Sunday in the "city"

One of the more recent blogs on my circuit is sfgirlbybay. The photos she posts and the design themes she pulls together make me dream of time to be creative, re-decorating, and wanting to have a camera in hand more often (other than my cellphone and my Canon point-and-shoot).

One of her features is Sunday in the City, where she posts photographs of her wanderings in San Francisco. This week she opened the challenge to her readers - take photos in your own city. I decided to use my weekend break (courtesy of the Englishman) to have a go.

I had some rather tight self-imposed parameters. One is that until I can afford to buy my own fabulous camera, I have to rely on the Englishman's willingness to let me borrow this one. The other is that today it is pouring buckets, so along with promising to treat said camera like gold, I could only take pictures where there was no chance of it being dripped on - under awnings and in shop doorways.







I headed off to my local town, and started off with a hike up our butt-kicking steps to get me warmed up. Here they are, taken with my cellphone (which is more easily dripped on)...








Then I switched to the lovely 5D.

Because it's been grey and drizzly all week, these flowers at a street stand caught my eye first:

But I quickly moved on, mostly because I was getting wet, and also because flowers arranged by someone else are too easy a subject. I love alleyways, and although we don't have any big city versions, we have a few picturesque alleys to sneak into - the first a brick paseo with a mosaic shrine, the second a true alley with a wall advertisement left over from early in the century.

Of the two alley shrine images I took I couldn't decide which to send to sfgirlbybay, but chose this one in the end:

What do you think?

Not only a fun little project for a rainy Sunday afternoon, but a nice break from being a mother and my other job as an editor.

And because my days begin and end with these two, here's what I came home to find. A piano and a strum stick, playing along to Badly Drawn Boy. It's a sweet life.

Stay tuned this week for a series of posts on Design Week in the Mosey House.

Addendum:
Have a look at the Sunday in your city entries on sfgirlbybay.
Creative and diverse, and don't you love seeing a slice of life from somewhere you're not?
And that last photo looks mighty familiar....