Poured Staircase by Ian Davenport
The Tide - elevated riverside linear park

#nikonz8

#thetide #art #artwork #flow #stripes #colour #staircase #pouredstaircase #iandavenport #london #thames #greenwich #greenwichpeninsula #riverside #MultiColoured #Pattern

#snap_art #snap_community_member #snap_colours #snap_kingdom #snap_community #snap_challenge #snap_artgallery #snap_uk #snap_vip_member #snap_minimal #snap_street #snap_patterns
#snap_world

Poured Staircase by Ian Davenport
The Tide - elevated riverside linear park

#nikonz8

#thetide #art #artwork #flow #stripes #colour #staircase #pouredstaircase #iandavenport #london #thames #greenwich #greenwichpeninsula #riverside #MultiColoured #Pattern

#snap_art #snap_community_member #snap_colours #snap_kingdom #snap_community #snap_challenge #snap_artgallery #snap_uk #snap_vip_member #snap_minimal #snap_street #snap_patterns

ZAPPED

Every day, the inflatable tubeman flailed in advertisements of “USED CARS,” and “HOT DEALS”.

“DREAM CARS!” read his sign. “HIGH END! CHEAP!”

Cars screamed past at horrifying speeds and he flailed until six o’clock when Wilf, the owner, would flick the big red switch at the tubeman’s base and watch his long orange body wilt.

One day the tubeman watched a woman pull into the dealership. She was grinning and pear shaped, with a floppy hat. She had ringlets of grey curls and thick cateye glasses and lots of red lipstick and she was absolutely radiant with joy.

“Wilfieeeeee,” she squealed, bouncing into the dealership.

Six o’clock came and went and Wilf didn’t come out to turn off the tubeman.

As the sales team left, and darkness crept over the parking lot, the tubeman’s flailing became imperceptibly panicked. Traffic thinned, and his wide eyes got wider. His inviting grin shifted to teeth gritting terror. Wilf always turned him off before sunset, and, as dusk rolled in, the tubeman thought the world was ending.

But as the stars came out, and bats flitted in the cool air the tubeman gazed in awe and wondered at the night, this cool, quiet, peaceful thing he’d never experienced before. He was struck.

Finally, Wilf and the woman strolled outside. She was holding his arm, and Wilf sauntered with a straight back.

“Tammy,” Wilf said.

“Yes?” Tammy had lipstick smeared all across her teeth.

“I know it’s silly,” he started. His grey moustache trembled. “We hardly know each other, but you make me feel young again.”

“Wilfie!” Tammy planted a huge, wet kiss right on Wilf’s lips. When she finally pulled away, the two panted, Wilf with a big smear of red across his mouth.

Tammy was breathless.

“I feel like I’m in my forties again! Or my twenties! Or high school! Quick,” she said. “Let’s screw in my car!”

The tubeman had no idea what ‘screw’ meant, but as the blue car began to rock and the windows fogged, he watched with equal parts horror, joy and amazement.

For the next couple weeks, Wilf came to work with a sparkle in his eye. He started wearing a tight red golf shirt and would pause at his reflection in the dealership door.

Things continued like this. Every day at lunch, Tammy came bouncing into the dealership, Wilf’s name operatic on her lips. She’d tip her hat at the tubeman flailing in the heat. She and
Wilf giggled, and kissed and screwed in Tammy’s car, always leaving the tubeman on, to whirl blissfully in the night air.

Then Wilf came to work with tension in his walk. When he glanced at his reflection in the dealership door, he glanced quickly, like he was touching something hot and didn’t want to burn his fingers. He tugged at his red golf shirt where it was tucked into his khakis.

At lunch when Tammy arrived, her gaze was downcast. She didn’t tip her hat at the tubeman, and she slouched into the dealership, hands clasped in front of her.

She left a few minutes later, wiping her eyes with the backs of her soft hands. Tammy wasn’t bouncing at all.

“Wait!” Wilf called, running after her. “Don’t worry, it was silly, I’ll return them.”

“Acupulco’s not the point,” Tammy called from her car. “I thought we were on the same page!”

She left.

Wilf hung his head and cried, fat tears marking his red golf shirt.

After that day, an urgency filled Wilf like a fan was blowing it in. His movements were calm, but inside, Wilf was flailing.

The boxes came on trucks and they were beige and unassuming and anonymous. But inside, they contained bright colours, tassels, grins. Wilf was buying dozens of tubepeople.

His employees gossiped and frowned, but he carried on, plugging them in and standing back as they unfurled into wriggling life. By the end of a month, Wilf had 23.

One night, after everyone left, Wilf came out and sat under his 23 tubepeople, swigging a bottle of rye.

“It makes sense,” he grimaced. “She wanted to screw in her car, and I wanted to have dinner and take her and her daughter to Acupulco.”

The tubepeople spun around him.

“Guess,” he said, hiccuping. “Guess I just thought at our age, we’d have something a little steadier.”

Night was falling, and the tubepeople’s twisting bodies cast long shadows on the pavement. Fireflies were starting to wink, and the day’s heat radiated against the night’s coolness.

