To make it more like spring...

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It's really rainy and gross here...so I thought I'd post a picture from this spring.

Happy New Year!

These were the New Year's fireworks in Edinburgh, Scotland. [Not just my Scotland fetish, they're very pretty, too.]

Have a great New Year!

I got this picture here, by Googling it.

Don't forget to make it your New Year's Resolution to visit Eavesdroppers more often!

Let's Scottify...

This made me happy. I found it on Google Images. It's supposed to depict Craig Ferguson, a late-night TV host (12.30 AM weeknights on CBS). He's Scottish, just so it all makes sense...

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Have a great day!

"All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray..."

These are some pictures I took at the beginning of fall. I'm just getting around to posting them. I thought that they were very fitting to "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas...

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This is one of the trees in our front yard with our dog, Raven, in the background. She was out there with me the whole time I was taking pictures. Her nose got into quite a few of them.

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This is of the same tree buy while laying on the ground. I thought it was a cool angle.

One for the holidays...

I was cooking the cranberries last night for this afternoon's Thanksgiving feast. I, of course, followed the directions. I found this snippet especially helpful:

TO FREEZE: Place this bag in the freezer.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

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I also posted this on Eavesdroppers. If you haven't seen this blog yet, check it out!

Scotland pictures...last of 3

And the long-anticipated final installment of the Scotland pictures...

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[Below]The first two are of the same little building ruins that I showed in the last post on this...just different shots of it. I think that this little building is really cool. If it was acceptable to live outside, I'd pick to live there. Right there in that little half of a cottage. Or somewhere just like it (with less tourists).

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[Above] This is the University of Glasgow. It's a really old, pretty campus. I have this picture in a little black polka-dotted frame right here next to my computer. I love it. I'd love to go to a college that's that pretty.

Cemetery

This is a picture that my mom took at a cemetery. It's kind of sad, but happy at the same time. I also painted something based on this picture. I haven't worked on it in forever...the tree just needs flowers and a few more little things like that and then it will be finished. But still the picture's probably better. I'm not the best artist in the history of the world...

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This also reminds me of when we were down at Mammoth Cave and passed a little cemetery. A sign showed us that it was called "Little Hope Cemetery". Take that as you may.

Scotland pictures - second of 3

The previous post was of some Scotland pictures that I really liked...here are a few more.

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[Above] A castle back in the woods.

[Below] Another castle. This is my desktop background now...I love it.

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[Below] I'm not exactly sure where this is or what it used to be. It's ruins of some sort, I suppose. A picture that I'll put on the next post has the same building but with lots of really pretty flowers...

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For background on these, see the previous post.

scotland - first of three

I haven't been to Scotland. However, I just got done watching Braveheart and I'm in a very Scotland-loving kind of mood. (As if I'm ever NOT in that sort of mood...but whatever.) So...yesterday I got these pictures that my grandparents took while they were over there a few years ago and I thought that I would share... [There are a lot of these, so I thought I'd do them in 3 sets...]

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[Above] Sheep! For you, Sarah...haha

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[Above] Sheep in the valley

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[Above] Stone wall and flowers.

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Excuse the big white boxes around them...they're scans and I've yet to sort this out.

out west...

We took a trip out west a long time ago - long before I even knew what a blog was. I was looking through my pictures the other night and I thought that these few were really neat.

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[Above]This is the St. Louis Arch from below. I presume that everyone visiting the arch takes a picture just like this one or at least one very similar. I think it's really neat though. I got lots of these.

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[Above] This is Bryce Canyon, in Utah. It isn't as well known as the Grand Canyon, where we went, too, but I think it's a lot cooler.

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Notice the orange printed dates in the corner...long before my digital camera.

organ views

I was at church this Sunday and thought that I would take some pictures of the organ pipes from different angles. Here are the results:

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I didn't take these on my camera, I took them on the church's because I had forgotten mine. It was a little more difficult to use - it was a much earlier version of mine. I'll bring my beloved camera next week and try again then.

