Tag: #atozchallenge

  • G Is For Gators, Gardeners\’ Friends; and G Is For Glens, Full of Rhododendrons; and G Is For Goldfish, Swimming in Ponds – Yes, It\’s An A to Z Challenge Post! Welcome, Good Friend!

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    As I wandered onto the Botanical Garden grounds today, I mulled over my choices for \”G.\” I mean, Garden seemed too easy. Right?

    I came around a corner in the path and seriously, THIS was sitting there.

    Waiting for me.

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    Dear Reader, it was hard.

    But I didn\’t get in and drive it around.

    Though I was tempted, Dear Reader; sorely tempted.

    Besides. Dude was around there somewhere, with a loud machine, blowing botanical materials around.

    Now, I confess, I don\’t really grok the meaning behind using a leaf blower in a botanical garden. I mean, what are you planning to do, blow the leaves all the way out of the gardens? And then what? Your neighbors will get tired of a dirty great pile of blown leaves in front of the gardens.

    But oddly, there weren\’t any piles of leaves.

    Maybe he was just dusting?

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    Gosh, this garden, for the letter G or not, sure is gorgeous, isn\’t it?

    But that brings me to my favorite discovery since moving to the PNW, or to those of us who aren\’t yet in on the native lingo, \”The Pacific Northwest:\” rhododendrons! The place is lousy with them! Locals are, get this, even tired of them! (???)

    Not me. This, then, without further gilding the lily (another G word, lookatthat!), is the Rhododendron Glen:

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    These are just the early bloomers, too! They bloom from early, early Spring (one of the ones in my apartment complex bloomed mid-March!) clear through June.

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    I know it\’s not the same thing, but you know how when a cat is showing you their foot pads and you say, \”What cute toe beans!\”? Well, I had that exact same instinct when I saw these flowers!

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    Not actually a hundred percent sure this is a rhodi, but it\’s in the glen, so I snapped its picture.

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    Same here. I must have walked around this one four times before I satisfied myself I was actually IN the rhododendron glen. So I guess this is a rhodi too? It\’s sure pretty – the leaf ends are colored, AND there are flowers. LOFF!

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    I call this one \”Potential.\”

    (Does this mean I\’m a \’budding photographer\’? ~hides~)

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    Sadly, the lighting was even worse this morning than the last time I went, and it makes photographing the fish next to impossible – which is a shame, as I adore koi. Or, as they\’re known today, Goldfish.

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    They\’re all congregating together. If they were mammals, I\’d say it was to stay warm on an overcast, rainy day. But they\’re fish. So I\’m not sure. Maybe just gabbing together? Gathering? Garnering support? ~grin~

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    All right, Dear Reader, all right; enough of G. Next up is H – which will be less about the pictures and more about the philosophy and science of gardening.

    If you\’re participating in the challenge, please leave me a link to your blog in the comments so I can come visit you! And if you\’ve already commented but I\’ve been absent, please forgive me, I\’m a bit behind in my visiting but I will catch up between now and the weekend. Real Life has a way of getting in the way.

    But hey – we can always visit a garden to relax, yes?

  • F Is For Frog: Me-Deep, Me-Deep

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    And so, Dear Reader, we come to the granddaddy of all frogs, the mammoth of Bellevue, the wart-encrusted bronze of doom, the ohmygoshwhatisthat of my morning stroll: this, then, would be the frog.

    Or toad, but today\’s the F day, and therefore, it\’s a frog. Besides. No placard announced its identity, not even an artist attribution – of course, that could be more due to my state of shock as this monstrosity is sitting right there, out in front of dog and everybody, on a corner of a patio-like structure that I don\’t think is really meant to be a patio since there is a distinct lack of seating there.

    And so, my lonely frog and I confront the solitary condition of man after coffee but before work in his search for meaning.

    Dude. I have a Humanities degree. I take these little digressions from time to time. They make me happy.

