The cat with no hat

There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat.
~Tay Hohoff

On the move

The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where were you born? Where is your home?
Where are you going? What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
~Richard Bach

Creature comforts

A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless.
~May Sarton

Setting skies

Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
~George Carlin

Rumbling skies

Weather is a great metaphor for life - sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad,
and there's nothing much you can do about it but carry an umbrella.
~Pepper Giardino

Shelter

For each new morning with its light,
For rest and shelter of the night,
For health and food, for love and friends,
For everything Thy goodness sends.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Orgy of colours

Hard not to smile when feasting your eyes upon such beauties, no?

Where's Waldo?

Hint: the cat's name is Waldo...

Basking magnolias

'Tis a shame that magnolia flowers only bloom for a few days out of the year... I find them fascinating!

Green babies

Mother Nature's little yearly miracles :-)

Rooted sunshine

This lone pretty flower is a poem on a stem.

Ginger snap

Met this little fellow while walking the dogs, he was very happy to give the nice lady a big smile for the camera!

Spring lambs

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want -
oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
~Mark Twain

Spring = rebirth!

The Bubblegum snapshots are back! Well at least for a while... so do kick back and enjoy daily shots of colour, courtesy of Mother Nature and my faithful old camera. Vive le printemps!

In praise of dogs...

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown,
and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me.
They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell.
~Emily Dickinson

Success

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

drifting sideways

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Winter skies wink at me

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
~Annie Dillard

Loneliness

What shall I do with all the days and hours
That must be counted ere I see thy face?
How shall I charm the interval that lowers
Between this time and that sweet time of grace?
~Frances Anne Kemble

Pounding the pavement

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Churches

How can the Church be received as a trustworthy guide in the invisible,
which falls into so many errors in the visible?
~John W. Draper

On life

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress

except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

The long way home

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together....
I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude.
~Helen Hayes

Civilisation

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings]
Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Eye see

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
~Lauren Bacall

Steel birds

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
~Henry David Thoreau

My sunshine, my "I do"

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Frozen monolith

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
~Bill Vaughn

Hail planet earth

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
~John Ruskin

Just... blue

Azure, cobalt blue, cornflower blue, cyan, electric blue, ice blue, indigo, lapis lazuli, midnight blue, navy blue, peacock blue, powder blue, Prussian blue, royal blue, sapphire, saxe blue, sky blue, slate blue, steel blue, turquoise, ultramarine...

Paper bridges

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
~David Russell

Happy New Year

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.
~George William Curtis

Spooky spinsters

Light can be gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, bare, living, dead, misty, clear, hot, dark, violet, springlike, falling, straight, sensual, limited, poisonous, calm and soft. ~Sven Nykvist

Duality

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
~Maori Proverb

Shells on ice

I found these remnants of spring basking in the winter sun on a patch of bubbly ice on Christmas day... thought they looked like a lovely decoration of sorts. Mother Nature likes to play with the seasons like that!

The Ice Princess

Winter either bites with its teeth or lashes with its tail.
~Proverb

Currently showing: Elvis On Ice!

...how we have fun on Christmas Day in Montreal! Wooo!

A bit o'warmth for the Christmas chillies

And now for a short break from the winter ice and snow... a glimpse of the Pacific coast for your viewing pleasure!

Hope you all had a beautiful and perfect Christmas, and that you can all enjoy some time off with your loved ones.

More winter pics coming up soon!

Happy Yule to everyone

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.
~Roy L. Smith

Round and round it goes...

Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.
~Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica

Holiday twinkles

Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.
~Norman Vincent Peale

The dark sister

Moonlight is sculpture. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Tired of the snow yet?

If you live here, you better not be... this was only the *first* snowfall of the season! LOL! It's mostly all melted away now, replaced with dismal ice and slush... but not for long, I suspect!

Purity

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
~Andrew Wyeth

More icy beauty...

Another view of the portrait Mother Nature left behind two days ago.

Winter has finally descended upon us...

Here's what the first storm of the winter left behind, to soften the blow... is this a beautiful work of art or what!

Starlings on the pier

Just another fond memory of a January afternoon stroll on the Brighton Pier, UK.

January skies at dusk

Another one of my favorites from the Brighton Pier, UK.

More Brighton beach, UK

...perhaps a better representation of the weather AND the "crowded at the seams" country! LOL

Brighton Beach, revisited

Just had an urge to sift through some UK pics from last January...
This is one of my favorites of Brighton Beach at sunset, as seen from the famous Pier.