Category: Ambience

A Photo a Week Challenge: Cityscape 10/23/2020

I knew the photos I wanted to share for this challenge right away. I love the view of the city I have from my house…of course, the view is not of the city I live in. Nope, this view is of the next city over to the West of me.

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That’s the downtown Seattle skyline, with the glorious Olympic Mountains behind.

These next shots are from an early morning walk when I just loved what the sunrise was doing to the Columbia Center…76 stories, and when it was built, it was the tallest building on the West Coast.

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This towering scraper of the sky has always fascinated me, though I had never been inside it. I rarely go into Seattle. Just not an urban type, although I guess I can hardly say that anymore, given that there is nothing left of the “country-side” my home was part of when I bought it 47 years ago.

Anyway, just a few years ago, I had the extreme pleasure of officiating a spectacular and delightful wedding at the top of the Columbia Center. I adore this couple and was thrilled to be asked to marry them, but I have to admit, when they told me where, I nearly fainted. I have a more than mild case of Acrophobia.

I knew I would need to prepare myself so I could be fully present and grounded for their ceremony so I started taking pictures of the building from all over town….trying to make friends with this giant black monolith, towering tall over all it’s neighbors…

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On the day of the wedding, I arrived early to prepare for the celebration. The ride up the elevator to the very top took forever. It made me seasick and break into a cold sweat. When I saw where we would be standing…so close to the windows, I nearly chickened out, but James kept me calm by reminding me that I would be facing inward, my back to the view. (Well, that half glass of Chardonnay he brought me probably helped too. Hmm, I wonder what the Minister’s blood alcohol number is for the legality of the marriage to be in question…😋)

Once I found my footing, I could embrace and enjoy the spectacular view we would all have this day.

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I never told my sweet couple about my trepidation that day but I suppose, now they’ll know. So worth it!! What an amazing, creative, beautiful, warm, interesting wedding. And the “Cityscape” setting? Well, hard to imagine ever topping that!!

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As I was selecting photos, I noticed something! A surprising number of airliners showed up, I suppose headed for landing at SeaTac. How many do you count?

 

A Photo a Week Challenge: Cityscape

Lens Artist Challenge 4/27/19 theme: Less is More

I always liked this photo. I loved the weird light from outside, and the way the moisture had collected itself on my window. But I always thought there was something wrong with the picture, something missing, something I needed to add.

Today’s challenge made me think of it in a whole new way.

Maybe it’s something I have to remove from it….making less more…

Here’s my experiment. Tell me what you think.

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Original

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Cropping some of the dark strip on the left

These two are with the smaller dark strip more centered

 

 

 

 

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Final crop choice

I like the last one. It seems so much more full and alive with detail and color. And I like that it’s a little more difficult to identify.

 

Thanks for this interesting challenge. Now I’ll go out there and apply these lessons to my hectic day!

 

 

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #43–Less is More

Window for WPC 9-27-17

 

My favorite window, before and after shots. It is in the shop/music and woodworking studio that James and I turned into a guest house. We call it the Bed and No Breakfast, because we’d love your company, but I ain’t cookin’ for you!

My James is amazing at reclaiming, recycling and repurposing old beauty. This particular window came out of an old mansion in Spokane. Built in 1910, it was one of the first houses in the area to have electricity. Apparently it was a beautiful house with a huge  sweeping staircase. It even had an elevator. Along with this window, James salvaged several others that he used when building his house back in 1980. Even the flooring in our living room (old rough fir) came from the old mansion’s attic.

a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/windows-2/”>Windows</a

Heritage for WPC 5-17-17

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The word for this week’s WordPress Challenge theme is Heritage. This “wall” in my home  office/group room was created to balance the masculine energy in my house these days as I live with SIX MEN!

But it really represents my Heritage. I come from a long line of very creative and powerful women, specializing in survival. Most of them, through necessity or circumstance, were Single Mothers.

These lacy, pastel bits and pieces are from these women, as far back as one of Brigham Young’s many wives…all of whom were basically “single mothers”

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B and NO B”…to complete the interaction…

I did a post for the WP challenge “Repurpose” to show how James had taken a really rough building and turned it into our “Bed and No Breakfast”, our Guest House.