    And it postpones the inevitable, which is this: I chose a topic for the A to Z Challenge, a challenge based on the beginning letter of words and words have specific meanings, and my topic is a topic about which I know few topic-specific words.

    It\’s like this, Dear Reader: there are two kinds of lady gardeners, according to the inestimable Sarah Ban Breathnach, of Simple Abundance: the first kind is the one with the pretty floppy hat and lovely gardening attire, gardening gloves and neat, well-oiled shears, who goes into her garden to maintain it and knows the Latin binomial of every plant and weed that dares step root in her loam. And then, there\’s the second kind, the kind to which I owe my allegiance, the ones with dirt speckling the sweat on our face and the leaves in our hair who proclaim exuberantly, \”I like that purple flower over there! No, not that one, that other one! The purply speckled one!\”

    Which makes it awfully hard, Dear Reader, without a lot of research, to post Garden posts past F is for Flower because one, by necessity, much know the proper name of said flower so that one can allot it to its proper day. Not unlike that lofty first club of Lady Gardeners to which, one day, I may claim some small allegiance but for today, whom I must displease with my exuberant shout of, \”Ooh! Pretty! Look, flowers!\”

    Flowers!

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    But wait, one more precinct heard from… As I was driving off to work, I saw my two duck friends (well, it may not be the two that live at my complex, but I like to think they joined me at the Garden today with convivial neighborliness) and I\’m pleased to say, they are environmentally Friendly (F is for Friendly) parkers! Look!

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    And that\’s all for this week, Dear Reader. Sundays are off for the A to Z, but rest assured, I shall return on Monday with G is for…

    Oh, come now. Would I be as banal as to say G Is For Garden?

    You\’d better come on back to find out, now, hadn\’t you?

    Cheers!

  • E Is For Entrance, and Comings and Goings – and, a Poem for David Bridger

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    Welcome to the Bellevue Botanical Garden and today\’s letter for the A to Z Challenge, E Is For Entrance! Believe it or not, the Garden is host to a variety of majestic entrance points. In Asian garden philosophy, and in particular the ones with which I\’m most familiar, that of Japan and that of Guangzhou, China, doorways and entrance points are given much thought. So, too, are windows and other vantage points from which to view something the garden designer wishes you to see.

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    This is deceptive, as it\’s actually a view of the exit: I merely walked in and turned around, to show you the sunrise and the parking lot. The car entrance to the Garden is circuitous: first you arrive at the passenger drop-off, then you swing around to the left to the first row of parking places. Then around to the right, then again to the left, then up and around to get off the Garden\’s demesnes.

    Oh, come on. I just had to use demesnes in a sentence.

    Moving right along then…

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    I love water features: fountains, bird baths, fish and koi points, rivers, streams, waterfalls – you know, water featured in a water feature.

    And this, Dear Reader, is a water wall. It\’s sort of a fountain, with a little pond at the bottom, fed by a stream at the top that\’s in a channel created by an artist that, in turn, comes from a fountain.

    In short, this sucker pushes ALL my buttons.

    And it\’s a nice place at which to meet other people in order to tour the Garden, if you\’re an extrovert.

    Like me, say.

    But I digress.

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    Apparently, I\’m not the only one on a Friday morning before work who wants to gain entrance into the garden. All forward movement counts, my friends; all forward movement counts.

    To My Friend, David Bridger

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    I thought of you in the dawn
    My friend, like the sun setting
    Fire to the world.
    The burdens you carry are not
    Ones I can take from you
    And you are, like the sun,
    Untouchable. Your words warm
    Me, like that selfsame sun
    Because I know you long
    For Fenrir to catch you and
    Take you into the West.
    I grieve that day just as I
    Watch the dawn of this
    For I know the cycle turns
    Whether we will it or not.
    And so, like Orpheus, I stare
    Into the sun and let its
    radiance hide that my tears
    Are not due to its radiance, but yours.

