Summer Stock Sunday - Black-Eyed Susans

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We'll be taking Summer Stock through the end of September to give everyone a chance to share our late summer shots, and what says late summer in New England more than these Black-Eyed Susans?

And while you're here, don't forget to check out Together, my contribution to BlogHer's Gulf of Mexico Benefit Auction. (Go here for a better look at the piece, the resolution on ebay is awful and doesn't do it justice at all.) Not only will this gorgeous piece, printed directly on glass so no need to frame, look fabulous on your wall it's for a good cause too. The proceeds are all being donated to the Nature Conservancy to help with Gulf cleanup efforts.


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Stick a fork in me 'cause I am DONE!

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Done with NaBloPoMo 2009 that is! Happy November 30th everyone. What better way to end this year's daily posting frenzy than with a post that illustrates the prickly and somewhat stubborn of those who call my little corner of the world home.
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Native-born Israelis are often called sabras - from the Hebrew for prickly pear - because they are "prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside". Trite and more than a little cliche, but also more than a little true. Israelis can be brash and overly agressive but when you look a bit deeper they're a bunch of big softies. Like the hard-talking barber down the block - he talks a good game, but when Itai did his own version of a sidewalk sale last Friday this tough guy walked over, asked the price of two little matchbox cars (about 50 cents each) and handed over nearly three dollars just because Itai looked like a good kid. And then of course there's always this. Examples of Israeli kindness don't come any better than that one.
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The sabra you see here isn't a prime example of its species, but I do love it's reddish yellow coloring. Objectively though, I'd have to admit that it's a bit misshapen. The other sabras growing on the same plant were fuller and of the more common barrel shape but it was this little one that particularly caught my eye.
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It was growing on this sabra plant, tucked away under an Ottoman-era arch, remnants of what is thought to be an old agricultural storeroom. I love the way the arch has gone from ceiling to floor, with grass now growing on top instead of below. Very circle of life, isn't it?

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Gratuitous Cute Kid Pics

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Why yes, it is November 29th, which means I've been posting for 29 days straight. Why did you ask?
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NaBloPoMo - the end is in sight!
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Coastal Agriculture

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View of the greenhouses and fields belonging to Kibbutz Maagan Michael (I think) with the Mediterranean Sea in the background, as seen from the foothills of the Carmel Forest.
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I like the vintage feel that monochrome gives this image, as well as the contrast between the different geometric patterns.
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Building Facade, Tel Aviv 2009

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Another more vertigo-inducing view of this building. It had been hanging around in my archives for a while and seemed tailor-made for Carmi's Thematic Photographic, which is looking at buildings this week. It's been ages since I participated, I'm glad this week's theme gave me a way to jump back in.
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I hope you're all enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, or for the non-Americans out there a wonderful not-a-holiday-where-we-live weekend.
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(Damn, this image looks really distorted shrunk down. View it full size for a much crisper view without any of those horrible wavy lines.)

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Oh crap I forgot to post, a/k/a Thanksgiving Israeli style

I'm leaving the house in 10 minutes to head off for a girls night Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and won't be back until after midnight so this sorry excuse for a post is all you get. And on Thanksgiving Day too. Be grateful I'm not singing for you I suppose. That's something.

Our main Thanksgiving celebration will be on Saturday and will involve a whopping 23 people this year (thankfully NOT being hosted by me - all I need to do is bring the sweet potato souffle (done today since I needed one for tonight) and roasted cauliflower, and Jay is making rolls. We all decided years ago that trying to do a full Thanksgiving dinner on a day everyone has to work is just too tough, so it's been Saturday for at least fifteen years now. It works for us and allows up to keep up this little but very beloved bit of Americana even after twenty years away.

Speaking of which, I'm late!

I'm Stumped

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I don't have any bright ideas for today's post and I'm running out of time. Aww heck, it's nearly Thanksgiving, there can't be that many of you out there reading anyway. Right?
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*hears crickets chirping and heads off to pour herself an end of the day glass of wine*

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G'night all.
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Happy Thanksgiving

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Not quite wordless today...

