Photo(s) Of The Year

On New Year's Day City Daily Photo members show off their best picture of the year. I'm a prolific snapper and don't seem to be able to limit myself to one image. As Oscar Wilde said, nothing succeeds like excess. And so:

Favorite picture of the year, and maybe best travel photo - Denali National Park in Alaska on a bleak day.

                             

Best Arch picture. There were not many this year because of the mess from the renovations of the grounds.

Best architecture. 120 Wall Street in New York, where my father worked for most of his career, followed by a club on the edge of downtown STL.

 

 

Best portrait - my friend, the artist Henryk Ptasiewicz.

Best urban landscape - snow in front of the St. Louis Art Museum.

Best flora, at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Best fauna. Sorry, three way tie. A millipede in a Costa Rican rain forest, rolled up in a defensive position; the koi pond in the Botanical Garden; and a puffin in Seward, Alaska.

 

 

Best travel photo, besides the other ones. Dinner on the beach in Tamarindo, Costa Rica.

Best local shots - the Great Forest Park Balloon Race, followed by dusk on Gravois Avenue.

Best picture of Madeleine. Not so much cute as deep. There is a lot going on behind those eyes.

So happy 2016 to one and all. Oh, and you may have heard that it's been raining a bit here. Pix of the Mississippi tomorrow.

And check the best images of CDP members from around the world here.

City Daily Photo Theme Day: best of the year

Happy New Year! May 2016 bring you joy and be full of good surprises! First of the month, Theme Day in the City Daily Photo blogging community. VDP's fave photo of 2015 is this one. To view the original post and all the explanations, click here! To see all takes on the theme, click there.

Bonne année ! Que 2016 vous soit douce et heureuse ! C'est le premier du mois et donc jour de thème dans la communauté des blogueurs City Daily Photo. Traditionnellement, le 1er janvier, le thème est le "best of" de l'année précédente et voici la photo préférée de 2015 de VDP. Pour voir le billet d'origine avec toutes les explications, cliquez ici. Pour voir toutes les interprétations du thème, cliquez là.

Fresh Flowers To Welcome 2016

These beautiful floral plantings are located next to the Town Center Plaza in Lake Sumter Landing, Florida. This has been cross-posted to Ocala & Central Florida Photos.

A Bit Breezy

A bit of wind and rain in London, however this is nothing compared to what other parts of the country are having to deal with.  The north of England and parts of Scotland have been flooded, some for the third time this month with water levels higher than has been experienced in many decades.

May 2016 bring a better year for all.

An Expensive Lunch

The Whitney Museum has an upscale restaurant with the bit-too-clever name of Untitled. Mrs. C and I had lunch there on Monday. The food was original and flavorful but the prices, for what you got, were outrageous. (Click the link to see the menu if interested.) The portions were quite small by American standards, which was okay since most of our restaurants serve portions more suitable to cattle than humans. The "braised lamb, hakurei turnips, cabbage", a delicate, delicious little nest of veggies might - maybe - have contained an ounce/28 grams of lamb, for which I was charged $27. Welcome to New York. Well, it was the only meal we had to buy on the trip.

The bottom picture shows the restaurant's large windows and the line outside waiting for tickets. I was standing to the right of the revolving door when I took the pix in yesterday's post.                

Bonne Saint-Sylvestre !

VDP wishes you a delightful, fun and happy New Year's Eve. This is the Guerlain window of the house of perfumes at the Scents Courtyard.

VDP vous souhaite un excellent réveillon de la Saint-Sylvestre tout en beauté avec la vitrine Guerlain de la maison des parfums à la Cour des Senteurs !

Yiddish wit and wisdom

.

Another old Yiddish proverb:

Better a crooked foot than a crooked mind 

Beser a krumer fus eyder a krumer kop

.

In Line

It got cold again in New York on Monday. Because neither of us remembered to buy tickets for the Whitney in advance, we had to stand in a long line in the chill outside the door. Later, we were waiting for our table at the museum's upscale restaurant. It had a window wall looking onto the sidewalk and that line. I shot these with my little Olympus. It has a flip-out screen so you can shoot from waist level with little chance of being noticed.

These people have quite different reactions to the situation. The young Asian woman looks sad, and did the whole time I was watching. Her companion is quite perky. The woman on the right looks distraught in both photos. Did someone not show up to meet her?                       

Bleu à Noël place Hoche !

Place Hoche Christmas lights!

Can't make a streimel out of a pigs' tail

.

Y is for Yiddish wit, for example:

You can't make a shtreimel out of a pig's tail.

• Fun a khazer-shventsl ken men keyn shtrayml nit makhn.

• English equivalent: You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear.
• Meaning: You cannot produce anything of good quality from poor raw material; often used of people.

In case you've never seen a shtreimel, it's that fur hat on the right.
Worn by ultra-orthodox Jewish men on holidays or Shabbat.
.
(Linking to ABC Wednesday.)
.

Christmas Day on the Lake Sumter Landing Waterfront

At The Whitney

A pair of elderly women peer out over the Hudson River from the new Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan.

Our plane was late (had to be de-iced at LaGuardia) and it's way past bedtime as I post this back home. More about the visit over the next couple of days.                      

Les sapins de la cour des senteurs

The Christmas trees in the Scents Courtyard...

Bringing in the Clam Harvest

Cedar Key is mainly all about clams. People here raise 'em and sell 'em. There are several major companies that raise and harvest clams in Cedar Key.

One of these is noted for their Sweet Littleneck Clams.

This boat had just pulled up the ramp after a clam harvest. It is, as you can see, loaded with clams. 

You can learn all about clam farming in Cedar Key in this YouTube Video: 




Note:  This was cross-posted to Ocala & Central Florida Photos.

Red and green, but not a poinsettia

.

I was out hiking the desert on December 25 when these red and green Christmas colors sparked my interest.
A lone eucalyptus tree, in an eye-catching stage!

You can enlarge this photo a lot and enjoy the pretty opercula.
I'm just learning this botany vocabulary and what fun to discover that eucalypt comes from the  Greek for "well covered," just like we can see in the photo!

Wikipedia explains

Eucalyptus is one of three similar genera that are commonly referred to as "eucalypts" . . . Many species, but far from all, are known as gum trees because they exude copious kino from any break in the bark (e.g. scribbly gum).
The generic name is derived from the Greek words ευ (eu) "well" and καλύπτω (kalýpto) "to cover," referring to the operculum on the calyx that initially conceals the flower.

.

My Strange Family

Weird Crowe family tradition: this ornament has hung over the Christmas dinner table for 40 years, first at my father's house and now my sister's. Someone spins and spins the string, then lets go. When the ornament stops turning, whoever Santa faces will have bad luck in the new year. Everyone calls him Evil Santa. Did I say we go through a lot of wine in this family?

Below, quality family time - a niece, spouse and brother sucked into their iPhones.

Every family has ups and downs but this one has had less than its share of bad luck. I am the oldest of four siblings. We are all still alive. We are all still on our first marriages. Everyone graduated from college, and there is a Ph.D., an M.B.A. and a J.D. sprinkled around the group. We all still like each other and make an effort to get together a couple of times a year. We turned out okay.

Rue de Montreuil

The butcher in Montreuil high street has wonderful decorations this year!

Chez l'un des bouchers...