After a week of not taking photos, I noticed a particularly attractive shot today that I thought would look nice.

This photo was taken of a decorative clay dish that is displayed on our fireplace mantel. This dish was purchased from a local potter in the small French town of Viviers while we were vacationing there in December of 2006. I thought that the colors were particularly vibrant on this sunny morning. The reflection you can see is that of the sunny southern skies outside our family room windows.

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We had managed to avoid winter’s freezing blast until this week, which is unusual in Michigan. Yesterday the freezing rain came, and the temperatures dropped into the teens. As you can see from the photo, there is a tremendous amount of ice on everything, including the branches of this bush.

Although it makes for a pretty photo, it really is an ugly scene here as many trees are down and thousands of homes are without power. It’s the price we pay to live in Michigan.

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It took less than a week to miss my first daily photo. In fact, I missed two days. Go figure.

Anyhow, I am back at it and have uploaded the photo for today. This is a photo of a good friend of mine, Dennis Markham. When Dennis is not busy talking on the telephone he can usually be found restoring Vintage Rotary Phones. Just before this photo was taken, Dennis was busy showing me some of the phones in his collection. It seems that just yesterday he had installed some beautiful floating shelves on the wall of his home office on which to display part of his telephone collection. How ironic that the telephone rang just at that time.

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I wanted to make certain that I did my daily photo early today. The national championship college football game is on tonight, and being a big college football fan, I wanted to clear my slate for this evening so I don’t miss a single play of the game.

With that being said, I looked out the door today to see one of the first smatterings of snow for the season. Sometimes we have three feet of snow by this time in January, but this year there has been almost none. The ground has not yet frozen and some of the spring flowers have already started to poke out of the ground, which I think is really going to be a problem for them shortly.

The fresh white snow, couple with a clearing sky in which the morning sun was shining from between the clouds, caused the light in my yard to be quite bright. A blue ceramic flower pot, which was to have already been moved into the garage to avoid freezing and cracking, stood out like a beacon against the relatively white background. It seemed to me to be about as blue as it could possibly be. I originally took a photo of the full pot, but to be honest with you it did not look so great standing next to my garage, which is in need of repainting. But I loved the color of the pot itself, so I took a close up macro photo of the side of the pot so that I could capture the great color.

The photo for today was born. I hope you like it.

Sunday morning over easy.

Not much excitement going on around here. I got an early start to a web design project this morning. The pendant light in this photo sits above my workspace. The rest of the house was dark, so the light seems to stand by itself in the darkness without any means of support. Just like a spaceship from Mars, isn’t it?

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A couple years ago I dabbled with buying old and tired Western Electric rotary dial telephones on eBay. You know, the kind of phone that people over 40 remember from their youth. I learned a bit about the phones, cleaned them up and made them work, and resold them on eBay. It was fun for a while, but then I got bored and moved on to other things.

For some reason one day last week I decided to try my hand at buying a couple more phones from eBay. The photo you see is one of those phones. I cleaned it, shined it, and made it work with the help of phone guru Dennis Markham over at Vintage Rotary Phones. After a bit of struggling with the correct wire configuration, the darn thing works again, just like it has for over forty years!

I listed the phone for sale on eBay. Feel free to buy it before someone else steals it out from under your nose.

The world is a pretty automated place these days. Most finanical transactions are done on line, and it is quite unusual when someone falls back on an old manner of doing something.

Every now and then I do a transaction on eBay, or elsewhere on line, which requires me to make automated payments. No problem, I pefer it that way. Sometimes I sell something on eBay as well. The process is quite automated. I accept EFT payments, I print my postage from the US Postal Service website, and I drop the package off at the post office. No waiting in lines, no counting stamps, no licking stamps, none of that hassle.

Today I received an item in the mail that was posted in the old fashioned way. Take a look at the number of stamps on this packages. The postage ws $4.05 for this item – I think it would be hard to have more stamps on the package and still have room for the address.

Another example of a time that is disappearing: “The good old days”.

