April 2021 in Pictures

“They came on one of April's most brilliant days--a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon...” ― Beverley Nichols, A Thatched Roof

Links I Love • April 2021

"Where flowers bloom so does hope." — Lady Bird Johnson

• 30 Ways to Pursue a Parisian Lifestyle — C’est normal.

• The Louvre Just Put Its Entire Collection Online

A Walk Through the Palais-Royal — one of my favorite spots.

• Stunning Footage Shows Restoration Work on Notre Dame

• Two Years Later, Here’s the Latest With Notre-Dame’s Restoration — It’s still so hard to believe that the devastating fire occurred two years ago, but these images provide hope.

• The Samaritaine to Reopen in May? I have always wanted to visit this iconic department story that has been closed for renovations since 2005. Next time…

• The Hemingway Daiquiri (David Lebovitz) — Too bad I didn’t read this before watching the six-hour PBS documentary.

• A TV Series Based On The Life Of Audrey Hepburn Is In The Works — You can never have too much Audrey.

• A Nerdy History of the Ampersand — I love a good grammar lesson.

• France Will Reopen To Vaccinated Americans This Summer, Macron Says — As eager as I am to return, I’m not sure that it’s time yet.

Travel Bucket List: UK and Ireland

“Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shining across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.” — Henry David Thoreau

Note: All London photos are my own except for the Tower Bridge and Notting Hill photos.

With all the hype about Brexit, popularity of The Crown, and the sad news of Prince Philip’s passing, the media has been saturated with articles, documentaries, and movies about the British royal family and England in general. We also just finished watching the delightful Men In Kilts with Sam and Graham of Outlander fame and are fascinated with the beauty and traditions of Scotland. Eric is a descendent of the MacIver clan and would love to learn more about his heritage. Although I have been to England several times and technically in Ireland (the airport in Dublin), there’s so much more I’d like to see, do (and redo) in the UK. Traveling “across the pond” is relatively quick and we already speak the language. So here is my UK + Ireland Bucket List.

ENGLAND

TO REDO IN LONDON:

Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge - London, April 2011

Millennium Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral — London, April 2011

• Westminster Abbey (especially Poets Corner)

• Palace of Westminster | The Houses of Parliament

• Notting Hill | Portobello Road Market

• Abbey Road

• St. Paul’s Cathedral

• Millennium Bridge

• The V&A and The Tate Modern Museums

• Kensington Gardens

• The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace

• The Tower of London + Crown Jewels

• Shopping at Harrods and Selfridges

• Covent Garden

• Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

• Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross

• Taking the Eurostar to Paris — Yes, I know this post is about traveling in the UK and Ireland, but I can’t be 3 hours away by train and not visit my beloved Paris!

NEW TO DO IN LONDON:

• See a play in the West End

• Thames Cruise — London’s answer to the Bateaux Mouches.

• London Christmas Lights — Maybe it’s because I’ve watched Love Actually so many times, but it seems to me that London does Christmas unlike any other city.

• London Eye — It just feels like something you should do, like going to the top of the Eiffel Tower when in Paris.

• High Tea in an iconic hotel or tea room — Claridge’s, The Savoy, The Ritz — How to choose?

FARTHER AFIELD:

• Oxford and Cambridge

• The Cotswolds

• Bath

• The Lake District

• Devon and Cornwall

• I suppose I should include Stonehenge although it wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped. I did like Salisbury though.

London, April 2011

SCOTLAND

My eighth grade teacher, Grace Lippert, hailed from Glasgow and went in school in Edinburgh. Her Scottish brogue still rings in my ears, but curiously, she taught me more about Shakespeare and French vocabulary than she did about her native country. Here’s what I’d like to see and do in Scotland:

• The Royal Yacht Britannia

• Isle of Skye

• Scottish Highlands

• Edinburgh Castle and Old Town

• Loch Ness

• Glasgow

• Scotch tasting

Scottish Countryside

IRELAND

Cliffs of Moher, Ireland

As I mentioned, I’ve spent a total of four hours in Ireland where I hand just enough time to learn the funny expressions like gobshite and for feck’s sake, watch the airport bartender pull a pint of Cute Hoor, and buy this Claddagh ornament for our 2018 Christmas tree. Next time that I’m in Ireland, here’s what I’d like to see and do:

• Stroll down Grafton Street and, enjoy a pint of Guinness at Temple Bar in Dublin (even though I’m not a beer drinker)

• The Clarence Hotel (owned by Bono)

• The Cliffs of Moher

• Trinity College Dublin

• Killarney and the 111 mile long Ring of Kerry

• Cork County and Blarney Castle (although traveling post COVID-19, I don’t think I would actually kiss it)

• The Dingle Peninsula

• Galway and a boat tour of Galway Bay

 

If you have traveled to England, Scotland, and Ireland, what recommendations do you have? And what about Wales and Northern Ireland?

