Friday Photo Shootout - Doors and Windows

As I suspected, today turned out to be a rush. I remembered - just before 5 p.m. - that I needed to get out-of-province medical insurance before I leave for Washington, and I didn't dare leave that task to tomorrow, lest I forget and find myself uninsured for five days. (I think Murphy was an optimist, so I don't set foot across the border without insurance).

Insurance in hand, I went to the bus station and bought my ticket, so that I don't have to stand in line tomorrow. I'm leaning toward catching the 10:30 a.m. bus after all. I'll just go to the station very early and get into line, book* and knitting at hand.

As for the shootout, I made an executive decision. I photographed only doorways and windows that I have walked (or looked) through. Nanaimo is not known for its spectacular architecture - we depend on nature for local splendour - so I am presenting, instead, places that have fond associations for me.

First of all, there's the ferry. As an islander, I generally rely on the ferry for transportation to the mainland. This is a photo of the recently renovated terminal at Departure Bay. The Departure Bay ferry sails to Horseshoe Bay, just north of Vancouver.

Next, I visited the offices of Shaw Cable, who provide me with both cable television service and, more importantly, internet service. Their facade is very high-tech and glossy.

When I left Shaw Cable, I drove right by one of my favourite doorways. This is the Bailey Theatre, our community theatre.


I hadn't intended to photograph the Bailey, but this caught my eye as I was going by. Cool. The new theatre season is about to start.


The last doorway I will show you is one that I'm afraid I use more often than any other.
There you go. The doors and windows of Nanaimo. This assignment was suggested by Kerri. For more Friday Photo Shootout posts, go here - or click on the camera in my sidebar.

*The book I'll be carrying is How to Read a Poem...and Start a Poetry Circle, by Molly Peacock. I'm loving it. As a matter of fact, I'm going to blog about it - but not tonight.

Friday Photo Shootout -

Incongruous: discrepant, unsuitable, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd. (per Dictionary.com)
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Shamelessly stolen from a comment to another blog)

I've been looking forward to this post all week. I knew exactly what I wanted to photograph. Then I went to Victoria the other day, and I had to amend my plans. I will still show you Nanaimo's incongruous spectacle, but first you must see what I found in Victoria's Beacon Hill Park. (By the way, check out the colour of the grass. A little rain would be much appreciated!) We were driving through the park, looking at the fountains, the green grass, and the beds of flowers in the centre of the park. On our way out, in the middle of a field of knee-high grass, we found these fellows. They were not only incongruous, they were noisy.



Fortunately, I was driving - so I was able to pull over at a moment's notice, leap out of the car, and walk across the field to take a picture of the drummers in the grass. Then my niece got out of the car and walked to the edge of the field, where she stood to take a picture of me taking a picture of the drummers in the grass. Our husbands stayed in the car, shaking their heads. A man - a total stranger - came along and said that he was tempted to take a picture of my niece taking a picture of me taking a picture of the drummers in the grass. Incongruity heaped upon incongruity...

And now I come to Nanaimo's contribution:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.


You'll note that Masefield's wish list did include a grey mist on the sea's face, which leads me to believe that he considered water an essential part of his dream trip. Not so this Nanaimo sailor, who has seen fit to erect a ship - "The Pirate Ship", we call it - in his back yard.



I've never seen anyone actually trying to sail the ship, but I imagine the lord of the manor, transformed at intervals into the swaggering captain of his ship. Can't you just picture him standing in the bow, brass telescope raised to his eye, shouting "Ahoy there, you landlubbers!" and scouring the sea (or the Strait of Georgia, which is about half a mile away) for enemy ships? Maybe he's expecting a really high tide.

For more examples of incongruity, visit Friday My Town Shootout here.

Friday Photo Shootout - Relaxation

You can find more FPS posts here.

I spent most of today in Victoria, which isn't really my home town. However, the part of my heart that was left after San Francisco got through with me is in Victoria. I live in Nanaimo, but I love Victoria.

Today's trip wasn't meant for relaxation. We had errands to run. We spent the first part of the visit sitting in the passport office - but I had a book to read (Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, which - at least so far - is just as good the second time around as it was when I read it on the plane coming home from England - maybe three years ago? Has it been that long? Really?). So even the passport office experience was fairly relaxing.