  • D Is For the Scariest Predator of the Garden

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    The life of an amateur photographer is fraught with difficulties: not getting hit by a car when taking pictures of the trees along a lane (nevermind that the lane is one of four on a major thoroughfare) or chased by the neighbor dog when trying to snap a shot of a particular flower (which really shouldn\’t be called trespass, don\’t you agree?).

    And then there\’s this. We wandered down around the waterfall and I saw him – the terror of the terrace, the devil of the developed garden, the predator of … something beginning with a p. He stood up tall and fixed me with a dour eye (a word also beginning with a d, as luck would have it) and I put my camera up to take the lovely shot of Mr. Duck Surveying the Fish.

    I didn\’t realize until just now, as I\’m doing my posting, that the slippery bugger ducked down (pun intended) behind a rock and left me naught but a picture of his ample duck body and orange feet.

    And so, Dear Reader, I give to you two more pictures of birds, though they match yesterday\’s post better since they start with C for Crane:

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    Tomorrow, Dear Reader, check back to see what I\’ve chosen for E. I have a lovely G, and a terrific R, but E… E. What shall I pick for E?

    Your guess is as good as mine, Dear Reader; your guess is as good as mine.

  • Carpe Carp! And Other C Words for the Letter C – on the A to Z Blog Challenge

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    Okay, technically this is from an earlier post where I shared what the QR code looks like. I had some delays getting my camera downloaded, and did so tonight. This is what the little QR codes look like, scattered around the grounds. What a lovely, unobtrusive way to share information for those of us who want to know what plant is which.

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    And this, Dear Reader, is a bench.

    Yes, I know. B was yesterday. Tough. I just unloaded my camera and found it – and isn\’t it a lovely bench? I love the design of these.

    Okay, let\’s Carpe those Carp!

    But first, a side note: Carpe diem, which is Latin for Seize the day, was popularized by what movie?

    And carp is…

    Well, c\’mon and take a look!

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    Fishy!

    According to Auntie Google, a carp is \”a deep-bodied freshwater fish, typically with barbels around the mouth. Carp are farmed for food in some parts of the world and are widely kept in large ponds.\” Commonly seen in garden ponds, they look like large goldfish. In some Japanese gardens, these fish live over 75 years!

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    The pond is just lovely. And tomorrow, we\’ll get to see what is waiting with baited breath to carpe those carp, when we see D is for…

    But that would be telling! See you tomorrow, Dear Reader!

  • B Is For… the Bellevue Botanical Garden – with a Twist!

    As we really get going on the A to Z Challenge, I wanted to share what it\’s like to visit the actual garden. And since it\’s the Bellevue Botanical Garden, I get two \”B\’s\” for the price of one!

    The Bellevue Botanical Garden

    The Garden is located outside of the city of Seattle, Washington State, USA. Bellevue used to be a sleepy bedroom community, but in the last couple decades the population has exploded and major companies have hubs here: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, to name just a few.

    The Garden has a great website, located here, with information on featured plants and their cultivation, rich photographs, and a robust calendar of events. It\’s just 53 acres, but once you\’re there it feels like you\’re not in a city the size of Bellevue. It\’s truly a refuge worth coming to.

    What I like as a garden visitor is that scattered throughout the Garden are stakes with QR codes that patrons can use to access information about particular exhibits and the featured plants. If you haven\’t encountered a QR code, according to Wikipedia: \”QR code is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode first designed in 1994 for the automotive industry in Japan. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that contains information about the item to which it is attached.\”

    Most modern smartphones can interpret these, and if you don\’t already have that capability, navigate to your phone\’s app store and look for a free \”QR Code Reader.\” Then, when you find a code you\’d like to read, open your phone\’s reader and position the phone\’s camera over the code. Wait a moment and your phone will ask you if you\’d like to launch the reader – in the case of the Garden\’s codes, my phone asks if I want it to open the Garden\’s web page. I took a screenshot of one of the results, so you can get an idea of the wealth of information:

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    Tomorrow we continue our A to Z tour with the letter C. Since I found some birds that will satisfy my letter D, I\’m not quite sure what I\’ll do for C; so I\’ll be just as surprised as you are. See you tomorrow!