Currently • April 2021

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

WATCHING:

• Hemingway — “[The] three-part, six-hour documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, examines the visionary work and the turbulent life of Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest and most influential writers America has ever produced. Interweaving his eventful biography — a life lived at the ultimately treacherous nexus of art, fame, and celebrity — with carefully selected excerpts from his iconic short stories, novels, and non-fiction, the series reveals the brilliant, ambitious, charismatic, and complicated man behind the myth, and the art he created” (pbs.org).

  I have been a Hemingway fan and scholar for over thirty years. I have read and re-read his work, researched, and ultimately, struggle to reconcile the soft spot in my heart for this man who could be so hard to love. It would, of course, be much easier to denounce him as a misogynistic, jealous, sometimes cruel and violent man who tragically succumbed to a family history of mental illness and suicide. Yet perhaps it is exactly these shortcomings that humanize the larger-than-life American legend. He was indeed a difficult, manly man, but he was also tragically a vulnerable, sensitive, lover of nature and women. Perhaps, too, in ways far less extreme he also reminds me of my own “Papa.” Like Hemingway, my dad was a product of his time; a man formed by the events of the 20th Century, by the tragedy and adventure of war, by family, and by love of the outdoors and respect for nature. He was kind and loving, but could be frustratingly stubborn.

  Regardless of how one feels about Hemingway the man, his writing is undeniably brilliant — clean, unadorned prose that is wonderfully descriptive and poetic in its simplicity. Hemingway himself once said, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

Last summer, we had planned a trip back East. We were going to sail on an America’s Cup 12 meter and sip gin and tonics at Castle Hill in Newport, tour Mystic Seaport and eat Mystic Pizza, and visit friends on the Cape. Our final stop was to be Boston where I had been granted permission to view the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. The collection spans Hemingway's entire career, and contains letters, photographs, and ninety percent of known Hemingway manuscript materials. Unfortunately, our trip was cancelled due to Covid-19 and the JFK Library has been closed for over a year. We hope to reschedule our trip later this year or when the museum re-opens.

• Atlantic Crossing — “A princess steals the heart of the President of the United States in an epic drama based on the World War II relationship of Franklin Roosevelt and Norwegian Crown Princess Martha. Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks, Sex and the City) stars as Roosevelt, opposite Swedish star Sofia Helin (The Bridge) as the beautiful Martha, who flees the Nazis with her three young children and lives under Roosevelt’s protection. The eight-part series co-stars Tobias Santelmann as Crown Prince Olav and Harriet Sansom Harris as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt” (pbs.org). I knew nothing about this intriguing story and historic connection between the FDR administration and the Norwegians during WWII.

READING:

• And So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures — “Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for Fresh Air and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender” (Goodreads).

• The Great Gatsby — Of course, I had to read it again.

• Nick — “Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's periphery, he was at the center of a very different story-one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I…Nick reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades” (Goodreads). I wanted to like this book. I didn’t.

FEELING:

• Proud of myself for rowing 100,000 meters by April 1st — that’s in the first twenty days with our Hydrow. I got a cool water bottle to prove it and I haven’t stopped since. I’m now approaching forty days in a row and 200K meters (special socks are sent at 250K). My next goal is to row sixty days when Hydrow will make a donation to water.org.

• Eager for this strange and challenging school year to end — In the meantime, I still have 7.5 flex days to take before June 11th. Anyone want to play hooky with me?

ENJOYING:

• The native wildflowers popping up in my back garden including hepatica, prairie trillium, bloodroot, Jack-in-the-pulpet, Virginia bluebells, May apples, great white trillium, and fiddleheads ferns.

PLANNING:

• Pots for the porch and the deck — Here is a Pinterest board for inspiration. I do love how a simple Boston fern can soften a corner, but I have learned not to hang them by our front door since wrens like to nest in them. Although I have enjoyed watching the tiny speckled eggs hatch into baby birds that are “so ugly they’re cute,” wrens do not keep their nest clean (ick).