Wilf rubbed his nose. “When I was seventeen years old, I was doing dishes. Our kitchen looked out on this big field of the people next door, covered in muck and chopped off corn stalks. There were a few clouds in the sky, but it wasn’t even raining, and I saw our neighbour, Tom, walking out across that field, and all the sudden, he got struck by lightning.”

Wilf took a long drink and burped through his nose.

“Bolt just hit him in the head, and his body went writhing around, like he was one of you. But I swear to god, maybe it was the electrical current making his muscles go funny, but he was smiling the whole time. Like this.”

Wilf looked up at the tubepeople, grinning.

The tubepeople grinned back.

“When I met Tammy, I felt like neighbour Tom. Like something great and magnificent had come out of nowhere and smote me, and all I could do was flail around and smile. But now that she’s left, I feel the same way– totally zapped.”

Wilf went to drink again, but found the bottle empty. He giggled, slumped back on the steps, and started to snore.

The tubepeople didn’t really understand Wilf’s point. Actually, they didn’t understand anything at all. But they enjoyed his company and the cool night air. And as Wilf drifted off into his drunken stupor, he did too, his broken heart easing in the grove of multicoloured flailing bodies.

#Cars #Fiction #flailing #JessiWood #multicoloured #olderAdults #relationships #story #tubepeople #ZackMason

#FlowersOnFriday

Massive #multicoloured #hydrangeas 😍

#bloomscrolling #florespondence #PollinatorGarden #Saanich #GardeningMastodon #Zone8 #YYJ #VancouverIsland #PacificNorthwest #VictoriaBC #VanIsle #Flowers #PlantFlowers #plants #nature #PNW #botanical #PlantLovers #Wsanec #perennials #DisabledPhotographers #photography #YYJphotographers #WorldInMyEyes #FloweringBush #Floral #landscaping

Dance of the hats during Ura Yakchoe festival, Bumthang, Ura, Bhutan by Eric Lafforgue

https://tmblr.co/Z7VXvxfxKdOKua00

#adults #artscultureandentertainment #asia #bhutan #bhutan2024775 #bhutanese #buddhism #bumthang #buthan #celebration #ceremony #colourimage #costume #cultures #day #festival #groupofpeople #horizontal #jakar #men #menonly #multicolored #multicoloured #mythicalcreature #outdoors #performer #publiccelebratoryevent #religion #religiousfestival #southasia

A few weeks ago, just before we had a heavy snowfall, I visited Volunteer Nanaimo to drop off a couple of blankets I had crocheted. I had been wondering where to donate them and through a Google search found this organization that, among many other things, donates blankets to community members who need them.

When I was there, I mentioned that their website indicated that they collect knitted or crocheted squares and asked if I could contribute. The woman I was talking to said that they currently had an embarrassment of riches in the form of a large supply of squares. What they needed, she said, was someone who could put them together. “Oh,” I said confidently. “I can do that,” even though this was not something I had ever done before. I figured it was probably within my capabilities, especially with the help of YouTube videos.

Accordingly, I was given a big bag of knitted squares and a couple of balls of yarn. The timing was perfect because the next day the snow fell and I was housebound for about ten days. Instead of just watching bad television, I was able to watch bad television and put together a blanket!

After I had done that, and after the roads were clear, I took the blanket to Volunteer Nanaimo where they were very grateful. I mentioned that I had some leftover squares and, if they had some more, I could make another blanket. Sure enough, after a quick trip to a back room, they provided me with another supply of squares. These were more diverse than the previous set because the sizes were not all the prescribed 8″ x 8″, and many were made from multiple colours of yarn. They were also of varying yarn weights, so the task of piecing them together would be a little more challenging than the previous effort.

Fortunately, this is my kind of puzzle. I made good use of the bed in my guest room in laying out the squares to create the required size of blanket. Volunteer Nanaimo preferred something to fit a twin bed and asked for a blanket six squares by nine squares, so that is what I put together. Some squares were a little smaller and some a little more than eight inches, but knitting is stretchable enough that I was able to use most of them. Only one had to be discarded.

I thought it would be fun to use up all the multicoloured squares and include the single-colour squares only to make up the necessary size. Once I saw the mixture of colours and yarns, I decided to add to the variety by turning some squares sideways. Instead of all the knitted rows being aligned, some went one way and some went another. After a bit of rearranging, I realized although there would never be a perfect layout, I could be content with a sort of balanced melange.

As I was putting this together, it occurred to me that this was a very appropriate solution, under the circumstances. The squares had been made by a number of knitters who were not known to me and probably not known to each other, either. They were all using leftover yarn from a variety of different projects, and the squares they had created reflected both the colours of their work and the type of yarn they worked with. Some were probably related to seasonal projects, some I could tell were originally for sturdy things like slippers, and some were for finer items such as shawls or baby clothes.

It pleases me to think that all these miscellaneous balls of surplus yarn came together through the kindness of strangers to create blankets for neighbours they will probably never meet. There is something profound in that.

https://snowbirdofparadise.com/2024/01/27/blanketed-in-snow-and-squares/

#blanket #blankets #charity #community #crochet #diversity #grannySquare #knitting #multicoloured #neighbours #squares #VolunteerNanaimo #volunteers #yarn