    If you are participating in the A to Z Challenge, please leave me a note in the comments so I can come visit you back. Happy reading!

  • Welcome to the A to Z Blog Challenge Day One – The Letter A!

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    Welcome to April, and the A to Z Blogging Challenge! This month, I\’ll be blogging each day, Monday through Saturday, and the day\’s post will be related to the corresponding letter of the alphabet for the day – Day One is for A, Day Two is for B, and so on, all the way through the letter Z. We don\’t blog for the Challenge on Sundays, which gives us 26 days in April, corresponding to the 26 letters in the English alphabet.

    My theme this year is the A to Z of the Bellevue Botanical Garden. I\’ll take you with me as I journey throughout the garden, exploring the gardens, the Copper Kettle Coffee Bar, Trillium Store, and everything in between. There will be a suspension bridge, a Japanese walled garden, a meditation building, native species cultivars… in short, everything an urban nature lover could ask for. I might avoid all the garden bugs, because I don\’t really get excited about them, but since the garden is talking about them this month, you might get a glimpse into the creepy, crawly world around us.

    But today, I\’m going to talk about A is for Alphabet, and thus, writing, which leads me to journaling. Specifically, journaling suited for a journey through an urban garden. In her class, Expressive Pages: Journaling the Everyday, Judith Cassel-Mamet shows us how to use simple manila tags and a binder ring to create something she has dubbed a \”tag journal.\” Pictured above is one of my tag journals, in this case with a gesture drawing of a dandelion drawn with a brush pen. Tag journals are perfect for wandering around in a garden, because you can write, draw, even staple in ephemera and it all stays in one place, courtesy of the binder ring.

    I hope you\’ll join me tomorrow as I visit the garden and look for the letter B – B is for Bellevue Botanical Garden!

  • The A to Z Blog Challenge Theme Reveal – The Bellevue Botanic Garden!

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    The A to Z of the Bellevue Botanical Garden

    Welcome back, Dear Reader, to the Worlds of A. Catherine Noon! I know, I\’ve been very, very quiet of late, and I\’m doing my best to get back to doing what Noony does best – writing! So in a way, this theme reveal is a way to kick-start my writing life, blogging, and in general just pick myself up by my suspenders and carry myself onto the page.

    Why the Bellevue Botanic Garden?

    The Bellevue Botanic Garden is a gem, right smack in the heart of Bellevue, Washington State, USA. It\’s open free to the public and houses acres of local plants, exotic trees and flowers, and even not one but two Japanese garden features. There\’s a suspension bridge and a forest of local trees.

    Why the A to Z Challenge?

    I\’ve had so much fun in years past with challenges. I\’ve done \”The A to Z of the Zoo,\” at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, USA; \”The A to Z of Letterforms in Nature and the Built Environment\” on my companion craft blog, Knoontime Knitting: One Writers Journey Into 3D, and several other things both with themes and without.

    Why a Theme?

    Because it\’s fun! I had so much fun, particularly with the Zoo and the Letterforms projects, that I wanted to reprise that for this year. I\’m only doing one blog this challenge, because I\’ve been so mute lately I didn\’t want to overdo it, but I do have other ideas. For example, I\’m thinking of making the Letterforms project into a book! But for this year, I wanted to ease myself back into blogging and out of the house. The Bellevue Botanic Garden is right here in the town where we live, not far from my office, and it\’s open free – all things designed to get me out of my head, into the world, and onto the page.

    What about you? Are you participating in the A to Z Challenge this year? If so, please share a link in the comments so I can come visit. And if you\’re not, tell me what you\’re looking forward to as part of the Challenge. And if you\’ve never heard of the Challenge, tell me one thing you\’re excited about whether you\’re above the Equator and it\’s now Spring for you, or below the Equator and it\’s now Autumn. Talk to me!

