Kaleidoscopic Topics

If you like thrill-seeking amusement rides then you're bound to like walking through a busy supermarket after having had cataract surgery because everything seems to be lurching and spinning towards you.  At least this was my experience today going grocery-shopping with my husband (Don't worry, since my vision was impaired he did all the driving, as well as acting as a sort of "seeing eye guide" for me.) I had really wanted to get out of the house and see places I haven't seen I'm the two weeks since my eye surgery.  I mean I was going stir-crazy - even though yesterday the weather was mild enough for me to take two walks around my neighborhood - so had been looking forward to running routine errands today. But the actual experience left me irritable. (Did you already guess that I am NOT a fan of thrill-seeking rides or of having things appear to spin and lurch into me?  If you've read my last blog-entry, about my trip up the Empire State Building, you mig...

I hope all my zillions of raving fans (I can dream, can't I?) will enjoy these views from the Empire State Building, where I recently went up to the 80th and 86th floor observation decks. Some of the views I'm about to post are of NYCs most iconic places, like the Crysler Building and the Freedom Tower, while others are simply of buildings I like for their architectural features. Most of the NYC skyline is very much contemporary steel and glass, but look just a little bit below the tallest skyscrapers, and you can find late 19th and early 20th century style buildings in a variety of styles.  Maybe you can help me identify some of the places I haven't already captioned. Manhattan skyline(s) Let's start with a portrait of the Empire State building itself and then a view from the 80th floor looking south toward Freedom Tower. NYC really has two tall areas of skyline, with the Empire State Building and rest of Midtown making up one tall area, and Freedom Tower and the rest ...

I've decided to try to adopt the motto "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" as I share with you a few of the many many photos I took of the fascinating varieties of flowers growing in Akureyri Botanical Gardens in Akureyri Iceland which my husband and I saw during our cruise in July to celebrate our 30th anniversary.  Yes, we were assured by our tour guide, these long-petaled flowers actually are native to Akureyri's atypical warm microclimate.  During the leisurely days of vacation I had planned to look up more information about this microclimate to verify what was said during our tour, but ran out of time to even so much as look it up in Wikipedia let alone any independent sources - vacations, after all, also entail lots of other fun activities from looking up everything else we planned to see to listening to jazz music in the ship's lounge and a film version of "The Magic Flute" as presented by the Metropolitan Opera in December 2022 t...