Tag Archives: New Year’s

2020 Hindsight

A year of flowers, clouds, raindrops…

I just finished going back through the posts from this year, a longer project than expected. I posted a lot this year, including two months where I posted at least once a day!

Going through the posts, I noticed a few trends: lots of flowers, mostly taken while walking the dogs around the neighborhood:

Lots of sky photos with dramatic clouds, mostly taken locally (Puget Sound region), although New Zealand had some great clouds as well:

…And raindrops: a lot of pictures with close-ups of raindrops, perhaps a sign of spending most of my year in Seattle:

I’ve also been spending time learning about photo processing. I learned how to take things for a spin (and a lot about blending modes in the process):

…And spent quite a bit of time learning about black and white:

These experiments, and wanting to give myself some structure around keeping the experimentation up, led me to start a new monthly challenge on my other website:

The one-to-three photo processing challenge an opportunity to try out new techniques and share what you have created.

In conclusion

I was not in a great place as the year started, because of some turmoil in the family. Until I reread the first post from 2020 : Another year over…I’d forgotten how depressed I was! I even left my 2018 wrap up in the featured block because it wasn’t sad. Turns out my conclusion was almost foresight, although not in the way I would have predicted!

We were truly blessed to have been able to spend some time with our son over Chinese New Year, we met in the middle (more or less) in New Zealand, and the pandemic was rearing its ugly head as we parted.

Since parting we message daily and have a video talk once a week. We are so fortunate to have these connecting technologies. It was so much more difficult for families living apart during the 1918 flu…most people didn’t even have telephones in those days!

So ends 2020.

I am opposed to making New Year’s resolutions and too many things are up in the air right now to make predictions…maybe it has always been so and, until now, we just didn’t realize how fragile our norms were.

I wish you all happiness and health in the year ahead!

Another year over…

2019 was not a good year, and it ended poorly

I’ve been rather inactive for the last month. I can’t seem to keep up and when I don’t keep up the vast number of posts coming out every day (honestly I do not know how people manage to post everyday) make catching up in the time available impossible. So if I missed your brilliant holiday posts I apologize.

Life has been going on. When stuff happens (do you ever feel like shouting “it didn’t ‘happen’, you did it!” to someone?) I always wind up silenced for a while. It’s kind of like when you fall and it takes a moment to figure out if you are alright or not, then get back up. If you don’t pause a bit before you get back up your legs can’t hold you.

…but it wasn’t all bad

I feel like I saw many beautiful things and learned a lot last year (notice my leprechaun animated GIF?).

A great thing about photography as a hobby is being able to go back through the archives for a year and see how much happened that was beautiful and good. I feel like holding onto the good and beautiful is critical to staying as close to sane as I can manage.

Will 2020 be a year of perfect vision?

Right now I have a fear that I may see perfectly a lot of bad stuff happening.

Here’s hoping I am wrong!

Finally…already

It’s finally New Year’s. 2017, a busy roller coaster of a year for me, is ending. 2018 will start soon…already has in much of the world. I deliberately took the picture with the roses this morning since it has all the stages from bud to rose hip in it. My life is less about new beginnings and more about cycles. “The seasons spin around again, and the years keep rolling by.”

Perhaps this bizarre scene I saw on the same walk would be a better choice:

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The doll has been sitting on the bench for several days now (it’s on my regular morning dog walk route), but someone added a banana blossom bud to it.

You know it’s been quite a year when you are elated to get a letter from Department of Social and Health Services on December 30th confirming your calculations and allowing you to close the books on 2017 with no carry forward.

Because of my grandmother’s situation I don’t necessarily anticipate a grand and glorious 2018. I am, however, confident that it will hold many joys; I fear they may be balanced with sorrows and stress. But so it goes.

I make no resolutions. Too much can’t be predicted and feelings of failure could upset my delicate emotional balance.

As I walked the dogs the wind changed and it went from warm-ish and cloudy to cold and clear-ish.

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Space Needle with Mount Baker in the background.

If you zoom in in the picture above you can read the sign saying “I’m getting a space lift.”

Almost sunset on this almost eerie day, it seemed very quiet and dim, and very chilly.

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and cheers to all for this brand New Year.

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She looks remarkably good for almost 95.

Finally