Then the fun started. We headed down to Dallas Road, where we sat for a few minutes beside the duck pond. There were no ducks. Hmmmmph. Geese, seagulls, but no ducks today. Nonetheless, the pond was a very relaxing place.

After our few minutes of meditation by the pond, we met a friend for lunch - at Spinnaker's, our usual haunt. We lingered over our meals. Mine was a spinach salad with hazelnuts, blue cheese, and a delicious vinaigrette, so it was worth lingering over. While we ate, we gazed out over Esquimalt harbour, where boat after boat sailed by, filled with people who like to do their relaxing on the water.

As we left the restaurant, I stopped to smell the roses - really. Often, these days, I am disappointed when I lean over to smell a rose. So many of the hybrids have little or no scent. Not at Spinnaker's. I bent to smell a red rose, and then I called everybody else over to smell it. It was fabulous. The nearby pink rose was also fragrant.

Even the drive back to Nanaimo had its moment of relaxation, when we pulled over at a viewpoint atop the Malahat Pass and spent a few minutes enjoying the view.

Thus, my busy day became a day of relaxation, punctuated by moments of business. I liked that.

Friday Photo Shootout - Power!

Friday? Already? This calls for some creative photography. Ahem.

My first photo represents the primary source of power at our house. I'm a little unclear about how it gets in there,

but all we have to do is plug our appliances in - and most important of all, plug our laptops in - and presto! we have power.

Just recently, I bought a new microwave. It claims to have 1200 watts, whatever they are. It cooks my morning porridge in 2 minutes, rather than the 4 that my old microwave took, so I guess there's a lot of power in those watts.

When we want to get somewhere fast, we drive our huge gas guzzling Buick, which we converted to propane some years ago. The engine is still very powerful.

But if we want to harness the power of our own muscles, we differ in our approach: My husband loves his bicycle. When he was a child, he wore several bikes out, and he's pretty close to wearing this one out, as well.

I, on the other hand, prefer to move under my own, unaugmented power, so I use these.

There you have it - the secret of our power. Use it wisely.

Friday Photo Shoot-out (Sunday edition) - Outdoor Food

I had an excuse. Honest I did. I had no internet coverage on Friday (or Thursday), and I didn't get home until 11 p.m. yesterday. So, this is what I did.

The last couple of times that our friends Franco and Jane have gone away in their RV, we have invited them to have dinner with us on the night they get home. Jane decided that we had a good thing going there, so she invited us to have dinner with them tonight, and we did. I rather thought we would be eating outside, but it turned out to be slightly cooler in the house, so that was where we ate. After we had finished our first helping of the dessert/cheese course, I grabbed the platter and took it out to the deck so I could photograph it. The result was rather impressive, I thought. We all agreed that it looked like a cover shot for Gourmet magazine or some such. Well, maybe not that grand - but it was a lovely platter, and it looked really good on that table. Our enthusiasm probably grew out of satisfaction with the meal, which was luscious.



Please note the figs, fresh from Jane's garden. The round cheese is a delicious Havarti, and the hard cheese is something similar to Asiago, but I can't remember what it is called.

Our homecoming dinner is now an official tradition.

Friday "Home" Town Photo Shootout -

Coming to you from the Christina Lake, B.C. Outpost

Note: I wrote this post yesterday (Thursday) and tried to post it, but my internet connection wasn't good. It was horrid, in fact. It took me two hours just to post the post I wrote saying "I'd like to post some photos, but I can't" or words to that effect. So - now, I'm in Missoula, Montana, asking you to cast your mind back to yesterday, when my "home" was Christina Lake, B.C.


***********************************

The Turtle is on the move, you see, and tonight (Thursday) we are staying in an RV park behind the Christina Lake Motel. We are going to try for Butte, Montana tomorrow, but I don't know whether we'll get that far (692 km/400-odd miles), and I don't know whether I'll have wi-fi there, so I thought I'd post some photos from Christina Lake, instead.

Unfortunately, we were unable to get a space in any of the lovely, treed, shady RV parks right down by the lake, so we're sitting up here in the balcony, as it were, in the park with no shade at all. The sun has moved along far enough that our outside thermometer is no longer in direct sunlight, so I checked it a few minutes ago. 32 Celsius. That's, um, (32X 1.8) +32 = 89.6 F.

