens, when I probably had my nose in a book reading about ancient Egypt or Sumeranians.

Faux Wood Computer

I was not able to take pictures of the sheep on my way home from work due to:

1. Lambs too short to be seen over the grass, alas
2. A blind curve and nowhere to pull over

I had the camera out, and then I decided not to risk it.

Instead, I give you a faux wood PC tower cover seen in a shop window near Dusseldorf, Germany last week. I’m back home, but i have lots of Project Spectrum fodder off my camera chip. Every so often, when at a loss for knitting content, you may get to see more from the one day I was off work.

The little “rock” on top of the tower is actually a faux wood grained computer mouse (cordless). Sadly, I couldn’t get a picture of the faux stone keyboard. It was in a box and slanted so there was a strange glare coming off the box lid. The sign assures the passersby that the PC housing is air brushed, as well as of superior quality. There are other sell messages on the sign, but some of them are cutoff or backwards, so I haven’t a hope of translation.

Time Travelers

I was driving up a one way street in the evening, past the Basilica, when I stopped for a red light. A movement on the left, from behind the Basilica, caught my eye.

He came down the access alleyway, an African American man on a bicycle, possibly coming home from a late night at work. His mouth was set in a line beneath a pencil thin mustache. He was wearing a dark grey tweed driving hat, dark pea coat, a scarf, and slacks the color of the charcoal night. He seemed to have spent more care on his appearance than is common now. As though he was going on a romantic assignation, or merely wanted to connect with a more genteel time, without looking overdressed.

I sat and watched as he glided silently on his bicycle toward the stopped traffic, passed the black gates with gold tips, and turned right. As he glided off the wrong way on the one way street, I sat and thought about how timeless people could appear, as though equipped to step across the frame of forward moving time.

And then the light changed, and I drove off toward the moonlit streets and flowered trees of the park in front of me.

Marzipan as Still Life

Photographed by the Gardener before they’re gone — the marzipan fruit candies of Sprungli are small, artistic, and very, very tasty. They made a wonderful gift to bring home — much nicer than airport flowers (and easier to carry on the plane). Here is a lemon, orange, a few pears, and apples. Each is small enough to fit comfortably on a nickel. I can’t imagine how time-consuming it must be to make these little pieces of art.

My marzipan never looks this delicate and beautiful. I am thinking of making simnel cake again this year for Easter anyway, since it still tastes wonderful, no matter how amateur my cooking skills are.

Stealth Elevators

I suppose, like the elevators that show up when no one’s called them, there are automatic toilets that flush when no one’s there. So, while I’m blissfully asleep, somewhen in the night a toilet in Dulles International Airport flushes, and no one is there to be startled. Interesting… and yet I won’t waste my time thinking about it.

Note: the escalators in the Zurich Airport sit silent until someone’s ankles break a beam of light, and then suddenly the escalator is running full steam ahead. Yes, I agree this saves energy and is very ingenious. But I think the rest of the world should be forearmed with this knowledge before they have to negotiate the down escalator with too much luggage. A bit down on technology today. My car is currently cannot go forward, backward, or sideways. I fondly call it the largest paperweight in the world.

Roam

I’ve been playing my own version of “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego”. In this case, I managed to go to a town in Germany and Zürich in the same week. Zürich was a stopover in the airport, so technically I wasn’t there.

There are no yarn shops in the Zürich airport, I wasn’t allowed to bring knitting needles in my carry on bags, and I left the camera at home, so there’s very little evidence of my trip. [The photo above is of the Atlantic, taken on a winter's day back in 2006.]

The chocolates and marzipan I brought home just in time for Valentine’s Day are the only sweet evidence: Sprüngli dark chocolates and miniature marzipan fruit from the waiting area of the airport. Well, that and tales of an amazing, unexpected trek and meals like deer and brussels sprouts or salmon and saffron cream.

Kind of Recursive

But a huge undertaking nonetheless…..

There’s a Christmas Goat that gets put up every year in Gävle, Sweden (sorry for the lack of umlauts over the “a” in Gavle, I haven’t found WordPress’s settings for foreign languages).* This has been going on since 1966, when:

On 2 December the 13-metre (42,6 feet) tall, 7-metre long, 3 tonne goat stood on the square. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the goat went up in smoke. The perpetrator was found and charged with vandalism.

The Gävle Goat has been burned down 22 times since then.

Here is a link to the film of the goat under construction: Goat film.

I’m not sure if putting a giant stack of hay in the middle of town and decorating it with lights doesn’t invite people to see what would happen to it when it went up ablaze. But hearing about this makes me curious about what the rest of the region is like, and whether the town has a plan for what to do if no one burns the thing down for them.  Burning Man is a young (controlled) tradition compared to this.

*Thanks, Naomi. You learn something new every day.