I have finally starting reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo…and it’s putting me in a Paris mood!
Happy weekend!
Visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots.
Category: Saturday Snapshot
Saturday Snapshot: Bookish Valentines
Last year for St. Patrick’s Day, I came up with Forty Bookish Shades of Green. So with Valentine’s Day coming up this week, I thought I’d haul my red and pink books off of the shelves and come up with a Bookish Valentine’s Day picture!
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots.
Saturday Snapshot: Daffodil Season
I get ridiculously happy each year when the daffodils are in bloom. They aren’t blooming around my neighborhood yet (though I’ve got my eye on some green spikes) but they are back in Safeway’s floral section. I buy daffodils every week for as long as they’re available, and enjoy them immensely.
Daffodils apparently can symbolize all sorts of different things, but my favorite is as a symbol of renewal and rebirth. And they’re supposed to be good luck! For me, they also remind me of my first, life-changing trip to England. Next time I go back, I plan to go in spring…because it’s off-season for the tourists, and the weather will be decent…and the daffodils will be in bloom!
I don’t have any good pictures of this year’s daffodils yet…but here are a couple riots of daffodils from past years.
Visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots!
Saturday Snapshot: Presidential Statues
With the Inauguration this past week, I thought it would be fun to focus a Saturday Snapshot on past presidents, using photos from my trip to Washington D.C. I didn’t get pictures of any living presidents, but there were lots of good statues!
The Lincoln Memorial was the one I most wanted to see, maybe because it shows up the most often in books and movies–and I have this thing about visiting places I’ve read about. It’s a beautiful monument and, as the inscription says, it feels very much like a temple, despite its essentially secular nature.
Jefferson is another one with a temple, that beautiful round marble space, and with such a hushed, reverent…well, temple feel. I’ve been meaning to read a biography of Jefferson ever since I visited…eventually I’ll get on that.
There’s an outdoor monument for Roosevelt. I love that he’s shone with his “little dog, Fala.” Thanks to YouTube, you can see a wonderfully funny speech Roosevelt gave about Fala.
And speaking of funny, I am probably far too amused by this Roman-style, shirtless George Washington in the Smithsonian. I just have this general impression that in life, no one saw Washington shirtless, except for Martha–maybe! 😀
Visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots!
Saturday Snapshot: Gargoyles
Last week was fun, so I thought I’d come back this week with more knick-knack stories. First, a picture that’s definitely not a knick-knack…
These are two of Quasimodo’s gargoyles, up in the Towers of Notre Dame. I climbed a LOT of steps last September to get a close-up view, and I think it’s entirely the fault of Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame that I wanted to do it. And it was worth every step!
After I came down all those steps, I bought a gargoyle. If you’re ever at Notre Dame, halfway up the towers there’s a gift shop, where they helpfully tell you that they’re the only one operating in the church. They don’t tell you that you can buy gargoyles at half the price from vendors along the Seine, which is what I did. So I brought home my Notre Dame Gargoyle and installed him on one corner of my tallest bookcase.
And then I started to regret that I hadn’t bought two, because it felt a bit lopsided without one on each corner. So it all worked out remarkably conveniently when I unwrapped a lumpy package at a White Elephant gift exchange on New Year’s Eve…
I could honestly tell my friends that, oddly enough, I had been wanting a small gargoyle figurine! So now I have my Thinker Gargoyle to sit at the opposite corner of the bookcase and bring balance to this particular corner of the universe. 🙂
Have a lovely Saturday! Visit At Home with Books for more Saturday Snapshots.
Tales of the Marvelous 