Hello Friday!

I told myself I was going to work out this week, I did go for a long bike ride on Monday, but that was the extent of that. sigh, so I will start today! I will go for another ride, the sun is out, it looks like it will be a decent day. This weekend is going to be yucky, but whatever. Here are a few of the pictures I took of my town while on my bike ride on Monday. These were not on manual, I let my camera think for me.

I ride up and down the alleys that nobody really knows about unless you live on them. I rode my bike to streets that are not main thoroughfares for anybody but those who live on that street. I do get many people staring at me like I am scouting out the neighborhood to rob them, but I am a non violent looking 35 year old woman with a camera around her neck and riding a cherry red vintage style bike with a basket. I do not look threatening.

I used this to my advantage to ask a few people if I could take pictures in the back yard. Two people accepted, the third was not home, but I so want to go back there, there is a HUGE decaying barn there. It is Gorgeous!

Anyway, the alley pictured here with the fence of many panels, with mean dogs that wanted to chew me up behind it I met two lovely towns people. They have lived in their houses since the 1950's. Both houses date from the 1920's (early). Gordon told me of his sons shooting at a target on his now leaning garage, the BB's are rusted in the weathered wood. They received these guns for Christmas in the 1960's. I thought of Ralphies red rider BB gun. He allowed me to take some pictures of his leaning garage, a wrens nest that was built in the middle of a rug that was hanging on a wire, a rusting blue bike, and he told me personal stories of what it was like living here long before I was born. He was very friendly.

Then to his neighbors home, she lives alone and she is elderly. Out on her porch sunning herself. I look at her gutters and they are growing a lot of plants, they look like little window boxes. It must have taken ten or more years to get that amount of growth on there. She must have leeks in her roof. I would like to go back and clean those out for her. I ask her if I can go to the back yard and take pictures. Her back yard is basically paths between bluebells and ivy, littered with rusty antiques. She said "it is not very pretty back there" I told her to me it really is. I plan to print out some pictures and bring them back to her. The last 4 pictures are from her back yard, they barely show all the stuff she has back there. When I was leaving she was inside, I suspect     

spying on me from one of the cluttered windows, but can't imagine how she could come close enough to any of them to see. I have a fear of becoming an old lady like her. In a house of disrepair with all my neat things as my prison walls. I think I have started the process, I think I am taking a different path, I hope.

I hope you all have a great weekend and If I do not pop in this weekend, please, all of you Mothers, Have an amazing Mothers day!