No Horses. No History. Just Happiness Courtesy Of The Blue Sky Above.

March 9, 2017 / Ally Bean / 55 Comments

When it’s a glorious day outside and it comes to finding something to photograph, I’m nothing if not persistent.

• PLAN A: HORSES I drove to the horse vet wanting to photograph the horses that are usually standing around in his fields. However, when I got there not one horse was anywhere to be seen, so I kept driving.

• PLAN B: HISTORY I drove to a tiny 200-year-old village that, when photographed while standing on its bridge over the river, would make for an interesting photo. However, when I got there the river was high, the sidewalks were muddy, and the wind was gusting. Standing on the bridge didn’t seem safe to me, so I decided to go someplace else.

• PLAN C: HAPPINESS Dreamed up on the fly, I decided to drive to the canoe rental place and walk the bike path that runs by the canoe rental place, using the opportunity to photograph the blue sky above and whatever might be underneath it. As the following four photos show, this plan worked.

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Make No Assumptions. It’s Greenery For The Win.

February 3, 2017February 14, 2023 / Ally Bean / 49 Comments

AS A WAY OF adding some color into our lives during this mid-winter gray time of year, I went to Lowes this week where I bought some little houseplants in little plastic pots.

I’m not a full on hippy dippy plant lady yet, so fear not. But I could be headed that way. [And really, would that be such a terrible thing?]

While transplanting each plant into a proper terra-cotta pot, it drifted into my addled mind that Pantone’s Color of the Year 2017 is Greenery.

I also remembered that when I first saw this color in early December I wasn’t taken with it, thinking that this particular shade of yellowish-green was almost garish. A color I’d never want to see in my house.

Was. not. a. fan. and. said. so.

But you know what? I was wrong in my snap judgement.

“Greenery is a fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring when nature’s greens revive, restore and renew.” via Pantone

I HAD TO ADMIT this to myself as I placed the new houseplants around the house– and realized that they were exactly Greenery green. And as such, they blended beautifully with our neutral color scheme of khaki golds + creamy whites + warm grays.

In fact, the new houseplants added much-needed splashes of spring-y color everywhere, proving to be an amazingly easy, cost-effective way of lifting my winter spirits.

So the moral of this little story is that when it comes to unfamiliar colors reserve your judgment until you’ve given the new color a chance to dazzle you.

For all you know the new color might be the perfect thing ever to grace your life… on a gray winter day.

What Was This Week All About? Anxiety, Awareness, Acrimony, And Adjustments

January 14, 2017August 5, 2020 / Ally Bean / 55 Comments

This has been a ridiculous week. MY MIND AND SPIRIT ARE WHACKED, ON EDGE. In fact, so much so that I’m going to write a listicle instead of a proper post To Remember It all.

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In no particular order…

√ ANXIETY: Our normal temperature for this time of year would be 39ºF. However, on Monday morning it was 7ºF here with a wind chill close to 0ºF, a light dusting of snow everywhere. By Thursday morning, after 65 mph winds on Wednesday night that took down many tree limbs, our temp was 65ºF. Right now on Saturday morning it’s 35ºF outside with gray skies.

These extreme temperature fluctuations make me nervous– and put a wrinkle [pun intended] in my early morning “what to wear?” decision-making process.

√ AWARENESS: I’ve always said that I believe that education is everything. I was naively referring to learning about language and history and math and science and critical thinking and how to get along with people. I was not thinking about learning new terms for sexual deviancy, but thanks to our PEOTUS I now know more about said topic. Unless you’ve been visiting Mars this week you do too, right?

Perhaps we should change the aforementioned acronym to mean Pervert Elect Of The United States.

√ ACRIMONY: I’m disappointed to know that one member of the board at LL Bean, a woman who is a descendent of the founder, has used her vast wealth to fund The Donald’s campaign. I agree in part with the current LL Bean Executive Chairman’s FB message [instead of a proper press release?] reminding us that this woman is free to do whatever she chooses with her money, but I disagree with him about how her behavior does not reflect upon the company.

A company’s board of directors, chosen for their acumen, is the brains behind a company, and as such whatever a director values will influence [obviously] his or her input into how the company operates. Thus any connection to anything or anyone dodgy [Hello Donald] casts doubt on the way the whole company is run.

Not saying I won’t shop there in the future, but it’ll no longer be the first place I go to when I need clothes, bedding, sporting equipment, outdoor furniture.

√ ADJUSTMENTS: My iPad, which by techie standards would be a great-great-grandma, is doing wonky things. It has taken to tweeting not what I write, but a link to the last article that I read. Fortunately I’m not ashamed of anything that research and read, so that aspect of this problem isn’t what worries me. No, it’s the fact that great-great-grandma seems to be on a tweeting bender. The poor dear just can’t help herself. Nor can I.

So I deleted my Twitter app from my iPad and this week have lived a life in which I only see Twitter when I’m using my desktop computer, which means not so often.

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Pillow Talk: Of Snowy Nights and Annoying Logic

January 10, 2017 / Ally Bean / 60 Comments

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I woke up with itchy eyes. I have lots of boring medical problems with my eyes so this happens.

Downstairs on the kitchen counter was a bottle of prescription eye drops that I knew would relieve my itchy eyes, but it was all. the. way. downstairs. and I was toasty warm in our bed upstairs.

Botheration.

However, I couldn’t get back to sleep so I begrudgingly got up and went downstairs at 3:00 a.m. to instill [that’s medical lingo!] a drop in each eye.

Of course while I was downstairs waiting for the drops to do their thing, I glanced out the window to see what was happening outside.

Curiosity. Or habit. Maybe both.

I dunno for sure, but I took a look-see. Just ‘cuz.

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Is this me OR is this a showgirl featured in a promotional photo for the New York World’s Fair (1939-1940)? { source }

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ABOUT FIVE MINUTES LATER I WENT back upstairs to bed where I thought I quietly slipped into bed again. But apparently my blanket shuffling was more disruptive than I realized and I awakened Z-D.

After politely inquiring if I was “ok” Z-D, who knows my habits, asked what the weather was like outside. I told him that it had snowed, but that it had only snowed on the grass, not on the sidewalk, driveway, and street.

He mumbled: “that can’t be.”

I assured him that was what had happened outside. It had snowed on the lawn, not on the hard surfaces. I’d seen it.

Again he said: “can’t happen.”

Then he rolled over away from me taking the covers with him and began to snore. I would have ignored him entirely but he had swiped too much of the blanket and I wanted my part back.

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Is this our bedroom OR is this a photo from the New York World’s Fair (1939-1940) Town of Tomorrow Exhibit? { source }

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SO I TUGGED ON THE BLANKET which roused him again.

At which point, in his sleepy daze as if the conversation about the weather was still ongoing, he said to me: “you’d have to be some kind of stupid to not know that snow falls on everything outside. It just doesn’t land on the grass, it falls on hard surfaces, too, where you don’t see it because it’s melted.”

And with that he fell fast asleep, leaving me, the stupid person, to realize that: 1) he was absolutely right; & 2) I had no more interest in talking to him if he was going to use annoying old logic.

I mean, really– this is a man who can’t find his car keys at noon when they’re on the kitchen counter right in front of him, but he can tap into meteorological reasoning when awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night?

Who does that? Honestly…

Meh.