Avid gardeners perk up when the subject of heirloom is broached – this peony bush has been in the garden for longer than most of us can remember; its larger than generous dinner-plate sized blooms last but a few short days and it is only then that we know that summer is not long behind.
A Word in your Ear has opened up a whole world of blossoms with the Word A Week Photo Challenge – Flower. Follow the link to view more…
Hello and Good Evening, Alastair Puppy here…
Finding a groomer whose idea of doggy beauty matches one’s own is no easy feat it seems. A routine nail-clipping wound up more than a little off the top, some off the ears and an eyebrow trim, leaving our fuzzball looking like a muppet version of PBS host Alastair Cooke or an extra in the classic Monsterpiece theatre. Good thing he doesn’t look in the mirror…
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Pets puts all our animal friends on parade – Have a look!
Standing at the edge of the world
Shuffling through the archives, this Scene Surfaced. Stones, Seaweed, Sand, Sea and Sky (and one Solitary buoy) Sing their own Story for Frizztext’s Story Challenge: Letter “S”.
See Something for the challenge in your Surroundings?
A slow, enveloping change
The same pear tree that produced such succulent fruit only a few short weeks ago has undergone a seasonal transformation – like the lady she is, she clothes herself in all of autumn’s glorious colour.
The ocean off Victoria serves as inspiration for this week’s Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Water. Stand like a child at the ocean’s edge, peer into the shallow pools and dream of tiny mermaids riding seahorses amid the kelp…
Not just a bunch of little flowers…
Hydrangeas used to be in that class of flowers grown in grandmother’s gardens – not any more! With a head over a foot in diameter, this variety is the perfect candidate for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: A Single Flower. More than four species of this bushy plant and enough shades to rival a watercolourist’s palette give gardeners a wide range to choose from. They can be temperamental, the colour deepening or fading with the ph balance of the soil they are in. Having a less than green thumb, I buy them, plant them and hope that they will reappear the next year…
Your choice
The last few days dealing with surly clients were fraught with high drama and the gnashing of teeth but fortuitously, offered up this week’s Two Cents Tuesday Challenge! Daily life, whether technicolour, monochrome or gray-scale can be, at best, give and take. How we deal with it relies solely on how we react – with logic or emotion, fact or fancy, nature or nurture. This week’s topic – Compromise – can be found in all the spheres that intersect: human, animal, plant, even things inanimate. It is sometimes as simple as our summer garden where the neighbour’s zucchini plant wound its tendrils along a shared fence and down into our tomatoes – the compromise rested between plant and static architecture, between friends’ understanding that sometimes nature needs to seek its own way rather than bend to our will.
So “What does compromise mean to you?”
We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers and in the spirit of this week’s topic, Across the Bored has made a few (minor) changes to the challenge:
HOW DOES THIS WORK?
Where have they gone?
It is a common occurrence in our house that searching for one thing leads to something completely different. It was on a such a mission, in the quest for material for a current project, that a long-forgotten archive popped up and presented exactly the right pic for Cee’s Foto Fun Challenge: Contrasting Colours. Taken in the garden quite some time ago, numerous photos of glorious blooms brought to mind the nagging question “Where did they go?” Not as in, all those lovely flowers are dead and where did they go, but rather that many of those very same perennials have not been seen in those specific locations in at least the last two years. Is it us who have been too busy to notice, otherwise occupied in trying to lay ground cover, removing tenacious weeds or concentrating on beautifying other areas of the garden? Did they flower at the exact moment we were on vacation? It is a mystery – one that will not be solved until spring rolls around next year when we wait for those blossoms to peak out from the damp earth. Or, as is more likely the case, we will forget and rediscover our photos next fall…
One stretch away from dessert
Who knew photo challenges could be addictive? By Saturday night, we were wondering whether the universe had left us out of the loop and put out a wordpress query asking as much. Lo and behold, an answer did come out of the ether from Ailsa at Where’s my backpack? kindly inviting Across the Bored to participate in her challenge – Travel theme: Foliage.
In our part of the world fall foliage is a big deal – one can see gorgeous examples hanging over every street corner, maples and oak fanning glorious like peacocks on parade. Central Canada and the Northeast Kingdom of the US have become an autumn tourist destination, with both the curious and well-acquainted making the trek to see just how vividly nature shows her colours.
In our backyard, we are surrounded by cedars, juniper, evergreens and an odd assortment of overgrown flowering bushes; the towering hundred year old maple will only turn long after many of its brethren are quite bare and so the bounty is of a different sort. Juicy pears and raspberries that have been here longer than anyone remembers are our harvest – just in time for thanksgiving.
I know he’s there
Solitary has as many definitions as entries in this week’s Photo Challenge and is, as we have seen, not a state unique to humankind. Our barbet, although spoiled and overwhelmed with love, knows the meaning of “alone”. Lonesome for his friend, even the first snows of winter do not deter him from his vigil – he sends his doggy thoughts across the fence and waits patiently. The reward is in the simple pleasure of play.
