Happy New Year!!!

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain
The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay
Paris
Left to right in the first photo, my son Joey, nephew Sammy, Niece Laura Lee. They are being silly in the Musee d'Orsay. Everybody should get out there this year. Go to see some serious art and be silly. Have fun, go someplace new. Experience life. Happy New year!

Winter Landscape

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.”
Andrew Wyeth
Delaware Valley College

Loves of Christmas Past

“When Christmas bells are swinging above the fields of snow, we hear sweet voices ringing from lands of long ago, and etched on vacant places are half-forgotten faces of friends we used to

cherish, and loves we used to know.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Find Me!

“One great use of words is to hide our thoughts”
Voltaire

The End of Autumn

If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It's a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it's time to reflect on what's come before.
Mitchell Burgess
Durand Pond, Freehold New Jersey

Devour Me

“`You must sit down,' says Love, `and taste my meat.'

So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert
Freehold, NJ

Windows

"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the
cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh
air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own."
Bertrand Russell
Henry Mercer Castle, Doylestown Pa

Fire

“Love is the only bow of life's dark cloud. It is the Morning and Evening Star. It shines upon the cradle of the babe, and sheds its radiance upon the quiet tomb. It is the Mother of Art, inspirer of poet, patriot, and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart, builder of every home, kinder of every fire on every hearth, It was the first dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to joy, and makes right royal kings of common clay.”
Robert Green Ingersoll
Manchester,NJ

Fantasy

“Dear love, for nothing less than thee / Would I have broke this happy dream, / It was a theme / For reason, much too strong for fantasy, / Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet / My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it.”

John Donne

Henry Mercer Museum,Doylestown, PA

Courage

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

Dale Carnegie
Belmar Marina,NJ

To be a Bird

“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”

Maya Angelou
Lake Topanemus, Freehold NJ

Devouring the Sun

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
Howell, NJ

Hope

Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.
Napolean Bonaparte
The Dahlia in the background is what this bud hopes to become.
Howell,NJ

Awareness

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
Virginia Woolf
Manasquan, New Jersey

Summer's End

No spring or summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

John Donne

Merry-go-Round

“Life's just a merry-go-round. Come on up. You might get a brass ring.”

Mae West
Taken on the Seaside Heights boardwalk.

Revolution

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
taken in Doylestown, pa

Human Nature

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.”

Dale Carnegie
Picture taken on the grounds of the Chateau de Chenonceau

Freedom

"As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion"
Butterfly McQueen
Colts Neck Fireworks, NJ

Journey

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

John Steinbeck
Atlantic City Boardwalk

To Be Alive

“We're sitting on our blessed Mother Earth from which we get our strength and determination, love and humility - all the beautiful attributes that we've been given. So turn to one another; love one another; respect one another; respect Mother Earth; respect the waters - because that's life itself!”

Phil Lane Sr. (Yankton Sioux)

Black is Beautiful

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door
Only this, and nothing more."
Edgar Allan Poe
picture taken at the Cape May Zoo

Determination and Love

“Love is the greatest virtue of the heart.
Sincerity is the greatest virtue of the mind.
Determination is the greatest virtue of the will.
Courage is the greatest virtue of the spirit.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

Morning

"In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

Kahlil Gibran

Dew Drop

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”
Rabindranath Tagore

Call of the Sea

“A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.”

Honore De Balzac
Point Pleasant, New Jersey

Longing

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”

George Eliot
From my Paris trip 08

Simplicity

“We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown [he or she] left behind.”

Clementine Paddleford
Colts Neck, New Jersey

King of the Roost

“O powerful love,
that in some respects makes a beast a man,
in some other, a man a beast.”

William Shakespeare

Undiscovered

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Issac Newton
Sandy Hook, New Jersey

Brass Ring

“Life's just a merry-go-round. Come on up. You might get a brass ring.”

Mae West
These pictures were taken in Asbury Park,New Jersey.
When I was a child there was a beautiful Merry-go-round in this building. It was always a thrill to lean off the horse as much as possible to try and grab those rings. If you got the gold ring you got a free ride. Asbury has seen some bad days since then. However, things are starting to change. I urge anyone in the area to visit the boardwalk. The Paramount Theater is open and so is the Convention Hall. Everything is being restored and many new shops have opened along the boardwalk.

Searching

“We can search the world over, for peace, for love, and honor. We can look from now to eternity, for all we do not own. We can search until life is ending, then when life is nearly ore. We find we had what we needed, only now, its too hard to bear.”

Donald D. Campbell
Gulls seem to be my best subject. We had such a mild winter they have be abundant in our Navesink River area.

Love

"Love, unrequited, robs me of my rest: Love, hopeless love, my ardent soul encumbers: Love, nightmare-like, lies heavy on my chest, And weaves itself into my midnight slumbers! "
William S. Gilbert
I took this photo in Tinton Falls not far from the recent beheading of a male swan. A reward is offered for any information. This lone swan made it's way slowly and sadly to me and broke my heart. Swans mate for life and this one to be alone is odd. I only hope the one killed wasn't this ones mate.
Not a happy Valentine's Day post I know. Sorry.

New Jersey Diners

The Roadside Diner, Wall NJ

Today, America has around 3,000 diners. In New Jersey around 570 diners operate, more than any other state. About half of all the towns in New Jersey, 284, have at least one diner.

Only three major companies from the 1920s and 1930s still build diners: Kullman, Paramount Diners, and DeRaffle Manufacturing Company. DeRaffle is the only one not located in New Jersey; it's based out of Rochelle, New York.

Route 130, which runs from Carney's Point northeast to New Brunswick, has more diners on it than any other road. It has almost two-dozen diners.

Even after the commercials set in Rosie's Diner ended, New Jersey diners can still be seen on television and in movies. Scenes from the movie "Boys on the Side" were filmed in the Bendix Diner in Hasbrouck Heights. On TV, a series of Tums commercials were filmed in the Harris Diner in East Orange. Diners even turn up in music. New Jersey native Jon Bon Jovi put the Roadside Diner in Wall on the cover of one of his albums.

http://www.state.nj.us/hangout_nj/200207_diners_p4.html

Winter Sky

“The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui, vanish, - all duties even”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fishy Business

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain"
Mark Twain