summer's power

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.

I was looking for a quote to go with this image and this one by Russell Baker just made me smile. Because me, I'm definitely a summer sufferer - although I'm not really liking it. At all. Basically, everything above 20 degrees Celsius is already too hot for me, and the 30+ degrees and 80+ % humidity we occasionaly get in summer in Zürich make me suffer a lot.

But there are also things I like about summer, for example when the sky suddenly darkens on a summer Sunday afternoon, big rain drops starting to fall first timidly from the dark clouds in the sky, one by one, quickly gaining confidence and soon pouring down with a force that soaks you through to the bone in seconds should you happen to be outside. But you're not. You're snuggled up on the sofa, with a hot cup of tea, watching the rain splash against the window, the bolts of lightning across the sky, one closely followed by the next, feeling the walls and floor of the house shake around and below you when two clouds clash right over you in a deafening noise. I like these moments. I love them. They're fleeting moments, the storm quickly moves on, the thunder fading in the distance. But the smile lingers on the lips for a bit, body and mind welcoming the cooling of the hot summer air the storm brought with it, even though the sun's already coming back through the clouds.

I took this picture for this week's (week 28) theme of 52 in Twenty Eleven, which is Black & White. There's s little field of sun flowers on my way to work, and of course I couldn't resist stopping for a few minutes, earlier this week, to take a few pictures. But you see, the thing is, yellow isn't really one of my favourite colours, at all, and yellow flowers, well, I'm afraid I'm just not very fond of them, at all. Not even sunflowers, I'm afraid. So they were just perfect for the black & white theme :).

I haven't quite made up my mind about Flickr yet, wether to go on or quit, or something in between. The thing is that Flickr, blogs - both writing and reading - painting, each of these take up time, and together, they take up a lot of time, and it has now got to the point where I'm struggling to keep up with it all - with the result that I'm doing a little bit of everything but nothing quite right. So I need to downsize a bit in order to being able to really concentrate on what I'm doing and to get satisfying results, and right now, I feel like I want to concentrate more on painting and my blogs. I feel like I've missed out on too many things. The 52 of Twenty Eleven project, for exampe. I've just not been able to keep up with anything. But then the 52 of Twenty Eleven is a Flickr thing. So it will probably be 'something in between', at least for the moment.