Red Hibiscus

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The hibiscus are still blooming here in Israel. Not quite as many as during the height of summer but still enough to add delightful bursts of color here and there. That's actually one of my favorite things about Israeli winters - they may be cold (relatively speaking) and wet, but they are full of color. Because winter is our rainy season, it's actually peak season for many wildflowers and plants. The summers are hot and very very dry, making it easy to plan picnics or a day at the beach, but things do start to get a bit parched looking. In winter all those brown fields and hills burst into colorful bloom and new growth is everywhere. There were no roses blooming in January when I was growing up in New York, that's for sure, and certainly no wild daffodils like the ones below, blooming right now in Nahal Shimri.

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Have an image with a bit of red in it? Or a lot? Come share it for Ruby Tuesday over at Work of the Poet.
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PS Notice anything unusual about the images in this post? They're bigger! I finally learned how to override Blogger's automatic resizing thanks to CoffeeShopBlogger. So much nicer this way, although they do make me think that a two-column template might work better with the larger format images. I think you can still click on them to see the image full size as well.
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Olive tree against a stone wall

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This was really more of an olive trunk, rather than a whole tree. In fact, I'm not sure it was still growing at all. If I remember correctly it was now just a decorative piece in the garden, a semi-living sculpture if you will. To me this one looks like a figure with its arms upstretched.
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Visit Monochrome Weekly (which now goes live on Saturday nights - I'm coming in quite late to the party this week) for more black and white images from around the world.
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November 22nd. Still hanging in there with NaBloPoMo.
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White Not-A-Rose

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I don't know what this flower actually is but I love it. When I bought it the woman in the store told me its name (and no, it's not a rose) but I can't remember what it is to save my life and a search of google images didn't turn up any likely candidates either. [Commenter Abbi to the rescue - it's a lisianthus!] I'm really pleased with how soft and subtle this image turned out with the application of a few textures, too.
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On a completely unrelated note, Maya woke up this morning dancing, singing and asking for latkes - and completely fever-free* - so we danced, sang and made latkes, and then we all joined our friends for our planned hike to Shluchat Ayala and Nahal Shimri after all (the hike link is Hebrew only, but there are a few photos on the site - my own will follow eventually). It was a good choice for today - easy (which our post-slumber party and post-fever kids both needed) but very pretty and not overly crowded once we got out of the parking area, and close enough to home that soccer-obsessed Itai still made it back in time to join a friend at today's game, where the internet has just informed us that his team creamed the other guys 7-1. I expect he'll be bouncing wildly off the walls from all the excitement when he gets home.
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And just like that another weekend has come and gone. Tomorrow it's back to work in our corner of the world.
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* I suspect her fever was a reaction to the second half of the flu shot she'd received the day before. It passed quickly though and hopefully getting the shot means that the flu will also pass her (and the rest of us) by.
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Frailties and Flowers

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I've got a sick and feverish one of these (she did perk up a bit for a glass of "choco" as it's known here)
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So I didn't have time to play much with these
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I did manage to get in a decent (or at least extensive, decent remains to be seen) photo shoot this morning with the flowers I'd bought yesterday but I haven't gotten a good look at the results yet. I may find myself with some unplanned downtime to have a go tomorrow though - we're supposed to join friends for an afternoon hike but at the moment it's looking like Miss M and I will be sending the boys off to go play in the woods without us. Hopefully this is just a short-lasting reaction to the flu booster (regular flu, not H1N1) she got yesterday and not some really evil virus but either way she's definitely feeling under the weather today, to say the least. Poor thing was most upset about missing kindergarten this morning.