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jaws strikes again

Jaws strikes again ? Nope, just an art exhibit.

The Caption:
Surfers walk past work titled 'Pedestrian Portait' by Australian artist Jennifer Cochrane, as part of the annual of the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Sydney's Tamarama Beach, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006. Staged along Sydney's spectacular Bondi to Tamarama coastal walk, Australia's largest annual outdoor exhibition of contemporary sculpture attracts over 400,000 visitors and exhibits over 100 works by artists from Australia and overseas. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

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From Yahoo! News

Talk to the Hand

I recently (Oh, I lie. I finished a week ago.) read my second book by Lynne Truss. It was Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. I liked it a lot, though probably not as much as her first book, called Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Talk To the Hand was still a really good book about rudeness, as the title implies. It discussed a lot of issues that I think are pressing in today's society.
The introduction was quite lengthy, and then it went into the "six good reasons". These discussed common issues in the world that have to do with rudeness. She told a lot of stories that were quite comical, which made the book very entertaining and enjoyable.

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It wasn't what you'd think of as a book about rudeness, though. It didn't tell what you should do in certain situations, and it wasn't really about etiquitte. It was just kind of like when you realize something is a problem and feel that you need to rant about it. It was that and a lot more.

It's truth made you laugh and realize that you'd been in a lot of the same situations. People talking loudly on cell phones all over the place (of course, I thrive on this so I can later blog on their stupidity) and others cursing at complete stragers or yelling at store workers or commiting various other acts of rudeness.

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It also made me see rudeness in a different light. It made me realize when I'm about to do somthing that would make people think "How rude!" and makes me hesitate.

That's something you hear a lot around places.

One person cuts in front of another in the hall.

"How rude!"

Someone bumps into another or burps or whatever and doesn't excuse themself.

"How rude!"

Someone doesn't hold the door open for the person behind them.

"How rude!"

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Of course, there are some times when rudeness is obvious, but need we state it so blatantly? I was recently at the mall, waiting in line for a soft pretzel. I never like it when someone stands directly behind me in a line, so I never do it. I was about 3 feet behind the woman in front of me - clearly still in the line - when a man came up in front of me and cut into that 3 foot space, like I wasn't even standing there. There was no "excuse me," no "may I get ahead of you, I'm in a hurry" and no convential getting-in-the-back-of-the-line.

But I kept my cool and didn't say a word. It got even more frustrating, though, when he didn't know what to order and then his kids came up to him (crowding me further, of course) and started demanding their orders, too.

I got the pretzels that were fresh from the oven though, didn't I?

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As cliche as it is, sometimes you want to yell "how rude!" and sometimes more than that. But we must hold ourselves back, because isn't yelling "how rude!" rude in and of itself?

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If you want to read more about Lynne Truss or any of her books, click here.

Pictures for Today...

Aurora

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I really really like all of the pictures that the NASA website [see link to the left] puts out on a daily basis. I think that they're neat and they make you think, too. Call me a nerd, but I look at them most every day.

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[Caption]

Aurora from Space Credit:Don Pettit, ISS Expedition 6, NASA
Explanation: From the ground, spectacular aurora seem to dance high above. But the International Space Station (ISS) orbits at nearly the same height as many auroras sometimes passing over them, and sometimes right through them. Still, the auroral electron and proton streams pose no direct danger to the ISS. In 2003, ISS Science Officer Don Pettit captured the green aurora, pictured above in a digitally sharpened image. From orbit, Pettit reported that changing auroras appeared to crawl around like giant green amoebas. Over 300 kilometers below, the Manicouagan Impact Crater can be seen in northern Canada, planet Earth.

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For the full article or more pictures of auroras, click here.

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There were a lot more NASA pictures that I really liked. To see a few of them, click the links below:

Sunspot

Bubble Nebula

Mediterranean Trip - Part 3

The last part...

