Downtown Skyline

Downtown St. Louis as seen from the Poplar Street Bridge in May 2012

 Linking to Thematic Photographic #210

This weeks theme is Parallelism 

Also Linking to:

Midweek Blues

Wordless Wednesday Again 

Wordless Wednesday 1 

Wordless Wednesday 2

Tina's Wordless Wednesday 

Sugabus and Me

Carmi over at "Written, Inc."  who host the week long photo challenge "Thematic Photographic" has chosen the color gray for this weeks theme.  I expected this challenge to be a hard one to fill.   I am never on the lookout for gray items like I am for some of the more popular meme colors like red and pink.   I started going through my archives and pulling out the gray photos and was surprised by how many I found that I have never used before.  I choose two to share with you today.    

The following photos were taken last fall when we escourted out of town guest on a tour of the Laumeier Sculpture Park.  

Me sitting on Sugabus

One of my favorite sculptures is this giant piece entitled "Sugabus."  It reminds me of a giant French Poodle crafted out of balloons.  Sugabus was created by Robert Chambers in 2004 out of six tons of bronze.  The following comes from the parks website: 

    

 "The globes represent the interlocking elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen found in sucrose. Chambers’ cuddly title, a mingling of “Sugar” and “Cerberus,” transforms the terror evoked by the mythological three-headed guard dog of Hades into a fluffy domesticated pet. Has Chambers made this scary creature into a loveable puffball through the association with a syrupy rush? The metamorphosis stirs together love for pets, elemental craving for sweets and legend into a whimsical alchemy of sculptural forms."

this photo from the
parks website

The above sculpture is entitled "The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot" created by Robert Lobe in 1995.

Constructed from the trunk and branches of a dead walnut tree encased in annealed hammered aluminum with stainless steel hardware.

The following comes from the parks website:  "Robert Lobe has described his sculptures as involving an interrupted, sacrificed-Nature that is not just borrowed, but violated. His works are created in nature and often reinstalled elsewhere as a sculptural echo of natural form. Inspired by this wildness and disorganized aspect of nature, Lobe’s The Palm at the End of the Parking Lot,  is a battered, aluminum-wrapped walnut trunk that exemplifies his continued interest in the violence of nature and obliterates the formal distinction between nature and technology with a battered layer of armor plate. Yet Lobe also preserves and protects the tree, as if technology is strong enough to reverse the ravages it has visited upon the landscape."

Laumeier Sculpture Park sits on 72 acres bequeathed by Matilda Laumeier to St. Louis County in 1968 in honor of her husband.  The Laumeier family home, a large story-and-a-half house of cut stone, on the property is still in use today.  In 1975, the park was proposed as a possible site for the exhibition of sculpture and the concept of Laumeier Sculpture Park emerged.  Catapulted by a collaborative of citizen leaders in the arts, education and business communities, Laumeier Sculpture Park,  was incorporated in September 1977; over the years it has grown to 105-acres. Laumeier Sculpture Park today has over 300,000 visitors annually.

Linking to Thematic Photographic 

This weeks theme is "Gray"

Childrens Hospital

Recently, we had the pleasure of playing substitute grandparent's for a friends son.  We drove him into the city to keep a doctors appointment.  I discovered that one of the most colorful places in the St. Louis area has to be Childrens Hospital.  

From the moment you turn into the drive, you encounter brightly colored statues that help show you the way.  

These colorful figurines are a mixture of animals 

and clowns 

Even the guard posts are in happy colors

Just outside the entrance are brightly colored sculptures 

of elephants and giraffes.  

The exam room floor tiles are even a rainbow of hues.

If a child has to be sick, St. Louis Childrens Hospital is certainly the place you want them to be.   I found the colorful pallet used throughout the hospital to be a boost to the moral of even the healthy folks who visit there. Being able to photograph all these colorful items certainly helped brighten my time there.        

Linking to Color Connection and Color Carnival 

Yellow Takes Center Stage

Monday is the day in blogland when the cheerful, sunshiny color yellow gets to take center stage over at Mellow Yellow Monday.  It is a good thing too because  my camera and I have been working overtime to make up for all those months of being housebound recently.  I have to admit that not being able to take my camera out on those illusive photo-hunts for blog worthy shots, was the thing I missed most during my illness.

Yellow is one of my all time favorite colors.  In fact, I have had a yellow kitchen in every house I have lived in since 1966.  Even when yellow was out of fashion and it was impossible to find yellow kitchen accessories I had to keep my yellow kitchen.  

