My Favorite Photos - June 2023

Many of my favorite photos are of flowers that I took in June. Since I already did a post about the flowers, I will not be including them in this one. 

One of the projects I started at Gammelgården Museum is a new bluebird trail. There are two volunteers who are monitoring the ten nest boxes. Within a few weeks of installing the boxes, we had our first brood of bluebirds! Since that time, all five sucessfully fledged and now there's another brood in the box.

In one of the boxes, there are tree sparrows. What a contrast to the bluebird nest with all the feathers.

Saw this little frog relaxing in the shade.

The bumblebees are around visiting the flowers. Look at how much pollen this one collected. 

In our backyard, we had a nest box with black-capped chickadees. 

The girls are home from college now. Olivia accompanied me to work one day and had the opportunity to learn how to use the weaving loom at the museum. Parts of it were built in 1879 in Sweden and then brought to the United States where it was completed by a new bride and her husband. It was used by her until the mid-60s and then by another woman until 1999. 

 

We have had several deer families at our home. This is the first one we saw. The mother came to our front door one day and set off the Ring doorbell. Nearby was her little fawn. This is a view on another day of the two in the front yard.

This is the mother. She's giving her fawn a tour of all the plants to eat. 

The 6th graders had their class play. It was nice to see the students who I worked with in different roles and challenging themselves to do something out of their comfort zone.

We celebrated Father's Day with dinner at home. The girls surprised Paige the night before with getting a hotel room in Downtown Minneapolis, having dinner, and then the next day (Father's Day) going bowling at a place they haven't been to before. 

The smoke from wildfires has been very thick here. This is what the sunrise looked like one morning. 

On another morning, it was clear when I took the dogs for a walk. The farmer of this field had the hay rounds all baled and ready for transport.

One day, Sophia and I took all the dogs for a walk. Since Father's Day, I've been walking the younger and bigger two dogs early in the morning since it gets so hot and humid by mid-morning.

At the beginning of June, the 6th grade class at the elementary school where I worked had their last day and graduation ceremony at Gammelgården. Two of the students wanted to take a walk with me to the pond. We saw this female redwing blackbird in the reeds.

The students stopped on the bridge and we watched the birds and other pond life for a while.

There was cake afterward the DARE ceremony and 6th grade ceremony. This student made me laugh. He chose not to use a fork and dove right into eating the cake. Later he came back - slightly panicked - when I showed him all the cake on his face. It took lots of paper towels to get the frosting off his face. 

The trees at our home are getting taller each year. 

This is the house from the driveway. The peony bed is to the right. The peonies were here when we moved to the home in 1995.

This is a view of the pasture. Most of the pond has dried up now because of the hot weather and lack of rain. 

In early June at work, a children's choir that sings Swedish songs and wears traditional Swedish folk outfits came to the museum. These two were the youngest ones in the choir.

This is the full group - children and adults - including the musicians. 

One of the folk dresses hung in the hallway at the museum while the group had lunch.

I've been enjoying the sunrises when the dogs I go on walks around 5:30-6:45 a.m.

In the middle of the month, we hosted Dalapalooza. One of the activities was painting cookies. 

The participants also painted wooden Dala horses. These are some that had received two coats of paint and were drying outside during lunch.

These were six of the 16 Dala horses that were made by children and adults.

Sophia and I went to Duluth on a Tuesday that I had off of work so she could take her driver's test. We stopped at Tobie's - the midway point between where we live and Duluth. This is a place where my parents stopped when they took the family up north. So, it is full of memories. 

Sophia passed her driver's test (and needless to say was THRILLED!). We celebrated with lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was really good! 

Towards the end of the month, one of the museum's supporters, Eleanor, came to the museum. She is 91 years old (the same age that my Dad would have been had he been living). She came to see the Midsommar decorations and the current art exhibit. Enjoyed talking with her and her aide over dessert and lemonade.

For Midsommar at the museum, I wanted to have a floral crown/headdress made. However, when I went to the florist I found out it would be about $75 because of all the handwork involved. Choosing flowers (like the ones I selected below) still would have cost about $50. I opted not to wear a floral crown this year. Maybe next year. 

On June 24th, there was a major event - Midsommardagen - at the museum. One of the vendors was a tintype photographer. He did old-fashioned photographs of people dressed in traditional Swedish or pioneer clothing. 

This is an example of a tinytype. It is of the American Swedish Institute (ASI) Cloudberries. 

This is a picture of some of the choral group in color.

