Click on images for larger photos.

Please forgive any fuzziness – no flash allowed and I didn’t have a tripod.  I’m thankful they allow photos at all under new rules this year.

More pics coming soon of Christmas at Strawberry Banke in Portsmouth, NH.

Month of May included the living rosary at the shrine of Mary on the corner between church and convent.  First communions.  Confirmations.  Forgetting your chapel veil and bobby pinning a kleenix to your head. The excitement of Christmas morning mass followed by gift opening.  The mystery of the teens in the family going to Midnight Mass.  All part of my childhood.  And so even though I started separating from the church in the mid 70′s, it came as a personal shock the night the great church burned down on Feb 3, 1978, at the hands of an arsonist.

While going through some old photos this weekend looking for family shots, I came across these pictures I took the night of the fire, and the next day.  I blame the blurriness on subzero temps combined with seeing your personal history burn down before your eyes.  More than thirty years later I thought some of my fellow former parishioners might find them interesting.

Do you remember where you were the night of the fire?

Click on image to view largest available size.

Visit the Owl’s Head Transporation Museum

The antique autos here are works of art all on their own, but with some I couldn’t resist taking a little artistic license. The day we visited there was also an antique motorcycle rally. I’ve been meaning to visit here for years and glad that we finally did:

Visit an alpaca farm

Take a ride on the Maine Eastern.

Train travel is a very relaxing way to travel, and the trip from Brunswick to Rockland and back makes for a lovely day trip here in Maine.

Spend a relaxing day at a lake.

This photo is the calm before the storm – sunset on Beech Hill Pond the night before Hurricane Irene.

Click on the images to see a larger view.

You can find all these filters in the iTunes store.  Their names are: PhotoArtista – Oil, RomanticPhoto, and VintageScene.  You can find them by entering these names in the search field of the iTunes store (If you have not already, you should download at least iTunes version 10.)

I took a photo on my back deck, then applied various filters and came up with different views of the same photo. These photos are below, and in my next post I will go into more detail on the use:

Original Photo

PhotoArtista 1

PhotoArtista 2 – with color adjustment.

RomanticPhoto

VintageScene

More soon….but chores are calling.

A1 diner, Gardiner, ME

I’ve just returned from 3 days at a friend’s camp. We started off with breakfast at the A1 diner in Gardiner – fun to see a diner straight out of time and great food as well. Then we continued on up to Cold Stream Pond near Lincoln, ME, with beautiful spring fed refreshing (cold) water.

There are certain sounds and sights that bring up wonderful memories and create wonderful new stories to be told as future memories.  Is there anything more relaxing than the sound of gentle lake waves lapping against the rocks while diamonds bounce off the lake in early morning?  Or that special green and yellow when the sun honeycombs the shallow edges? We laughed, we ate, we enjoyed the lake and realized how truly blessed we are to be each others friends.  A thank you to Mary and Andrew for putting up with us (and teaching us to play Canasta) and to Pat, Eirwen and Martha and Carol for the laughter, stories and sharing my birthday!

Photo by Pat

July 23rd, 2008 by Gloria

I’ve settled back into work after a week camp hopping around the state of Maine. I visited 3 camps of different friends and we had a great time, but there is one lake that is closer to my heart since I spent a couple weeks there every summer growing up. It was with much pleasure then that I learned some friends of mine had a camp on the same lake (albeit the other end of the lake)

This camp is so cool I just had to share some of the photos.

Now, let it be said, if you are reading this post from anywhere other than in Maine, you’re probably thinking to yourself “Why did she go to a kids summer camp”….

So let’s define “Camp”.

If you grew up in Maine, camp is what most of you would call a cottage – probably but not always on a lake. There are some that are quite sophisticated, but to me a camp often means a much older building, with or without lake frontage but preferably with (no lake frontage probably means it’s a “hunting” camp.)

In this case the camp has it all (except a decent inside bathroom…oh, and “all” includes a resident chipmunk, the occasional mouse, and on one visit/occasion a bat – though thankfully nothing spotted on this visit). It was originally a hunting camp as evidenced by the deer and moose heads both inside and out. (Andy, my apologies to the vegetarian in the crew).

It also has great lake frontage with the sand beach going up under the porch and about 15 feet of beach between the camp and the lake. I also include a photo of the sink….an odd thing to take a picture of you say? Take a closer look….that sink and counter top is all carved out of one great big tree/log. Hope you enjoy these pictures of a good old fashioned Maine camp!

Many Thanks for the camp hospitality go out to Eirwen and Lane (Lake Cobbosseecontee near Augusta); to Doug and Linda – with a shoutout to Martha and Kevin (Beach Hill Pond near Ellsworth – the pictures are from here); and to Mary and Andrew (Cold Stream Pond near Lincoln).

Note the Bird’s nest in the antlers……circle of life?

All my friends have green thumbs.  Me…not so much.  I like the end result of wonderful flowers, just not the getting there.  A couple weeks ago one of my favorite people showed up with two boxes full of wonderful plants.   I had just rearranged my small deck with some new patio planters, but they were still sitting there sadly empty.   Martha not only brought plants to fill them, but also used her gardening talent to arrange and plant them.  Best birthday present in years (even though it’s still two months away).

Thank you Martha!!!   Check out my new patio  garden:

In Stockton Springs there is a graveyard with a stone that has always intrigued me since I came across it many years ago.  The memorial  for a Captain Albert Partridge that has the outlines of continents carved in a large granite globe.  My thinking is the named locations were regular ports for the Captain.  If anyone has more on this story I’d welcome your comments.

No day trip to the coast is complete without a photo of a lighthouse, so here’s a shot of Bass Harbor Headlight:

We also took a ride around some of the beautiful homes in Northeast Harbor, but what really caught my eye was the greening of the moss covered stones with sunlight dappled through the trees.  Surely spring is really here to stay!