To see the enlarged photos and read the captions, click on the first photo.
https://ceenphotography.com/2017/02/28/cees-fun-foto-challenge-looking-up-at-things/
This large tree had fallen across the road near the shop of a carpenter where I’d gone to to have cut some boards for my art day with friends.  The center section that was over the road had of course been taken away, but the rest of the tree was left where it fell.  Local youth had availed themselves of its surface to use as a canvas for their communications on one side and nature had left its own mark on the other
Click on first photo to enlarge all and see slideshow.
https://beccagivens.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/sunday-trees-276/
The bark of this giant tree that had fallen across the road and been cut in two, then left with the chunk covering the road removed, became a host for other plants and fungi to thrive on.
Click on either photo to enlarge.
Just a few blocks away, we found this other bark—this one less welcoming to intruders.
For the Travel theme “bark!”
I love the fleur de lis-like squiggles at the center of this zinnia. Â Vive la macro!!!
Written in answer to Cee’s daily flower prompt.
jdbphoto
No Biker Chick
The reason I’m alive and kickin’
is because I’m such a chicken.
As the storm clouds form and thicken,
you won’t find me riding frikkin’
motorbikes, lest I be stricken
by a lightning bolt to sicken
and my death to surely quicken.
Sidenote: The Quickening is a phenomenon in the Highlander films and television series. Beheading a character known as an “Immortal” produces a powerful energy release from their body called a “Quickening.”
The prompt word today was quicken.
Click on first flower to enlarge all and see slide series.
Glass? Â No. Â My friend Jan is the Chihuly of plastic. Â These beauties are fashioned using a simple votive candle, various cut-up plastic bottles and old CD or DVD discs. Â She had to make do with my “super match” at my house as I was fresh out of votives.
https://ceenphotography.com/2017/02/26/flower-of-the-day-february-27-2017-camellia/
Centering
Many folks are fearing the center will not hold.
Our unity is broken, our future has been sold.
But the ways of nature are complex and manifold.
And when the final stories of mankind have been told,
of how we “bested nature” by trying to break its mold,
when all our quests have ended, both for glory and for gold;
 we won’t be its ending, but just another fold
whose exploits lay beneath the earth, written in the mold—
of how we “tamed” an environment that was too brash and bold,
wrapping it in hydrocarbons, conquering the cold.
The prompt word today was “center.”
 Â
I’m presently spending three months in a small beach town in Mexico where I’ve come every summer for the past six years or more. Tonight I went to the readers’ theater production of “Sylvia.” At the play, when they sounded the 5 minute bell during the intermission, I went to the ladies room.  Right after I entered, the announcer said over the microphone, “As soon as the restrooms empty out, we will begin.”  Then, as I was sitting there thinking I had plenty of time, I heard, “As soon as Judy DB joins us, we can begin!”  I ran water on my hands, drying them on my pants as I ran out of the bathroom and to my seat.  As I sat down, I heard someone say, loudly, “At least she washed her hands!” No such thing as privacy in a small town. I guess I’m a local now.
By the way, the photo above isn’t really of the ladies room at the theater. I just couldn’t resist using my favorite bathroom shot of La Mosca one more time. Â To hear the story behind La Mosca, go HERE.
Here are a few more posies for Cee’s Bouquet.
Mame
Compose a ballad for Auntie Mame,
famous of body and of name,
and make the music slow and sad
as we revere the moves she had;
for all those parts she chose to wiggle
eventually began to jiggle.
Those shocking movements that won her fame
were finally ones she had to tame,
and all the fellows who once came
to see her at her sexy game
seem to have vanished, to have flown
once her parts moved on their own.
No matter that she lived by art—
how wide her fame, how big her heart—
once revered parts began to swing,
I fear her peeping Toms took wing.
What wives saw as depravity,
I fear she lost to gravity.
Yet years that held her in their sway
could not take her spirit away.
In some assisted living facility,
she still displays agility.
Her movements, true, may be much slower
and certain displayed parts much lower.
Her scarves are larger and tightly wrapped
where once they fluttered and they flapped,
but still admirers hoot and holler
and grace her g string with a dollar.
So sing her praises far and wide.
She’s still the tart she was inside.
The prompt was jiggle.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 