The climb must have been going pretty well, straight up the wall of Mt. Gimli, in Canada's Kootenay Rockies. And then Hank stopped for a moment and looked down.
We might speculate that looking down would be a terrible thing to do. But all the evidence suggests that Hank just calmly snapped a picture of his own right foot and then went back to climbing on up.
Bright and early today, the kids go back to school in Philadelphia, all except for the kindergarteners, who get a few extra days of freedom before beginning thirteen years or seventeen years or even more of sitting at desks and trying to pay attention.
Of course, the kindergarteners don't know to appreciate their last days of freedom. They'll learn.
In 1983, our oldest child started kindergarten in Decatur, Georgia. Here he is with his class, sitting so nicely in the lower lefthand corner, smiling and looking at the camera, hands clasped in his lap. You better believe we were proud. Still are.
It must have been Oscar Wilde who said that you could never be overdressed or overeducated. In fact, he may be saying it just now, as he contemplates the world outside his childhood home in Dublin's Merrion Square, dressed to the nines from the neck down and wearing a becoming shade of snark across his face.
Sculptor Danny Osborne was as much prospector as artist for this project. He found the jade for Wilde's smoking jacket in extreme northern British Columbia, near the Yukon border. The pink collar and cuffs are from manganese-rich veins of zoisite in Norwegian shale.
The shimmery trousers are larkivite, also from Norway, a coarse-grained rock rich in anorthoclase feldspar, mined in Oslo Fjord. The well-polished shoes are black charnockite, from southern India; they get their shine from a distinctive kind of pyroxene known as hypersthene.
The 35-ton boulder that Wilde lounges on is Irish, but it's not in situ; Osborne found it in the Wicklow Mountains outside of Dublin.
The statue was sponsored by the Guinness Ireland Group and dedicated in 1997, ninety-seven years after Wilde's death at age 46.
It seemed appropriate, even necessary, to end this posting with a Wildeism. Settling on a single passage, however, proved ridiculously difficult, and it is certainly unfair to the man to reduce him to well-dressed witticism. But this line may do as well as any: "Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future."
According to the good people at Life magazine in 1937, no animals were harmed in the production of this and the many hundreds of similar pictures that comprised the life's work of photographer Harry Whittier Frees, "the most famed U.S. photographer of dressed-up animals."
"No animal protective socities have ever accused him of cruelty to animals," said the Life article. "Some have praised and admired his work." Frees, for one, insisted that gentleness with his models was the secret of his success.
Still and all, in the twenty-first century, we kinda wonder.
It all started one evening in 1906 at the Frees dinner table in Audubon, Pennsylvania. Somebody had brought a silly paper hat to the table, and it was passed around from head to head with plenty of giggles and wisecracks. And then somebody put the hat on the head of the family's pet kitten, Boots, which led to even more giggles but also to an epiphany for Harry Frees: he would take a picture of the cat in the hat and see if he could sell it.
A postcard printer bought it and begged for more; a career was born. Frees spent the next forty years dressing up baby animals that he rented from the neighbors and posing them in human sorts of activities. The postcards and children's books now sell for about $20 each on ebay.
Most of the costumes were sewn by Frees's housekeeper, Mrs. Annie Edelman, who contrived stiffeners to keep the animals posed somewhat upright. In his studio, Frees worked hard to keep his models' attention; bunnies were the easiest to work with, he said, because they were so timid they didn't move much. Piglets were the most difficult to handle; when unhappy, they tended to close their eyes tight and squeal.
But Frees's bread and butter were kittens and puppies doing everyday sorts of things that people do. And for what it's worth, note that the clothespins here are made from a single piece of wood, not the spring-loaded pincer kind of clothespin, which would have been difficult to manipulate without opposable thumbs.
This is a pretty spectacular photo, with the features of an iconic landscape dwarfed by a skyful of stars and clouds and hints of daylight. Modern cameras can capture this sort of scene more or less routinely if they are set up to stare into the night, lens wide open, without blinking or moving for, in this case, twenty seconds.
The human eye could drink it in at a glance, if only we were there. But we weren't there, sadly. This morning, we must make do with the picture, and fortunately it's a picture that rewards a slowly wandering eye with pleasant little discoveries in the realms of shadow and glow, detail and hulk, pattern and emptiness.
Back in June, baby Summer was a four-pound preemie whose days blurred into nights tethered to the beeps and wires of an apnea monitor.
But by mid-August, when she left Philadelphia to begin life with her adoptive family in a village 50 kilometers north of Amsterdam, Summer was fat and happy and paying attention to the world. That's what a summer on Kater Street will do for you.
Last weekend, Hank, his climbing buddy Pat, and their other climbing buddy, the orange-footed yaller guy, summited Mount Gimli, a 9,000-foot spire of gneiss in the Valhalla Range of southeastern British Columbia.
