I miss you Sam!!

I miss you Sam!!
I miss you Sam!!

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


We've had sun, clouds and everything in between today, but the colors up and down the streets are multiplying every day and it's once more a joy to walk outside. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.
Kahlil Gibran

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
Kahlil Gibran

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
Anais Nin

Shadow Shot Sunday!


Time for Shadow Shot Sunday again! Check into Hey Harriet's site, sign up and play with shadows!

I love colored shadows! Actually, I just love shadows period because if there are shadows, guess what? It means there's SUNSHINE! And it truly feels like SPRING!!!







Friday, April 17, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


If click in the photos to enlarge and you look closely, you can see the wind, fortunately you can't feel it because it was cold. But there was some blue in the sky today. The trees look so delicate and fragile with their tiny new leaves. I do love the willow, swaying in the breeze.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.
Kahlil Gibran

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.
Kahlil Gibran

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
Kahlil Gibran

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
Rabindranath Tagore

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
Anais Nin

If This is Earth, What's Heaven Like ....

A friend sent these to me today and they are so beautiful I had to share the thought and the beauty.

Lavendar farm and tree.

Breithorn Peak in Switzerland

Earthbound rainbow.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


Today, at least for a while, it looked and felt like spring with a blue, blue sky and beautiful blossoms.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.
Kahlil Gibran

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin

I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy.
Anais Nin

Sky Watch Friday


A new round of Sky Watch hosted by Klaus, Sandy, Ivar, Wren, Fishing Guy and Louise starts today! Click here, join us and share your skies!

We've had quite a variety of skies lately, from grim and gray, to clear and cloudless and then more lovely sunsets. Hope you enjoy the lastest from last weekend.








Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty



Your friend is your needs answered.
Kahlil Gibran

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
Kahlil Gibran

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin

A Blue Look at Texas

Although I don't talk about it much, I was born in Texas and grew up there. While it's not one of my favorite places in the world, about this time every year there are sights that will take your breath away and I'm going to share some of those with you now. Click on any of them to see the details, it's worth it.







Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being.
Kahlil Gibran

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
Kahlil Gibran

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
Anais Nin

Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
Anais Nin

This is the maple tree with the diamond-like raindrops a couple of weeks ago that taught me that there can even be beauty in the rain. Click on both of the photos to really appreciate the detail.

This is the same maple as she/he begins leaf out to catch the sun.

ABC Wednesday


Welcome to ABC Wednesday! Today's letter is "M"! Click here to join us and play!

M is Magnificent Magnolias and Moon!


M is for Mermaid!

A Sad Statement for America

Less than a week after I posted that I would be focusing primarily on the beautiful things in life, an article by Bob Herbert, Op-Columnist for the NYT, hit me right between the eyes. There's no way that I could read it, shrug my shoulders and go back to taking photos.

Ten days ago three police officers were killed by a 22 year old gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with a variety of weapoons, including an AK-47 assault rifle. They were responding to a disturbance at the house. The young man's grandmother told Herbert there was no mercy for what her grandson had done. But as Herbert says, mercy or not, there is no end to the trauma and heartbreak caused by these horrifying, blood-drenched eruptions of gun violence, which are as common to the American scene as changes in the weather.

On the same day that shooting took place, a man here in Washington, shot his five children to death and then killed himself. A day earlier, a man in New York, invaded a civic association and shot 17 people, thirteen of them, fatally and then he killed himself. Three days after the shootings in Pittsburgh and Graham, Washington, a man with a handgun in Alabama murdered his wife, their 16-year-old daughter, his sister and his sister's son, before killing himself. And there's more, there's always more.

After all, this is the American way. Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country's attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in non-terror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it -- 120,000 dead! That's nearly 25 times times the number of Americans killed Iraq and Afghanistan!

And for the most part, we pay no real attention to this relentless carnage. The idea of doing something meaningful about the insane number of guns in circulation is a nonstarter. So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes!

The goal of the National Rifle Association and a host of so-called conservative lawmakers is to get ever more guns into th hands of ever more people. Needless to say, Texas is one of a number of states considering bills to allow concealed guns on college campuses. Of course, supporters argue, among other things, that it will enable students and professors to defend themselves against mass murderers, like the deranged gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech two years ago. These gun supporters would like guns to be as ubiquitous as laptops or cellphones. One Texas lawmaker referred to unarmed people on campuses as "sitting ducks."

This murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.

How many more have to be killed before we find a better way to deal with violence in this country other than making it even easier for more angry, mentally/emotionally disturbed and just plain stupid people to get guns?

Monday, April 13, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.
Kahlil Gibran

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
Kahlil Gibran

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
Anais Nin

Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.
Anais Nin


A tulip tree that will be even more beautiful against a blue sky -- if and when we get one before the blossoms die. Click on it to embiggen. It will take your breath away!

