Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge – “Sense of Smell”

I took these pictures of wet pine tree trunks after it rained, at our former summer home in Wisconsin. I like the way the bark turned reddish when the trees were wet. To me, these pictures evoke the smell of rain dripping off trees onto the wet ground and a strong scent of pine brought […]

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change – baking cookies It is extremely rare for me to bake cookies! However, I wanted to give gifts last Christmas and had little money to spend, and since I hadn’t made cookies of any kind for a long time, I decided to make a project out of it! I downloaded recipes […]

The Hermitage Museum: 13 Masterpieces you can see in 2 hours

August 12, 2015 During our cruise in the Baltic Sea, one of the things I most looked forward to was visiting the Hermitage Museum, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world. It has the largest collection of paintings in the world. The museum, located on the banks of the Neva River, was […]

Onion domes and spires: Orthodox churches of St. Petersburg

August 11, 2015 Trinity Cathedral (Troitsky Sobor) We passed this cathedral, which I thought was so pretty, on our tour bus and did not visit. Wikipedia says that it is an example of Russian Neoclassism, and was built between 1828 and 1835. After years of neglect, it has recently begun to be restored. Many of […]

St. Petersburg (part 1): Two Palaces – Why Russia Had a Revolution

August 11-12, 2015 Catherine’s Palace It’s no wonder there was a revolution in Russia, I couldn’t help thinking when we toured the opulent and ostentatious Catherine’s Palace. Some of it was beautiful; some of it was garish. All of it was obviously extremely expensive. Catherine’s Palace was a gift from Peter the Great to his […]

Lost in Old Town Tallinn! (Tallinn part 2)

August 10, 2015 When the bus dropped us off in Old Town Tallinn, the first thing I noticed were the hordes of people everywhere! Since there were six cruise ships in port, each containing an average of say, 2,000 passengers – plus Tallinn has become a popular destination in Europe – Old Town was swarming […]

Blogging 201, Day 1

Blogging 201: Three (or four) goals to increase readership and improve my status as a writer.

Writing by Hand

Handwriting is necessary but not always convenient.

Touring Tallinn with a young Matthew Crawley (part 1)

August 10, 2015 We docked at Tallinn on a beautiful day. At 7:45 a.m., the temperature was 25°C/77°F! My husband got sick on the ship yesterday, and was quarantined for 24 hours – obviously no one wants a virus to spread like wildfire through the cruise ship! So I was on my own on the […]