• I hope to take a little weekend or even day trip to Door County while the cherry blossoms, trillium, lady slippers, and forget-me-nots are in bloom.

10 Years of Blogging

Today is my 10th “Blogiversary.” I published my first post, Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant on April 7, 2011 and today, I am publishing my 2,706th post [13 in 2011, 33 in 2012, 384 in 2013, 419 in 2014, 380 in 2015, 380 in 2016, 379 in 2017, 384 in 2018, 190 in 2019, 125 in 2020, and 19 in 2021 — so far…].

In 2011, I posted about education, music, movies, fashion, and of course, a trip to Paris.

In 2012, I focused on my francophila and participated in blogging challenges like Things I’m Afraid to Tell You.

In 2013, I began my six-year Project 365. I took a photo everyday and posted it along with a quote or my own musings. Those early photos are now rather cringeworthy, but they illustrate how much I had to learn. The quality is inferior since I took them all with my iPhone 5. The colors are over-saturated and the compositions are predictable. But Project 365 taught me to slow down, to be present, to pay attention, to rejoice in the unexpected. By repeating the process everyday for six years, I did begin to improve my technique. As my iPhone cameras got progressively more sophisticated and I learned to use a DSLR, I improved my angles, focus, composition, and lighting. I taught myself to use Photoshop to further enhance my images and to develop my own aesthetic. I also began to write again, to express my creativity in both words and images. I felt inspired, dedicated, and so very blessed by the encouragement of those who followed my progress. Although I repeated this project for six years, I also added additional challenges. In 2016, I dedicated the month of November to black and white photography, and by 2019, I had a designated color palette for every month.

What began with quick iPhone snapshots of whatever I found interesting, beautiful, or indicative of my current situation progressed as I learned the rules and eventually felt comfortable enough to break them. I loved the Project, but I often struggled to maintain the pace or to find new inspiration. Every year, I tried to shift my focus from quantity to quality while recognizing that it is actually the quantity of photos that lead to the quality I strive to achieve. In 2018, I also started participating in weekly photo projects to try new things and learn from other photographers. I did the Dogwood 52 Challenge in 2018 and 2019 and Capture 52 in 2020. When I lacked inspiration, I found that capturing familiar subjects helped me to experiment with camera settings, lighting, angles, and editing techniques, ultimately allowing me to grow as a photographer. Yes, my photos did get better, but let’s face it, you had seen a lot of flowers, trees, books, pastries, cups of tea and coffee, glasses of wine, critters with wings or fur, and one particularly photogenic beagle! And if I’m being entirely honest, it wasn’t always fun. There had been days when nothing captured my attention and nights when I was too tired to be creative or clever. In six years, I posted content while in five time zones, six states, and three countries. Above all, I sometimes wondered if I missed out on truly experiencing a moment by always trying to capture it in words and images. And, at the end of each year, I wondered whether I should reduce or even abandon my Project. I hadn’t miss a single day in six years — that’s 2,191 days (365 day/year + 1 Leap Year)!

Although it was time for a change, I knew that if I were to stop entirely, I would disappoint a lot of people — especially myself. I would miss the challenge, the careful observation, the creativity, and the learning. So in 2019, I decided to afford myself the flexibility to enjoy the process rather than hold myself accountable to strict guidelines. I continued to challenge myself with photo stories, themes, and colors. I created recurring series including French Fridays (to satisfy my wanderlust between trips), Links I Love (to share inspiration and to honor other writers, bloggers, and photographers), Currently (to serve as a mini-journal where I can reference what I’ve read, watched, listened to, planned for, felt, and enjoyed), and this year, since we have all be grounded due to a global pandemic, I started compiling Travel Bucket Lists.

A lot has happened in ten years. In 2011, I started working in Blogger, but in 2019, I built this more robust platform to share curated photo collections, to archive of all my work, and to continue creating new material. I still struggle to find a focus for this blog, so I have included a contact page for you to offer suggestions and ideas. Although, my primary motivation for continuing this work is personal, I really do appreciate your feedback. Perhaps my favorite thing about blogging “back in the day” was the active interaction between myself and my readers. I looked forward to and replied to every comment. I still do if you’re so inclined to let me know what you think.

In the meantime, cheers to 10 years of inspiration, learning, and creativity!

March 2021 in Pictures

“Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.” — Pedro Calderon de la Barca