That's My World -- Astoria, Oregon

Time for another chance to show us your world, hosted by Klaus, Sandy, Ivar, Wren, Fishing Guy and Louise.


Astoria, Oregon is one of the loveliest and oldest towns in the northwest. Located on the border between Oregon and Washington at the mouth of the Columbia River, it has a fascinating history. This post is a little longer than I like, but it is such a beautiful area with so much wonderful history and I wanted to share it with you today. The Lewis and Clark Expedition spent the winter of 1805-1806 at Fort Clatsop, a small log structure south and west of modern day Astoria. The expedition had hoped a ship would come by to take them back east, but instead endured a torturous winter of rain and cold, then returned east the way they came. Today the fort has been recreated and is now a national monument.

Fort Lewis and Clark National Park.


Click to enlarge this. It is a wood engraving of Astoria published in Harper's Weekly on May 30, 1868.

In 1810, John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company sent the Astor Expedition that founded Fort Astoria as its primary fur-trading post in the Northwest, and in fact the first permanent U.S. settlement on the Pacific coast. It was an extremely important post for American exploration of the continent and was influential in establishing American claims to the land.

Washington Irving, a prominent American writer with a European reputation, was approached by John Jacob Astor to mythologize the three-year reign of his Pacific Fur Company. Astoria (1835), written while Irving was Astor's guest, cemented the importance of the region in the American psyche. In Irving's words, the fur traders were "Sinbads of the wilderness", and their venture was a staging point for the spread of American economic power into both the continental interior and into the Pacific.
The Maritime Museum

In 1876, the community was legally incorporated. It attracted a host of immigrants beginning in the late-nineteenth century:Scandinavian settlers, primarily Finns, and Chinese soon became significant parts of the population. The Finns mostly lived in Uniontown, near the present-day end of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, and took fishing jobs; the Chinese tended to do cannery work, and usually lived either downtown or in bunkhouses near the canneries. In 1883, and again in 1922, downtown Astoria was devastated by fire, partly because it was mostly wood and entirely raised off the marshy ground on pilings. Even after the first fire, the same format was used, and the second time around the flames spread quickly again, as collapsing streets took out the water system. Frantic citizens resorted to dynamite, blowing up entire buildings to stop the fire from going further.

Astoria has served as a port of entry for over a century and remains the trading center for the lower Columbia basin, although it has long since been eclipsed by Portland and Seattle as an economic hub on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Astoria's economy centered around fishing, fish processing, and lumber. In 1945, about 30 canneries could be found along the Columbia; however, in 1974 Bumblebee Seafood moved its headquarters out of Astoria, and gradually reduced its presence until 1980 when the company closed its last Astoria cannery. The timber industry likewise declined; Astoria Plywood Mill, the city's largest employer, closed in 1989and the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway discontinued service in 1996.

In 1966 the Astoria-Megler Bridge was opened; it completed U.S. Route 101 and linked Astoria with Washington State on the opposite shore of the Columbia.

The Astoria Megler Bridge.

In addition to the replicated Fort Clatsop, a popular point of interest is the Astoria Column, a tower 125 feet (38 m) high built atop the hill above the town, with an inner circular staircase allowing visitors to climb to see a breathtaking view of the town, the surrounding lands, and the mighty Columbia flowing into the Pacific. The column was built by the Astor family in 1926 to commemorate the region's early history.

Since 1998, artistically-inclined fishermen and women from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest have traveled to Astoria for the Fisher Poets Gathering, where poets and singers tell their tales to honor the fishing industry and lifestyle. Astoria is also the western terminus of the TransAmerica Trail, a bicycle touring route created by the American Cycling Association.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Evening Words, Wisdom and Beauty


Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
Kahlil Gibran

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
Anais Nin

Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly.
Kiss slowly. Love truly.
Laugh uncontrollably,
and never regret anything.
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass
It's about learning to dance in the rain.


It's gray and rainy and chilly, but the Lilac is about ready to burst into bloom and that is what hope is all about!

How About This?



Amazingly this is all begonias ! What looks like a rug is actually flowers.



A National Day of Recognition


Today is National 'HOLY CRAP YOU'RE HOT DAY!'

Send this to someone gorgeous, but not me,
I've been getting this damn message all morning!!!

What Can I Say?

What Can I Say?
I'm interested in almost everything. Use to like to travel, but it's too expensive now. I take Tai Chi classes, swim, volunteer in a Jump-start program for pre-schoolers. I'm an avid reader and like nearly everyone these days I follow politics avidly. I'm a former teacher and Special Projects Coordinator for a Telecommunications company, Assistant to the President of a Japanese silicon wafer manufacturing company. Am now enjoying retirement -- most of the time. I have two daughters, one son-in-law and two sons scattered all over the country. No grandchildren.

Portland Time