The melting snow has added to the flood water along my morning cycle ride.  The general effect is usually grey and boggy.  However, this morning there was a brief flash of sunlight when the dawn colours of red, gold and blue were still showing together in the sky and reflected in the water (er - fields).  Beautiful!


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Happily 2012 seems to be ending with improved fortune for some friends - a good omen for 2013 hopefully! To keep the celebratory character of the mood, I thought I'd show a few photos from Christmas here in Oxford, UK.


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To all of you enjoying a holiday at this time of year, I wish you a relaxing and enjoyable celebration with friends, family, LJ and pets.  I've failed to take any satisfactory photographs of my Christmas tree so far but I have used a section of it for my greeting to you all (the white stag is new and was bought as a reminder of happy times at the ( Read more... )

Below the cut are some photos from my cycle ride to work in the morning:  I managed to catch the minute when the sun is just appearing at the bottom of the sky and the mist of the night is still lying in a woolly layer on the land.  This section of my ride is a stretch of countryside probably unchanged for a couple of hundred years or more;  the ( Read more... )

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I took the camera with me to work yesterday so the views you see in this post are part of my bike ride in the morning and in the evening. I've chosen this time to take the pictures as the water-meadows (part of the local flood plain) have just been mown, leaving lines of golden hay lying in the fields. It is a very old-fashioned sight.

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A friend in Ohio sent me a photo that she'd taken recently, whilst walking round and about in Columbus; the startling yellow leaf colour in a sweeping cascade reminded me of thrown coins and put me into a good mood as though I had found new riches!

Picture courtesy of Sheena Phillips; click on the thumbnail to read the haiku without squinting.


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