I've had two posts (actually 3, but whatever) before this about my trip last year to the Mediterranean. This is the last of them and will chronicle my journeys to Rome and Vatican City.
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When we got off the boat in Civittavecchia, we stayed in another hotel in Rome. It was on the far other side of the city from where we stayed the first time. It was closer to the Vatican, because that was where we were to go the next day. I forgot my camera when we went, so I used Mom's. I'm not sure if the pictures in the post are mine or hers, but that's beside the point.
It was a really really cool thing to see. There was so much history crammed into a space of barely .2 square miles. That's teeny. And there were just so many things that you've always seen in books or wherever.
We went to the Vatican museum (Musei Vaticani) where we got tickets into all of the tours and went through security. [Vatican City is actually a country. It is the only country in the world that does not require a passport to enter.] So we got in and started touring through what seemed like miles of corridors filled with statues and historical things. Eventually it opened into a courtyard that had the "Vatican Pinecone" and lots more famous statues. [The Vatican Pinecone is (I think) Bernini's creation. It's a huge pinecone made of copper, but it's turned green by now, of course. Dante gave reference to it in The Inferno, in reference to something really ugly. It was one of the less beautiful things there, I will say.] After all the museums, we went through the Sistine Chapel museum, which was filled with a lot more art, lots of which were by Rafael and Michelangelo. Then it opened into the Sistine Chapel [bottom left - the big square-ish part towards the top], one of the most prolific works of art of all time. They don't let you take pictures or talk in there, but it was truly beatiful. And HUGE. All of the paintings seemed life-size, but they were way up there, so they were really much bigger. Lots of wellknown glimpses of art are in there, like the one where God's and Adam's fingers are almost touching, and the wall on the far end that shows, in a sense, heaven and hell. I can't think if they have names or not, but they're definitely recognizable. It's got to be one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Speaking of what I saw, we also saw...the Pope. We were there at about five o'clock, and they were having Mass at St. Peter's Bascilica, so we went in. There was standing room only, so stand we did. We stood on the right side where the choir sits. They were singing in Latin, so I didn't know what on earth they were singing, but we were right there next to the baritones, and one of them moved his book over so we could read off it...very nice of him, but we couldn't read it. I hummed, though.

Then we looked up towards the front and there was the Pope (Benedict XVI, or Papa Bendetto XVI, in Italian. That name made me giggle.) in his white robe and little hat thing...just kind of standing there. He didn't say anything. As far as I ever saw, he was just standing there.

After we were there for a while, we decided it was time to find some dinner, so we left. On the way out, I accidentally dropped my water bottle. Of course, everything else was silent, and the water was icy. It rolled about five feet and a Swiss Guard in the vicinity looked at me kind of mean. I picked it up, muttered a "scuzie", and went on my way. So across Italy, on televisions or hundreds of Catholics, they hear a big THUNK. Yeah, that was me.

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After we saw Vatican City, we stayed a last night at the hotel and then flew back. Seeing the sign after customs that said "WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" was a sight to behold. Of course, we then had to drive home. It was good to be back, but great to have gone.

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[NOTE: I found a good picture of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Click here to see it.]

I never cease to be amazed...

Another genius in the world...


[We are in Walmart, in the crafts section. Sunday afternoon.]
Mom: Excuse me?
Worker 1: [bewildered] Yes?
Mom: Do you all have self-adheisive felt?
Worker 1: No.
Worker 2: But we do have the kind that you can stick to things.
Me: [smirking] That might just work.


Have a cheery day!

Mediterranean Trip - Part 2

[This is my second attempt at posting this.]
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There are some posts below this about my trip a year ago to the Mediterranean. I've been having a hard time getting anything posted - especially the pictures.

Anyhow, this is about the second part of the trip: the part in Greece and Turkey.

