September Cards

A quick selection of my favourite cards from September - before it's time for October!! Not much time today for editing any photos...

I liked the second one as a non-traditional baby card - but I should have done it in pink and I could have used it already! The musical one was a thank-you card for the daughter of a work-colleague of C's. She is studying clarinet, and loaned him one to try out so he could see if he would be interested in purchasing one himself - answer, yes! The retiform elephant one was for my father-in-law's 93rd birthday. Unlike elephants he is getting forgetful, so I don't think he'll have remembered that he had a retiform card just a couple of years ago.

This last one is not a September card, it is the thank-you card I made for the owners of the cottage we stay in, with a very rough and ready collage of the pictures I used for the View-Master wheel. The lake is Coole Forest Park. The shell was tiny, smaller than my little finger nail. There were some wonderful fungi growing in the wood beside the house. I'd brought my macro lens but unfortunately my tripod head needed the attention of a #3 Allen key which I didn't have with me - it was hard to photograph the fungi without it, but I managed the shell. The sparrowhawk was along the coast road from New Quay to Finvara, and I was was able to get very close!! The Red Admiral was in the same area, and again I was able to get very close. It seemed particularly large, and for mid-October in very fine condition. I'm sure there'll be a full-sized photo of the sparrowhawk along soon, as well as more of Coole.

Barns

A recent photo challenge on SCS was "Barns". Not so easy for me here in Dublin, and when we're driving it can be hard to just pull in - especially now that we're much more likely to be on motorways than in the bad old days.
But while we were down in Clare I was able to get some photos. Not many - I had some other great looking ones picked out, but one day it was raining too heavily when we passed by my chosen stopping space. Another day we'd picked out two good locations but ended up coming back on a different road altogether. Still and all, I managed to come up with a few usable photos!

Room with Views

This is terrible - I don't know how I am ever going to catch up. I still have two more post's worth of photos from Paris, and that was June. And our visit to the Botanic Gardens in late September...
I was sick for a couple of weeks which has left me even more behind. We did manage to get away for a long weekend in the country. A beautiful old beech tree had had to be felled as it was rotten through, and while the main living area in the house always had wonderful views over the lake through the french doors and big windows, there was now a lovely new view opened up which I enjoyed while I played the flute ~ first two photos.
We had fairly good weather on the whole - some rain on the first afternoon when we went for a walk in some woods and didn't mind it too much, and then not much till the last afternoon when we were cleaning and packing anyway. In between the occasional showers there was some beautiful sunshine to set off the beautiful autumn colours.

 

Views over the lake in various weathers...

I took the last two photos on Saturday after lunch; I had a few birthday cards that needed posting with me, and I'd forgotten to bring them with us on Saturday morning when we were stopping at the local shop. So after lunch I walked into the village (about a mile) stopping off to go into the lakeside land on the way. And then when I got to the village, I discovered that I had carefully brought the two unstamped cards that didn't need posting till Monday. So C came to the rescue and drove up with them - and maybe it was just as well because it started pouring on the way home!

Purple in the woods

This was one of my favourites from the Sculpture in Context exhibition at the Botanic Gardens when we went recently. From a farther distance than the photos, I saw the splash of purple and thought maybe it was colchicums. Perhaps because I was too busy looking at it, I didn't pay a lot of attention when I heard something fall - C was ahead of me and I could see he hadn't dropped anything. It never occurred to me that I had - but a while later C informed me that the weight of the tripod had pulled the back flap on my rucksack open - and my portable hard drive was missing. Luckily I knew where I had heard something fall - so we got to see this beautiful creation twice. It was called Pretty Purple, created by Sarah McGloughlin, and seemed to be a mix of crochet, knitting and felt. A perfect example of a sculpture truly in context.

Promenade Plantée part 2

Some of the more street-level parts of the walk, and when we detoured into the Petite Ceinture.
We had a beautiful day for this walk - warm enough, but not enough sunshine to burn, and it stayed dry until after we'd got to the park. I hope it won't be quite so long before I'm back with some photos from the park, and then our last major outing was to the Albert Kahn gardens.

Paris re-visited - Promenade Plantée part 1

Maybe it's the darker colder evenings, but at last I'm getting back to editing some photos from Paris. And I had dreams of being finished before the end of August...such is life.
The Promenade Plantée is a linear park that runs along an old disused railway line from fairly near the Bastille metro station out almost as far as Parc de Vincennes, the far side of the Périphérique (ring road). Last time our problem was finding our way from the end of the walk to the park. This time we remembered that with no problems, but had more issues when we took a slight detour into the Petite Ceinture, which was a circular railway line connecting the main Parisian mainline stations to each other from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. Like the line used for the Promenade it's now disused  - some is derelict, some has been used as green space. Where we found ourselves there also seemed to be a small allotment-style garden attached to a local school. The initial part of the walk is raised, on a viaduct, with great views over the city. Further on it descends to street-level and becomes part of the quartier rather than just a path through it.
The first two photos are from the Bastille metro station.

parts of the walk are divided into separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists/skateboards/roller bladed

Sunshine Day

Sunshine, and what may not have been but certainly felt like the hottest day of the year.
Actually it was intermittently cloudy in the morning, but we'd planned a trip to the Botanic Gardens and went despite the cloudy start.

Too hot to eat much - we just had Thai  chicken soup with coconut milk for our dinner. It was much quicker to make than a similar Malaysian soup I tried recently, but perhaps just not quite as nice. I'd make both again - so long as the butcher goes on offering me free chicken carcasses which make superb stock. Today I put the stock on before we went out, and let it simmer until we got back from the Botanic Gardens.

August cards

Hard to choose just a few favourites from August! With the Dare to Get Dirty challenges on Splitcoast I always get an extra creative boost. I had enormous fun with the soot stamping one -I'd never tried this technique before. C was fascinated, too, as I did the sooty part down at the kitchen table. He liked my first go best, with a line-art stamp, but I liked the solid leaves.

Cormorant

I had terrible stomach cramps almost all the way in to work yesterday and couldn't wait for the bus to get into town! But as I was walking up the quays towards work I saw a cormorant take off from just in front of me, and fly under the bridge towards the station. So when I got to that bridge I had to stop.
Sorry for the wind noise - maybe I should have edited it out, but the sound of the train and the trams going by give an urban context which you wouldn't know was there just from the visuals. At first C couldn't believe that I was up at Heuston station.



And one of these days I am promising myself to sit down and finish off my Paris photos. Apart from anything else I'd like to get them printed!!

Starlings

I walked over to the shopping centre yesterday as it was a beautiful and warm morning. I didn't see anybody looking of their own accord at all these starlings perched on the bolts of the canopy at the entrance - I did get some odd looks as I missed several green pedestrian lights while I stopped to take some photos. They look like young birds to me, in the close-up shots I got. I could have spent a lot longer watching them if only life weren't so busy just now.
Another hot and sunny day today - and while tomorow is forecast to be cloudy it's also currently forecast to be up to 25C. Summer, at last!