Happy New Year!

My exciting New Year's Eve consisted of watching Auburn beat Clemson in OT, and then watching the ball drop at Times Square...my youngest teen was already sound asleep as 2008 rolled away and my eldest greeted the new year playing Xbox...wow, gotta keep the thrill level down!

Welcome 2008!!! Now, I'm going to bed...

I'm too tired to play with the pics...note the time in the bottom right of the second pic--pretty good timing!

Baltimore & Poe

I recently went to Baltimore, on what I call a "medically-induced vacation." In other words, I didn't really CHOOSE to go there, and I wasn't really there to sightsee, but I did get to spend one day, after some testing at Johns Hopkins the day before, exploring the Inner Harbor.

It also happened to be on Halloween, and we got to go to the church/cemetery where Edgar Allen Poe is buried and take a tour of the catacombs under the church, as well as hear some dramatists present some of Poe's works, including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.
Halloween ranks pretty low on my list of holidays, but I must say this was an excellent way to spend the evening...it was not presented as a creepy, scary thing, but had a much greater historical/literary emphasis, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I did take pictures in the cemetery and in the catacombs, but I'm only posting one of Poe's grave, because there were just too many other beautiful things to photograph in Baltimore. This is just a small sampling; I took over 100 pictures, easily, but haven't had much time to play with them. I'll add more as I can, but even if I don't play with them, they have to be adjusted to a more web-friendly size.

Never Forget

We Remember.

Rose of Me

In the posting on Sept 4, I mentioned how random flowers have popped up in my mostly barren yard, the most recent being a Rose of Sharon (okay, I don't know my flowers all that well, and this could easily be a hibiscus rather than a true Rose of Sharon...but hibiscus doesn't have my name in it, so that's just not as cool...)

Anyway, I mentioned that I had not yet been able to get a good picture because they hadn't really bloomed out well. The very next day, of course, they were suddenly out en masse...all white, except for ONE purple bloom...crazy.

Anyway, here's a few pictures of them I've played with:

Work Artified

Since I listed things I like about my job on one of my other blogs today (The Seven), I thought I'd go ahead and post some work-related pictures on this one. The "modern day" pics are all ones I've taken and "artified" but the older pics, well, they're already art, in my opinion...and it's my blog, so my opinion is all that matters!!

The Eyes Have It

A Bonus post for the day, just because I came across this while uploading pics for the previous post, and was reminded just how much I love it!! This is one of my nieces, when she was very little.

Knoxvegas

Today's photos are just some random pictures from my hometown, or thereabouts...

Bridge at dusk, with boats below










This is a really cool little working waterwheel that serves as the entrance to a subdivision near where I grew up...it's been there ever since I was little.







Downtown skyline from across the river, done in colored pencil effect from Photoshop








We're near the Smoky mountains, an endless source of beautiful photo-ops!







The view from a nearby hiking trail