  • Gone Visiting – Monday Road Trip, Jingle, Jangle, Jungle

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    In 2014, when I participated in the A to Z Blog Challenge, they had a neat feature for the post-challenge period called the A to Z Road Trip.  Visiting other blogs in the list and commenting allowed the participant to hit blogs they didn\’t get to during the challenge itself.  While I\’m not sure if they\’ll have this for the 2016 challenge, I figured what the hay, I\’ll do it on my own.

    My visit today is to a blog called Jingle, Jangle, Jungle: a blog about music, artists, and the stories behind them.

    The theme for this year is \”Women In Music.\”  Wow!  What a neat idea.  Plus, this blogger finished all their posts in February – a feat in and of itself, I might add.  Even a death in the family and a serious fall didn\’t deter from the challenge itself, and that\’s even more impressive.  Sort of takes all the excuses for not writing and throws them out the window.  This is, all things considered, a good thing.

    Happy blogging!

  • Why Letterforms? – Reflection on the A to Z Blog Challenge, Letterforms in Nature and the Built Environment

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    My theme for the A to Z Challenge here at Knoontime Knitting was \”Letterforms In Nature and the Built Environment.\”

    Why Letterforms?

    I adore letters.  I have my whole life.  I started young as a calligrapher, and had a business at the age of thirteen where I did menus and certificates for local small businesses.  While art was not something that was encouraged when I went to college, it\’s always stuck with me in the back of my mind and I got back into daily calligraphy a couple years ago.  It just seemed natural to look at letterforms in a non-traditional way, and while I was outside walking one day, it hit me.  Why not look for accidental letters?

    A book that was a deep influence on me was Alphabet Art:  Thirteen ABC\’s From Around the World, by Leonard Everett Fisher.  This was one of the first calligraphy books I ever owned and I used to pore over it for hours, looking for similarities and differences in the way people make the alphabets that represent their language.  I suppose because of this, it\’s no surprise I studied languages when I went to university, or that I speak several now as an adult.  My love affair with language and letters is a long one.

    When I started the challenge, it was simply \”In Nature.\”  I didn\’t start adding the \”Built Environment\” until I was out on one of my photography walks, prowling the neighborhood looking for ABC\’s.  I found an \”F\” in a fence that made me laugh because of the double entendre, and it hit me that because I have become, of necessity because I live in the third largest city in the U.S., an urbanscape photographer, doing letters in built structures was a natural progression of the landscape photography training I\’ve had.  After all, \”can\’t beat \’em, join \’em.\”  And so, I set out to find more letters.

    The more I photographed, the more I saw letters around me.  I\’d be waiting for a bus and examine a sapling waiting for Spring.  Or I\’d find letters in the joints of buildings and the elbows of signs.  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  I may even turn my photographs into a book, which tickles me because I can include narratives and poetry as befits the particular images.

    On a more mundane note, as I did the challenge I realized that I needed some kind of footnote to explain to visitors what I was doing, and where, since I had multiple challenges going.  Rather than re-write it each time, I created a \”backmatter\” file in my word processing program where I could write the notes, customized for each blog, and then just copy and paste each time.  That really helped me feel like my posts were tied together with a common thread and helped me promote the different blogs where I was participating in the challenge.  I\’ll definitely do that again next year, because it made things feel much more professional.

    Suffice it to say, I had a ball with this challenge and with picking a theme and, while it didn\’t have anything strictly speaking to do with knitting, I found the inspiration it gave me to be invaluable.  I can\’t wait until next year\’s challenge!

    For your ease of viewing, here\’s the list of the posts for the Challenge.

    Letterforms in Nature and the Built Environment

    A: The A-Z of the Natural World – Letterforms In Nature

    B: B Is For Bush! (No, Not THAT Kind of Bush)

    C: Urbanscapes And Letterforms In The Built Environment

    D: The D in a Tree

    E: The Largest E You’ll Ever See

    F: Hit the Fence

    G: Good Things Come In Threes

    H: How Does Your Garden Grow?

