Summer...

Summer's now finally arrived here, with much delay, and, in my opinion, rather unnecessarily. I don't like summer very much, and I don't like sunshine very much. Long, cold, dark winter nights, the world outside all white, warm lights inside a comfortable, welcoming home, thick wollen socks, a big mug of hot white cholocate, big snowflakes falling noiselessly down outside my window are much more to my taste. The only thing I really like about summer are the thunder storms. Hopefully, we'll have one tonight!

Textures: Shadowhoues Creations

It's my day off today, outside, the temperature is around 30 degrees, and it's hot and humid, and I'm doing the only reasonable thing - I'm staying inside the house. All day. All weekend. And all of next week I would too, if I could and didn't have to go to work, as summer has apparently decided to hang around for a bit now.

So I'm staying inside the house, spending the time doing things that need to be done, going through my pictures, old winter picures, dreaming of cooler days, longing for winter, snow, ice, the north, another place, another life, listening to my favourite songs, dark, melancholic songs, which bring back memories of times gone by and places where I felt at home.

Maybe I'll go outside a bit later on, when it's cooled down at least a little bit, when the sun has set behind the mountain. But maybe not. I'm looking forward to having the snow scrunching underneath my warm winter boots again, in a few months, hopefully. I feel so much better in thick wollen jumpers and scarfs and winter boots than in t-shirts, skimpy dresses and sandals, and I look much better in them as well, believe me.

Textures: Shadowhouse Creations

So I'm staying in, drinking a glass of cold water with homemade mint syrup, and planning my next summer's holiday: Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, the North Pole... ;)

~ rhythm ~

I've signed up for yet another course involving yet another 52 week's project, along with 52 of twenty eleven (where I'm again behind) and 52 weeks of no colour (where I'm just about keeping up). The new project is Picture Inspiration at Big Picture Classes. I enjoyed Picture the Holidays and Picture Winter but the daily prompts were a bit stressful and really just too much for me. But once a week should be manageable. I hope :-).

The course started last week and this (the second's) week prompt is rhythm. We were given a number of definitions and had to translate one of them into a picture. I chose the definition pattern of masses alternating with voids. I love bare winter trees (I only really came to appreciate them now, after I got my camera and finally learned to see), the mass of dark branches in all sizes and the voids in between them. I took the picture a few weeks ago, but I just thought it fitted the prompt so well and I did the processing today :-).

For week 1, we had to take a self portrait so that we could all see each other, as we are going to spend the next 52 weeks together. A good idea, of course, only that I don't really feel much like taking selfies at the moment. I have no energy at all right now (health issues...) and I'm tired all the time. I took some pics in the bath room mirror and then tried some b&w processing and added a framte, until I got a result I could halfway live with. I also added some Gaussian blur under the pretext of softening it up but it's really just an excuse to disguise the fact that the picture isn't really quite sharp but slightly out of focus.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the journey and I hope that I'll manage to keep up :-). I'm really happy about seeing many of the "girls" from Picture the Holidays and Picture Winter again in the new course and taking the journey with them. I know I'll find lots of inspiration in the class gallery. I also like the community spirit in these classes and I really hope that I'll manage to keep up with everyone's uploads and with commenting better than I did in the last two classes.

The quote is by Cecil Taylor, the textures and the frame are from The CoffeeShop Blog and Flypaper Textures.