October Mosaic

Row 1: 1. Giants, Midgets and Oddballs at Ochs Fruit Farm in Lancaster, 2. Ochs, 3. Go This Way, 4. Mums, 5. More Wag, Less Oink (Fairfield County Fair)

Row 2: 1. Piglet Plea, 2. Goat Grin, 3. Fair Rides, 4. Stick Horse Race, 5. Sunflower Seeds (all Fairfield County Fair)

Row 3: 1. Goldenrod, 2. Preying Mantis, 3. Last Sunflower, 4. Heroic Grasshopper, 5. Last Coneflower (all school Land Lab + Yucca in the next row)

Row 4: 1. Yucca, 2. This one has a story. So our master bath is decorated with a bird theme. We've lived in the house for almost 17 years and I just noticed that there are two birds in the marbling of the vanity -- a short, stout Twitter-like bird on the right, and a caricature of partridge on the left. Imagine all I'd see if I really paid attention!!! 3. Fin du Monde beer bubbles, 4. Food For Thought tasting event at Old Worthington Library -- Bleu Cheeses, 5. Now Panic and Freak Out (we resisted buying this at Sur la Table when we got the new bowls...but it was hard not to...)

Row 5: 1. The five bowls that replaced the one I broke, 2. Which Contrail Do You Leave -- Delicate, Bold, or Meandering?, 3. X Marks The Spot Where The Moon Is, 4. Tic-Tac-Cloud-o (all three cloud pictures were the same morning -- inspirational sky!) 5. Celebrating Josie!

Row 6: 1. Who Made This Nest?, 2. Our Punkin', 3. Sunflower with new filter app, 4. Apple Crisp with new mosaic app, 5. Starbucks with new mosaic app


You can see the pictures full-size on Flickr.

My two new favorite photo apps on my iPhone are FilterMania 2 (I could play with this one all day!) and Mosaicam (shoot a mosaic rather than having to go back afterward and build it).

September Mosaic

Ah, September! You lasted a lifetime, yet you were gone in a blink.
Gardening
Teaching
Volunteering
Meeting/Eating
Celebrating
Silliness
Broccoli Blooms and Bees
Photo app play (Poetics, Finger Focus)


You can view the set on Flickr here.

August Mosaic

Hmm...it's always interesting to observe the patterns that emerge each month. Apparently, August was about food. Fully one third of these photos document food or restaurants. There's the scallops from Skillet, biscotti and coffee and DeLucas and cheesesteak in Pittsburgh, the coffee house in Urbana, peanut butter sandwiches from Krema, eggplant salad (made with the eggplant grown in the community garden), and Jeni's on Mohawk.

And it's not every month that dinosaurs show up not once, not twice, but THREE times.

Between the tomato hornworm caterpillar (found in the community garden) that I unsuccessfully tried to keep alive for my students to see, and the exhibits at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, it was a great month for insects, too.

You can click on the mosaic to enlarge it, or visit the set on Flickr.

July Mosaic

July flew by out the windows of an airplane and various cars: Colorado (photos 1-9), Kansas (10-11), Illinois (12), Maryland (15-20), and the Hocking Hills in S. OH (21-29). Brief glimpses of home can be seen in 13 (cat-in-the-box), 14 (107 point final word winning move WWF), 30 (baby eggplant in the school's plot of our community garden).

Click to view the set a bit larger, or go over to Flickr to check them out.

June Mosaics (plural)

What a month.

(...but aren't they all, when we stop to think of it?!)

I had my fortune told in a cup of Arabic coffee. Can you see the tiger's face? That's really lucky and rare! And see how there are several paths/options/choices that come together and are open at the rim of the cup? Also very propitious.

I weeded in the school land lab one cool morning after a rain, and caught the cup plant, an Ohio Native, doing what its name implies.

Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. Yum. Cherry Lambic Sorbet, if I remember correctly, and something lemony, though I can't find the exact one on the website. I do see Juniper and Lemon Curd and Lime Cardamom, both of which I HIGHLY recommend! :-)

We are loving having Natalie's Coal-Fired Pizza and Live Music at the end of our block! Will likes takeout best, pizza boxes being a particular favorite of his. We thoroughly enjoyed Juanito Pascual playing flamenco guitar music live at Natalie's...without Will.

I got a set of lenses for my iPhone camera (macro, wide angle, fish-eye and telephoto -- from Photojojo) and have had lots of fun playing with them. The macro is my favorite: text on a book cover and 3 of the sweet peas. There's my back garden beds with the fisheye. Then a couple more garden flowers and a homemade cinnamon roll with the built-in lens.

Can you spot mom's cat Mellie in the next picture? She's disappearing behind the microwave in a space barely wide enough to store an onion. In the next picture she reemerges with a look on her face as if to say, "What? I didn't do anything!"

Next are the pictures of a play space that makes me want to be 8 years-old again. I featured these pictures with my review of James Preller's Pirate's Guide to Recess.

That grass seed (macro lens on my phone again) is on Buffalo Grass, a short prairie grass native to Colorado that can survive without irrigation. That's why it does so well in mom's gravel alley!

Next is the turtle who walked up the driveway one morning last week, and who I featured yesterday with Kay Ryan's poem TURTLE for Poetry Friday.

The last few are: my poem and collage for Summer Poetry Swap, a Little Leaf Linden in bloom, a feather (hope is the thing with), an outrageously yummy BLT, a toad who didn't have the same good luck as our turtle in making it across the street, and sky, sky, sky, sky, sky...what there's most of in Eastern Colorado. Those last 5 were taken within about an hour of each other. Just before sunset and just after.

(You can view this set of photos on Flickr here.)



I had the great good fortune to spend the day at the Denver Botanic Gardens a week ago Saturday with Carol of Carol's Corner. We strolled and chatted and lingered and sniffed; we ooh-ed and ah-ed (and awe-ed). It wasn't the first time we had met on the other side of our blogs (in that other real-er life, as it were), but after spending all of April trading poems back and forth, it was more like meeting up with a neighbor from down the street than a neighbor from the blogosphere. The time we spent in the gardens, in the brilliant Colorado day, and in each other's company healed both of our souls in ways our souls needed healing. I am grateful that we had that time together. I took too many pictures for one mosaic, so here are three -- one all of pink and purple, one of the various parts of the Botanic Gardens proper, and one of the magnificent rooftop children's garden.

All of the Botanic Gardens photos can be seen by viewing my Flickr photostream, or my Flickr sets.

May Mosaic

May, as you can see, was predominantly about flowers.

A couple new colors of iris (ones I brought back with me from Mom's garden) bloomed this year -- the yellow and the rust. I'm thrilled that the Jack-in-the-Pulpit I got at the Clintonville Farmer's Market last summer is blooming!

The squirrels are using our garden gnome as a chew toy. He looks even worse now than he does in these pictures. Is this revenge for all the times in stories when gnomes ride on squirrels as if they were their ponies?

There were two amazing visitations this month. As I pulled up to park one Saturday in the early(ish) morning to work in the Land Lab, a Cooper's Hawk landed on the fence right in front of me. Same one I wrote about in Madness 2013? Perhaps!  And one night when AJ went to put some trash in our trashcan, he realized that the "leaf" on the handle wasn't a leaf at all -- it was a luna moth!

In this set you can also find a piece of pizza with a funny face, a sunset at Goodale Park and documentation of a first-try French Braid. (Next week I'm getting 4-6 inches cut off at my twice-yearly haircut.)

You can see this set up close and personal on Flickr. They've redesigned the site. It is quite lovely!

April Mosaic

At the beginning of April, the sun was just rising as I left for school. Now it's well up.

It was a month of acronyms: CFR (1st row #2), IRA (1st row #4-6th row #2),  PFA (4th row #4-5th row #4).