There are little chrome hooks affixed to the walls of the restroom stalls at New York City's American Girl Doll Store, and their specific purpose is to support the dolls by their little plastic armpits while real-life American girls use the facilities.
This doll is Saige, a 2013 American Girl doll of the year, who has been proudly claimed by Lily, an American girl here on Kater Street who's turning seven today. Lily now has a dress that matches Saige's, and Saige now has her own hairbrush, outfits, and dog.
Saige comes with a backstory, as detailed in a hundred-page biography–what the kids would call a chapter book. We can read about her life among the ponies and desert landscapes of the American Southwest during World War II. Yet truth be told, at least some of the issues Paige is dealing with are not so far-fetched in twenty-first-century Philadelphia; for example, her school is having budget problems and faces losing its art teacher. Will Saige be able to pull off her fund-raising project and save the day? We know a seven-year-old we can ask.
Happily, it's a big year for weddings in this branch of the human family. And one of the best things about weddings is that the pictures are so many and so various and so thick with kisses and flowers and hopefulness. Indeed, every morning could be a Wonderfully Good Wedding Morning in this blog . . . if only Facebook didn't always have the jump on us.
Here today, however, are a couple of shots from Maggie and Colin's wedding back in June on Peaks Island, in Maine's Casco Bay. Above, the newlyweds focused on a joint engineering venture that went off almost without a hitch: as the sun went down, illuminated hot-air balloons soared up and away, floating into the future.
The first one rose and floated perfectly, above the island and out over the sea. The second one plopped down into the harbor. As did the third. The fourth balloon also looked doomed at first, but it somehow fought hard against gravity and wobbled skyward and . . . fell flaming into a patch of brush next to the island gas station.
Nothing bad came of it. The day and the night were far too gentle and elegant.
Actually, it's a nesting Falcon. I do not pretend to know what this is all about, except that I understand the bird and almost certainly also the tree are Australian.
Go ahead. Laugh, all you kookaburras. Gay your life must be.
This camp at Zaatari in northern Jordan just marked its first anniversary. Refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war have flooded in so fast that attempts at accurate headcounts have been abandoned. Back in March and April, when the fighting was especially intense, the influx from Syria was estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 new refugees every day.
The current camp population is believed to be approximately 144,000, making Zaatari the fourth largest community in Jordan.
One year ago today, Bonnie and John, aka JJ, were married in Seattle. After the ceremony, we all enjoyed the toasts.
Now that the clutches of time have put in a claim on the newlyweds, we would like to mark the anniversary with words that are sweet yet also a little bit edgy; nothing appropriate comes to mind, but surely it was all said back then during those toasts.
On New Year's Day of 2014, the islands of Mayotte, population 194,000, in the Indian Ocean channel between Madagascar and Mozambique, will become the newest official Outlying Region of the European Union. Already, the currency here is the euro.
Most islands in the archipelago that includes Mayotte are part of the independent Union of Comoros. But in 2009, the voters of Mayotte chose overwhelmingly to affiliate with France, as its 101st département, instead of with Comoros. French citizens need no visas to vacation in Mayotte, and many of them do just that, notably for the diving in the island's lagoon and coral reef.
Tourism seems to be the major industry; per capita GDP in Mayotte is about $6,500–ten times that of Comoros, though only about one-fifth that of mainland France.
Most of the population is Muslim. Seen here is the mosque in the town of Kani Kéli.
Roman mosaic floors (plus one freize), mainly from Pompeii.
This image is a reproduction of one page from Heinrich Dolmetsch's compilation of craftsmanship and design in ancient and modern civilizations, first published in 1887. There is more.
The climb must have been going pretty well, straight up the wall of Mt. Gimli, in Canada's Kootenay Rockies. And then Hank stopped for a moment and looked down.
The caged bird sings. Above a doorway in the old quarter of Lisbon.
It's gotta be that shredder sitting by the windowsill, just to the right of the desktop.
It must have been Oscar Wilde who said that you could never be overdressed or overeducated. In fact, he may be saying it just now, as he contemplates the world outside his childhood home in Dublin's Merrion Square, dressed to the nines from the neck down and wearing a becoming shade of snark across his face.
Back in June, baby Summer was a four-pound preemie whose days blurred into nights tethered to the beeps and wires of an apnea monitor.
There are little chrome hooks affixed to the walls of the restroom stalls at New York City's American Girl Doll Store, and their specific purpose is to support the dolls by their little plastic armpits while real-life American girls use the facilities.
Actually, it's a nesting Falcon. I do not pretend to know what this is all about, except that I understand the bird and almost certainly also the tree are Australian.
On New Year's Day of 2014, the islands of Mayotte, population 194,000, in the Indian Ocean channel between Madagascar and Mozambique, will become the newest official Outlying Region of the European Union. Already, the currency here is the euro.