Cee's fun foto challenge: Earth

This is the last week for our Chinese 5 element challenges:

Earth/Harvest: Clay, Rock, Dust, Sand, Mud, Crystal, Powder, Shadow, Space, Darkness, Gravity, Bone, Silicon

Black Rock at Praia da Luz Beach

Rocky "window to the sea" at Galé Beach

Low tide at Galé beach exposes more sand and interesting rocks.

Parched earth, before the rains came.

 

Typical "calçada" pavement and one of the many stone carvings by the Arade River, Portimão.

As I am still more or less hibernating and my camera batteries, which are rechargeable, keep dying on me at the most inconvenient moments, I have given up on trying to add to this short selection of photos.

Visit Cee's for many more entries. 

7th November 2013 - updated Cee's link.

Ongoing

Ongoing is...

• my struggle with the winter blues, or should that be the winter greys? Spring cannot come soon enough for me!

• my disgust at proposals to eliminate 50 thousand jobs in state education in Portugal - that's teachers and other employees.

For more upbeat takes on Jake's theme Ongoing, click on his new Sunday Post button below.

 

Hope

I don't read much poetry, but I do enjoy Emily Dickinson's work. This is one of my favourites and came immediately to mind when I read Jake's prompt:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

                                    Emily Dickinson

For more Sunday post interpretations on Hope, pop over to Jake's blog. 

First Blogoversary

One year ago today I published my first post and became a blogger.

Image by Ciara (public domain)

One year and over 100 posts later, I can say that it has been a marvellous experience. I feel very lucky to have had so many visitors and received supportive comments from experienced bloggers from all over the world. 

I was honoured to get the Sunshine Blogger Award from lovely, funny Marcia at Menopausal Mother and especially honoured to be mentioned as deserving Jo Bryant's awards at Chronicles of Illusions. Jo's blog is in a class of its own so being considered worthy of an award by her is really special. Thank you, Marcia and Jo, from the bottom of my heart. Perhaps I should reconsider and get more into the award thing as it does bring in a lot of traffic... hmm... I don't know.

I was very surprised to get an invitation from Polly Allen @holidays.easyjet.com to enter a competition. I nearly didn't even open her email, thinking it was spam/scam, so I ended up doing the Insider Tips post just before the deadline and it was only yesterday, while I was googling for something quite unrelated that I discovered that I had been included as a "top blogger" and "Algarve expert" on EasyJet's Insider Tips from Top Bloggers. Wow, that brought a smile to my face!

Thank you to all those who visit and especially to those who leave comments. I will try to keep you coming back.

Cee's Fun Foto challenge: Fire

This week our challenge is to show off a few photos of the Chinese element of Fire.

Fire/Summer: Heat, Light, Lava, Radiation, Sparks, Plasma, Explosions, Burn, Blaze, Oil, Ash, Smoke, Glass, Napalm, Sun, Matter

Alte, Algarve

Oven, Medieval fair, Feira, Aveiro

Smokey stage, Medieval fair, Castro Marim

Sun-kissed summer flowers

Fiery gazanias

For more entries, visit Cee's.


9th November 2013 - updated Cee's link.