Scribbles and Photos

Yesterday on my birding expedition to Central Park, I saw ruby-throated hummingbird, a yellow-crowned kinglet, a common yellowthroat, a northern mockingbird, and a flock of ruby-crowned kinglets. I am  wondering if it is finally time to start a bird list? You can definitely tell from the photos below that the common yellow throat and the northern mockingbird were quite cooperative subjects. The hummingbird and the kinglets, not so much.   Ruby throated hummingbird Yellow-crowned Kinglet Common Yellowthroat Northern Mockingbird Ruby-crowned Kinglet

So much for any commitment I made last year to either writing more or at least posting more frequently here at Scribbles and Photos.  *Takes break to tidy up apartment. I guess I really meant the "we'll see" at the end of Backend Housekeeping (on the blog)  in January 2020.   *Takes break to tweet sadness about how very few photos made the short list for a #500px quest. To be fair to myself, it's not like I haven't been writing or taking photos! It's just that I haven't been active on this blog since August 17, 2020. *Gets distracted by the end of the episode of the Waltons (S3, E2: The Conflict) playing in the background.  I supposed now is as good a time as any to reveal that in addition to binging many of the same things everyone else has binged during quarantine, I've also binged Gilmore Girls (reminded that Rory is a piece of work), Little House on the Prairie, the Waltons, and Dr. Quinn Medicine Women. Something oddly comforting about

  Do we believe in the distopian future of many a pundit, that NYC real estate will never come back from the gut punch that is the COVID19 pandemic? Or do we have the faith of the developers whose buildings continue to rise and reshape the NYC city skyline (sometimes for the worse)?   

Summer 2019 Two summers with two decidedly different vibes here in NYC.  The approach to photography? Same.  Both photos shot from my navel as I was walking behind someone.  Apparently, my navel was approximately level to the pockets on both occasions.    Summer 2020

Up until about 10 minutes ago, I was convinced that I had taken a photo of a trash bag filled with empty gin and tonic bottles back in early June. I had a whole backstory planned for 500px about my first boss who used to use cheap gin and cheap vodka to make gin that tasted remarkably like Tangueray (the original). Or maybe it tasted like Tangueray because he poured that cheap concoction out of a Tangueray bottle? I remember slowly sipping  Gin & Tonics on the wide front porch of his house with colleagues and thinking that this was adulting at its finest. I swore off gin after over-imbibing it at a house party that we threw (also adulting). This was all in my 20s.  Gin recently crept back into my life and my house because of Negronis, Zoom cocktail hours, and sheltering-in-place. These days it's Bombay Sapphire. I'll save the Campari stories for when I find a bag filled with empty Campari bottles. Hmm, a trip to Italy may be in order since I'm not sure how

Since I wrote Cigarette Butts , I've made a trashy movie that, quite literally, consists of the trash that I saw on an early morning walk last Thursday (July 9th) on the upper Westside of NYC. I also found another cigarette butt at the base of one of the statues in Madison Square Park and read up on how toxic said butts  are for our environment .  No doubt about it, smoking is not good for anyone.      View this post on Instagram So, I made a trashy movie out of my photos from a July morning walk in the era of #COVID19 on the Upper Westside of Manhattan. This all started because I am obsessed with Irving Penn’s photos of cigarettes. When you start hunting for the #butts on the ground, you see a lot of other trash along the way. The cover photo for this reminds me of my Mom, always the 💄 on the end of her #cigarettes. #NYC #garbage A post shared by Nancy Lundebjerg (@nlundebjerg) on Jul 11, 2020 at 10:18am PDT We humans make a lot of garbage.