Life in progress


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#ThursdayDoors – Historic Doors, Kingston, Ontario

During my last excursion to Kingston I took a lot of photos. This house:

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luckily, speaks for itself in the form of a plaque right outside.

 

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The front door is no longer in use. On the inside…CAM01581

 

is the Kingston public library.

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Thursday Doors is a popular weekly prompt brought to us by Norm at Norm 2.0. Check out his post (by clicking on his name) and join in!


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#ThursdayDoors – More info on doors that aren’t, Kingston, Ontario

As promised, I did some more research on the wall (with a hole where a door used to be that I discovered on Ontario Street in Kingston), when I was there last weekend. Upon searching the library, I came up with two addresses on the adjacent street: 221 and 223 King Street. I still couldn’t find any information about the wall, except that it seemed to stretch across the back yards of these two homes. So off I walked to check it out. Handily, it was only a couple of minutes from the library.

Here is 221 King Street

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and attached to it is 223 King street.

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Here is the wall from both sides,

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You can see the door at the bottom of the garden, below the branches of the small tree.

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and the “front” door of #223.

223

All this still didn’t give me any clue as to what the wall might have been part of, however. So I came home and did some more research. I came across this site: http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=8265 which goes on to say that #223 was built in 1834 for a lawyer, John Solomon Cartwright as an addition to #221. (If you click the link, you’ll see a much better picture of the wall than mine: in 1991 it had ivy growing on it.) The only real mention of the wall is this:

The property on which the building stands is also of interest, containing a carefully groomed lawn, plentiful gardens and a ten-foot limestone wall at its rear.

which indicates that it might have simply been built as an aesthetic piece. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open; I kind of hope, in some strange way, that it used to be a structure.

This post is part of Thursday Doors, brought to you by Norm at Norm 2.0. Check out his post (by clicking on his name) for the prompt and join in!


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One-Liner Wednesday – Just Like Dirty Dancing

Dirty_Dancing

Just like the water lift scene in Dirty Dancing, apparently geese learn to fly in formation in the water. Who knew?

formation

Click for a better view

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Anyone who would like to participate, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do,
you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post, and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.

3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.

4. Add our very cool badge to your post for extra exposure!

5. Have fun!

#1linerWeds badge by nearlywes.com

#1linerWeds badge by nearlywes.com


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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge – Architecture

For this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge,  the prompt is “architechture.” Since I don’t have a lot of fancy tools at my disposal for altering photos, I decided to choose a building and pick it apart. I thought what better place to look than Japan, where aesthetics is everything.

Here’s a picture I took in December of 2014, of the Disney store in the Shibuya section of Tokyo. Click on the pictures for a closer look:

 
If you’d like to participate in the prompt, click here for Dale’s page, and/or here to go to K’lee’s place. Go on – it’s fun!


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#ThursdayDoors – Doors that tell a story

It was 2009 and I’d already decided to buy my house. During the inspection, the real estate agent and I were poking around in all the nooks and crannies when we discovered that the inside of one of the closet doors had been used, for decades, as a place to record the growth of the children who grew up here. Click on the pictures for a closer look.

It’s fun to find history displayed in public places. It’s even better when you come across it in your own home.

Thursday Doors is brought to you by Norm Frampton at Norm 2.0. You can find the origin of this amazing prompt here: https://miscellaneousmusingsofamiddleagedmind.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/thursday-doors-june-2-2016/


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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge – Candlelight

This week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge prompt is “Quest for Fire.” I decided to go with a picture I’ve posted on my blog before, except this time it’s modified. At the time I shot it, I actually shot three as I often do, so I can be reasonably sure one of them is good. The first is a modified version of the one you may have seen before. I heightened the saturation to bring out the colour of the fire.

candle sat

In the second one, the camera, for whatever reason, picked up the flame’s aura above it. I’m guessing it was due to the angle of the lens. I kind of like the black and white version.

candle unsat

The third and final one was out of focus. I call this the drunk version:

drunk

You can find the photo prompt here at Dale’s blog, and here at K’lee’s blog. Come and join in! It’s fun!!


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#ThursdayDoors – Doors that aren’t, Kingston, Ontario

On a recent visit to Kingston, Ontario, I was wandering up Ontario Street and decided to take a picture of what used to be a building between Earl Street and William Street. After doing extensive research and finding nothing in the history sites of Kingston, I think I’ve figured out it was either a shed, or more likely a stable that was demolished sometime around 1953. It could have been a house or maybe servant’s quarters, but it wouldn’t have had road frontage. I found a map that dates back to 1865, with a slider that morphs the map up to 2013. Now, the wall faces a parking lot behind the houses on the two above-mentioned parallel streets. Here’s the map: https://apps.cityofkingston.ca/snapshotkingston/ It’s actually really really neat. I found the streets by their names in the 1865 version of the map. Grab the map and move it right and up slightly, so you’re moving south west – the block you’re looking for is right at the letter “A” in “ONTARIO.” (Note: Ontario Street runs parallel, and closest, to the water.) You can zoom in once you find the right block (the +/- button is at the top left of the map). You can see the building there before 1953, but it disappears at about ’53 and then shortly after, the wall appears as a white line in the middle of the block, running parallel to Ontario Street. It’s the wrong colour to have been the the above-mentioned building, but on close inspection I can’t tell what else it could possibly have been.

I’ve always had an interest in ruins. They cause my imagination to go in both conceivable and inconceivable directions. Next time I’m in Kingston, I plan to visit the library or the town archives to see if there’s any information on what this might have been. In the meantime, I’ll allow my imagination to play.

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Please forgive the odd angle…

 

...this was as close as I could get.

…this was as close as I could get.

I’m so happy and excited to finally be participating in this prompt. Kingston is just a two hour drive from where Norm took his Thursday Doors pictures. Check out his post (by clicking on his name) for the prompt and join in!


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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge – Up Close

For this weeks’ Cosmic Photo Challenge we were to get up-close and personal with our subjects. This worked out well for me, since I took some pictures early last week that fit the bill.

The first I cropped and sharpened. I left the flowers in the distance in the shot, to show the contrast between near and far.

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This second shot is completely unaltered. It doesn’t fit into the challenge, but I like it.

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To find the rules for the challenge, click the link: https://diaryofaninternetnobody.com/2016/05/23/klee-and-dales-cosmic-photo-challenge-10/ Join in – it’s fun!!


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Friendship – #tuesdayuseitinasentence

Anyone who is my friend, knows to be patient. I can go for years without talking to people, but that doesn’t mean, in my mind at least, that the friendship no longer exists.

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Tuesday Use It In A Sentence is brought to you by MLW. Click on the link to join in! https://awordadventure.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/tuesdayuseitinasentence-friendship/ It’s fun!


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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge – Woodlands

I took this picture last year.

the original

the original

I love it, but I felt like it needed something extra done with it. My camera washed the scene out; while it looks hazily romantic, it’s not clear enough to see what was there.

Here’s what I came up with: first, I darkened it to make it look closer to the actual scene.

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Then, just for fun, I took the colour out of it.

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I like the way the swans pop out of the picture in this last one.

Which do you prefer?

For this week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge,  the prompt was “Into the woods”, giving you a pretty broad theme of trees, woodlands, forests, leaves, anything arboreal in fact. You can find it by clicking
here.