Highland Park

Sky Watch Time Again

Sky Watch Friday is a photo meme with photos of sunrises, sunsets, blue skies, gray skies, pink skies, dark skies and any other kind of sky posted by bloggers all over the planet.

She was happy to be included with the sunset. Personally, I think she’s more interesting to look at than my sky photos, which all seem to look alike. To me. Sky Watch is great to do with your kids.

window_s3rd
For many years this was the Corner Confectionery. Then that little ice cream shop/candy store on South Third Avenue closed its doors, and a FOR LEASE sign haunted the windows for several months. About a month ago the sign disappeared. I wonder what it will be?

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Zombie of Highland Park

This is one of the teen films of the 2009 Highland Park Teen Film Festival.

I am including this film on my blog because:

It’s funny.
My son shows up quite a few times.
If you’ve ever been to Highland Park, New Jersey, you will enjoy familiar scenes (and one in Edison, New Jersey).
It made me smile, and maybe it will have the same effect on you!

Sepia Scenes: Is it the 1950’s?

No, it’s South Fourth Avenue, taken with my camera set to sepia color!

See the post below for sepia photos of homemade bread.

For more sepia photos, visit Sepia Scenes.

Twitter Basics for Librarians

In honor of the librarians at the Highland Park Public Library

I have been telling the librarians at the library about Twitter. If you put in a little effort at first, you can later use Twitter to increase contacts and resources in whatever area interests you.

Step One: Sign up and pick a username. You are going to need to stick with the name you pick, so pick carefully. It can just be your first or last name with an initial, or you can choose an alias like this one: jedilibrarian. If/when you are ready to represent your library on Twitter, you can use a username that reflects your library. You should also get an identifying user pic (I use my little froggy), because you might stand out a bit more if you have a good picture. You can poke around on Twitter to see what others are using to get some ideas. It doesn’t have to be a photograph of yourself; just something that looks good tiny. You can change the user pic easily later, if you like.

Step Two: Find some people to follow. I’m going to make this easy for you.

Step Three: You can find others twittering about any topic by keyword by using search.twitter.com. You don’t have to follow someone to read their tweets (unless they have them protected). You can also learn about hashtags.

Step Four: Write some Tweets. Tweets need to be 140 characters or less. It takes getting used to, but you can learn to shorten “you” to “u”, for example. If you want to Tweet a URL, just paste it into your tweet. Try to fill up your tweet with key words. Let’s say you are writing about teen films. You may want to use the words ‘animation’ or ‘movie’ or ‘film software’ or any other descriptive words. Hash tags can be useful, too; you can find lists of hash tags (key words with a # in front, such as #books or #library) on the hash tag site.

Step Five: Get others to follow you. You can’t force anyone to follow you. But if you provide Tweets with valuable information (valuable is relative, we all have different ideas about what’s valuable!), others might find you and decide to follow you. You will probably also find that if you follow others, they might follow you back. No guarantees.

Step Six: Reply to someone. Did someone Tweet something of interest? You can reply publicly by typing an @ sign in front of their username and then write your Tweet. Like this:
@leoraw Thank you for your post on how to get started with Twitter.

frog

I’m leoraw if you want to follow me on Twitter.

Note my regular readers: if you see ideas that were repeated from old posts, thank you for being such an avid reader! I’m planning to write a series of How To Use Twitter type posts, and I hope to gear them toward different audiences.

Thank you to these Twitterers who helped with this post:
@tealan, @camdencclibrary, @jransom, @briankelly, @tripnmommy
Brian Kelly sent me this post of his: 14 UK Information Professionals to Follow on Twitter? I believe his point is once you get used to Twitter, you should use it to build community, not just to follow the “big” pearls of wisdom.

Questions? Comments? Ideas about how to use Twitter? All welcome.

Time Travel Flick

Enjoy this film about time travel “In Between Times” written and directed by my middle son. Michelle Reasso, the fabulous teen librarian at the Highland Park Public Library, put this up last night (and she will be putting up the other films that were part of the Library’s teen film festival, too). Michelle has a major role in the movie as Miss Puffin the librarian. The main character is played by two different teenage girls, because the first one had midterms and couldn’t continue to show up on Sunday afternoons.

Upcoming Teen Film Festival

I am greatly enjoying the work I do for the Highland Park Public Library, especially the page for 2009 Teen Film Festival. I must admit some bias in this project; I have a talented filmmaking son whose film will be one of those screened on Sunday, February 8 at 2 pm. I understand he has some cameo roles in some of the other films. A beaming mom!

American Sycamore

I consulted with my local tree expert, and she thinks these trees outside my office window are American Sycamores. There seem to be quite a few in Highland Park.

I was attracted to them because of the round seed balls.

The above is a photo of the seed ball, before we got white snow now gracing Highland Park.

The trunks have this distinct peeling bark. This particular tree is on Abbott Street.

Same tree as above, but the sky was bluer.

Tales of a Skywatcher

Sky Watch Friday is a photo meme with photos of sunrises, sunsets, blue skies, gray skies, pink skies, dark skies and any other kind of sky posted by bloggers all over the planet.

moon
Last week I noted two wonderful Sky Watch posts: Guy in Regina and Carletta in West Virginia. Guy wrote: “I’m sure glad I had my camera while I was driving down Lakeshore Drive…” and Carletta said: “As I look through the branches of the big old oak tree often I catch a glimpse of the sky and know a sunset I wouldn’t want to miss is about to happen. Traces of pink in this image were enough to make me grab my camera last Thursday as I was looking at Sky Watch posts and head outside.”

cupola
I wanted to share with you a bit of how I get photos. Two of my three kids take art classes across town with Jill, so I’m often driving from the North side of Highland Park (where I live) to the South side (where Jill lives). It seems that this driving is often around sunset (at least in winter). So on the particular day that I took these photos, I had a few minutes before I needed to pick up my daughter, and I headed over to the high school to see the cupola (see above) and its sky. On my way, I captured the moon (see top photo).

high_school
I enjoyed the pinks and blues on top of the high school, but I realized that I had to rush to get my daughter on time.

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On my way in my car to get my daughter I need to cross Raritan Avenue. I photographed the above while waiting for the light to change. You can see by the upper right of the photo that I’m taking this through my windshield.

back_hs
Once my daughter was in the car with me, we re-crossed Raritan Avenue. A quick glance down Raritan toward the river and New Brunswick displayed a powerful, colorful sunset. But I decided to head over to the back of the high school with my daughter. This is what I caught in the back.

hs_blur
Here’s my six-year-old daughter’s contribution to this post (she took this picture).

hs_snow
In contrast here’s how the high school and cupola looked this morning during a brief snowfall.

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Highland Park

Watery River and Brook

Sky Watch Time Again

Ruby Tuesday: Store Window