You can see the photos (bigger, with titles and sometimes captions) on Flickr here.

My photos on Flickr are all labeled with a Creative Commons license. That means you are free to use them (non-commercially), as long as you provide attribution that they are my photos. If you do use a photo of mine, stop back and leave a comment (and a link, if possible) on Flickr so that I can clap my hands with glee that something I've made has inspired your creation!

March Mosaic

Spring Break in Chicago. Lovely skies, eh?

For a bigger view of the pictures, click on the mosaic, or you can visit this set on Flickr.

February Mosaic

This month's photos are documentary: Poetry Friday poem observations; book purchases; the quote wall by my classroom door (future blog post); Louise Borden, Ralph Fletcher and Vicki Vinton at the Dublin Literacy Conference (future blog post); English Shepherd mom with her English/German Shepherd pups that we temperament tested.

January Mosaic

Not many photos in January.
It was a good month, nonetheless.

December Mosaic and 2012 Photo Projects

Flickr photoset is here if you'd like to see the photos full-sized.

At the beginning of the month, our temperatures were still in the 50s. Almost like the flipping of a switch on Winter Solstice, the temperatures dropped and the snow came. Fun vegetable shots this month -- "Bright Veggies" in my Buddha Bowl at Northstar, a grinning spud spotted at Kroger, and fresh Brussel Sprouts from the Winter Worthington Farmers Market before they were roasted for Christmas dinner.

***~~~***~~~***~~~***~~~***~~~***~~~***

Back in January, I gave myself a new focus for my photos:

I'm going to collect photos of numbers and letters (actual and representations). By the end of the year, I'll be able to make my own Alpha-Numeric picture book through the iPhoto store!

I collected about half of the alphabet and all of the numbers 1-13 except 9 and 10. I also discovered that our local Cord Camera is the way to go for all kinds of photography projects: support a local business and don't pay exorbitant shipping fees!

November Mosaic -- NCTE12

This month's mosaic is all NCTE and Las Vegas. You can view the set on Flickr here.

October Mosaic

Fall colors, Fairfield County Fair. Other than that, October was a blur of schoolwork.

Photos can be seen full size on Flickr.

September Mosaic

September always begins with the Upper Arlington Arts Festival. The blown glass tree and the grilled cheese sandwiches from my favorite food truck are from UA Arts. A week later, Clintonville had its first ever Festiville -- SpiderMonkey and SuperMonkey were spotted there.

The cocoonish thing on the brick of the school wall was sighted by an observant Environmental Club member. ID, anyone?

All the rest of the photos, except for the last four, are from Ohio's Casting for Recovery event at Indian Bear Lodge. Pretty spectacular sunrise over the pond, eh?

The last four are teasel critters -- made with the seedhead of a wonderful weed -- thank goodness I left enough or missed enough in the Land Lab so that every Environmental Club member could make a critter with one last week. We had our first indoor meeting of the year, due to the wet weather. The club members and their critters made a glorious, noisy, creative mess.

You can check out a larger view of the photos on Flickr.

August Mosaic

Three big photo ops in August. Last Friday of the Summer, spent hiking in John Bryant State Park (lunch after at The Winds in Yellow Springs--YUMMM). I used the pair of fresh eyes to help me find some numbers and letters for the Alpha-Numeric project that I haven't forgotten about, but which has been back-burnered for a couple of months. Top center is a nice Leaf Lady. Top right is a fabulous A. Second row center is an amazing millipede, then O, and Jewel Weed. Third row features 5, J, and a 3, courtesy of Trillium. X marks the spot in fourth row, first position. Fourth row center is me and Jack Gantos. The next one is a page from his writer's notebook. I'll use that one in a writing workshop minilesson soon! Fourth row fifth picture is Hahn with Giant Hahns at the McConnell Arts Center. All the rest (except the lamp at the end) are from Chagrin Falls, Ohio -- another end of summer outing. Fifth row center, probably my favorite of the month -- Just Grace vs. Jeni's Ice Cream...and Just Grace WINS!! The lamp (last photo) I made for my Sweetie Pie, with a photo from last month and a new app I haven't had time to play much with -- WordFoto.

