When I started this blog soon after retiring I thought that I would be posting a lot of photography but that never quite happened.  I have a confession to make,  since I got my iphone I have used that camera much more often than my good Nikon and lenses.  It's always in my pocket so I can often get a quick shot that I might have missed with the "good" camera.  Actually the iphone camera isn't bad if you are careful while shooting the picture.  Since we are nearing the end of another year I thought it would be fun to post some of my own favorites from the past year and talk about why I like them.  So let's get started. There is about one each month.  

The common denominator in most of my photography is color and shape. This one was a good example of color on the vine and the shape and location of the window in the frame.  

One of my very favorite neighborhood homes in the beautiful early evening light. I really like shooting 

late afternoon evening light all the way into sunset.  

Here is another one with both shapes and colors.  The white, yellow, and blue caught my eye along with the curved stairs and circular ceiling above. 

Here we go again with shape and color, but with some local history in the background with the courthouse dome showing through one of the openings in the sculpture.  

Need you even ask?  I started out photographing a lot of people.  Senior pictures, a couple of weddings and some other events, but I soon discovered that wasn't for me but this one was just too good to pass up looking unrehearsed and natural.  

Besides color I liked the way the background color was soft while the foreground was sharp. Prophetstown State park and this one was taken with my Nikon equipment.  

This place just shows off for night shots. 

I love this one.  This guy comes around and keeps an eye on the bird feeders.  He was giving me the once over but he did let me get pretty close.  

I have a really good view of sunsets from my office window. I have no views of sunrise so I often take advantage of the sunsets...this one had great color and I like the roofline of the house next door and 

of the church steeple down the street.  

The sunsets can be so different from day to day but they all have great color 

This is not an especially good photo but it had some senimental meaning to me.  My grandparents had a windmill not far from the front of their house and a trumpet vine with flowers like these climbed all the way up that windmill.  When we were young we would pick those flowers and stick them on our fingers which made us look like we had long orange fingers.  

Some cool stone carving but I've never figured out how that face ended up on the side of a church.  

I'm always happy to see new life popping up when spring arrives.  The fern sprouts have a nice top spiral as they come up

Finally, this one of the Wabash just after sunset way back in February   I loved the striped sky and reflection on the water.  

Good old American Consumerism AKA Conspicuous Consumption

 

I read a funny quote on Facebook the other day.  Life consists of three phases: 

1. Wanting stuff

2. Collecting stuff

3. Getting rid of stuff 

Camilla and I have hit phase three I believe. At our age I think it's natural to start thinking about "downsizing" and a big part of that involves evaluating what you have and what you can do without.  As I was emptying the dishwasher and putting things away the other day I stopped and actually looked at the wall cupboard where we keep our coffee mugs.  My lord...why do we have over 30 coffee mugs...in addition to the white ceramic coffee cups that match one of our china sets.  I have not counted to see what the actual total is.  I'm afraid to.  I did however take a quick photo of that wall cupboard just to give readers some idea of how runaway our "collecting" of coffee mugs has gone.  

I would guess that we are not any different than a large number of other folks. Our American economy is based on consumerism so companies have always worked hard to increase our desire to have "stuff".  We have been convinced that possessions are a sign of wealth, and wealth equals worth to many.  So we buy, collect and accumulate more stuff to in order to make us feel better about ourselves.  Not because we need more stuff but we long for more worth.  When we get a new thing it makes us feel better about ourseves, at least for a while.  

So going back to my question about why we have so many coffee mugs.  We both have a small number of "favorites" that we use most days.  Usually we make a pot of regular coffee each morning and then a pot of decaf in the afternoon but we usually use the same cup all day, and sometimes I use the same mug for more than one day with just a hot water rinse between days.  Some of our mugs have been gifts, I think we brought a few home from my parent's home after mom died. We did a lot of travel in the first several years after I retired and some of the cups are souvenirs from places we have visited.  I have a colorful Route 66 mug as we have traveled that road a few times on our way to Arizona.  It might be the mug I use most often.  A basic fact  of life is that "too much of anything is the beginning of a mess." In truth we have created a mess and having a lot of stuff just complicates our lives. 

So which mugs would we eliminate if we wanted to simplify our lives? I'm not sure yet, but I think we will find out one of these days soon but coffee mugs are just the tip of the clutter iceberg.  

Our clothing is just as much a nightmare as our coffee cups.  My closet was full, tightly packed full of shirts, in fact I was using two closets, one just for shirts and another for pants.  There were, and still are, so many shirts that the closet rods were literally packed so tight that it was hard to get a hanger off the rod without messing up 2 or three adjoining hangers.  Before retirement I was using lots of shirts, a clean ironed dress shirt every day.  Now some of those same shirts are still hanging there,  unworn for several years.  Earlier this week I cleaned out my shirt closet, pants closet, and went through my sweaters and sweatshirts and I ended up taking 3 large bags of clothes to the Salvation Army.  

We have lots more to donate or sell in order to simplify our lives, but at least we have started moving in the right direction.