The Present

When we went to Boston, Kathy wanted to bring a present of some plants to give to our friends in Rhode Island.  So she put together this collection, and we brought it with us.  Only problem was, we had three days before we saw our friends.  And I was planning to go to museums, which meant the car would be parked in a sunny lot and it would bake the poor plants.  So we brought the container into the hotel room.  We kept it watered, and I put it in the sunshine in the morning, knowing that the sun would move and thus not give the plant too much sun.  I loved the shadows of the plants on the rug, so that's why I took this.

Old Timey Theater

This is the Avon Cinema on the East Side of Providence, RI, right near Brown University. The Art Deco styling dates from its opening in 1938, and the theater primarily screens independent, art house, and foreign films.  It was cool to walk down Thayer street to get to the restaurant we were eating at, and then to see this classic marquee.  So I had to take a picture, of course.

Liz is Home!

There are all kinds of interesting things going on in this photograph.  Liz and Sarah are visiting for the week from Los Angeles.  When she was rummaging around in her bedroom, Liz found the beret.  When she was touring with the band back in 2005, we all went to Nice and Barcelona.  I spotted a beret shop in Barcelona, and we went in and both bought one.  So I went and found my beret, and here we are!  Oh, and you have to love the purple hoodie "Fear the Frog."  Pretty cool, huh?

Heartbreaker

Back in the middle of May I showed a photograph of the mother cat and one of her kittens, sitting on top of the kayak in our neighbor's yard, as seen through the fence.  We thought everything was going well, because we were feeding the mother every day, and not going near the babies.  A few days after that photo was taken, we realized that they were all gone!  The mother cat had moved her kittens again!  We did a search, looking over fences into other neighbor's yards, to no avail.  We have been unable to find them all.  The mother stopped coming by to feed as well.  What a heartbreaker this mother cat is.  We wanted to capture the mother cat and have her spayed, and take her kittens and save them from becoming feral cats.  That is no longer possible, unless something changes.  Today she showed up at the back door at about 5:30 and I fed her, trying to keep an eye on her.  Here she is waiting to be fed.  At one point I turned my back and she was gone, and we have no idea where.

The Gate in Trauti's Garden

On the way home from Boston, we stopped to see our friends Dick and Trauti.  We have known them since 1965 - Dick and I started at the Rochester Times-Union as photographers at about the same time.  This garden and gate have been at their house since the 1970's.  I have photographed it before, but it gets more interesting to me as it gets older and older.  I love the green lichen growing on the pickets of the fence, and on the stone steps, and I love how tired the old garden gate is.

Art Lesson, Sort Of

This is not really an art lesson because I know so little about art.  The first picture is a detail of a Jackson Pollock painting titled "Number 10,"  at the Museum Fine Arts, in Boston.  It was created in 1949 and was one of his earlier "drip" paintings, for which he is best known.  His drip paintings revolutionized abstract art when they first appeared in 1947. I haven't seen a Pollock recently and so I spent a lot of time studying this one.  We have all heard the criticism that "Oh, anybody could do that, it is just dripped paint."  What impressed me about this painting was the incredible complex detail evident in the painting!  It is really stunning how many layers there are in his canvases.  I decided that it took a detail from the full-size painting to appreciate how much is there.  Underneath that is a copy of the entire painting.

Stickwork

I went to the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem on the second day of our Boston trip.  This is an outdoor exhibit down the street from the museum.  It is called "Stickwork" by the artist Patrick Dougherty, and was constructed out of saplings over the course of three weeks.  There are about seven or eight of these structures that you can wander into and out of. It was a fascinating experience to wander through them, and look out through the openings at the other structures.  It felt as if these objects were actually alive.