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PS She's eating omelettes now! (Well not NOW now, NOW now she's lying on the couch with her eyes half closed staring blankly at Spongebob, but yesterday and the day before she did.) Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will know that among other factors at play Maya's also got enough food issues to qualify her as officially neophobic. This child leaves picky in the dust. We were told all along to focus on the other issues and the food would take care of itself eventually. It didn't really, she'd add a new food at the rate of about one or two a year (yes, a year), BUT, and this is a huge but, since she was doing so well with everything else we told her that once she turned six she'd have to start trying new foods. No more saying she doesn't like it without even tasting it. She'd have to have at least one bite of something new each day. She wouldn't have to eat more than a bite if she really didn't like it, but she would have to at least taste it. We gave her a full month to get used to the idea before we began, and so far it's working. She certainly isn't breaking any land-speed records for the rate at which she's adding new foods, but in the past few months she's added carrot sticks and red peppers (vegetables! my daughter is eating vegetables!), homemade chicken fingers made out of actual food rather than only the frozen processed ones, pizza with sauce (still no cheese, but it's not just naked crust anymore), brown rice instead of white, and now plain omelettes! She decided she wanted to try it on Wednesday evening (mid-yogurt I might add). I jumped on the initiative and made her promise that if I made it for her special that she'd eat at least three bites, and more if she liked it. Damned if she didn't eat the whole thing. She was so excited about it that she called her dad at work and her grandparents in the US to tell them! The next night she even accepted her brother's offer to make her another one.

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Maya funny: after eating the omelette Itai made she promptly declared it "the best in the world, better than god makes", then thought about it for a minute and asked "does god even make omelettes?" This kid cracks me up.

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Didn't we see a castle back there?

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Nope. Not a castle (but lots of imaginary bonus points to you if you got this fairly esoteric Rocky Horror reference). It's the crenelated top of Notre-Dame de l'Arche d'Alliance in Abu Ghosh.
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Those of you who are tiring of my Abu Ghosh images can breathe a bit easier now - I just went out and bought a bunch of flowers (including a very cool looking variegated gerbera daisy and a white not-a-rose, aka something I can't remember the name of but which looks quite like a rose) for the express purpose of photographing them tomorrow morning.

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More skies from around the world can be found here.

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Benedictine Monastery - 12th Century Frescoes and Window

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Click to better see the delicately painted figures that surround this wonderfully unusual window.

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My internet (and phone and cable) service is really acting up today so I'm going to post this as quickly as possibly before something else goes wrong. Look here for a better description of where I went and what I saw on my Abu Ghosh photowalk.
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Benedictine Monastery

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One more from Abu Ghosh. This photowalk is turning out more successful than I originally thought.

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what everyone else isn't saying this week.

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And then the angels sang

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I told you the other day that I'd had a really special experience on my Abu Ghosh photowalk, one that made the whole gloomy rainy day worthwhile - and here it is. These few photos are the only ones I was able to grab after the whole "left on manual focus" debacle, but the story itself shines through as the highlight of my day.
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After leaving our first stop we headed for the nearby Crusader-era Benedictine Monastery. This beautiful building, restored by the French in the 19th century, has beautiful 12th century frescoes, lovely grounds, and more relevant to my story (especially since with the rapidly approaching dusk we could barely see the frescoes) some of the most magnificent acoustics you can possibly imagine. So lovely that the church (and Notre-Dame as well) are used as venues for the semiannual (that's the one that means twice a year, right? I can never remember.) Abu Ghosh music festival.
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I walked around the church's exterior, growing more and more frustrated that we'd missed the light completely and it was too dark to shoot. Another frustrated photographer and I decided to look into the interior of the church and see if anything more promising was on offer there. When we stepped inside, to our surprise and utter delight, we heard the most magnificent singing imagineable, but where was it coming from? The chamber we were in was completely empty. We went down a set of stairs, up another set and around a corner in pursuit of the music. At one point we even heard a guitar of all things, but where on earth was it coming from?
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And then we found it. These magical, angelic sounds were coming from a large group of Philippine Catholic pilgrims. We snuck in on tiptoe, not wanting to disturb or break the spell, not daring to lift our cameras.
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That lasted as long as it took us to realize that EVERYONE in the group, and by that I mean everyone, including the 37(!) white-robed priests in the group all had their own cameras out and were shooting at a speed that would make a papparazzi pale! It was an utter free-for-all. At that point we figured it was acceptable (practically required) to immortalize the moment and raced for those cameras. I caught some GREAT shots of clergymen taking pictures from right in the middle of the choir, leaning over, under, around and in front of anyone in view. Unfortunately, that was also exactly when I forgot to put my camera back on automatic focus and not a one of those images turned out, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was quite a scene.
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I did get these few just afterwards though - by invitation no less. They were all so excited to be there that they were actually asking to have their pictures taken, handing us their cameras to use, and even inviting us into their pictures (I lost count after being asked to pose with five different groups of people). I was trying not to use my flash because by then the nun in charge of the church was getting (rightfully) agitated so they're not the greatest photos, but what wonderful memories they hold. (And they even hold a bit of red too, enough to sneak them in as my Ruby Tuesday post - did you find it?)
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Church window

