Daylillies

After hollyhocks and poppies it's the daylillies' turn.

With our new home came a good-sized garden (and a HUGE front lawn that I eventually will take out) with mainly lawn and a few flowers, among them daylillies.

I have no experience with daylillies at all, but I was immediately captured by their beauty.

I will certainly keep them and take good care of them - they are lovely.

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Textured Hollyhock

Hollyhocks belong to my favorite flowers. They are happy, remind me of English cottage gardens and they thrive on neglect. They self-seed, so if you have them in your garden once you will probably have them for quite a while.

This partucular hollyhock stood at the front door of our old house. I had brought the seeds from a friend's garden in Germany and they took off here. I've saved the seeds so I can have them here at our new home as well.

For processing - I used one of Kim Klassen's textures - and unfortunately I haven't kept the recipe (usually I do) and am not quite sure anymore which one I used - I think it is "warmsun". I layered it twice, once at soft light 100%, but I forget what I did the second time. My apologies.

I'm linking this to Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday.

Poppies

I love poppies. Of course the California Poppy with its happy orange color. But also the Iceland Poppy that comes in all kinds of color, like the fiery orange-red in the top photo, found in the garden of the Geek's aunt in East Germany. Or all the "fancy" poppies I had in my old garden.

Not only the blossoms are beautiful, the seed pods are pretty awesome as well.

But most of all, I love the "wild" red poppies that turn up everywhere in Germany as a sure sign of summer. They are on the side of the roads, spread out in fields and there are even entire meadows of poppies, like these ones in East Germany.

They are so incredibly beautiful. Nature's paint brush simply does it best. It inspired me to do my own mixed media painting of those red poppies that we call "Klatschmohn" in German. Honestly, I never am even close to nature's artistry.

"Bloom" is now available here in my Etsy store.

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Moving In

Boy, I haven't been here for a really long time. I did know that I wouldn't have too much time for blogging during our move, but I hadn't expected that the move would demand ALL of my time.

We actually moved into our new home about two weeks ago, but the weeks before that were full with painting (as in painting the walls of a room), remodeling, cleaning, packing, end of school year stuff, etc. It was a very hectic time, and of course it is still very busy.

The nice thing about owning your home (among many others) is that you can paint your rooms in any color you want. That's what Kaefer and I did - she painted her room and I painted the master bedroom, the entryway, the living/dining room and the studio - so far. Color choices are sometimes hard, but so much fun.

 One of Kaefer's color choices - "Carolina Parakeet"

Me painting the master bedroom - "Seafoam Pearl"

The work on the downstairs bathroom was in full swing and I couldn't resist to take a picture of how to cut tiles.

Kaefer and the Geek assembled the new worktable for my studio - a nice sturdy table we had bought at IKEA.

Then came the moving day itself. We hadn't hired a big moving company but a small local business who moved just the big items - furniture, boxes - but all the packing and everything else was done by us. These guys were phenomenal! Of course it was one of the hottest days, but that didn't slow them down. They were pretty amazing.

My friend Jeanne helped with her truck, moving all the garden stuff and our office.

On the morning after our first night in our own home I walked through the house and took some pictures of the chaos.

 My studio

The living/dining room

Kaefer's room

A wonderful surprise awaited us when Sergio, who was tiling our bathroom, brought some Mexican breakfast his wife had made for us. The day before, one of our neighbors welcomed us with a plate of Starbucks treats - we had a wonderful breakfast this way, hearty and sweet. I was so touched by the kindness of these people.

We went back to the old house that day to clean it and clear everything out. The hardest part was to say goodbye to my little friend who had visited me almost every day since April 2011 - Geeda.



Now we are trying to make this house livable - unpacking boxes, assembling shelves, constantly searching for things. Some decorating in between to keep up a good spirit, like hanging up these beautiful Moroccan lanterns on the porch. My wonderful backyard neighbor had given them to me before we moved out.

A few days into living in this house I witnessed a beautiful moonrise from my bedroom window. If I had had any doubts before, I now knew that we made the right move.



During these stressful weeks of moving we have been blessed with wonderful people who helped us, friends, neighbors and strangers. We experienced a wonderful community around us, a great support web. We couldn't have done it this way without their help, their trucks, their food. It's amazing how little things can make someone's life easier. We feel truly blessed.

As this house seems to be...

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Moon Eats Sun

Yesterday we took a break from all the working on the new house, got in the car and went up North on I-5 to a location just south of Redding to watch the annular solar eclipse. It was quite a drive, but so worth it.

Yes, you can call us crazy.