    I: There Is No “I” In Tree (possibly my favorite title of the series)

    J: Jump Out At You

    K: Konlabos. With a K.

    L: Too Literal

    M: Paint the Fence!

    N: Noony!

    O: O Say, Can You See?

    P: Poussez, Tirez

    Q: Quotidian

    R: Lowercase

    S: A Bit of a Stretch…

    T: Look Up, Young Man!

    U: Under-Over

    V: V! V-I! V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!

    W: Weird Sky

    X: X Marks the Spot – Even If It’s Tardy!

    Y: The Fork In the Tree and the Path Less Traveled By

    Z: Zed

    Thank you for joining me for the A-Z Blog Challenge.  If you’re blogging in the challenge, please leave me a link so I can come visit you too.  If you have a moment, please check out these other fine blogs:

    The theme on my main blog, Explore the Worlds of A. Catherine Noon, is The A To Z of the Zoo.  Join me as I explore Brookfield Zoo and finds animals, birds, and insects from A to Z.

    The theme at Noon & Wilder is The A To Z of Chicago.  Since I live here in the city and we have our Chicagoland Shifters based here, I figured I’d share a window into the city, Noon & Wilder style.

    The Nice Girls Writing Naughty have a new home, and we’re blogging in the challenge again this year.  Throughout the month you’ll be hearing from each of the Nice Girls, and during the RT Booklovers Convention from April 12th to the 17th, you’ll be getting live convention reports.  Join the conversation!

    The Writer Zen Garden’s brand new website is up and running, and we’re bringing you posts from me, Noony; my partner in crime, Rachel Wilder (the Wilder half of Noon & Wilder); the talented Darla M. Sands – a blogger in her own right, see below; as well as Grace Kahlo, Evey Brown, and author Tina Holland.  Check it out!

    My friends who are participating in the challenge (and if you’re not on this list, tell me and I’ll add you!):

    Write on, and Happy Blogging!

  • The A To Z of the Zoo – A Retrospective

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    As is the custom after the A to Z Blogging Challenge, participants prepare reflections posts that discuss what they learned from the challenge, what worked, and what didn\’t.

    Plus, I have zebras.

    First, the Lonely Zebra That Wasn\’t

    The last week or so of April, I cause the nasty cold virus that\’s going around and it horse-kicked me into the barn.  I don\’t often get sick, but when I do…  Yeah, yeah.  Thank you, Dos Equis man.  But seriously, this cold stinks.  So I was frantically trying to keep up with my daily challenge posts, which I usually forward-posted on the weekend so I\’d have time to visit my fellow challengers each day.  But as it got down to the wire, and I got sicker and sicker, it got harder and harder to do.

    And then the last day came.

    I was a day behind!  Oh noes!  But never fear, I\’ve got at least three challenge prep trips to the zoo under my belt, plus all my other zoo trips if needed, to make my final challenge post of Z Is For Zebra.

    Only… there were NO zebras!  Not in my March zoo trip.  Not in either December zoo trips.  Not in my last couple zoo trips.  Not in my phone.  By the time a half hour had gone by, and I was dragging and needed to go to bed, I had to face facts.

    My last post of the challenge would be sans animal.

    Never fear.  I am nothing if not resourceful in the face of danger!  And, there are plenty of peacock pics.  I lurve me some peacocks!  So not to be deterred on that, the last day of the challenge, my zebra post featured a peacock, a meme, and my fattest cat.

    See?  And who said challenges were for the faint of heart?

    But today, Dear Reader, the day of my Reflections post, I have Zebra!  Will post!  Read on, MacDuff…

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    So we went to the zoo on Mother\’s Day, which also happened to be my birthday.  I told my family, we must find zebras!  No worries, there are plenty of zebras.  They are always wandering around their enclosure, nibbling at hay, and being cute.

