This Time of the Year

If you want to feed two struggling species -- monarch butterflies and bees -- plant purple asters.

Japanese maple.

Limelight hydrangea.

A May-flowering rhododendron that got confused.

A quiet weekday afternoon in West Hartford Center.

Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, Connecticut

Norwich was a rich city at the end of the 19th century.  Industrialists harnessed the water power of the Thames River for mills and sold Norwich-made products globally.  The Slater family was the leading industrial mill family.  The son of the family's founder built a museum to honor his father.

The Slater Memorial Museum is attached to Norwich Free Academy, the public high school for Norwich and nearby towns.  An early museum head commissioned plaster casts of Europe's best sculptures and friezes.  So, a replica of Michelangelo's Pieta commands the mezzanine
above the central hall.  (The original is in the Vatican.)

Moses -- also a replica of a Michelangelo statue -- sits in front of fine stained glass at the other end of the mezzanine.  The original is in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.  Flash photography is prohibited, so I had to lighten the image to show Moses, at the cost of washing out the window color.

Tractor Ride

Willa.

Hazel.

And the dynamic duo.

Collinsville

The Collinsville neighborhood of Canton, Connecticut, has dozens of lovely old houses.

Come and Get It!

You can find this on the Collinsville Road in Unionville (Farmington), Connecticut.

Pink Party

The Susan G. Komen organization sponsored an event last evening in West Hartford's
Blue Back Square to raise money to combat breast cancer.

Mary was distributing literature but I talked her into posing for me.

She looked familiar but it wasn't until I got home that I remembered she is Susan,

whom I photographed three different ways at the New Britain Museum of Art.

Laura Hutchinson is the morning anchor at WTNH Channel 8's Good Morning show.

Alyssa Rae Taglia is a recent Miss Connecticut who now does traffic reports and news reports on Channel 8's morning show. Vanessa Wojtusiak is off air, the station's director of audience development.  She coaches the on-air talent about social media.

Ion

Ion Restaurant on Middletown's Main Street offers vegan food in a casual dining setting. 

Peace signs decorate one wall.

And on the opposite wall, City Bench has crafted a stunning environment from

a salvaged tree that might have found its way to a dump without City Bench and Ion.