Picture of the Day

  • Wisteria

    I love wisteria vines, particularly when they are in bloom, as they are right now. My mom had such fondness for them, they reminded her of her Great Aunt Julia (for whom I am named), who had a lovely arbor in her back yard. Growing up, she would always point them out to me. So of course, they make me think of my mom, and also of my Grandma Wells, who had lovely wisteria growing in her back yard as well. The other day I decided that I was going to go in search of wisteria on my walk, and share my pictures with you. The picture above is of…

  • Throwback Thursday

    This is a picture of me and my roommate Troy, back in 1988 or 1989. He’s putting me in the garbage can at an amusement park, which is clearly HILARIOUS. I love this picture. When I was 21, I moved from Stockton to San Francisco with Troy, to attend San Francisco State University. We had worked together at a hotel in Stockton, and I wanted to move to San Francisco, and so did he. He had lived on his own before (I had not), so he had some furniture and an idea at least of how things like signing up for utilities and paying bills worked. But we were both…

  • Honeymoon Photos

    For our honeymoon 30 years ago, we went to 3 amazing cities – London, Amsterdam, and Paris. We had a cheap point-and-shoot camera, and of course it was film back then, so we don’t have a ton of pictures and what we have are not great. It’s not like today, where you can take an unlimited number of photos, and immediately see whether they are in focus, centered, etc. Here are a few pictures that I like. I guess Ted had the camera most of the time, because there are more pictures of me than there are of him. We stayed in little Bed and Breakfasts. The one in London…

  • J’s Index – Alaska

    *Note: If you are subscribed to my posts, you may have seen this one already. I accidentally posted it instead of scheduling, but I didn’t intend to have this post go live until I finished my other Alaska posts. So I took it down and am re-posting it now.* This post is an homage to the Harper’s Index, a summary of our trip to Alaska. The photo above is from our whale watching trip. It was so beautiful, it looked like a painting to me. Number of Flights Taken – 7 Number of Boat Trips – 2 Number of Rental Cars – 3 Number of Airbnbs – 3 Number of…

  • Throwback Thursday

    I found this picture of me, circa 1987 or 1988, when going through shoeboxes of photos for Ted’s slideshow the other day. The picture tells me some very specific things about time and place. 1. Very likely this picture was taken in the summertime. I’m on the Golden Gate Bridge between San Francisco and Marin County, and you can see the fog below the bridge. Also, I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt (You can’t tell this, I just remember the shirt.) and a long black wool coat. Have you ever heard the (not actually) Mark Twain quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”? That’s…

  • Morning Walk

    Just a quick post tonight, Ted is making dinner (Dungeness crab, caught by a friend’s fisherman son yesterday, fresh fresh fresh) and then we will be watching Maya’s new zombie show, The Last of Us. Here are some photos from an early morning walk Mulder and I took recently. Actually, looking at the photos, I can see that I cheated, these are not all from the same walk. Pretend you don’t notice that the leash in the last photo is different than the leash in the first photo. The picture above is the sun coming up behind Mt. Diablo, and Mulder looking handsome near the little lake in our nearby…

  • Picture of the Day

    Wow, my hands look old. I’m turning 57 next month, so I guess it’s not surprising. Anyway, my old lady hand is showing off the lovely bracelet that I bought in France this September. I had in mind that I wanted to buy myself a memento in France, something to remember the trip. I went with my cousin…she and I were in charge of our Grandma’s estate after she passed away. Her will said that her sister, my Great Aunt Flo, was entitled to stay in the house as long as she wanted to. So my cousin Carey and I managed that, with repairs and taxes and so on, for…

  • Thankful

    Quick post today…guests are arriving in 15 minutes or so. This is our table, with casual glasses instead of our crystal. It’s not exactly what I would hope for, I love our crystal, but it’s delicate and our table is tight and I worry it will be broken. So there you go. I haven’t been very good about commenting this week. My iPad often won’t let me log in to comment, so I have to do it on a different computer. Work has been crazy. But I’m loving NaBloPoMo, and hopefully this weekend I will be by your place and say hello. Happy Thanksgiving to my US friends.

  • Picture of the Day – Cemetery in Vincennes

    My cousin and I didn’t go to any of the famous cemeteries in Paris when we were there in September, but we did happen upon this walled in cemetery on the same street as our hotel in Vincennes. Knowing nothing about it, we didn’t explore and see if we could find any famous people there. Looking at this picture, that fourth grave has a lot of flowers, perhaps a recent addition? I like the calm of cemeteries, and these multi person tombs are lovely. But somehow it feels strange to explore too much, so we just looked around for a few minutes and then got on our way. I did…

  • Cheese Glorious Cheese

    Here you see my cousin Carey, talking to the Fromager at the little cheese shop in Vincennes, the town where we spent our nights (and some days) just outside of the Paris city limits. I told you about the day we were too worn out from our travels, including lots of driving and late nights, to stick with our initial plan of driving to Versailles. We stayed local, got massages, had a glass of wine and watched people, then got some food to eat, brought it back to our time-share, and watched a movie, ate bread, cheese, salami, and drank wine. And did laundry. It was a nice, lazy day.…

  • Onion Soup in France

    This sad, sad picture is of our dinner one evening in Cannes. We had had a lovely lunch (I think this was the day we took the boat to Saint Tropez and had a big lunch, so we weren’t terribly hungry), so we thought we would a light dinner. Carey had been wanting French Onion soup, so when I saw ‘Soupe a l’oignon’ on a menu, we decided to give it a try. I don’t think it’s that big of a thing in the South of France, and we hadn’t seen it on any menus yet. This was the soup we received…the broth was not the dark, rich broth, the…

  • Picture of the Day – Outside Sacre Coeur

    First off, let me apologize for the inordinate use of the word ‘amazing’ in yesterday’s post. The fact that the croissant was delicious and perfectly prepared is not something to cause great surprise. You kind of expect that in France. It was lazy writing. I considered editing the post and finding some other adjectives, but decided to leave it as is. I like this picture of a street musician and his cat, entertaining the tourists on the steps of Sacre Coeur. He’s even wearing a beret. The messy ‘No Entry’ sign on the door takes a bit from the picture, but I like his cat.