    We arrived, and all we saw were butts.  Three butts.  Zebra butts.  But butts they were, and butts they remained – despite calling, and cooing, and clicking, and \”Hey, you!\”

    We gave up, our sad intrepid little band, and made it to the okapi enclosure when it happened.

    The most loud, awful, non-donkey donkey racket we\’ve ever heard in our lives.  It sounded like a cross between an angry emu and a mule arguing politics.  (You think I\’m kidding?)  So we trekked back to try and find what made the noise and found this lovely fellow.

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    For those of you adults in the audience, even though you can\’t quite see it in the shadows, it became immediately apparent why he\’d been making such a god awful racket and why there was a large fence between him and the other, probably female, zebras.

    It is, after all, Spring.

    o.O…

    As for reflections, I have these:

    I like challenges, I\’ve decided.  This has been a year for them.  I participated in a gym challenge in December, where I attended the gym 25 days in a row.  I participated in the A to Z Challenge on three blogs by myself, as well as two team blogs.  I did something differently this year, though; I decided to actually pick a theme that required research and collecting photographs.  I have links to my other \”Reflections\” posts below, but here\’s a recap of what I did on this blog:

    This year, I decided to do the \”A to Z of the Zoo,\” which I like simply because of the alliteration.  I limited myself to Brookfield Zoo, for no other reason than to give the challenge some, well, challenge.  I have lots of photographs of animals in zoos because we love to visit zoos.  In the past year, we\’ve been to the zoo in Tacoma, St. Louis, and here in Chicago; plus there\’s the Lincoln Park Zoo here which, while we haven\’t been recently, has different animals from Brookfield.  I figured it would make it more challenging to actually find animals at Brookfield.

    We had to resort to Latin binomials for some of the animals, (a \”Latin binomial\” is the two word name scientists give to a specific animal that tells its identification and membership in specific animal sub-groups.  This practice is known as taxonomy; not to be confused with taxidermy, the practice of stuffing dead animals.  But I digress).  We had a heck of a time finding several of the letters; for example, \”J\” gave us particular fits.  If we\’d allowed ourselves another zoo, such as Lincoln Park, it would have been an easy matter to choose a jaguar.  But we limited ourselves specifically to Brookfield and so, on a chilly day in March, my husband and I went to the zoo with little yellow cards on which I\’d printed the animals I already had, and we brainstormed the rest.

    This turned out to be a ton of fun.  I\’m not sure what I\’ll do next year, but I think I might try something like it again because I had a ball wandering around and photographing things.  I got a lot of photographs that I didn\’t use in the challenge but liked a lot; I\’ll probably have those in later blog posts throughout the year.

    I highly recommend the challenge to anyone who likes to blog, and even for those of us bloggers who are intermittent or unsure how to begin.  I got a lot of ideas when I visited other bloggers on the list, and look forward to my Road Trip between now and next April where I plan to visit other challengers and see what they\’re doing with their blogs.

    Happy blogging!

    And, for your reading pleasure, here\’s a list of the posts for the A to Z Challenge, The A To Z of the Zoo:

    Amur Leopard – For A!

    Bears Napping, Bears Pacing, Bears, Bears, Bears! B Is For Bears!

    Wray-Wray’s Namesake – When You Find Your Name on a Camel

    Dogs – Of the African Wild Variety

    Stephen Colbert Ain’t Got Nuthin’ On Him! Or, E Is For Eagle

    Too Foxy!

    Number One Goose, And Giraffe Have Long Tongues

    It Came From The Ocean – The Dogs of the Sea – Harbor Seals

    Gettin’ Beaky With It – The Ibis In The Pond

    The Bird That Wasn’t: Jambu Fruit Dove – And A Party #Giveaway

    Lookit Them Feet!

    The King Of The Jungle

    Mexican Grey Wolves Are Sneaky

    North American River Otters… Were Busy?

