The 366 Project: January

 

This year I am working on a special project: take a photo every day of my daily life. Since 2024 is a leap year I've called it the 366 project (duh). It doesn't matter what the subject of the photo is - something from the garden or my home, something I'm doing or reading - anything that I see and think that this will be the most fitting photo for that day. When you look at the images I shot in January, you see that it's all over the place.

On January 2nd and 20th I took pictures of candles - Rain's prompt this week is candles, so I'm including them here. The top ones are the candles in our fireplace, and the ones in the second photo were lighted at our friends' home when we had dinner with them.

We need some food for Rain's Thursday Art and Dinner Date. Some evenings I really don't know what to cook. I usually love to cook, but there are always times when I'm less enthusiastic about it. Yesterday was one of those days when I looked into our fridge and pulled a few veggies (broccoli, zucchini and carrots), leftover spaghetti and some cream. I sautéed the veggies in some olive oil, seasoned with ancho chili pepper, added the spaghetti and finally poured some cream and let it slightly thicken - simple, but good.

We're expecting another atmospheric river (I guess the times of "normal" rain are over), so I went to the farmers market in the morning to get more fresh veggies. While I'm typing this, the rain has started and I've decided to spend the afternoon curled up with a book, a mystery by Tony Hillerman, the first one of his series featuring Navajo Nation Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. This is my second attempt - the first time I tried to read it is 20 years ago and somehow I couldn't get into the story back then. Let's see how what this time will look like.

Daily Vancouver

While in British Columbia, we spent a few days in Vancouver. Just like the first time we were there three years ago, the traffic was crazy, the streets were crowded, the weather was great... and we enjoyed ourselves very much. As my first post about Vancouver, I want to throw some light onto the "little things", that make up daily life. Not the big glass buildings (that's worth its own blog post), the famous waterfront or Stanley Park - just the little daily things that give a city its personality and flair.

One part of Vancouver's daily life is the arrival of giant cruise ships which anchor at Canada Place. I loved how the orange taxis lined up ready to take the tourists to town. They obviously were prepared for groups as you can tell from all the vans standing there. Many Vancouver taxis are actually Prius' (what's the plural of that?).

Biking is big in Vancouver! Often bicycles have their own lanes, get their very own detours and there is parking space for bicycles everywhere where you can lock your bike to. As far as I know you can even rent bicycles to get around, but I didn't get into that. We were happy with the very good public transport there, mainly buses and the SkyTrain.

Oh, and apparently you also get your own lane when you roller skate!

As everywhere... Jesus saves. But why are these guys always so angry??

Little street cafés seem to be everywhere even if the space is very limited. I got the feeling that the people in Vancouver relish summer and appreciate every day it doesn't rain to spend as much time as possible outside.

Here in Gastown which brims with tourists I found this white rose on the black bench. Did someone forget it? Has someone left it there on purpose? Is it a final good bye to some lost love? For what ever reason, I loved when I saw it.

Laundry

Over the recent weeks I was in a creative slump - scratch the "creative", there was no creativity at all. I haven't painted for weeks and even my photography was kind of plain. There was no inspiring bolt, just nothing. I actually think I need a break, but that still has to wait a little bit.

So I signed up for a very "simple" photography class that I found among Jeanne Oliver's summer classes. It's called "The art of seeing" by Cathy Walters.

There wasn't any new exciting information about photography for me in that class (and I hadn't expected that), but it gave me some good inspiration, and that was what I had been looking for. One of the projects (my favorite one) is to take 10 images a day (or whatever amount we like) for a week about our "dailyness". I very seldom take pictures of my "normal" daily life, so I dove right into it.

That day happened to be laundry day in my house. Is there anything more boring than doing laundry (well, cleaning the house, I guess, which I am totally in unfavor of - mildly put)? But with Kaefer's happy colored shirts and my colorful clothes pegs it turned into a joyful task.

I love to hang-dry our clothes, at least in the summer. Sure, it is more work, but hanging the clothes actually holds something very meditative.

My least favorite part of laundry is probably folding the clothes - as you can see from my pictures, I skipped the ironing. I don't do it, period (here goes your image of the German housewife, right?)

Tell me, do you like to do laundry or is it a dreadful chore? Which chore do you like the best and which one would you avoid if you could?