Canine hearts beat as ours
We often dogsit our neighbour’s foxhound, a pup who managed to teach our own barbet-poodle mix how to bark. Being a fowl-retriever the loudest sound to come out of him, up until their meeting, had been a low growl but he quickly learned a full range of barks, yowls, whines and yelps. This is, perhaps, the true nature of friendship – having a buddy who is willing to teach one things not inherent in our essential characters, to be non-judgemental about us whether we are scruffy or groomed and to always watch our backs. Were it so easy for those of us who walk on two feet…
A shift in perspective
This week’s photo challenge: Near and Far brought to mind that visitors to our city have often been primed by picture-perfect postcard views and sweeping panoramas taken from the many lookouts. They are rarely disappointed but the local art and architecture sometimes becomes a shadowy backdrop for those who live here year round. In this photograph, a hazy autumn afternoon had found us playing the role of guide for a friend who had never been to the Oratory – we had taken an alternate route than usual to get there, one that circled around the back of the mountain and it offered up the landmark in a very different light. It asked for nothing but quiet contemplation – a gentle reminder that beauty is always there when we choose to stop and refocus.
Rose quartz necklace – Ideflex Collection
An especially bright morning called out for closer inspection of the garden that we had left, somewhat unhappily, at the beginning of the summer in the hands of non-horticulturists. It tends to be wild back there on the best of days, a hodge-podge run to ruins English garden that lets grow what it will. Like us, it resists attempts at too-neat order – flowering weeds sprout rampant in the smallest patches of dark earth and each season brings a new yield of blooms that seem not to have been there the year before. Huge bright green elephant ears beckoned as an ideal bed for a piece of jewellery finished in another climate. A chinese clavicle pendant of rose quartz from Studio BBG was the catalyst for this necklace; two large Murano glass beads, some pink jade, blush pearls and silver spacers add lightness and bring an element of reflectivity to the larger rose quartz rectangles. Feminine in nature, this lovely pale pink stone is said to be the crystal of love, emitting a calming and cooling energy. It gives inner peace and makes the wearer receptive to matters of the heart. Much like the garden…
Where sky and ocean meet to whisper
The sea is magic. In search of renewal, each year we migrate from our landlocked home to the coast. On a sandy beach rife with the sounds of summer, we close our eyes to the bright sun and are suddenly alone, the waves’ voice a soothing lullaby. On other days, a free spirit may seek the water’s edge to wizard an answer from the deep.
The conversation of crows mutes the low rumble of traffic
Remain in the same spot and the urban landscape changes slowly, depart for a few months and the transformation of little details begin to pop, return after many years and neighbourhoods once familiar seem foreign territory. We tend to contemplate our surroundings at eye level, taking stock of the doors and windows, pedestrians and passing cars for it gives us a sense of place. Unable to get out and document just how much childhood neighbourhoods have been altered, this week’s photo challenge: Urban forced some archive digging and a little thinking outside the box. No matter which side of the country we may find ourselves, a constant can be found in the crows, ravens and blackbirds that love to congregate in big trees. As the cityscape changes at a sometimes furious pace, they watch, wait and follow.
A sudden change in weather has brought cooler winds and hazy skies – it is an omen that summer vacations are almost over and makes one long for that almost blinding brilliance of July. We are in transit, obliged to leave the slow, dreamy pace of the west coast for the east. Renewed, refreshed and recharged going towards the winter, we are already starting to see things with a different eye.
Urban, meet wild – concrete kissing rock
A fashion photo-shoot along the causeway illustrated proof that many west coast urban areas seem to run right into the Pacific. For all that is intrinsically wrong with cities taking over once-green spaces (the subject of a future post) there is still much beauty to be found, sometimes right beneath our feet. This weeks’s photo challenge: merge and the very act of just looking down are serendipitous indeed.
Growing up, the only mammals apart from the two-footed variety that populated our house were cats and rodents so when the question of “getting a dog” was broached by my own children, I would respond with an ambiguous “We’ll see”. This answer seemed to be sufficient until 4 years ago when…. I succumbed to gentle but continuous pressure and the liquid, brown eyes of a furry mop up for adoption. This year marks the first that we have been separated for any great length of time and though I didn’t think I would, I miss my troublemaker terribly – next year he will get a vacation, too!
Sunny grey, blue sky lazy days
Even the smallest child seems to have a fascination for things that wash up along the shores of the ocean. Watch people as they wend their way along the beach: they stop to pick up striped rocks, pastel-hued sea glass or bits of wood that have been polished to a silky softness. This is the sea’s sculpture gallery where a combination of fierce sun and salt has stripped away bark and roots to reveals a new twisted form – each is unique, only hinting at a previous greener incarnation. The small ones sometimes find their way home with us, the large ones rest like weighty monuments waiting for the next week or year when we may visit once again.
ACROSS THE BORED 