Richly colored

Color – spent part of the weekend with colored pencils and experimenting with dark, light, transparency. Like stained glass on paper. I love color – and always have.

The Museum of Modern Art currently has an exhibition, "Reinventing Color," which shows how modern artists have dealt with color. Some have dealt with it more successfully than others, IMHO. Still, check out the online exhibition – fascinating ideas and work.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/colorchart/

And some other views about color:

Orange is the happiest color.
-Frank Sinatra

Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Pink is the color of romance and a friend tells me that the girl with the pink dress at the party is the one who is selected for each dance.
-Alfred Carl Hottes

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
-Vincent Van Gogh

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.
-Paul Klee

Geese and gaggle

These two were part of a gaggle of geese sunning themselves in a local park. They fly in by the river; some have learned to beg for treats from passers-by. Though some people complain about goose poop, it’s good the geese have made their place here. I love watching the goslings at the Nature Center in spring and hearing their poignant calls as they fly overhead in the fall.

"Gaggle" is an interesting-sounding word. It refers to a group of geese on the ground. A "skein" of geese refers to those in flight. Skein reminds me of yarn, as if they are connected by strands of colorful yarn "knitting" their V in the sky. I wonder why they aren’t called a "Vee" of geese when in flight?

I think gaggle would be an excellent word to describe a group of legislators arguing. Perhaps it could be expanded to include lobbyists, too. Maybe we should introduce a bill to expand the definition of gaggle. But then perhaps it would just be another wild goose chase…

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If you feel the urge, don't be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for anyway?
-Will Rogers

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
-Lao Tzu

Best intentions and gardening

People are coming out of their houses now, digging around in their yards, raking, pulling weeds and brush, trimming bushes and trees.

Gardening can be a good thing - do it enough and you'll develop arms of steel... :-)

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You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt.
~Author Unknown

Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.
~Michael P. Garafalo

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
~Author Unknown

An exceptional trout

My "catch" at the Nature Center yesterday…

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I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.
-Groucho Marx

Listen to the sound of the river and you will get a trout.
-Irish Proverb

Taking a walk

On a Saturday afternoon…

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People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don't sit looking at it -- walk.
~ Ayn Rand

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
~ Jean de la Fontaine

Fun with the sun

A fun sun illuminated by sunlight…

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The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
~ Pablo Picasso

Tribute

A salute to Arthur C. Clarke, innovative thinker, inventor, and writer; the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey." He transcended into the greater cosmos this week at the age of 90.

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The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

--Arthur C. Clarke

Zesty weather

Zesty weather lately; wind, rain, sunshine. Storm clouds hovering in the background behind Camel’s Back. All of it, good for the soul…

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It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
~Charles Dickens

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
~Mark Twain

Through a cat's eye

Double-take
double vision
but no Doppelgänger

just a reflection
through a cat’s eye

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Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
-Groucho Marx

In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.
-English Proverb

Catching a rainbow

Dramatic weather today with rain showers, sleet, wind, and sunshine. And a rainbow…

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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
~G.K. Chesterton

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work.
~Patricia Clafford

The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.
~Henry David Thoreau

Ready for spring

Ready for a new couple and their family. Ready for birdsong. Ready for spring.

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A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
-Chinese proverb

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
-Henry David Thoreau

The value of shadows

Another scene on a sunny afternoon…

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I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.
~Grandma Moses

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.
~Rita Dove

Spring fever

Today is one of the warmest we’ve had so far. People are doing yard work, riding bikes, walking dogs, sitting outside in the sun. Starved for sunlight after an unusually snowy January and a cold, windy February. Crocus are blooming and spring fever has broken out in bird song.

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If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
~Anne Bradstreet

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

Little red wagon

We had a red wagon much larger than this one. But we didn’t dare-devil down hills with it. We used it to haul gardening supplies, like fertilizer, tools, and rust-red ceramic "tubes" to put over young tomato plants.

All work; no play.
And it eventually rusted away…

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Hitch your wagon to a star.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person without mirth is like a wagon without springs.
-Proverb

Seeing what is invisible

Something to start the new week…

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When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.
- Tuli Kupferberg

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
-Jonathan Swift