Note: I will be moving this “One Photo a Day” feature to a new hosting account within the next few days. It will be easier and more efficient to have the photos and descriptions stored there.

It sounded like a good idea – start playing hockey again, at the age of 51, and after not even being on skates for over a decade. It really sounded like a good idea when I found a local organization that had an “Over 50″ hockey league. So, I took the plunge and went out to practice with the old guys.

Apparently these fellows hadn’t taken the last ten or twenty years off from playing hockey. It was a tough lesson. I think I better rethink the whole idea. Perhaps I should start out playing a little bit of pick-up basketball at the center instead of this “fast, hard, fall down, have a hard time getting up, slip on the ice, get hit with hard things going really fast sport”.

It sounded like a good idea.

I have decided to host my “One Photo a Day” chronicles at www.blipfoto.com.

More details about how this will work, including my daily photo for January 4, 2007 will be posted here later today. Please stop back and check out the daily photo when you get a chance.

I retired in October of 2006. As a belated “retirement party” some of my friends took me on a trip to the Greektown Casino in Detroit. Before getting to the casino, we stopped in Detroit’s Mexican Town and had dinner at the Mexican Village Restaurant. One of my friends, let’s call her “Amy”, ordered a liter of margaritas. After she drank most of the liter, this classic photo resulted.

I like to take photos from low angles, and this photo was taken with the camera sitting on the table and “Amy” leaning down to frame the photo. It came out pretty good, I think. There probably won’t be many portrait photos posted here, but this was an exception.

I am afraid that Mexican Village Restaurant will never be the same again.

I never said this photo-a-day thing would be interesting. I just said that I was going to do it.

Today’s photo is our dinner. The “our” in this case is my wife and I. Although the photo looks rather disgusting, what you see here is a snapshot of my wife’s homemade split pea and ham vegetable soup. She made it yesterday, and all afternoon I have been dilligently cooking it over low heat so that things cook down and will taste great this evening.

Such is the life of a retired police officer / part time website developer / part time blogger. Do you envy me? Leave a comment below. I look forward to hearing from the few of you who actually visit this blog!

As promised, here is the first “One Photo a Day” for the New Year. Each day I will post one photograph depicting an image of some part of my daily activity.

Christmas is officially over at our house. As is normally the practice, January 1st is the day when our live Christmas tree is taken down for the season. All of the ornaments, many nearly one hundred years old, are carefully taken down. Once wrapped in the appropriate layers of facial tissue, they are stored away in a Tupperware crate where they will sit siliently in the dark until next December. The lights are then removed, and the tree is rather unceremoniously taken out the back door to await removal of the stand. Several days from now the city will bring a chipper truck down our street and the tree will be reduced to mulch.

There has been talk at our house for the past fifteen years about buying an artificial tree. Each year that talk has been vetoed by one member of the family or another. Unofficial family rules established years ago granted that veto power to each family member. Our two sons have both graduated from college and moved on to their respective lives, so there are only two such votes that remain in our household. I did get the distinct impression earlier this year that, for the first time ever, there might be a unanimous vote to get that artificial tree this year. Time will tell. In the event this occurs, I will write about it here.

A good friend of mine, Dennis Markham, restores vintage Western Electric rotary dial telephones. He painstakingly disassembles them and cleans and polishes each and every component. Including the screws. He does a phenomenal job. Until you see one, you won’t believe how great they look.

Anyway, a couple years ago I fooled around with restoring the same phones. Nothing serious, but I restored a few and then lost interest. For some reason, two days ago, I suggested to Dennis that I was iinterested in a red phone that was manufactured during the month of my birth, which is November of 1955, and that I was searching eBay trying to find one.

Guess who showed up at my house today? Yup. He had a perfectly restored red Western Electric phone that was manufactured on November 11th and November 14th of 1955 – the day before and two days after the day of my birth. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, that a fifty-one year old telephone is still in service, and looks as good as the day it was made.

