Musings

These are tiny, delicate blooms in a lovely shade of kinda-pink. That’s an official color name IMHO.

Posted at 6:25 PM | 2 Comments »

The other day I learned that the city of Santa Fé’s architecture overseers permit forty-four shades of adobe, whether of clay, or of the far more common cement stuccoing (if I have it right).

I realized by the end of today, that I had a bunch of shots with different adobe(like) walls in them.

So, here’s a chance for you to compare shades/hues/tints/colors.

What names would you use for the various, um, terra cotta shades?

It seems I also managed to get a bunch of flower pictures today.

The flower colors—and organic shadow shapes—do highlight the natural light brown shades of the walls.

I also like the weathered wood matched with the adobe.

This building is not unusual in having different parts/wings/walls in different shades, and in having the normally shadowed porch the lightest shade of all.

That large tree-trunk shadow is from a cottonwood, álamo in Spanish.

This is probably some kind of ornamental apple.

Here are shade-variations on commercial buildings downtown.

Upon reflection, photographing the adobe walls was easier than naming the shades, and far more interesting.

Posted at 10:08 PM | Comments Off on Adobe-city

I got distracted into photo metadata and learned a smidge about big-endian (and its opposite little-endian—duh; collectively: endianness), and their distant “friend” circle of confusion.

I think I have spent some time in a circle of confusion, but today I just felt like that was a distant memory.

Posted at 9:40 PM | Comments Off on Minutia

As we headed out this morning, a fire truck and fire car consulted in front of the cathedral complex. Pompier means fire department.

And, around the corner, we came across two people walking flowers to…a shop(?), and two workers changing a lightbulb (no joke), using a high ladder…and another worker passing by. Ampoule means light bulb.

In the plaza around the market, many people had tables and displays on the ground of…just about everything but food…bird cages, western decorative items, bad art, record albums, books, household items, antique children’s bicycles, cross-stitched tablecloths…a wide assortment. Tablecloths are nappes.

Pass through the flower vendors under an awning and enter Les Halles, the market, and find enticing foodstuffs. This is about one-quarter of the seafood at this stall. The next stall was serving oysters on the half shell—at 11am, mind you!—and all but one of the tables was full. We kept strolling.

The locals meet up at Les Halles, wisely bringing their wheeled carriers…paniers?—oh, wait, the one on the right is a voiture d’enfant.

Heading south toward the wall, we found a service station…diesel is gazole, meaning gas-oil mix…and sans plomb, you can figure it out.

Ah, there’s the city wall, looking inside out. Wall is le
mur (duh, like mural).

Found these flying buttress on a church…église.

This was called a tartelette, and wow was it tasty. How can it not be? Cheese, sliced potatoes and bacon (more like smoky ham), hot and gooey (and more than I expected—that was a large ramekin!). With a salade verte.

This was the back of the hôtel d’ville, or city hall.

Me, I want one of those foot props! Foot is pied (like piedmont!).

Hey, way in the background, center, see the snow? That’s la
neige here.

Nice shadows in this courtyard after dark…shadows are ombres.

And, with that, bonsoir.

Posted at 5:15 PM | Comments Off on In French…

These ATL croci have not figured out the timing with the snow. The snow was here…and has been gone a while.

Yet our croci still are a lovely lavender/lilac (perhaps orchid) (but not really violet)…FLOWER-y purple-y color.

Posted at 7:46 PM | Comments Off on Plant dyslexia?

Came across a word today I don’t remember encountering before: derp. Seems like I would have seen/heard it before. I found it in a Krugman-NYT headline…and the article text, duh.

Derp means “foolishness or stupidity.” Seems like I would have encountered it, oh?, maybe a thousand times in the last year at least…. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention (hrrrrumph).

Posted at 10:29 PM | Comments Off on Updating…

I “knew” this plant long before I remember hearing its name. I knew it had nice red berries come autumn. And some bright red leaves. I knew it had stiff woody branches, and no thorns. I knew that the branches were quite rigid, far more than most shrubs.

When I heard the name, I heard coh…toh…neee…assss…ter. Sure, fine. Then, sometime later, I saw the name spelled out, and I tried not to sound it out (as I was told to do, over and over; and over) because I found sounding it out to be misleading.

This is an artistic rendering of a section of an autumnal branch of a cotoneaster. So, again, it’s a distortion of reality…?

Then again, cotoneasters are taxonomically related to photinias. 😎

Posted at 9:49 PM | 3 Comments »

I am not certain because of the veil of time, but I suspect that “bow” was the word that introduced me to the concepts of homonyms and homophones. I knew about this kind of bow (for hair**, too), then about bowing before royalty*. I really fought the idea that the same spelling could be pronounced differently, and realized that spelling had just revealed itself to be a can of worms, and, I suspect, nematodes.

Then I found out about “beau” and that it was French, and that may have put me off French for decades.

* Confession: we have finished season two of “The Crown” and are working our way through “Shetland.”

** Not mentioning “hare.” Or vale (first sentence). I realized that spelling was a trap. Still is. Many times people told me that Spanish is spelled the way it sounds. Not so. See: the trap is not only in tricky English.

Posted at 9:14 PM | 2 Comments »

Would you call this a bi-color azalea bloom? Big one, too….

This flock (aka flamboyance or pat or…your term here) of flamingos are to mark the houses on the tour. Or this collection/bunch marks a super-house?

Too much pink? This is crepe myrtle bark, with wrinkles and marks rather like a desert graben.

Posted at 5:53 PM | Comments Off on Of pink and drab

My constant companion these days is medically named paresthesia. It is the sensation mostly on the top of my foot and toes—they feel like they are “asleep.” With a vengeance. Sometimes I call it Pares, and think Paris, as a distraction.

The photo is to symbolize (lamely—haha) the light at the end of the tunnel. Or, “this, too, shall pass.” Something along those lines.

Posted at 10:21 PM | Comments Off on My paresthesia