This is the museum's intern. He has been incredibly helpful with event set-up and management, and painting/refreshing the museum's children's wooden games and objects. The pails are used with the yoke to show children what hauling water was like in the early-settler days.

 

One of the items that was refreshed was the Dala horse croquet set. 

At Midsommar, people wear flower crowns. Some of people made them at the museum with flowers that the intern and director cut the day before the event. 

  

At Midsommar, there was a group of youth dancers. The girls are wearing the national folk dress of Sweden.

  

I've enjoyed seeing friends and neighbors at events at the museum as well as at the farmers market where the Lions handed out free native wildflower plants and activity kits focused on creating native wildflower seed balls.

  

On my birthday, I put together a "Mystery Trip" - only I knew where we were going. We made many stops including going to Downtown Minneapolis. We walked near the place where my parents had their wedding anniversary (the light-cream brick building). I believe it was the women's club in 1964.

We went to the Foshay Tower to go up to the 30th floor where they have a museum and observation deck. Even though the website says the observation deck is open, it isn't. So, that was disappointing. The museum didn't have any lights on and no light switches could be found. We ended up walking through it with our phones' flashlights. 

 

The next day at work, I was surprised by a party that the director had put together for me. The museum's intern, who enjoys baking, made this three-level cake. The bottom level is actually 2 levels and the top is a cake-topper that is filled with fresh-picked strawberries. It was amazing!

The 30th was Sophia's 22 1/2 birthday. We still celebrate half-birthdays. We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie which we enjoyed.

When we came home, we gave Sophia some presents and a card. The wool fox purse matches a bag she got overseas that has fabric with foxes on it.

Black and White Photos

On Swap-Bot, there is a challenge to create three black-and-white photos. I chose six photos - three from walks that I took with the dogs last week and three miscellaneous shots. The first three photos were taken on my iPhone and the last three photos were taken on my DSLR camera (Nikon D3400 Series).  All the photos were taken in color and converted to black-and-white in post-processing. 

When I look for photos to convert to black-and-white, I am looking for images that either are very simple (e.g., the wooden post with coiled wire pictured below), have a lot of texture (e.g., pictures of the clouds and farm fields), or where the color detracts from the image and/or message (e.g., the image of the flower where the petals are white, the center is yellow, leaves are green, and surrounding flowers are red). 

The first image I created is of a wooden fence post with a large eye screw that has a loop of a thick coiled wire through it. It serves no purpose now - the owners just left this post and wire at the corner of their property. At one time, this fence blocked off an entry point to acreage with thousands of trees planted in it. During the past decade, the owners cut down or moved the trees and now the land is empty. Just grass. No cover or food sources for birds and other wildlife. So, as I looked at the photo in color with the bright and cheerful blue sky, white puffy clouds, and green grass it didn't convey the sense of loss and bleakness of this space that once was filled with life.

The second photo I took was on a warm, sunny day when I was walking the dogs. It was in the afternoon and the sun had come out from behind the clouds. The clouds were illuminated by the sun's rays. It was a beautiful afternoon.

This was another day that I walked the dogs in about the same area in the previous picture. I like this stretch of the walk because it feels so open and immense. The fields were being harvested, so there are different levels in the field. 

The picture below is of a white flower with a yellow center in the shape of a heart. I had to do a double-take when I looked at it because I have never seen a heart-shaped center...they are always round. I've been missing my parents (both have died - my dad in 2012 and my mom in 2015) and my daughters who are now both away at college. Perhaps this was just the thing I needed to see when I looked at this flower on October 8th.

This is a three-foot-tall bronze statue of a girl with a jug by Italian artist Vincenzo Aurisicchio. He lived from 1855 to 1926 and is known for his sculptural artwork. When my step-father-in-law died last month, we inherited this statue that he and my mother-in-law purchased in Italy and shipped back to their home in Minnesota. It is in the back of our car and at a different angle than what is typically seen when the statue is upright.

It's not a piece that I would typically be drawn to because the girl has a blank/sad expression and her jug is broken (that's the way the artist created the piece). I would like to learn more about the piece, but I cannot find anything written about it - just the images of it with the artist's name. So, the artist's concept for it and the story behind it will remain a mystery.

The last image I am sharing is one of a partially-completed caning of a chair. At an arts festival, coordinated by a local folk school, there was a craftsperson who was demonstrating how caning is done. It was interesting watching her work and learning about all the steps she needed to take to create this pattern. 

So, these are my six black-and-white photos. I enjoyed going through my photographs from the past nine days and picking ones that I felt represented things I enjoyed doing and learning, and were representative of life's transitions and changes.