Sky Watch Friday: Watercolor Sky

Taken around sunset, April 3, 2010, Springfield VA.
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Outdoor and Wordless Wednesday: Lunch Break

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Outdoor Wednesday is hosted by Susan at A Southern Daydreamer. To see many, many more outdoor photos or to post some of your own, please visit her blog.

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Outdoor and Wordless Wednesday: Table for Two

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Outdoor Wednesday is hosted by Susan at A Southern Daydreamer. To see many, many more outdoor photos or to post some of your own, please visit her blog.

For more Wordless Wednesday offerings,
please visit the website here.

Blue Monday: Blues at the Mall

Blue Monday is hosted weekly by Smiling Sally.
To see more offerings, or to participate yourself,
please head on over to her blog.

On a shopping trip to one of our local malls not long ago, we noticed that, sadly, a lot of the stores have closed. Some of the spaces are being renovated for new shops that will eventually move in, but at the moment it's a little depressing. But the management has jazzed up the empty spaces a bit with brightly colored walls, like this blue one that seemed to go on forever.


A little happier sight was this play space they've installed with a nice blue make-believe stream running through it. The kids were all having a great time. There's obviously no such thing as an economic downturn in fantasy land.

Happy Birthday, Mamma

1921-2001

My mother died nine years ago.
She would have been 89 years old today.

She always said (or claimed that her sister Bette said) that most people die on or near their birthdays. So she was predicting that she'd die around April 11th, the date she was born. And I think through sheer force of will, she pretty much made it. She died April 15th, 2001 – on Easter Sunday and just four days after her birthday. I miss her everyday, but especially on those three days every spring.

The Day the Beatles Broke Up

It was forty years ago today!

April 10, 1970, was the day Paul McCartney made the "official" announcement that the four mop tops from Liverpool would never work together again. A very sad day. Time flies.

Outdoor Wednesday: Carny!

Outdoor Wednesday is hosted by Susan at A Southern Daydreamer. To see many, many more outdoor photos or to post some of your own, please visit her blog.

One of my childhood ambitions was to join a carnival or circus. My ideal job, at the age of seven or eight, would have been sailing through the air on the flying trapeze, handing out the prizes at the shooting gallery, or barking a sideshow. Every spring, one of our local malls turns a section of its parking lot over to a traveling carnival show. M and I have walked around it once or twice in the past, but when it made its appearance this year, we were both attracted by the Ferris wheel. And the weather over the weekend was so glorious, we just couldn't resist. We arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and the place was a little deserted. But by the time we left an hour or so later, it was beginning to fill up very quickly. We rode the Ferris wheel, passed up all the junk food, and took lots of colorful photos. And got to feel like kids again.

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Doll of the Week

Make that Dolls, plural. And these aren't dolls from my personal collection. At least, not yet. But I've really got to have them.


These are the new "Mad Men" Barbies and Kens. From the left, the characters are Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling, Don Draper and Betty Draper. It's interesting (and a little disorienting) that both Joan and Betty have the same measurements. Shouldn't Joan be a little more generously endowed?

The show and Barbie seem like a perfect match. After all, Barbie was introduced in March 1959, and the show's first episode is set in March 1960. And many pundits have pointed out Betty Draper's similarity to the B doll. Apparently, the choice of characters to represent created a bit of controversy, though. The Times article said:

That two dolls [Joan and Roger] represent a relationship outside wedlock, and Don Draper’s propensity for adultery, may be firsts for the Barbie world since the brand’s introduction five decades ago. But for the sake of the Barbie image, her immersion in the “Mad Men” era will go only so far: The dolls come with period accessories like hats, overcoats, pearls and padded undergarments, but no cigarettes, ashtrays, martini glasses or cocktail shakers.

Darn! I would have loved a teensy martini set. But I'm really interested in those padded undergarments, too!

This photo is from the New York Times article about the dolls. As I said, I don't have my own set of the dolls yet. They don't go on sale until June or July, and they're listed at seventy-five bucks each. A little expensive, I guess, but I'm definitely putting them on my wish list.

Blue Monday: Cherry Blossom Weekend

Blue Monday is hosted weekly by Smiling Sally.
To see more offerings, or to participate yourself,
please head on over to her blog.

The Cherry Blossom Festival was going full-blast in Washington DC this weekend, and this year Mother Nature cooperated amazingly well. Most years, we get massive amounts of rain dumped on us all week, or a huge wind storm appears early in April and blows all the blossoms away. But not this year. The weather was gorgeous all weekend.

We didn't attend any of the festivities this year, but one day last week the hubby took some time out of his busy work day to walk over to the Tidal Basin and check out the blooms. These are a couple of the shots he took with his cell phone camera - it takes really great photos, don't you think? Well, I suppose the photographer had something to do with that, too. (Click on photos to enlarge.)

Here's a shot of the cherry blossoms with the Jefferson Memorial in the background. Beautiful blue sky and water.

And this one gives you a bit of an idea of the kinds of crowds he met.

Sky Watch Friday: Spring Migration

I liked the pink stripe of the clouds in this shot, and all those migrating birds silhouetted in the branches. I think there's a squirrel or two in there, too, although they're hard to make out. This was taken a couple of weeks ago; by now these trees all have nice little green buds and tiny leaves on them. Hooray!!!

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