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Public transit in Greater Boston didn’t run today as MBTA staff tried to dig out tracks, switches, and signals. We were told to work at home for the 5th time in two weeks. I went for a walk at lunch. Where sidewalks were plowed, the snow was often piled shoulder high on either side. I like walking in recently plowed snow because boots have more traction. The texture is like pie dough that’s a little too dry. Once the snow gets packed down, it makes for slippery walking. In the town, where merchants went bananas with salt, the sidewalk and crosswalks were unpleasantly soupy.

The first photo is from today. It’s Concord Academy. The others were taken in the past week and include a tree on Congress Street in Boston, a snowbank that the plow cut through as if slicing cake, snowy fire escapes near the TD Garden, a view of the Boston Seaport District from a roof garden, and my ice lantern (still going after more than a week of evening lighting).

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Last year my Wisconsin brother told me how he makes ice lanterns. (See post.) I really wanted to try my hand at this, but my first two attempts failed. Finally, yesterday, after 52 hours in the cold, my balloon produced a successful lantern. Psyched!

Among today’s other pictures is the Japanese Maple at my workplace, glorious in every season. The reflection photo was taken at Fort Point Channel in Boston. That ice is made of saltwater. If you live inland, you may not know that for saltwater to freeze, it has to be extra cold for an extra long time.

The construction scene is from the nearby Seaport area, which as everybody knows, is being recklessly overbuilt, given that it’s low-lying area exposed to hurricanes.

The gingerbread houses were at the Boston Society of Architects and featured Boston buildings, including the state house with its gold dome. The giant geometric snowballs in Dewey Square are courtesy of New American Public Art, about which, more anon.

Created with Nokia Smart Cam

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I got an unusual number of hits from readers this morning. I never know why. Is it because we are having a big snow in New England?

Let me give you a couple preliminary snow pics just in case. I hope to do a regular post this evening.

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My friend Bob says there is no bad weather, only bad clothing. So I headed out at lunch yesterday all bundled up to take some pictures.

The following is to be sung to the tune of “When You Walk through a Storm.”

When you walk in the cold
Hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid
You will freeze.

At the end of your walk
There’s a golden …

I think I’m stuck. Maybe songwriter Will McM will dig me out.

While I’m on the subject, here’s a 1980s attempt at a song about cold, to be sung to the tune of “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Suzanne’s elementary school music teacher actually used it in class.

What is the reason
That we’re all freezin’
And the birdbath is filled with ice?
Why does my Omni
Go sideways down the street?
Why do my children wear
Baggies on their feet?
What normal fellow
Whose brains aren’t Jello
Would keep fighting this cold war?
What is the reason
That we’re all freezin’
And what did we move here for?

Believe it or not, I kind of like the cold. And I love getting out and taking pictures. Yesterday I noticed a yellow Fort Point Arts sign on an old chain link fence. Then I noticed the butterflies.

Read about Claudia Ravaschiere and Mike Moss’s installation, Flutter, here.

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Saturday was a day for hawks. I saw one on the highway as I drove home from John’s and then another one just a little farther along. Each was perched on a high limb, scanning the road and the verge for lunch. A third hawk, in the center of town, dove after a small bird, but being intercepted and stunned by a fast-moving car, wheeled back to land on a parked vehicle, catch his breath, and pose for photos.

I wondered why the hawk was hunting in such a heavily populated area. It must be hard to find food in this weather.

Fortunately, I had bought my camera, having decided that I don’t get enough pictures for the blog if I give in to the cold and take my daily walk indoors. There aren’t many photo ops when you go ’round and ’round from the hall to the living room to the dining room to the kitchen … .

If any reader knows what type of hawk this is, I’d appreciate being enlightened.

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Here are a few recent photos from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I took all but the shivery January 1 New Shoreham plunge, which is the work of Sandra M. Kelly. I doubt I would have been brave enough even to go watch these hardy souls freeze on such a cold day.

What can I tell you about the other photos? The Hmong church near my grandson’s play school was a surprise. I knew about Hmong refugees in California, Minnesota, and Central Massachusetts. Didn’t know they were in Providence. A wonderful book about the Hmong immigrant experience is The Late Homecomer, by Kao Kalia Yang, who grew up in St. Paul.

I include a porcine household god from Providence, a bathrobe in the guest room where I awaited the arrival of my new granddaughter in December, and two aspects of the Seekonk River on January 1.

The photo I call “In Trial Realest, a Message from Beyond,” is one I was determined to capture while the sign was broken. It called to me from my office window as it lit up at dusk. I’m glad I caught it when I did, because the neon letters are now all working, and its message is no longer as interesting.