For a better view, you can visit this set of photos on Flickr.

July Mosaic

Remember a couple of days ago, when my computer's brain was about to explode? After the memory upgrade, there is now PLENTY of space for downloading the rest of July's pictures from my camera!

Time for the July Mosaic!

If you want to see each picture more clearly, check out the set on Flickr.

June Mosaic

So many stories this month. Family quilt stories, carousel memories, All Write inspirations, heat and drought, storm damage, two animal rescues (Coopers Hawk chick and a little dog named Troy).

I have five years of photos in my iPhoto (6,988 shots), and three more years archived from my old computer. There are four years worth of mosaics on Flickr. I realized at All Write, that what started as a modified version of Project 365 on Flickr has become a really powerful digital writer's notebook. Sometimes I sketch before I write, sometimes I web out my ideas, sometimes I pick from a list of brainstormed topics...and sometimes my prewriting is just look at a photo and either tell the story that's there, or imagine a new one.

You can see larger versions the pictures (and bits of stories in the captions) on Flickr.

May Mosaic

To view on Flickr, go here.

Happy May. Happy June. Happy Summer.

April Mosaics

APRIL MOSAIC

The sky above

a yellow glove

Two observe

mushrooms curve

Long spikey

slow slippery

25 spot

3 cake pops

Bee in the window is dead

Cat in the window turns head

Tree in bloom

Vast amounts of room

River has meanders

Table has treasures

Cake plate view

(coins from 1892)

Sugar bowl twinkles

Cut glass crinkles

Flow Blue plate

Butter dish weight

Carnival glass shimmers

Tools made many dinners

Shot glass -- small

Pitcher -- tall

Pike's Peaking

Hawk's eating

Stack of three

Plate of cheese

Powell winery

Spring's green finery

Birdhouse gourds hang 

April's gone...dang!

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012

Poem #30, National Poetry Month, 2012

All 30 poems for this month make a mosaic of their own, a different sort of glimpse into my world -- the poetic version of what I was seeing and doing and thinking about. Here is a link to my 2012 NPM Poems. (My April photo mosaic is on Flickr here.)

In March, the Poetry Tournament at Think Kid, Think! was a watershed moment for me as a writer. I changed my identity from "person who sometimes writes poetry" to Poet. I'm excited to see where this new direction in my writing will lead. I have a brand new PINK writer's notebook to start filling...beginning tomorrow!

Cathy, at Merely Day By Day, is joining me in a poem a day this month. Other daily poem writers include Amy at The Poem Farm, Linda at TeacherDance, Donna at Mainely Write, Laura at Writing the World for Kids (daily haiku), Liz at Liz in Ink (daily haiku), Sara at Read Write Believe (daily haiku), Jone at Deo Writer (daily haiku)...and YOU?

March Mosaic

M -- North Market

Flower Stall -- North Market

Silly Question -- North Market

G -- North Market

Thai Burrito -- NorthStar Cafe (YUM!)

W -- Heart of Ohio Antiques

Z -- March Sky

Redbud and Fly -- Our Yard

Redbud -- Our Yard

Redbud -- Our Yard

Unlikely Nestbox -- Olentangy Plaza, just down from Mad River Outfitters

Crawdad -- Little Miami River in John Bryan State Park

River Shells -- Little Miami River in John Bryan State Park
Dutchman's Breeches -- John Bryan State Park
Geometric -- Our Neighborhood
0 -- Our Neighborhood
8 -- Selby Park
Pines -- Selby Park
Tracks -- Our Neighborhood

Tree Imitates Sky -- March Sky

5 -- Utility Pole on Goodale Street

Not as many numbers and letters this month, but as A. E. Housman said,

"...And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow."

You can see all the photos HERE on Flickr.