Ruby Tuesday - Party dress

A cousin's birthday party guests Julie, Christina and Amy, 1983

Ruby Tuesday 2 returns this week as do I. Plenty of old prints have been found and scanned, and over the decades there have been plenty of reds from decades past. This is from 1983 and are birthday partiers ready for cake and fun. With one dress and a few balloons to meet the ruby requirement (the Smurf birthday hats explain the era). Too cute, kids then some with kids now - where did the time go?

Whimsical Windows - Lakeside view

Toby graciously hosts the fun architectural meme Whimsical Windows/Delirious Doors. Windows allow us to look out hopefully at scenery of note. I unearthed these views taken in August 1983 and a vacation to a relative’s lakefront home in Minnesota. Big Stony Lake one of actually 11,842 (not 10,000) lakes in this beautiful state and four hours northwest of the Minneapolis/St Paul airport - close to the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi River. We are looking outside the living room window toward the boat on the lake 

The bottom view is looking up from the dock - nondescript in style, yet functional for a lakefront home. Inland is where we reside now, but summer in The land of sky blue waters is great for a respite, although the mosquitoes up there are the size of birds :)

Shadow Shot Sunday - Shadowy Collapse

Examining the collapsed Hartford Civic Center roof February 1978. © 2012 Alcam Writing & Admin LLC 

Shadow Shot Sunday is back as I go back in time to February 1978. The place is the 24th floor of the Gold Building in downtown Hartford. The persons are my father (who worked for UTC and had access) and Grandmother examining the collapsed roof of the Hartford Civic Center. 

This is a print that I have seen but found last week - the color had faded so I edited it in B&W and sharpened it as best possible. So the eerie view through the reflections is maintained...I found two cool things that explain it better - this Hartford Courant slideshow (great newspaper photography in its heyday) and a video below from the History Channel that I've seen before. The fallibility of humans is quite apparent in this mishap...

Whimsical Windows - Dwarfed

A favorite meme of mine, Whimsical Windows/Delirious Doors, is back for the week. Our intrepid host Toby allows us the freedom to find interesting architectural items to post, and windows, doors and perspectives. A fun pursuit as we all run into such, and hope to have photographic devices with some charge remaining.

Of course, pictures were once taken without digital modernity, such as this one taken by a relative with my manual Pentax K1000 in 1982, an SLR with nothing automatic, and heavy with its steel body and K-mount lenses. It would be a challenge to use for me these days...

The place is the famous Cologne (Köln) cathedral - I found this original print another original and scanned it this afternoon. The sense of proportion is what I see - for instance, the twin spires are 157M (515 ft) tall and I, even in my walking days, am dwarfed by comparison. A landmark that could not be constructed these days due to cost, so it remains an original!

Shadow Shot Sunday - Sightseeing luck

Battersea Power Station, London, April 2005. Photo by Allegra

Album cover

Shadow Shot Sunday 2 is back, and we look for shadowy poses, sometimes in many different and perhaps odd places. This picture was taken by daughter Allegra in London on an 11th grade school trip to London in 2005. It is the Battersea Power Station made famous in the 1977 album by Pink Floyd, Animals. This might not mean much to many, but way back then she loved the Pink Floyd so much that her e-mail address was lessthanfloyd@...

With her okay, the shadowy power station is my submittal to SSS2. The picture was taken through the window on a bus on the way to Heathrow on the last day as Patti wrote. How could our daughter know that later on this would be a great shadowy post?