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I’m trying to think of a good collective noun for a bunch of photos. Do you like “a phalanx of photos”? How about “a frittata of photos”?

In any case, I’m going to dump some more photographs on you, but now that Bob no longer works in my office, I’ll never know if any of them are good.

Going back to Halloween, there was an artsy ghost in Wormwood Park (Fort Point), and a witch street sign that Erik photographed in Providence. I also have a picture of the moon before dawn and one of the early-morning sun on Trinity Congregational Church in Concord. Next is a wintry Audubon boardwalk in Bristol, Rhode Island. There’s a fall-themed window box, a cemetery with holly in the foreground, flowers in the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway, and fire-escape shadows in Fort Point, Boston.

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Erik, this one’s for you. I saw a book on 100-year-olds in your kitchen, and I know you and your company aim to enable us all to be centenarians.

Sally Williams writes in the Guardian, “Three score and 10 may be the span of a man, but no one has broken the news to David Bailey who, at 76, still behaves like someone turning one score and eight.

“Last month he walked into a studio in London (not his: too many stairs) to photograph some of Britain’s oldest people. The youngest was just 100; the oldest 107. Dressed in a baggy polo shirt and a pair of old combat trousers, small but physically imposing, Bailey flirted, flattered, insulted his subjects in order to get the picture he wanted.

“ ‘We’ve been married for 62 years,’ Shirley Arkush told Bailey of her husband David, one of the centenarians waiting to be photographed. ‘Same as me,’ he replied, ‘but not to the same wife.’ And he gave a combative, high-pitched laugh. (Bailey’s marriage to his first wife, Rosemary Bramble, lasted three years, and his second, to Catherine Deneuve, two; he was married to Marie Helvin for 10 years, before marrying Catherine Dyer in 1986.) …

“He worked at an incredible pace – nine portraits in four hours, and on subjects with a collective age of 917 years. ‘I’ve always wanted to photograph old people,’ he said at one point, after pinning one centenarian in forensic close-up (he had requested no makeup, only ‘a tidy-up’ for the women).

“Not everyone was happy. Joe Britton, 103, Chelsea Pensioner and horseracing enthusiast, said he knew Bailey and had been looking forward to seeing him again. But, ‘That’s not David Bailey,’ he said with disappointment after the shoot – his David Bailey is the horse trainer.” More pictures, more story here.

Photograph: David Bailey/Guardian
Violet Butler: ‘I’m no paragon. I used to smoke and drink, but not to excess.’

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The photo of the library windows, above, was taken this morning. I was beyond thrilled to see the bubbles. It turns out that’s what happens when a flash meets a mist.

Suzanne took the lovely picture of leaves through a fan-shaped window in Rhode Island. The tiny house photo is from the entryway to a real estate office. The golden carpet is of ginkgo leaves. I took the shot of bittersweet growing on a Liberty Street fence Veterans Day near where the first shots were fired in 1775. The sculpture in front of the Umbrella Center for the Arts is by Nancy Arkuss. It’s called “Sid.” (Suzanne went through school with the artist’s son.)

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Sometimes I get leads from twitter. Liz Devlin @FLUXBoston earned a hat tip for this one.

Andrea Magrath writes at MailOnline about Monsanto, a “medieval Portugal village build in and around gigantic 200-tonne [ton] boulders. …

“Living beneath a roof that weighs more than the average cruise ship may make some people a little nervous. But it is commonplace for the villagers of Monsanto in Portugal, who adapted their homes around the environment, filled with gigantic granite boulders.

“In the mountaintop village, homes are sandwiched between, under and even in the 200-tonne rocks. The enormous boulders have been utilised as walls, floors, and most astoundingly, as roofs for houses that date back to the 16th century. …

“Located in the municipality of Idanha-a-Nova, in eastern Portugal near the Spanish border, Monsanto sits at 2,486 feet above sea level and has spectacular views. Donkey is the preferred form of transport for Monsanto’s 800 residents, who have managed to maintain the village’s medieval character.”

For some great pictures of life amid boulders, click here. One photo really looks like a hobbit home.

Photo: Xalima Muriel/Media Drum World
Monsanto, Portugal, villagers have formed their homes around the existing boulders, rather than attempt to move them.

 

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In my part of New England, Daylight Savings is drawing to a close with cold, wet, dark presentiments of the season to come. Seems like a good time to think about the fun we had in October.

Artist Don Eyles floated a pyramid in Fort Point Channel until a storm blew up. Suzanne, my husband, and our middle grandchild visited the sheep and other animals at the Audubon Society’s Drumlin Farm.