Thanks, Dennis, for another great restoration and a great gift! Anyone interested in one of these delightful gifts should visit www.VintageRotaryPhones.com.

I took my camera with me today for my afternoon dog walk into the woods. We walked past one of those very tall radio towers that seem to spring up in the middle of nowhere. We walked all around the tower, and I was interested in the various guide wires and tie-down cables that sink deep into the ground and hold the tower steady.

My dog was interested in smelling about for where the deer had been. Her nose took me around the backside of the tower fence where I found a placard laying on the ground. It apparently had been attached to the fence, but either time or vandals had torn it loose and the sign now sat quietly on the ground. Taking notice of just what the sign read, I took a quick photo and got the heck out of there. No telling what kind of strange illnesses my dog and I are going to get after being too close to the radio tower!

Yesterday I was walking my dog. I drive her to a trailhead near our house and walk on the trail for about two miles. The trail is an old, abandoned railroad line that has been reclaimed by the city, regraded and is now a nice firm surface to walk or ride a bicycle down.

It meanders through a wooded area that is actually a nature area. Beautiful setting it is. Trees, the Clinton River, and lots of other nature. As we reached a point on the trail my dog kept wanting to pull off to the right, which was in the direction of the river. So, being a dog lover, I wanted to give the dog exactly what she wanted. After arriving at the river, which was only a few hundred feet away, we were confronted by four whitetail deer standing in the nearly still water. Quite a sight. Large deer they were. They took one look at us and bounded off to the south, with their whitetails glaring back at us in the setting sun.

If I had only had my trusty camera…that would have been the daily photo for yesterday. The lesson learned was to start taking my camera with me everywhere so that I might actually post a photo or two of something interesting on this website…

The day is winding down. It’s nearly midnight and I am just about to close down the computer for the day.

What you see in this photo is what I have been looking at for the past four hours: my laptop, a bottle of water and a mouse. I have been working on a new web design project that I just received the go ahead on today. So, I have been doing some basic mockup and initial layout work for the new design. Being a freelance web designer looks pretty glamorous, doesn’t it?

Christmas evening at our house found several family members and friends lounging around the family room watch NFL football on television.

One of the visting friends was Molly, a yellow Labrador Retriever that belongs to the girlfriend of my youngest son. Molly had settled in on the sofa, but I am not sure that she was watching television. She was much more interested in my dog, food in the kitchen or chasing a stick in the backyard. One thing is for certain, though…whoever coined the phrase “It’s a dog’s life” must have been envisioning Molly settled in on the sofa.

This photo was taken on another glorious day in Venice, Italy. The image you see is a portion of the Grand Canal, with an assortment of gondolas docked for the day as they await the arrival of their singing gondoliers. We found Venice to be a magical place – perhaps the most magical place on earth. There is nowhere else like Venice.

This is a test post in preparation for my New Years challenge to post one photo per day on this website.

This photograph was taken in Rome, Italy. My wife and I are standing on the roof of the Castle St. Angelo. Behind us the Vatican City is in view, with the dome of St. Peter’s Basillica standing prominently. The lower buildings to the right of the church are the Vatican Museums, where the Sistine Chapel is located. It was a terrific day, very warm and sunny, and in a location that could not be beat. We had been talking with a retired couple from California who volunteered to take this photo. It has turned out to be one of my favorite travel photos and a personal favorite photo of my wife and myself.

OK, here’s the deal. Starting on January 1, 2007 I am going to take and post one digital photograph each day. A thumbnail to each of those photos is located on the sidebar of this page, with a link to the full size photos and a brief description. I haven’t quite worked out the details of where these photos will be hosted, but I will have the plan in place by New Years Day.

In other words, each day I will be taking one snapshot-in-time of something in my day-to-day routine. Because I know my routine far better than you do, I have to admit that most of the photos will probably be pretty boring in composition. On the other hand, I might just take a good one from time-to-time, too!

I got this idea from Dan Champion over at Blether. I will take up the challenge and see if I can pull it off. Stay tuned.