We had dinner (store-bought roasted chicken and a big salad), then headed for the pool, which was blessedly cool. Then I came back to the RV, checked to see what tomorrows Shootout theme was - and figured I could handle that. So I went for a walk. That left me with a big question in my mind.

WHERE ARE ALL THE PINK FLAMINGOS WHEN I NEED THEM?

Stymied, I walked around the motel in front of the RV park, and I finally found some odd objects. This is an ash tray. It's full of sand. That's how I know it's an ash tray.



and this, it appears, is a combination ash tray and notice board, with a bit of garbage can thrown in. It looks to me like a baby change table, recycled.



The rest of what surrounded the motel was pretty mundane - RVs, picnic tables, the pool - but these bits of homemade kitsch were just what I needed to see.

Friday Photo Shootout - Texture

For a list of participants in the shootout, click here.

This is exciting. I've been waiting for a chance to show you this part of Nanaimo. I fell in love with this stonework the first time I saw it. Unfortunately, I don't know who the artist is, but an artist he is. His work is the textural equivalent of chiaroscuro, a rough arrangement of smooth stones.



The walls I love are in a north end neighbourhood consisting mostly of patio homes and condominiums, liberally dotted with intermediate care facilities for seniors. I hope the folks who live in the neighbourhood are able to get out and enjoy the beauty of the place.



I like the use of larger stones to contrast with the flagstones.



The most beautiful stonework is this, a swirling confection that seems to flow like water. I'm going to post three photos together, without comment, because it's just such lovely stuff.







When I came to the end of the wall, I found a patch of dandelions gone to seed. I tried to blow on one while photographing it, but that didn't work. Oh, for a corncob pipe, I thought - I could have blown in the mouthpiece and out the bowl, without getting in the way of my camera. There's never a corncob pipe when you need one.



My visit completed, I headed to the Parkway Walkway for my daily walk. I kept having to stop to take photos, though, as suddenly there were textures everywhere.





This was a part of the Walkway that I hadn't walked before - or not in many years. I found another underpass with graffiti. Hmmph, I thought. This is the high-falutin' part of town, but we have much better graffiti down my way. You'd think these folks could afford some gesso to cover over the old graffiti before they put on a new coat. The medium here is Paint on Paint on Paint on Concrete - altogether a shiny and smooth texture.



The saddest sight was this evidence of Unrequited Love - or perhaps, Love Gone Wrong - that I saw on the fence beside the highway. Life has texture, too - in this case, rough.


I do hope you've enjoyed your tour of North Nanaimo. I had a great time. If I ever become filthy rich, I'm going to hire that stonemason to build me a wall.

Friday Photo Shootout - Celebration of Life

Links to many Friday Shootout blogs are here.

This week, there has been a lot to celebrate. Here on Vancouver Island, the weather has been fabulous, and I've been able to have daily walks at least an hour in length. I've come to love these walks. I can hardly wait to get moving, and I am always aware of how fortunate I am to be able to do that - able to walk, and also able to feel enthusiastic about it.

Earlier in the week, we drove to Roberts Memorial Park, south of town, and we walked down to the water.
The ferns along the path were lush, and the forest seemed to quiver with life.

When we reached the water, a dozen or so other people were there, along with half a dozen dogs. I took this picture of two dogs
who were obviously celebrating their lives, enjoying every second.

Yesterday, the sun was shining again, and we decided to drive half an hour north, to Parksville, which has a lovely beach. The beach was full of kids digging in the sand, there were kites flying, and people were swimming. We hadn't had the sense to bring our bathing suits, so we didn't go in, but we enjoyed watching the folks who did - and I got to sit in the sun and read my book - the best treat.


Today, I will be taking part in another Celebration of Life. This is one I would rather not be attending. In the old days, we would have called it a memorial service or, before that, a funeral. We will be celebrating the life of a man whom I didn't know at all well - only to say hello and exchange pleasantries now and then. He was just my age, and he died last week. This makes me all the more aware of how precious life is, and how brief.

I can't leave you on that note, so here is a song to draw this post to a close: