Pink at night, Bloomingdale delight.

Really, the sky over Bloomingdale DC was this color the other night and was quite spectacular so of course I had to snap away and record it. And no, I didn't fidget with the photo software and make it pinker and bluer and prettier!  There's something very intriguing about our peaked roofs; when my mother-in-law came to stay once we were sitting on the back deck and saw a similar view as in this photo, of all the peaked roofs lined up pointing away, and she said it reminded her of ships moored at a harbor.  So here we are, moored in Bloomingdale DC in our lovely Victorian houses, and enjoying the pink at night, sailors' delight! 

Blue Sky and Daily Bread

Gutted Wonder Bread building

Wild clematis icing the rose of sharon

When I saw the sky through the open roof of the old Wonder Bread building at 641 S Street NW, I just knew I had to snap it as after the building is developed there will be no chance to do that again! It's a big building -- about 98,000 square feet -- that will become stores and offices. I actually looked up the history recently, to find out that the Wonder Bread Factory opened in the early 1900s as Dorsh's White Cross Bakery. Then it was bought by Continental Baking Company in 1936 and used  as a factory for Wonder Bread and Hostess products (Twinkies perhaps!) until they relocated to a larger plant in Philadelphia, closing the DC factory in 1988. When I first moved to BloomingdaleDC I do recall smelling the baking aroma as far away as North Capitol street sometimes and hearing that they gave away "stale" or "overrun" baked goods to anyone who got there at the right time.  Then again, the sky has looked wonderful lately almost every day so I found myself snapping my usual flowers and plants and things, all with the sky in them.   How wonderful is our daily bread of blue sky!

Evenings Darken Earlier But Roses Still Glowing

All of a sudden it seems like the evenings are darker earlier! As I walk home there have been some spectacular sunsets but my cell phone camera doesn't take sky shots very well. So all I could do was to capture the last of the sun's glow on my roses in the garden. Even though it's 90 degrees this evening, winter is approaching very quietly and stealthily if you just take note of the little signs. Birds practicing formation flights, trees beginning to tinge orange, some bees dead from the sudden cold snap the other day, neighbors taking air conditioner boxes out of their windows, people talking about Halloween and Christmas, wondering when the clocks fall back an hour or when they will stop street cleaning so we don't have to move our parked cars. What other signs are there? .

Rear Window View during a Tea Break

A look out of the three windows from my downtown office is all about reflections. Real reflections, not my rambling thoughts, that is. I'm on a corner and look into a courtyard at the backs and sides of half a dozen buildings. Since reflective glass is now the norm every window stares back at me with a picture of yet another building or roof or satellite dish or antenna or air conditioning unit or balcony or brick wall or light fixture or flags or some kind of building equipment. In some cases it's a reflection of someone working on the roof of the building I'm in; he's walking about talking on his cell phone, arm akimbo, possibly concerned about the air conditioning unit he's standing beside. Occasionally some birds nose-dive through the space and are reflected multiple times, tripling their number. Of course, I can look upward and see a beautiful June blue sky with puffy white and grey clouds scudding westward. I get to see them twice too, as they are also reflected in all the upper story windows on the buildings around the courtyard. It's a mistake to think that a rear window has no views. And I haven't even started to try and think about this from a theological perspective.