In the game of life

[viridian5]

There was a lot of stress for me in 2025, but it had its good moments too.



This shot was an accident that I thought turned out fun! The day my youngest niece, the girl with the pink and blonde hair, graduated from high school was so hot and bright that my camera phone was having a lot of trouble and the screen kept darkening, so I was shooting blind. Also, I was feeling like crap due to the heat. But the colors in all the photos really popped. The bouquet in the corner here is the one her parents gave her. (Seeing my nieces becoming adults is still weird to me; aren't they still kids?!)



Kleinfeld Bridal gets the win again for the window display photo I'm using for threeforthememories. Their Christmas window displays are often surprisingly conceptual, but the snowmen in this year's two windows, including the tiny skiing ones, took me by surprise.



This photo I took of a site in St. John's Cemetery was nominated to Flickr's Explore, which means it got a much wider audience with more views and favorites than most of my photos on Flickr. Which was cool! But some of the past choices Explore made on my photos made more sense to me.

(In last year's post, I told you the story of a neglected child's monument in All Faiths Cemetery I'd been protecting for years. Unfortunately, this year the ground's crew finally took out the encroaching tree... and knocked Irving's statue and gravestone to the ground, where it's been lying mostly face down for ten months and counting, so I can't see if there's more damage aside from the wing they destroyed. I sent an e-mail to the only address I had for the cemetery; it did nothing. This was Irving Mager's angel.)

Comments

[vriddy]

That picture with the snowman is incredible, wow!

I'm very sorry to hear about how carelessly the angel statue was treated... No words.

[viridian5]

Thank you!

What really gets me is that the ground crew did some sensitive and delicate pruning in other parts of the cemetery well, only to break this angel badly and then just leave it lying there. With how badly they’ve already handled the Mager site, I’m getting afraid that if they did move it, it would be to get rid of it completely.

[cmcmck]

A local cemetery got a lot of damage to historic stones when a tree came down in the last big storm of last year.

[viridian5]

In my 20 years or so of photographing local cemeteries, I’ve seen a lot of storm damage. This cemetery handled toppled statues more sensitively in the past, and that’s with damage they didn’t cause themselves. (In some cases, the statues were far too destroyed to keep at all. I don’t know what other damage Irving’s angel may have taken, given how it’s lying in the dirt, but if the wing is the biggest problem, it could be positioned in ways to minimize the visual impact. There’s also the gravestone it’s attached to, which for me heightens the disrespect of leaving it all face down like this.)

[smallhobbit]

The picture of your niece and her friends is such a joyful one.

[viridian5]

Thank you!

[angrboda]

I totally get the weirdness of your nieces growing up. My cousin became someone's mother in 2025. I don't understand it, she was just born yesterday, but I'm reliably informed that she's actually closer to 30 than to 20 now...

[viridian5]

My nieces are currently 18 and 20, which should be impossible.

[yourlibrarian]

That is a great "happy accident" pic! Yes, screens are great for setting up shots but sometimes a viewfinder is a lifesaver. I've often run into the same problem.

Their being old enough to have kids of their own is definitely hard to wrap one's head around.

Someone definitely has a good time coming up with those window displays!

A shame about the graveyard statue.

[viridian5]

Thank you so much!

Kleinfeld's window designer(s?) has an off-kilter sensibility I often enjoy.