A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
A lone pidgeon sits on a fountain in the French Provence city of Cavaillon, and he thinks about his options. He’s not that dirty – but he does feel a bit dirty. And it’s not that cold – but it is somewhat cold. I saw him sitting here, thinking, for a long time. He ultimately had more patience than I, and I walked away before seeing if he took a bath.
A guest blog, by Arlene Ritley
I have been wondering for some time now if I should start a blog. It then came to me that a blog is like keeping a diary which every girl in the 60’s and perhaps earlier, kept. Boys might have kept a diary but never went around advertising this to other guys. A sign of the times.
I’m not familiar with blogs so I went to my good friend Google. “Google,” I asked. “What is the difference between a blog and a diary?” And this is what I found.
You probably knew this, but I didn’t, the word blog came from the words “web log.” Who would have thought? I found this interesting. But why isn’t it called a diary? Again I found that a diary contains personal and perhaps confidential information or entries that probably shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.
Do I really want the world to know that I was in love with Elvis Presley? Or that I cut a day of school so that a friend and I could travel downtown to see Liberace who was in Cleveland for the opening of the Cleveland Trust Bank? Or that the day of becoming a woman finally arrived. I wrote about the last one in great detail.
CERTAINLY NOT!
Blogs are for people who do or say things that are important to them and who feel that their thoughts or pictures should be shared with the universe. Some are interesting and general, like travel or photography others are more specific like cooking and gardening.
Did you know that there are companies who will write blogs for you? They not only compose the blog but also set up the blog site. Google “blog writing services.” How can an amateur blogger compete with a blog that was written by an accomplished writer? I was lucky to get one A+ in high school (and that was in glee club) so how can I compete?
I can’t. But I do like the idea of writing down my thoughts. Not to share with others but to cleanse my mind at the end of the day or the early morning hours. I will write freely and without fear of hurting anyone’s feelings by putting my thoughts in writing.
Dear Diary……
This guest blog was submitted by Arlene Ritley, an editor with the Island Moon Newspaper – one of South Texas’s largest community newspapers.
The tiny Provential village of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue has a few paddlewheels in the creeks that flow through the center of town. This one is actually turning – but as far as I can tell, it’s not connected to anything so it must be there for decoration:
I took this snap on the one and only day this century in which the orbit of Saturn will intersect the orbit of the moon. As you can it, it looked magnificent above the countryside near the village of Roussillon in Provence.
I took this snap just outside of a lavender distillery in Apt,
I usually travel to Provence in the winter, then the lavender has already been harvested – it is on my bucket list to return someday and see how they actually harvest this plant. Judging from the neat shape of the hedges above, I assume they use some type of curved, bladed harvesting device.
I took this snap just outside of a lavender distillery, in Apt:
Well, I can’t say it surprised me, but when I went up to the stuff and stuck my hands in and pulled out a huge amount and put it up to my nose and smelled it – no smell at all! Not only no lavender smell, but also no rotting smell. My guess is that if they subject the lavender leaves to high temperatures then this more or less sterilizes the organics, and it probably takes a while before bacterial action sets in and it begins to compost.
Continuing the series, I took this snap just outside of L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue, heading in the direction of Apt,
I captured this head just along one of the banks of mighty Sorgue river and it passed through the L’isle-sur-la-Sorgue,
First things first: Happy New Year, dear world!
I was surprised to learn that the well-known litmus test dates back to the 1300’s – I would have guessed it to follow sometime after the Renaissance.
Anyway, I digress.
Although to be honest, it may be impossible for one to digress unless and until one has actually started, which I have not.
So first things first, let me start.
For those that may not know it, in addition to acting as an outlet for a combination of very creative and very weird mental juices that, if not periodically released, would mix together violently and cause very great danger to my brain, my blog serves primarily as my own personal litmus test for my desired degree of sanity. If I am happy and healthy and have a bit of creative energy left over in my day, I find time to tap into this energy and express myself in a blog. If I am under pressure or find my creative juices overly drained, no blog.
Oh, and a hobby of mine is travel photography – so my blog also serves as a very nice showcase of some of my travel photography snaps that I am more proud of.
Anyway, in the time since I started this blog in 2014, hardly a day has gone by without a blog: I have just over thirteen hundred of entries by now, and if I am in good spirits, I can usually knock out a new blog (including photo) in less than 3 minutes. I’ve timed it, so I know.
Since November this site ritley.com has been blogless, and precisely for these reasons mentioned above. New job, new demands. Well, new job is a bit of an understatement: whole new career.
Hopefully I have things now better under control, so let’s see how long I can keep up my daily blogging!
I had a very intense bittersweet moment here, just as I was taking this snap. A big black crow came up to me – which crows very rarely do. Somehow we connected, albeit briefly, on that part of consciousness where man and crow overlap. After this spiritual bonding I tossed him a huge pecan nut from a bag I was carrying. Instead of enjoying it, he just carried it off to one of the bushes you see in this snap, and promptly buried it. Did he truly think it was his nut – maybe a nut so good it could not be eaten today but best saved for a more festive time? Was he just showing me how much he cherished the nut, only to return to eat it after I left? Or . . . was he contributing to the foodstocks of all the crows in Le Locle – and if he was, would that somehow reduce the pleasure I took from this man/crow nutgiving gesture? Or rather, should I judge a community spirit like that to be both admirable as well as somewhat lacking in mankind?
What is worth mentioning now is that the famous science fiction writer Stephen Baxter has postulated that after the evolutionary fall of man, crows will ascend and become the dominant species. Maybe this little man/crow event today is a little evolutionary kick along that inevitable journey?
If you’ve spent anytime skimming through my blog, you’d’ve (how’s that for a contraction!) picked up that I love street art.
Well, that doesn’t mean I love all street art. Here’s a snap from what directly in front of the main train station in the city of Biel/Bienne:
When you consider the location of this piece in the direct pedestrian traffic flow then it sort of makes sense. But, somehow its very tight integration into the landscape – no “buffer” to soften the effect . . . well, I’m not sure what it’s missing, but in its entirety, for me personally it is a bit lacking.
In Geneva
A public mausoleum in Jardin des Alpes, a city garden in Geneva:
Just like just about everything else in Europe, the Chateaux de Joux dates back to the 1200’s.
Southern Germany is an incredible, incredible place that sadly most tourists never visit. It is remote – almost desolate – but from time to time you accidentally stumble across something magnificent, such as this church that dates back to the Middle Ages:
Disclaimer: the sky was enhanced a bit with Lumina AI.
I’ve taken this snap before,
Here’s a snap of a building owned by the Rolex corporation, sadly, I could not find the date:
And here’s a snap of the same building today, still owned by Rolex but now used as a primary building by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Applied Sciences in Bern:
Sadly it is a bit difficult to find information about these things on the Internet. I took this snap from the parking lot of IKEA in Mulhouse, in Alsace.
I took this snap in Stuttgart, but then I realised I know next-to-nothing about any element here: who the person is or why there is a statue there, the building in the background . . . I know nothing!
When I walk around with my camera, from time to time I see an interesting snap,