After Sicily, our next stop was in Turkey. When we woke up one morning, the above picture was what we saw out the window. It was a city called Marmaris. There were a lot of stores, so we shopped even though Americans got gouged for their money. The vendors came up to you as you walked down the street and asked you [in English] to visit their shop. If you said no, it wasn't rare to get yelled after...one man yelled after us, "You insult my family!!" They really took it personally. The best thing to do if you didn't want to go in was play foreign. We often just replied "No hablo ingles" or "No parlo iglisi" [Spanish and Italian for "I don't speak English."] They only spoke Turkish and Engish since Americans were their top customers and they were from Turkey. They charges us higher prices, too.

After Turkey, we went to Greece. The first stop there was in Patmos. We walked up to the site where John wrote Revelations...it was way up on a mountain. The picture at the right is out of the window there. There's also a well-known monastery there, but we didn't hike that far up the mountain. It was a really neat place in the cave - there were lots of paintings and really old things and it had the place where John is said to have sat writing, and shows where it said he laid his head, etc. You weren't allowed to take pictures in there, so I just bought a postcard for my scrapbook, because it really was nice.

After Patmos, we went to Santorini, a little town situated on top of a mountain out in the middle of the ocean. It looked like it would topple if you so much as stomped. To get to the top, you either rode a cable car or a donkey...we chose the cable car - the donkeys were expensive and we can ride a donkey at home anyway! There was a lot of shopping there and we went to a Catholic Church [someone who lived there told us that it was one of hundreds on the island]. It was really a cool place. The clock tower shows what most of the buildings looked like. Most of them were shades of white and blue, and all square and plain. They had porches and gardens, and their occupants seemed to be very carefree. There were lots of cats there too - I got a really cool picture of me with a little black kitten that lived outside a bakery. I was offering it food and it looked pleased [though not too much in need].

Note: The previous and next pictures would not load. For the clock tower, click here. For the boat, click here.

Like I said, almost all of Santorini is situated up on the cliff. There was just a little bit down at the bottom, like information and the cable car station, etc. There was also a place that rented out boats and gave rides. The boats were really cool - kind of like a pirate ship. I took lots of pictures of them. We didn't ride on one because it, too, was very pricey. And we only had so much time there - there was so much to do! After Santorini, we started back towards Italy. We had a few days at sea, where we did things like go to concerts, watch fruit carvings, and go to paper-flower-making classes. That was just as fun!

Coming up next: my favorite part! The Vatican's coming at you.

Mediterranean Pictures

Ah...finally I have given in. Posting these pictures with Blogger is just not going to work. I have tried every way I know - URLs, new posts, Print Shop, and countless attempts...with no avail.

But I have done the next best thing.

To get URLs for pictures to post, I use Photobucket, and they give you links you can use to get to pictures. So...here they are.

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The Colosseum:

This is one of my favorite pictures I have ever taken. I took it just as we were going to tour the Colosseum.

Roman Forum:

Another very cool place...This was just a big building (I want to say a church?) but I'm not really sure about it. But right next to it was a place where a famous martyr was burned at the stake. His last words were "Flip me over - I'm done on that side." Ah...the wit.

Tower:

I'm not sure what this is called, but it's in the general are of the Forum. When I got my pictures developed, I couldn't remember where it was, and I only found out when I saw it in the background of another Rome picture.

Sicily:

This was in the public square in Catania, Sicily.

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For more on the trip, see the post two down from this one. Sometime soon, I'm going to post parts 2 and 3. Better luck then, I hope.

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[Note: When I tried these links, they took awhile to load. But my internet is very slow, so that could just be it. Stick with it, though - they're really neat to see.]

light in motion

When I was at Sarah's house last weekend, the moon was really pretty. We thought that we would take pictures of the moon...but that was difficult as usual. (See a post a few down from this...) Then we decided to move the camera deliberately...hail the results:

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My brother says that this looks like the new iPod commercial...but whatever.

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[Note: If you view it in the actual size, you'll see a little blue dotted line right under the big white one that is the moon...the blue one is just a light on a house in the distance. There was much confusion over what it was...but then we looked out at the horizon again and figured it out.]

