I didn’t have much time to blog this week, as my kids are off from school and we went on vacation to the Berkshire Mountains.
If I had more blogging time this week, I would have done a Nature Notes post about both Tu B’Shvat (the Jewish holiday of the trees) and Parshat B’Shalach, before which one is supposed to feed the birds. Here is a nice story about the Maharal, feeding birds, and teaching children.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the Describe Person Experiment. You are still most welcome to participate!
The colors of Robin’s flower and Ilana-Davita’s Swedish shed photos are similar in palette, yet the photos are so different in subject matter and in photographic style.
I really enjoyed Michelle’s videos after the rain then during the snow. She’s funny, whether she means to be so or not… listen to the goldfinch who didn’t get the January memo.
Having been born Jewish, I often find it curious why someone would convert…”There are Jewish roots in my family, on my Dad’s side,” says Rachel. <- I suppose that helps
Eva Abreu in the Home News Tribune wrote about how people use Twitter to connect and produce new business relationships. She included the example of how I connected with Kacy Campion Renna of CCW Insurance, and I wrote up a post about Eva’s newspaper story.
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.
Afternoon View Outside Jiminy Peak Country Inn
Three photos from the same vantage point: the first one was taken on January 26, a day of some sunshine and wonderful skiing with the family. You may notice that all the snow in the second photo has been washed away by the rains in this one. But Jiminy Peak in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts does a great job of snow making and grooming, so skiing was fine.
Outside Jiminy Peak Country Inn in early morning, day of rain
On this day, January 25, it rained so much and the winds were high so the mountain was closed, unusual for January.
pre dawn at Jiminy Peak Country Inn
Everyone was asleep except me and the friendly desk clerk.
I finally finished reading Laish by Aharon Appelfeld, which is reviewed beautifully here by Jew Wishes. I cannot even begin to imagine being a 15 year old without parents who is raised by this caravan, but in some ways it is similar to Aharon Appelfeld’s story, who also lost his parents quite young.
Muqata has an eye witness account about the IDF field hospital in Haiti: “A doctor and nurse from Germany came. They heard this is best hospital in Haiti. An emergency room team from Colombia arrived with all their equipment and asked if they could set up next to us to be part of our hospital. England is the enlightened country in Europe, the one which has an academic boycott of Israel; twenty British doctors and nurses asked to work with us.”
I love the way portraits look in sepia. I took a piece of a photo that my son took and used this tutorial called Basic Sepia Tone Old Effect. In the tutorial it suggests changing the whole image to Grayscale; instead, I just used Desaturate on one layer in Photoshop.
Here is the original cropped section of the photo in full color. I used the clone stamp tool to change my husband’s bright lime t-shirt into the coloring of the tree behind. Here’s a good tutorial that demonstrates the use of the clone stamp tool.
I was thinking of using a detail of this photo for this post called Why Use Thumbnails, and I would write: “Is she creating a great thumbnail layout for a blog?” Instead, I’ll just ask you to provide your own caption.
It seems the time to see birds in my backyard is midday on a warmish day after a cold spell. Then they come in groups. All of these photos were taken through a window, so they are a bit fuzzy. The robins were bouncing around from tree to tree a few days ago.
A male cardinal was in the far end of my backyard. The telephoto lens on my camera allowed me to see this little guy.
I don’t often see blue jays in my backyard, but last week a group visited. They had a female and a male cardinal with them, too.
I wasn’t the only one birdwatching; I got a fuzzy photo of the neighbor’s cat, but you’ve all seen a cat before. This one was just lolling about in my garden, watching for possible prey. I bought a bird feeder in a sock at the supermarket (that I haven’t seen touched by bird or squirrel), and I found a window bird feeder online that I will order soon. After I get some work done.