At work, we had a pumpkin-decorating contest. My team did Miss Piggy, porcine Muppet diva, to use the Wall Street Journal identifier. (Left to right, Elvis, the Monopoly Man, Miss Piggy, Edgar Allan Poe, Chia Pet, and Gonzo.) A Halloween band marched surrounded by babies, kids, and adults in costume all around blocked-off Providence thoroughfares near the Brown Street Park.

More quietly, chrysanthemums soaked up sunshine.

Here is a bit of background on the pyramid, in case you are interested.

“In 1998 Fort Point artist Don Eyles floated his first pyramid in Fort Point Channel, marking the water as a venue for art and opening the doors to years of temporary art installations to come. The installation was a bold move, made independently, and completely self-funded.”

“ ‘Consider the history that has passed along the cobbled streets of Boston — all the men and women, famous or unremembered, who have walked and rode here … always with granite cobblestones beneath their feet and wheels. I have long dreamed of making this history tangible, by constructing a great pyramid from the cobblestones uprooted by the City’s recent development.’ ”

More on the Pyramid and other Fort Point projects at tumblr, here.

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Studio 360 interviewed a blind photographer the other day. He had not always been blind, and blindness has not stopped him from creating high-quality photographs, strange as that may seem. He gets by with a little help from his friends.

But then, which among us doesn’t?

“In 1994, a stroke left the young photographer John Dugdale nearly blind, and over the years since, he has lost the remainder of his vision. But has never stopped taking photographs.

“ ‘I have a few wonderful people in my life that I trust to help me create the pictures that I see in my mind’ Dugdale tells guest host [Studio 360] Alan Cumming. He insists on releasing the shutter on every photo he takes. ‘It’s the most sacred time in my life whenever that shutter opens and closes — and it’s also the only time I’m quiet.’ …

“Dugdale contracted HIV in the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s he became ill with cytomegalovirus retinitis, an eye infection common in HIV patients, and it accelerated quickly. ‘I didn’t tell anyone, because I thought through magical thinking maybe it would go away,’ Dugdale explains. ‘In a matter of weeks I lost one eye.’ A stroke left him paralyzed for a year and left him with about 20% of his vision. … ‘I’m alive because my mother brought me elbow macaroni with Parmesan cheese and beans every single day for a year.’

“When Dugdale was released from the hospital, he almost immediately began working again. He tells Alan that the photographs ‘poured like a libation out of a vase. I barely even felt like I was making them. They just made themselves.’ …

“ ‘Being blind is not what you think,’ Dugdale tells Alan, ‘it’s not all darkness. My optic nerve still works and shoots a beautiful ball of brightly colored orange and purple and violet light and sparkling flashes all the time.” More at Studio 360, here. Check out some of Dugdale’s work, which continues to be in demand by prominent collections.

Photo: John Dugdale
“Untitled, Self-Portrait with Teacups” 1994

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Photo: clickalps.com

Go to Bored Panda to see adorable mouse photographs collected by Skirmantė that could come straight from Beatrix Potter. Two Bad Mice, anyone?

Wikipedia’s entry on the children’s book author and naturalist says, “Born into a wealthy Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. …

“Beatrix was educated by three able governesses, the last of whom was Annie Moore (née Carter), just three years older than Beatrix … She and Beatrix remained friends throughout their lives and Annie’s eight children were the recipients of many of Potter’s delightful picture letters. It was Annie who later suggested that these letters might make good children’s books.

“In their school room Beatrix and Bertram kept a variety of small pets, mice, rabbits, a hedgehog and some bats, along with collections of butterflies and other insects which they drew and studied. Beatrix was devoted to the care of her small animals, often taking them with her on long holidays.”

I visited her home in the Lake District with my husband, and I read a biography of her. Like many girls of her time and social stature, she was a lonely child. But her creative genius filled her world with fully realized imaginary companions. And she seems to have had a satisfying adulthood preserving land in the Lake District and pursuing her natural history interests.

[Asakiyume: Thanks for putting the lead on Facebook.]

Photo: Miroslav Hlavko

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Here are a few autumn photos from the island. The lotus on the left is indifferent to having looked prettier in the summer. It’s still interesting.

I include milkweed about to sow itself to the four winds, clothes drying on a line, a chair that sat on a houseless property all summer, yellow bittersweet with red winterberry, a neighbor’s shed, and leaves collecting by a bench.

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Today’s post features a bunch of photos again, if you can bear it.

I was especially intrigued by a lovely sunflower and a utility pole that is an actual tree trunk. Although the tree trunk has probably been right in front of my nose for 20 years, it wasn’t until a recent late-train day that I actually noticed. “Holy cow! That’s a tree trunk!” No one else seemed to notice.

Other photos are attempts to capture early-morning light, but you may not be able to tell what time of day it is.

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