Our 14-day quarantine ended today. Yay!
Karen celebrated by going grocery shopping - for about three hours! I don't know how many different stores she went to, but a few. It took a long time to sanitize all the food when she finally got it home.
The upside: we had a salad and fresh green beans for dinner, the first fresh vegetables we've had - other than carrot and onion - since we left England. The salad tasted particularly fine.
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In the afternoon, I drove out to Henry's to pick up some photo prints I'd ordered before we left at the end of November. Sister Pat had very sweetly given Karen and I a lovely picture frame for our 50th anniversary, with instructions that we should put one of our wedding photos in it. We're not crazy keen on displaying pictures of ourselves in the house, but thought we should honour her gift. Here's the one we chose, taken by JHB (my dad, our official wedding photographer.)
As you can see, we were quite young. I was 14, Karen 13. What I can't figure out is how our parents could have let us go through with it when we were such children? But all's well that ends well, I guess.
The cost to print just the one picture at Henry's was some paltry amount, but there was a minimum charge, so I added a couple of other pictures to the order, of Caitlin and Bob's wedding. I thought we could get frames for them as well. Here they are.
That wedding took place on a restored 19th century river barge that sits in the Chelmer River at Maldon in Essex. The boat is used for sight-seeing cruises and as an event venue. The weather that day was perfect: sunny and mild. The bride and groom looked fabulous. It was a lot of fun.
The total cost for the three pictures - the one of us was a 4x6, the two of the kids' wedding were 5x7s - was $3.55. And they all look great. Pretty good deal.
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At the risk of overdoing it with pictures, here's one I had meant to post yesterday when I took it from our living room window.
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| Ain't it grand to be home again in Canada! |
Today, I have to admit, it was pretty nice here in Londonville, cold but sunny.
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Poop Bomb! I'm starting a new regular feature in my blog: amusing bird facts.
I'm reading a great book called The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, by Jennifer Ackerman. In the chapter I read last night, she talked about how birds communicate to warn each other about nearby predators. There are basically two types of alarm calls: flee and mob. Mob calls rally nearby prey birds to come and harass a predator.
Mobbing is apparently quite common in the bird world. It usually involves a bunch of smaller birds - safety in numbers - swooping down on a bigger bird such as a hawk from above or behind, harrying them until they give up.
"Gulls," Ackerman writes, "often resort to the practice...with an unusual twist: vomiting on the predator with keen aim. Colonies of fieldfares fire from a different orifice, ejecting feces on a predator in such volume and with such accuracy that the threatening creature is literally grounded or stopped in its tracks. If enough of these droppings-bombs hit their target, they can soak a bird's wings so it can't fly."
So there you have it, today's amusing bird fact. Stay tuned for more.
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Every picture tells a story My other regular feature, which to this point, I've referred to as my memory-bank photo of the day, I'm re-titling. Henceforth it shall be known as, "Every picture tells a story."
That old cliché could be interpreted in a number of different ways. As a photographer, you ideally want your pictures to tell a story all on their own. The best do. But to me, it's just as important that pictures trigger a story, or have a story lurking within them. It could be, usually is, just a personal memory. But it could be more than that. Here's an illustration.
Chagall accepted the commission and, in 1967, when it was completed, he came to England to oversee the installation and unveiling. The story is that, on seeing the unassuming little church - to my eyes, nothing exceptional by English village church standards - he said, "It's magnificent. I will do them all." He meant, I will make stained glass for all the windows in the church. And he did.
Today, all 12 windows have glass designed by Chagall. Most are abstract, but some show elements of the familiar magic realist style of his mature paintings. Chagall lived on until 1985, the year our Caitlin was born. He was just shy of 100. Sir Henry died in 1977. The windows remain.
In 2019, when Caitlin and Bob were briefly living in Kent, Caitlin, Karen and I and Louis drove over to Tudely to see the windows. They were, are, spectacular. The day we visited, nobody else was in the church. We had it entirely to ourselves. Louis was the only one not impressed.
And that's my story.
What the heck, it deserves a couple more pictures.
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