  I seldom travel into the city, but, a recent trip to a doctor in St. Louis provided me with this photo.  This giraffe sits in front of Children's Hospital.  

I snapped this shot during a trip to Branson, Missouri.  We were there the day after the recent tornados and I was delighted to find this watering can still standing.  It sits in what was a miniature golf course and a good bit of the course was a pile of rubble.   

This forsythia sits beside my sister's porch in Omaha.  It is very rare to find plants even starting to bud out in mid-March, so having plants in full bloom is extra special.  In fact the temperature while we were there was breaking records almost every day.  It was in the mid eighties the day we left to come home.   

I hope you enjoyed my shares today, and may this sunny color brighten you day as much as it does my kitchen.

I am linking this post to Mellow Yellow Monday hosted by Drowsey Monkey.  To join in the fun or visit other Mellow Yellow participants just click here.

Friends of Wings

Recently, we visited a large shopping mall and found these butterflies decorating the courtyard.

I thought they were lovely and made a nice spring statement. When I got home, I visited the website I found attached to one of the butterflies and learned they were more than decorations.

The butterflies were part of a fundraising event for a local children's charity called "Wings". The "Friends of Wings" had these plain white butterflies made and sold them to anyone who wanted to decorate one and donate it back to the charity to be auctioned off for the charity.

Sixty butterflies were purchased by area corporations, merchants, artists and civic groups. The decorated butterflies have been placed in busy locations around the city. These three were at the mall. In May all the butterflies will be on display in one location and auctioned off.

I would love to have one for my garden, but I fear that bidding will be way out of my reach.

I am linking this post to Yard Art Thursday.

Mary T. at the Work of the Poet host Yard Art Thursday. To join the fun or just check out the

entries of others, visit Mary and her friends at Work of the Poet.

Ruby Tuesday --- The Top Spinner

Welcome to Ruby Tuesday the day we show off our photos that contain some red. My ruby shots today were taken during my last visit to a place called Turtle Park.

Whenever I have out of town guests, one of the St. Louis sights I like to take them to is Turtle Park. Turtle Park is a small playground that contains lots of cement turtles from tiny to very large that you can climb on. Children love to play there and adults enjoy taking photos of each other on the turtles. I plan to do a post on the park some day soon. Normally, you would not find anything red in the park, unless one of the visitors was wearing a red shirt or driving a cool red car.

On my last visit to Turtle Park, however, we met and were entertained by an elderly gentleman from China who had fantastic skills with tops he had made himself. His largest top could be made to spin very fast and he would throw it in the air and catch it in his free hand. He then transfered it to a pen with a depression in the top to hold the spinning top. When he handed it to one of the watching children and the child felt the power of the spinning top through the makeshift handle , the child's eyes would light up in amazement and wonder. He happened to be wearing red and most of his tops had some red in them. Here are the shots I took that day.





Have a great week everyone and for more things red, or to join the fun visit Ruby Tuesday at WORK Of THE POET

Color Carnival #14 --- Tom Sawyer Cruise

Sunday is the day we join Martha and all of her friends at Color Carnival, the meme that lets us celebrate all the colors of the rainbow. For this weeks entries I am going back to the beginning of last month for my photos. Some of my Alabama cousins came for a visit and the Old Salt and I played tour guide. Naturally, one of the first places we took my cousins was to the St. Louis riverfront where we visited the Gateway Arch and then took a cruise on the paddlewheeler "Tom Sawyer."

When coming up the ramp to the barge that serves as the ticket office and waiting area for the cruse I photographed this barrel of colorful flowers sitting at the entrance way.



Overhead hung the these colorful signal flags


the waiting area had bright read chairs and colorful posters on the wall.


As we exited the ramp after the cruise I spotted these colorful bicycles waiting to be rented. I had never seen this type of bike before that day but, I have seen them several different versions of them posted here since then.




To join the fun or to check out all the colorful entries of other players, visit Martha and her friends at http://colorcarnivalmeme.blogspot.com



Now I have a very colorful shot I want to share. I subscribe to news service and this showed up recently. Since it is not mine it will not count as a Color Carnival entry but I thought you would enjoy seeing it. credit goes to the Zhou Chao of the China Foto Press.

Photo Friday ---Big and Small

The theme for this Friday Photo Challenge is Big and Small. This was taken on Thursday when sight-seeing with our out of state company at the St. Louis Arch. The Arch is so large it dwarfs the buildings down town. I just happen to capture it at an angle that that made the small flag seem larger then it was. I thought this would be just perfect for this fourth of July.




To join the fun or visit the participates go to http://photofriday.com