The Geek had his small camera attached to the spotting scope and got some really cool pictures of the eclipse.

 Kaefer was wearing the sunfilter glasses we got for the total solar eclipse in Germany back in August 1999.

Of course she had to goof around!

 I loved how the beginning eclipse changed the shadows on the ground - it was fascinating and so beautiful.

 The moon starts biting into the sun - wonderful how she went up in front of the sun.

 The peak - we almost saw four minutes of the Ring of Fire - fascinating, gorgeous - I actually was (and still am) at a loss of words.

Slowly the moon leaves the center of the sun...

 ... and climbs up into the sky.

The shadows were still dancing on the ground.

It was a beautiful day.

Did you see the eclipse?

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Neither here nor there

The rhododendron in front of our house

Over the past days I have been pretty rare in blogland - and those of you who have read this post probably know why. We are busy working on our new home while slowly packing up our current home. We're neither here nor there - somewhere in between. Every day I pack the car with boxes and stuff and shuttle it down to the new house, piling things up in the garage. I can't believe how much stuff we have!!!

Meanwhile, work has started at the new house. The Geek took several trips under the house to check on pipes, wires, the wood under the bathroom that has some dry rot, and he always came back rather dirty - surprise, surprise.

Doesn't he look pretty professional?

This is the problem bathroom - when we saw it the first time, back in November, it had wallpaper that was striped in shades of pink, really retro. Unfortunately that was painted over before the house came back on the market in March and the only retro thing left were those pink tiles.

Not half as retro as it was before. Since we had to rip open much of the bathroom anyway, we decided to go with a fuller repair and get rid of all the tiles and also the vinyl flooring. At the moment the bathroom is a pure disaster zone.

Looks nice, doesn't it?

The Geek installed new locks

and we took a trip to IKEA for a new sofa and more shelves. The sofa - bright red - resides in the breakfast nook for the time being.

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Kaefer has been planning her room:

We discovered that there's hardwood under the carpet in the studio and the office. So we ripped out the carpet in both the studio

and the office.

Since it was so much fun (backbreaking, really) we also decided to rip out the carpet in the living/dining room and get hardwood instead. 

Cool teenagers work with a lollipop in their mouth. 

Two days ago the hardwood was put down. Next week it will be sanded, finished and sealed. All three downstairs rooms should be done by next Thursday, which means I can move into my studio!!! I can't wait.

And this is me, fighting decades-old layers of dust and cobwebs in the storage area behind the garage.

I won! (for the time being...)

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75 Years

This month we celebrate the Golden Gate Bridge’s 75^th anniversary. After only four years of building, it was finished in 1937 and became a new landmark that is known all over the world. Thanks to the engineering mastermind Joseph B Strauss and architects Gertrude and Irving Murrow it didn’t become the eyesore of concrete pylons and yellow stripes that the navy was in favor of, but turned into one of the most beautiful suspension bridges on this planet. Watching its tall rusty-red (called “International Orange”) pillars in the setting sun takes one's breath away.

One of my dreams from a rather early age on had been to see the Golden Gate Bridge with my very own eyes. I had seen pictures of it and on TV, in various movies, and I had promised myself that one day I would cross that bridge. 

This day came in late February 2001, a drizzling, cold evening. We had just landed in San Francisco and were driving north to what might become our new home. And although the fine rain drops collected on the windshield of our car, we could see the majesty of this beautiful bridge that stood with its hundreds of lights before a dark sky. I had goose bumps all over while we were passing under the first pillar and then the second one. 

Over the years we have found many wonderful places that offer a fantastic view of the bridge. One of my favorites is from the Marin Headlands where you can see the bridge with San Francisco in the background. This is spectacular when the sun hovers deep over the ocean, casting its golden-red light onto the bridge and the city. It is wonderful when the fog rolls in and covers parts of the bridge. More often than not we actually didn’t see the bridge but saw faint outlines in the fog. Another favorite is the view from Baker Beach from where I took this photo.  

Since that very first rainy day we have crossed the Golden Gate Bridge many times. We walked it enjoying the ever present wind and chilly conditions. My Girl Scout troop did its bridging from Brownies to Junior Girl Scouts here, walking the entire length of 1.7 miles from the Fort Point lookout to the Marin side. Whenever we come back from Germany we have to cross the bridge and that is when we think “we’re home”. But no matter how often we cross it, I still get goose bumps – those of the really good kind.

Cross-posted over at Vision and Verb, where a coolaborative group of like-minded women from all over the world share their passion for photography and the written word

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