I’d accumulated quite a few pictures before I started this blog, an many of them have never seen the light of day. From time to time I go back over these pictures. I see if I still like them (I’ve been surprised to find that there are surprisingly few that I do still like), I sometimes re-edit them. And up onto the blog they go. These were taken in Copenhagen in 2011.


Statue


Fern


Turtle on a rock

January – Storefront, New York City

An earlier post describes why I prefer black and white. One of the points made in that post is that I’m just not very good with color. I don’t have a good feel for it. So coming up with twelve pictures in color was a bit of a struggle. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d decided to have one picture per month. For some reason the color pictures I liked clustered together in certain months. For example I had quite a few from June, July and October and very little from February and March. Maybe it’s because the sunnier months make for more vibrant colors. Anyway here are a few that I liked:

February – Bryant Pond Farm


March – Canoes, Roaring Brook Lake


April – Fiat 500 through Tires


May – Eirah and Geese


June – Facade, Le Bouchon restaurant, Cold Spring


July – Sailboats – Roaring Brook Lake


August – Butterfly


September – Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks at the Church of the American Martyrs, Putnam Valley, NY


October – Apple picking


November – Hessian Lake, Bear Mountain


December – View from Mount Beacon

My mother-in-law Concordia Durano Gorre passed away peaceful in her sleep on April 6, 2013 – just short of her 90th birthday. Here she is with my father-in-law Vicente Gorre who I never met. He passed away at an unnaturally young age in 1978. I love this picture, which of course I didn’t take. It seems to have been taken by the Robles Agency in Cebu City, Philippines.

Mama was an amazing person. She didn’t talk a lot, but the area we had most in common was cooking. I love to cook and I’m not too bad. However, compared to her I’m a rank amateur. She taught me a lot.

She always seemed a little sad to me – probably because she had lost her much loved husband very early. But she was tough and got on with her life.

RIP Mama.

We ended up with a white Christmas after all – just.

About a week before we had about a foot of snow and I was convinced that there would be a white Christmas. Then the temperatures went up into the high 60s/low 70s and it all melted. No white Christmas in the offing. Then, on Christmas Eve, we had another snowfall. I believe the actual definition of a white Christmas is that there must be an inch of snow on the ground on Christmas Day – and that was just about what we got.

I spent the day cooking. Spicy garlic shrimp; roast duck marinated in five spice powder and stuffed with oranges, garlic and ginger; mashed potatoes; sauteed asparagus; homemade apple pie and rye bread. I got a certain satisfaction that I had made everything except the wine we had to accompany the meal: Ladoix premier from Bourgogyne.

Happy Christmas everyone!