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I took this natural monochrome in the very dim interior of the Notre-Dame de L'Arche d'Alliance church in Abu Ghosh on Friday. I was taken by the way these windows high up on a wall seemed almost to "float" in the darkness but what really delighted me was something I never noticed at all until I got home and began sorting through my images from the day's photowalk. Click on the image to enlarge it and then look in the top right corner of the window to see what a fun little surprise I received.
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Once you've done that swing by Monochrome Weekly for more black and white shots from around the world.
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Notre-Dame de l'Arche d'Alliance

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Yesterday I braved some fairly dreary weather and tagged along on a photowalk sponsored by a local photography forum (that I don't participate in, my photographer-neighbor invited me along) to Abu Ghosh, an Israeli-Arab town up in the Jerusalem hills. In addition to being locally famous for humus Abu Ghosh is also home to two well-known churches which were our destination on that gloomy rainy day.
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Our first stop was Notre-Dame de L'Arche d'Alliance (Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant), built in 1924 on the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church. Surrounding the church are gardens with wonderfully ancient and twisted olive trees and flowers of many types, including the rose you saw in yesterday's post. The church itself is well known for the large statue of the Virgin Mary on the roof (which may appear in a later post) but I was particularly taken with the mosaic work on the church's facade.
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A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world *

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Getting this one in just under the wire today. I'd say it's because I was busy and needed a quick NaBloPoMo post, which I was and which I did, but the truth is that even though I spent half the day on a (nearly cancelled due to weather) photowalk in Abu Ghosh and returned in the evening to find my house full of company I did have plenty of time after that to put a post up. Or at least I would have if I wouldn't have spent it all photoshopping this image from today's walk. It needed a bit of work to pull it out of the doldrums and even now it still isn't really zinging for me. Conditions today weren't great. It was overcast and dim most of the time with intermittent drizzle, and by the time we got to the heart of the trip the light was pretty much gone but we did have fun and a few truly great experiences along the way which I'll share later. I lost some would be great images because it was simply too dark, even with my ISO bumped up to 1600. (And then I lost a few more truly incredible ones because I'm an idiot. My camera suddenly wouldn't focus, I kept snapping and image after image were blurry. I began to panic, wondering what on earth I'd done, when my friend pointed out that I was still on manual focus following some experiments with his extension tube. Unfortunately by then it was too late and the shot was gone. I could have kicked myself.)
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I'm going to revisit the whole batch tomorrow with a fresh eye. Sometimes the best images take a while to make themselves known. Right?
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* Leo Buscaglia
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Cloud Nine *

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Straight out of the camera, taken out the window of my dad's plane last summer. Don't they look like fluffy cotton?

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* For those of you who aren't native English speakers, to be "on cloud nine" means to be very happy.

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More skies from around the world can be found here.

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