    The Secret Forest-Dweller

    So Many P’s, So Little Time

    The Q Files

    Six Inch Thick Skin

    Been Waiting ALL Month For This!

    The Trouble With Tigers

    What Izzit!? – Today It’s Uromastyx!

    Varanids, Varanids Everywhere!

    Water Dragon!

    Xtreme Birds

    Yes, It’s Snow Leopards!

    Zebras Aren’t For Riding

    Thank you for joining me for the A-Z Blog Challenge.  If you’re blogging in the challenge, please leave me a link so I can come visit you too.  If you have a moment, please check out these other fine blogs:

    My theme on my Knoontime Knitting craft blog is Letterforms In Nature and the Built Environment.  I’ll be exploring my daily round, looking for shapes in the natural world and build environment.

    The theme at Noon & Wilder is The A To Z of Chicago.  Since I live here in the city and we have our Chicagoland Shifters based here, I figured I’d share a window into the city, Noon & Wilder style.

    The Nice Girls Writing Naughty have a new home, and we’re blogging in the challenge again this year.  Throughout the month you’ll be hearing from each of the Nice Girls, and during the RT Booklovers Convention from April 12th to the 17th, you’ll be getting live convention reports.  Join the conversation!

    The Writer Zen Garden’s brand new website is up and running, and we’re bringing you posts from me, Noony; my partner in crime, Rachel Wilder (the Wilder half of Noon & Wilder); the talented Darla M. Sands – a blogger in her own right, see below; as well as Grace Kahlo, Evey Brown, and author Tina Holland.  Check it out!

    My friends who are participating in the challenge:

    Write on, and Happy Blogging!

  • Zed

    And so, Dear Reader, the A to Z Challenge has come to an end.  Thank you for coming along on this journey with me.  I hope you\’ve enjoyed wandering the streets of my daily round, looking for letterforms in nature and the built environment.  I have to say, it\’s changed how I see the world around me and even given me an idea for a book.  But in the meantime, I\’ve got not one but two images for you today, one in nature and one in the built environment; a fitting close to my challenge this month.

    And remember, May 9th is the A to Z Reflections Post Day, and the Linky List is open from May 9 to May 13.  Keep an eye on the main A to Z Blog Challenge page for more info and updates, and of course come back here on the 9th for my reflections on my various posts.  Also, if you\’ve visited me and I haven\’t responded or visited back, please forgive me; I\’ve had a nasty cold and do plan to catch up to everyone over the coming days, I promise!

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    My theme here at my Knoontime Knitting craft blog is Letterforms In Nature and the Built Environment.

     

    Thank you for joining me for the A-Z Blog Challenge.  If you’re blogging in the challenge, please leave me a link so I can come visit you too.  If you have a moment, please check out these other fine blogs:

    The theme on my main blog, Explore the Worlds of A. Catherine Noon, is The A To Z of the Zoo.  Join me as I explore Brookfield Zoo and finds animals, birds, and insects from A to Z.

    The theme at Noon & Wilder is The A To Z of Chicago.  Since I live here in the city and we have our Chicagoland Shifters based here, I figured I’d share a window into the city, Noon & Wilder style.

    The Nice Girls Writing Naughty have a new home, and we’re blogging in the challenge again this year.  Throughout the month you’ll be hearing from each of the Nice Girls, and during the RT Booklovers Convention from April 12th to the 17th, you’ll be getting live convention reports.  Join the conversation!

    The Writer Zen Garden’s brand new website is up and running, and we’re bringing you posts from me, Noony; my partner in crime, Rachel Wilder (the Wilder half of Noon & Wilder); the talented Darla M. Sands – a blogger in her own right, see below; as well as Grace Kahlo, Evey Brown, and author Tina Holland.  Check it out!

    My friends who are participating in the challenge (and if you’re not on this list, tell me and I’ll add you!):

    Write on, and Happy Blogging!