Tag: Progress

Haunting

Hannah KeeneLeave a comment

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

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We are fortunate here in Oakland to have several very talented Mural Artists. I drove by this mural yesterday, made a U-turn, parked, and took several shots.

At first glance from the car, this appears to be straight out of my childhood nightmares. So much so that I wondered if the artist, whom I have never met, had a window into the horrors of my brain. This mural is HUGE, painted, as you can see, on 2 sides of the building, and probably 15 feet tall.

From the car, this portion was all that I saw. It is terrifying.

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Up close, I saw the full mural.

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This mural completely overwhelms you. But once I had gotten up close, I noticed this small courageous figure and the forrest of stark trees, which hadn’t been noticeable from the car.

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A closeup.

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This young boy, standing up to the wild, fantastical beast, is showing so much bravery, that you think that he just might prevail. He must be terrified inside, but he continues to stand, recorded in paint on a wall. It ends up being a powerful symbol not only of courage, but of resistance. I suspect the world is in desperate need such symbols, haunting though they may be.

And the title?

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All photographic images: Hannah Keene 2019.

Posted for Terri’s Sunday Stills Photo Challenge: Something Scary.

Lines, Squares and Bumps

Hannah Keene8 Comments

This is an example of the bright yellow metal plates that our city puts in the cut out portion of the curb meant for wheelchair users. The bumps slow the wheelchair down a bit, and the yellow shows everyone that the curb is cut out to be a slope from the sidewalk down to the road. In addition, these proved helpful to my husband in the last few years of his life when he was legally blind. He still had a small circle of vision in one eye, but could only look one place at a time (straight forward, down to his shoes, etc.). He thus could either look where he was going, or down at the sidewalk. He obviously chose to look where he was going, As he approached a cut out curb, the texture of the bumps that he could feel both with his feet, and with his white cane, warned him that he was coming to a road and had to stop. They were of great help.

A few weeks ago I was in a very large parking lot with a lot of sidewalks in front of shops, and I noticed that there seemed to be these yellow plates all over. It seemed to be a photo opportunity for Becky’s challenge of October lines&squares. And bumps.

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Hannah Keene 2019

A Boy and His (Shared) Dog

Hannah Keene2 Comments

I am finding myself somewhat nostalgic and sad lately. The daylight is beginning to fade sooner and sooner, and while fall is usually my favorite season, September 2 marked the first year anniversary of my husband’s death. So I have been looking through family pictures of late, and went searching for these, as they are among my favorites of the past year – the first year without my husband of 44 years. While the post itself is far longer than six words, the title is exactly six, so I hope I can still use the Six Word Saturday hashtag.

I have written before about the fact that my good friends, Martha and Arthur, and I share our two dogs. Theirs is Teddy the Labradoodle and mine is Zoë the Miniature Schnauzer. When my husband and I returned to Northern California three and a half years ago and moved into our retirement community (St. Paul’s Towers), the grandkids were just 1 and 3½. Teddy was bigger than the 1 year old, obviously, but he was also awfully big for the 3½ year old. About a year ago, when they were 3 and almost 6, the two of them decided that it was time for them to start walking the dogs instead of just accompanying me when I walked them. So they became the walkers, and I became the accompanying and supervising person. The 3 year old was still rather scared of Teddy, but was comfortable walking Zoë. The almost 6 year was adamant that he wanted to walk Teddy by himself, without me holding on to the leash. Here is the result: he walking confidently on ahead with Teddy last February, when he was fully 6+ a few months. My granddaughter, Zoë, and I are lagging behind, in a perfect position to capture a photo.

Walking the Dog at Twilight

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Images: Hannah Keene 2019

Posted for Six Word Saturday. Well, at least there’s exactly six words in the title. 😉

The San Francisco Transbay Terminal/Transit Center

Hannah Keene3 Comments

When I was a little girl in the early 50’s, and then later when my family returned to the Bay Area in the late 60’s, one of the constants was the San Francisco Transbay Terminal. Built in 1939 by the famous local architect Timothy L. Pflueger, it was a huge concrete building where the trains from East Bay and then in 1959 buses from the extended Bay Area would arrive. Even long distance transportation such as Greyhound busses and Amtrak trains would pull up at the terminal. Then all you had to do was walk outside, and climb aboard one of the various forms of public transit available in the City. The East Bay cities had their transit companies and S.F. had another. But all of them worked remarkably seamlessly together. Not flawlessly, mind you, but it was a piece of cake to transfer from one system to another.

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This image was copied from Wikipedia

My husband and I left the Bay Area for jobs when we got married at the end of 1974. 42 years later we returned (2016), only to visibly discover what we knew from the news: the 1939 Terminal had been demolished and the new San Francisco Transbay Transit Center had been built. This was a HUGE change as you can see below. I took this photo as friends and I were inching our way towards the on-ramp for the Bay Bridge about 2 months ago. We had gone into the City to see a play, and there seemed to be an accident blocking one access to the bridge. At one point it took us half an hour to advance 5 blocks, so it was a long trip home. We laughed, we joked, we carried on, and of course I used the opportunity to take photos by leaning out the window.

Here is one photograph of the new Transit Center taken just as we entered under the overpass, and looking behind us. (It’s now named the Sales Force Transit Center). Look for the garage entrance (Enter and Do Not Enter) in the lower right of the photograph, then follow upward on the slant toward the windows and you will see the steel grid of the canopy reflected.

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Hannah Keene 2019

Posted to the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Change

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Genius of Scaffolding

Hannah Keene2 Comments
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Image: Zebras Child 2019

Scaffolding has been around since humans decided to try and build higher than their arms and hands could reach. It took ingenuity to get the idea off the ground. (Sorry, that’s a really bad pun, but I couldn’t resist the temptation.) Archeologists think that scaffolding might have been used to reach the high portions of the rock in the Lascaux Caves in France. That would put the use of scaffolding in the Paleolithic era, which means that prehistoric man constructed some sort of scaffolding over 17,000 years ago. That is amazing to me, as I can’t really conceive of how long ago 17,000 years was. Additional information on the history of scaffolding can be found here.

This is posted to the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Ingenuity

Under Construction 2019

Hannah KeeneLeave a comment
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Under Construction                         Image: Zebras Child 2019

The theme I use, Manifest, is now retired, and so I find that I am unable to use the most recent tools to  write a post (such as Block Editor). So, an announcement:

New Theme, New Look Coming Soon

I may even experiment with different themes over the next several weeks, so hang on.

P.S. ~I would REALLY appreciate your feedback: what you like, what you don’t like, suggestions concerning what themes you use and why you like them. I’m doing much more Photography than I did in the past, so that also comes into play in terms of choosing themes THANKS!  ~Hannah