You can read that post here:

Weekly Photo Challenge-Repurpose

This is one of the comments I received:

Marilyn Armstrongsays:
February 4, 2017 at 7:19 am

I also love your house. I don’t want to sound envious, but it’s perfect for the setting and I love the way it fits into the land, like a nest.

 

REPLY

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So here is that brewed up response:

Before and after shots of our beloved Casa Esmeralda

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A wonderful, tiny one bedroom cabin

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Then, THIS happened! (view looking up from the Guest House)

 

I really wanted to retain the Porch Swing, our favorite wildlife viewing spot.

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This end of the house is still a work in process but you can see the low windows the Turkeys visit for their vanity checks. My Grandsons are helping me create a rock garden with stones and shells from the beaches of the San Juan Islands!

The inside of the addition is not finished yet but is almost done outside, (still have to complete the upper deck….oh, and shore up the mine-shaft terraced gardens out in front of the house.)

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So Marilyn and JoAnne and Ed, and Karuna, Linda, and Lisa and husband and whomever else is interested…make your reservation soon!  (smiley face…winking face…hearts…geez, I really have to get some emojis!!)

More Shadows from ChosenPerspectives

Shadow

I have become obsessed this week with Shadow photos but did not think about all the different definitions of the word until this morning.

Here are some of the shots I took inside to show how cool a shadow can be sometimes, cast from the sun on different objects…

My bathroom wall at sunset

Then I went outside to look for interesting shadows. As those who live way up here in the Northwest know, we can go for days and days without shadows of any kind outside.

So I was lucky to come across these…

And then I waited for a long time for these…

It was getting to be late in the day and I remembered playing a shadow game with my grandsons when they were younger…out on the back lawn, so I headed out to see what my shadow looked like.

This is as close as I get to a “selfie”.  Don’t I look tall and thin??

But then, as it darkened outside, I began thinking of all the other connotations for the word “shadow”.

I debate with some of my Psychotherapist colleagues who believe we all have this “shadow” part of us…a permanent dark side we can do nothing about. I don’t see it that way. I prefer to think of it as having unfinished work or areas of growth. We can bring “light” onto anything…sometimes simply by changing our perspective.

As I was pondering these various definitions, I remembered a photo I had taken recently, as a follow up to one of my very early posts. This particular story was very “dark”, so much so that I even warned my readers of its disturbing content. I wrote a lot about an incident as an essential part of my own healing. James and I witnessed a horrific car accident, resulting in the very graphic death of a toddler. Here is a photo of the scene just a few days after the collision.

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And then on the one year anniversary, I went back to the location and took this shot.

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But for this slightly ominous shadow, it’s like nothing bad has ever happened on this corner in Bellevue…like the sweet little girl named Sraddha Pancha Karla never existed.

I do like how the shadow sort of refuses to cover the spot where she died…

Read more about the accident here, but be forewarned…

The Choice

Ambience for WPC

Ambience

Ahh, to be thirteen again…and to be given complete freedom to decorate my own room. My Dad did that for me so I painted my room white and then, with a pencil, traced circles around plates, cups, and saucers all over my walls. I filled them in with pastel pink, yellow and blue enamel paint. (I also made striped curtains in the same colors.) I loved my room. It was such a peaceful haven in an otherwise tumultuous household. I could shift my mood by closing my door and immersing myself in the ambience I had been allowed to create.

When my son and grandsons moved back in with me I really wanted the boys to feel at home and so of course, passed on the traditional “freedom” to decorate their space.

Here’s a slideshow of how the oldest (13) chose to set up his room. It is filled with the dichotomies of his age and individual personality. I LOVE it! Enjoy the song below while viewing the show. (It reminds me of my Junior High/High school boyfriend, David Taylor!)

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My first reaction to some of his belongings was apprehension. His Dad (my son) was never allowed weapons of any kind, not even toy guns. That really backfired as a parenting stance. But I am not too worried about my grandson. His “weapons” are mostly decorative, and are nicely balanced with his other collections (Pez dispensers, sports stuff, art, guitars, etc.)

Oh and his “stuffies”, many from his babyhood.

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These are his favorite Stuffies; a fluffy elephant (he had one in his crib from day one that played “Imagine”) and his favorite, a “Frankenstein doll”.

My grandson posed in this photo…can you see him?

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