April with Dierk Haasis

Now have a look at the pictures Dierk Haasis is offering this month -- delicious fish, a beautiful Easter egg, and many other enjoyable and thought-provoking images. Spring delights, all!

Slide Show of Past World Cup Celebrations -- and Fine Galleries, Too!

Dierk Haasis has an excellent slide show on his Front Page, in honor of the World Cup tournament now taking place in South Africa.

He's also made improvements in the galleries at his website, and they're now more user-friendly and therefore even more enjoyable than before. I like to look at these images full-screen. Beautiful and satisfying, as they succeed one another on my monitor.

Some of them -- chiefly selections from his landscapes -- I have as prints, framed and displayed in my hall and in other places around my house. Truly they are works of art, and living with them enriches my life every day. These can also be seen in his Imagekind galleries, where they're available for purchase.

Nashville Public Television Documents Chihuly Glass Sculptures at Cheekwood

Scroll down and click on the video for a short preview. These are the sculptures I wrote about in my blog for June 13, 2010. Truly magnificent.

Chihuly Art at Cheekwood

The Chihuly exhibition at the Cheekwood botanical garden and art museum is spectacular. No photographs are allowed to be taken inside the museum, but there is an installation of several of the stunning glass sculptures behind the reception desk in the Visitors Center lobby, and I had permission to photograph those, as well as any of the outdoor sculptures.
Here's the one titled "Sun," which is on the museum's front lawn:





And here are three views of the exhibit in the Visitors Center lobby, behind the reception desk:

Who Goes Walking at 7:00 in the Morning?

Today, I got a late start and was still dawdling around snapping pictures of roses at 7:00 a.m., when who should come lunging over to greet me but Pebbles! She didn't really have her ears laid back, as appears in this photo -- the wind of her swift passage blew them back. She was really quite friendly, even though not so well-behaved as her owner would have liked.



I'd seen her from a distance on other mornings, but this time I had the opportunity to ask permission to take her picture, which the owner readily granted me. Here she's just checking out a trail invisible to us humans:



And now she's telling us all that she's ready to move on:



On the other side of the campus, over half an hour later, I met Sammy and his owner -- my first ever encounter with those two. Both of them were also very friendly and so I got permission to photograph Sammy.

His owner and I exchanged names, and she said that Sammy, like the Buddha, is friends with everyone. When I asked, in bantering mode, if perhaps Sammy were an incarnation of the Buddha, I got an appreciative laugh. "Yes," she said, "he's Neo-Buddha." I'm invited to visit them next Saturday, since they live only a few blocks from me.

So, heeere's Sammy!



And Sammy moving on:

Silver Maple Branch

A small casualty of an overnight storm, this silver maple branch was lying in my back yard when I walked out early this morning.

I fetched the camera right away -- it was a good chance to get a close-up of a living leaf.



And I found that a fly was already taking advantage of the grounded foliage.



But it flew away a split second after I took its picture.

St. George's Day

I'm going to comment on this date, April 23, by quoting my response to Celia Warren's post in honor of St. George's Day in England. Celia is a published children's poet, and a long-time e-mail pen-pal of mine, and today's page at her website, POETRY BOX (see the link above), is particularly delightful:

Today is also the accepted birth and death date for William Shakespeare, and over here in the U.S. it’s Earth Day. The first graders at the school where my sister teaches, including her class, made solar cookers from empty Pringle Chips’ cans, one per student, for roasting a hot dog (a weiner sausage) under the hot Texas sun. Neat science lesson, I thought.

There probably wasn’t any smoke — only steam — from this project. However, perhaps there’s no steam without dragons either?

And what is a steam locomotive but a great iron dragon?

End of musings on your wonderful poem. Thanks for the space, Celia, and Happy St. George’s Day to you!