Haven’t posted since the beginning of April.

(Pennsylvania went into lock-down on March 16.)

Didn’t want to write during the quarantine mainly because everyone else was documenting the experience, and I didn’t think it needed another voice. After-all, I’m a retired 70-something – I have a pension; I don’t work, I don’t have to worry about rent; I don’t have to worry about health care ...
Yes, I learned how to Zoom and that has been fun. I even play canasta online with 3 Canadians – Frank in Toronto, Ron in Leamington and Brian in Markham.

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So, what finally gotten me here?
The newly painted alley-gates – the above image is of the gate at the sidewalk; the featured image is of the back alley-gate. Both were designed and built by Steve Shepherd of Gilgamesh Forge up in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania.

The above pic came after several tries. I’ve been shooting the front gate for the last 3 days and it was only this morning, when I went back to simply remove the lock so as to get only the gate in the pic, that I began experimenting. And, the result is the above image. It looks like something you’d find in Europe.

In the next paragraph, I’m going to reference Freud’s definition of uncanny – the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar. (now tell me that isn’t a spectacular definition)

Let me begin by saying that I am terrible at picking a pallet from a set of color chips. Every time I’ve had to do this, I always picked wrong. (In the kitchen, it took three paint jobs before I got the right color. In the bathroom, there are paint splatters around the light fixtures that no where match the wall paint, but the bathroom is getting re-done, so it’ll get repainted.)
This inability to generalize from color-chips continued when I went to pick the paint colors for the wooden window-trims, door-frame, door and decorative cornices on the front of the house. The painters had to paint over the accent color I had picked. (For a couple of days, the front of my house looked like an Italian flag – OMG!!! – tacky to the max.)
However, I did pick the right color for the front-door and on a whim, I decided to have them paint the alley-gate the same red as the front-door.
And wallah, I got a red alley-gate.

Freud would refer to the serendipity as uncanny; I like his word better.