Mediterranean Trip: Part 1

Ah...it's been a year exactly since I was in...Greece.
That was part of a trip I took in 2005 that brought me to Italy, Turkey, Greece and Vatican City.
I saw a lot of really, really neat things. That was my second time going to Europe, and it is quite the experience. It's not just the things that you see, but the oddities of foreigners: languages, food, mannerisms, and feelings toward Americans. And the feel of it all. It's completely different from going somewhere in the U.S. where you understand what you overhear, you know what every dish of your dinner contains, you know how to ask directions, know how much what you're buying REALLY costs, and you don't act like you're from a different country so that you aren't charged more for everything. You're wandering back to wherever because you've lost your way and your ears are filled with the sounds of the street: babbling Italians (or whomever), street vendors, and - usually - a cat. (I'm telling you, I've never seen so many stray cats. And they're FAT. Thanks to the tourists like me who give them a pinch of whatever they happen to be eating...)
So...now I've finally gotten my scanner up and working (this trip was before the reign of my digital camera) and this was the first thing I did.
I have quite a few pictures that I thought summed a lot up. Because my computer is so horribly slow, I'm only going to do a few at a time.
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The first little section, I guess, is going to be the first few days in Italy.
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We flew to Rome, where we stayed in the Hotel Imperiale, just down from the Hard Rock Cafe Roma (I wear my shirt all the time). The first day, we took a bus to the Roman Forum - home of the Colosseum. We took a tour nearly four hours long of the Forum. (May it be noted that we had just disembarked a cramped plane after a sleepless eight hour trans-Atlantic flight, taken our suitcases to the hotel, and then gone straight to the Forum on the Roman equivalent of a Greyhound bus. I was feeling a bit off-color, I admit.) There was a lot to see there - the Colosseum was the main attraction, but there was also the Arch of St. Constantine, the tomb of Julius Caesar, and various basilicas and statues.
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Our next stop in Italy was Civitavecchia, a port-town about an hour from Rome. Here we boarded our ship, the Costa Tropicale: home for the next week or so. Our first stop after boarding was in Catania, Sicily. (Sicily is a region of Italy - and island to the Southwest.) It was really quite rough and there was a lot of evidence that it was a port city - it was messy, fishy, and there were a ton of boats around. I have lots of pictures taken just of some of the trash and fish piled high on the sides of the roads. The streets were filled with markets and everything for a while once you got there. We were starting to think that there had to be something more to Sicily when the busy street we were on opened up into a courtyard - downtown Sicily. Here we found an abbey (Very, very pretty - I couldn't find a picture of this, though), lots of statues, a place that sold Coca-Colas (one phrase that can be recognized in any language), and even a "Euro-Store" - the European equivalent of a Dollar General. (Here I bought lots of gifts for people. They were cheap, but still authentic. We also gave the store's workers quarters and candy from the U.S. - they spoke only Italian and were very interested in us.)
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We left Catania at the end of the day: laden with packages from the Euro-Store, full on pastries and Cokes, and about ready to be back on the ship for dinner and a nap.
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Thus ends the first leg of the trip...I'll pick up on the rest of it sometime soon! The next post should be on Turkey and Greece and the last one will be about the Vatican, etc.
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[Note: My computer is currently being disagreeable and refuses to load my beautiful pictures. I've even tried a few different computers and it still doesn't work. It does this often, so I will just post this now and try tomorrow to get the pictures up...they're the best part, I think.]

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[I beleive that I have surpassed the deadline I set for myself at the beginning of this "series" - I wanted to get it all done during the 8-18 of October, because that's when I was there last year. However, it is currently the 20th of October (nearly the 21st, for that matter). I'll get it done eventually. I think my picture troubles are nearly over. I'm trying again. It hasn't worked. I'm off to bed...I'll try once more tomorrow.]