It’s been a while since I’ve entered the PhotoFriday challenge, but I liked this weeks theme — “Body of Water” — and thought I had a good image for it. This was taken a couple of years ago in Lake Tahoe, California.

Ice cream, originally uploaded by stephendarlington.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Temperature.” I thought this image from my recent trip to Barcelona fit the bill.

This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is “Neglected,” which is quite appropriate since I’ve neglected to enter the challenge for quite some time now.

My entry was taken in Amsterdam.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Pattern” and here is my entry, taken in the new Oslo Opera House last year. Can’t say I’m a big fan of opera, but the building was amazing!

Is wasn’t really my idea. I saw it in the newsagents in Rhodes Town and laughed but I never really thought of actually buying it. The credit for that goes to my wife.

I’ve been posting pictures of each month entry on Twitter and Facebook but I thought it would be nice to group them all together in one post. That’s what you’ll find here.

“Glory to God, I’m an atheist.”

“What should I say now?”

“So that we don’t forget…”

“This is the life for me!”

“I’m feeling very romantic.”

“I took grandma skiing as well!”

“Shut up and move on!”

“For a bale of hay…”

“Anything for tourism.”

“We said tourism, but not like this!”

“Come again next year!”

“For a better tomorrow, we’ll talk the day after.”

I’m afraid that there’s no way that we can complete with this in 2013 so we’re not even going to try. I apologise in advance for your  disappointment. 

I barely recall any mention of Halloween when I was growing up. That’s changed in the last few years. It’s certainly being much more heavily promoted these days and I want to say — though I have no evidence to support it — that it’s at the expense of Bonfire Night. Presumably children asking strangers for sugary treats is safer than fireworks and piles of burning wood?

In any case, it’s big in America and has been for a long time and one of the traditions is going to a pumpkin patch. Since I was in California recently with family, including two children¹, it made sense to check out what happens…

There was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of activities from horse rides and hay mazes to eating grilled food and drinking lemonade. Oh, at there were pumpkins for the taking.

I never really got the idea of dressing up, but it’s a popular thing to do. Whatever my misgivings, Junior didn’t seem to mind being dressed as a pumpkin. His cousin wore the same outfit last year (this year he was dressed as a tiger). He spent some time studying his (almost) doppelgängers before moving on to the hay maze.

Away from the stalls, the pumpkins progressively lost their vivid orange colour and became yellow and then food for non-humans.

We didn’t take one in the end — suitcases being only finite in size and Virgin’s baggage allowance not being overly generous — but plenty of other people clearly did. Around the local neighbourhood were many examples of some fine carving…²

Whether or not you celebrate Halloween, I hope you’re having a great day. Here it may not be such a big deal but I had a fun day seeing what the run-up is like across the Atlantic.

1. Only one mine if you’ve been keeping count. [↩]
2. Complete with plenty of purple haze. Thanks iPhone 5. [↩]

Oslo’s new Opera House is bright and “Vibrant” — this weeks PhotoFriday theme — literally to the point that it hurts your eyes when the sun is out. (Fortunately this doesn’t happen very often in Norway!)

There are lots of cars “In Motion” around this roundabout in Lisbon, Portugal, which I thought made this a good choice for PhotoFriday this week.

It’s been a while since I entered a PhotoFriday challenge, but when I saw that this weeks was theme “Texture” I immediately thought of this picture. It was taken in Spain in 2009 and has been the desktop picture on my Mac pretty much since then!

This amused me but didn’t quite fit in with the “story” I was trying to tell in my blog about Oslo…