Steadfastness

And two kinds of blue.

A photo from a few evenings ago. We were down at the river for a swim under the hot summer night sky, then back up in the coolness of the closed-up house.

Off to this for a long weekend.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Alice dans le payer merveille)

Taking it out and chopping it up with Cookie, Lily and Tuck, traversing canyons, swimming with the swims, chasing wild beasts. It's her first trip to the WhyTea!

And another Alice, almost as surreal, from the prodigious Jan Svankmajer.

End Time

The other day my Mum, Sister, Carter, Finn and I spent the afternoon at Fort Edmonton Park. It's a serene kind of place. I find myself getting pleasantly drowsy, calm after a few hours there.

We used to live just up the hill from where the Fort sits on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River. My brother and I would sometimes wander down there on rainy days when it was dead. We'd slip into the grounds through a hole in one of the fences, an apple and a carrot in each pocket to treat the horses and a few coins to buy brown paper packets of anise and horehound candies.

Stationery supplies, books and pysanky on the shelves of a shop in the Ukrainian Village.
Girls in cotton dresses working the penny arcade at the 1920's Midway. The costume maker produces two outfits for each employee: one for everyday and one for Sunday.

Guest Bloggers: Carter & Finn

Hi, it's Carter and Finn! We showed our Auntie a website called Wordle and we started to try and figure out how to get it onto Auntie's blog. We used her blog to make a Wordle for you that we'll post tomorrow. And then we thought we should put some pictures we took today on Auntie's camera of us with Alice. Alice is cute and very cuddly and she waddles around wherever she goes. When she's going down the stairs she has a weird thing where she puts her paws on one half of the step and the back of her body on the other side of the step so she's going down sideways. She does that because she's like a long squirmy noodle with eyes and four paws and a tail.

CARTER:
I love animals, nature, exercise and sword fighting.

FINN:
I love candy and skateboarding.

Just Little

My imagination has always been easily captured and held by scale. Today, for the first time (clang clang) I realised this tendency is magnified (pardon the expression) when I'm feeling overwhelmed.

So here my thoughts return to a particularly difficult day a few summers ago when I walked through Den Hague to spend some hours in Madurodam, the tiniest city in the world, where blackbirds loom over churchyards and begonias take over buildings.

And I'm thinking about Robert Moses's Panorama and a new way of mapping misery, with pink plastic triangles made by Damon Rich. I'd like to hear this conversation he and Martha Rosler had a few years ago.

Living Rooms

in the early morning.

It's renovation season in the city and the jackhammers and backhoe in the neighbor's yard started at 7am. As my Grandma Hanson would say, "for the love of Pete!" though i don't much mind when it's light like it is.

Anticipating this (or half of it - the half that's Meryl) and this.

Ball Diamond

Made and mended by hand.
The photo below just caught my eye relative to seeing this cage on our walk this morning. It's from a collection of memorabilia from Duryea Pennsylvania.


These bring this to mind.

And in a roundabout way, this.

Happy 4th of July !

Sprouting

on the window sill: alfalfa, adzuki, dupui lentil and sunflower. It may be a deterrent to those of us who are extremely busy but if you're interested in a reciprocal relationship with living things, know that these little ones require a fair amount of daily loving attention for which they will reward you handsomely.
This will prove helpful in getting going and keeping going.