Blogger Friends

I want to thank Michelle, of Rambling Woods, and Rambling Woods Green, for offering a friendship award to those who have visited and commented on her wonderful blogs. I do feel she is a friend, and I find her blogs chock full of good information, great interest, and really beautiful pictures. I am so glad that I found her after she agreed to continue Think Green Thursday when Gina, The Pagan Sphinx, found she could not continue hosting it. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for that.


So, Michelle, thank you for this award.

And thank you for being a friend in the Blogging Community. I know that there are many, many
others besides myself who are very happy to have
found you.

Sky Watch #57

Klaus, Sandy, Ivar, Louise, Fishing Guy and Wren are once more bringing us
Sky Watch Friday, and people from all over the world are bringing us pictures of their beautiful skies.

On the last day of July it was hot and humid. The day started like this:




But it ended like this:


We had quite a series of brief, violent thunder storms.

Think Green Thursday

Please join us at Think Green Thursday. Share with us some of the soothing greenery in your life, or suggest some way that you have found to help to preserve our environment or the creatures in it. Many thanks to Michelle, who brings us this meme each week, and to Gina, whose ideas began the whole thing.



There is a commercial I have seen several times lately on TV which suggests that painting the walls in your home a soothing color will calm even your rambunctious children, and turn them into quiet and well behaved little angels. The picture it presents is ridiculously exaggerated of course. But it is true that our tension and anxieties can be miraculously quieted when we find a place to spend a little time surrounded by nature's lush green.







I am very grateful to Mother Nature for her restorative power when I have felt exhausted by stress, and I am eager to find ways to make sure our world remains as beautiful as it is today. It has changed drastically in my lifetime. I do remember, as a child, playing in the fields and woods and along the streams, never suspecting that within a few years the landscape would change so much as to be unrecognizable. That is what has happened to my old neighborhood.


I have since found other places to visit near my present home that give me the pleasure of quiet and peace. But I have watched changes come to this area too in the past thirty-some years, and know that if they continue as they have, it won't be long before these places of sanctuary, too, will be gone. I may not be around to see it, but my children and grandchildren may not have the beauty and peace that I have known.


A sobering thought.

Big Surprise for Grandmom

Some time ago I had sent Isaac a book I made by pasting pictures of trucks and construction equipment onto construction paper. He was crazy about trucks and things, and I thought he might enjoy this. Soooo...... he has responded.

(I did not want to deconstruct this book, so if you click on the photos it will enlarge them, but don't expect great quality, since the photos are in plastic covers. I only copied a few pages.)


I had a wonderful surprise today! The mailman brought me a big envelope from Isaac. When I opened it, I found a loose leaf notebook titled "A Day In the Life of Isaac". It was full of pictures, showing me how he spent his day. He had printed the cover himself, and his mother had helped by printing explanations beside each photo.


I had so much fun, seeing how he had spent the day! There he was in his pajamas, getting up in the morning. He showed me how it looked outside of his front door. (It was a foggy morning.) He took a picture of Banyan Bunny, who he sleeps with, and showed me a shirt they are making for his Dad, decorating it with fish and islands and seaweed.



Then there was a picture of Isaac, all ready to go to pre-school, and one taken from the top of the hill near his house.




There were pictures of him with his school friends too, and how he showed them a big red scarf that he juggles with. He let them have turns trying to juggle. He showed me a picture of himself with his teacher, and another of a beautiful cactus blooming in her yard. When he came home from school, he picked the first ripe strawberry from their garden. He decided to give that to his babysitter.


A little later, he went to a friend's house to play. And then it was nap time.


When his Dad got home from work, they went to the Farmers' Market. Here are some of the things he saw there, looking down from his perch on Dad's shoulders. They ran into some of their friends there too.










They went to a restaurant for dinner that night. Silly kid! When he spilled some catsup on his hand, he just dipped his french fry into it.





Then, home to bed. Dad read him his story before he went to sleep.


His book ended with a picture of his cat, Emily, waiting for her dinner.


Thank you so much, Isaac. Grandmom really enjoyed her book!

Pogo

After posting my Mellow Yellow Monday, I discovered that a great many of my readers have never heard of Pogo the Possum, Walt Kelly's wonderful little cartoon character. I guess you're all too young. In my Mellow Yellow, I posted a picture of a campaign button with his picture, declaring "I Go Pogo". (He was running for President at the time.)

Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was a very clever man. His cartoons ran in newspapers all over the country, and were compiled into many books. My oldest daughter, Ruth found the campaign button and a couple of the books, including Pogo's Body Politic, for me on line some time ago. The Forward for Body Politic was written by Jimmy Breslin, who speaks of "...the buffoonery of people trying to look solemn and important who were actually out doing evil things." This is what Mr. Kelly's cartoons were about, and he handled it so well in his whimsical, wonderful way, through Pogo the Possum and Albert Alligator, and Churchy La Femme the turtle, and Porkypine, and the bear called P.T.Bridgeport, and so many other inhabitants of Okefenokee Swamp.

If you are among those unfamiliar with Pogo, you might enjoy visiting him on his website: http://www.pogopossum.com/. Or you could Google him or Walt Kelly. The cartoons are not all political. I have always loved the Christmas ones, for instance. But he does make politics kind of fun. I do enjoy the Women's Lib parade, out to teach those uncouth men a thing or two about couthity. And when someone wants to know why they don't "throw the rascals out", the question is raised, "Why doesn't anybody think of that before they throw the rascals in?"

But Pogo's most famous quote of all probably is, "We has met the enemy, and they is us."

Mellow Yellow Monday

It is Mellow Yellow Monday once again, and you can visit Drowsey Monkey to see lots of bright yellow pictures.

I have been seeing many, many political ads on TV for the men running for the Governor of New Jersey. The ads are bad enough. I've also looked at their records. I have reached the following conclusion:




I always loved Walt Kelly's Pogo the Possum cartoons anyway. Pogo was a wise little character.