Days Of Gratitude - Mistakes, Challenges, Adventures And A Wonderful Time

I write this having been at home all day.  The weather hasn't been the best and I'm not particularly well.  That doesn't mean it's been an awful day of course.  I had been able to rest.  I've been able to catch up on some rubbish television watching.  And I've been able to write.  I've also cobbled together a makeshift cover for the hatch to our loft (or roof space) which has been open for a few weeks.  The noise of the wind over the roof was impressive from the hall this morning and now the weather has got colder having a large open hole in the ceiling isn't the best idea.  My plan worked so now we have a cover made out of a piece of kitchen work surface and an old kitchen shelf.

The days I'm posting about today were amazing.  Each day had another photographic challenge - and I've posted about all of them so most of these photos have already appeared on this blog.

Ten days in a row I've gone out in search of things.  I didn't succeed yesterday in finding a gorilla in a tutu.  I won't say I failed.  Just that I haven't succeeded yet.  The giver of the challenges did succeed in my non-successful challenge.  And she found a pink flamingo too today.  And a winged unicorn.  She has amazing finding skills.

Today I had to take a day away from photo challenges - although the challenge has been set I am leaving it a day.  Instead I've written from a writing prompt I asked the giver of the challenges to give me yesterday.  That's been an enjoyable pastime.

Okay.  Some amazing days.  A writing prompt is a little thing.  It doesn't contain a story.  And for each of these days the photo challenge acted much like a writing prompt.  The challenge was a seed but it wasn't the story.

What story will arise tomorrow from prompts and challenges? - and from my first cinema trip of the year, at a little 51 seat independent cinema.  Looking forward to it.

29^th October

Another day. More challenges! Photos of a butterfly, a pink flamingo and a marble run.

I completely mucked up the thing I was meant to be doing in Sunderland with nice Christians and so wasn't there at all. But that gave time for challenges and getting distracted.

By bedtime I had completed the three challenges. But on the way in Sunderland I'd walked down a few streets I'd not walked before. And there was art. Lots of art. (It's all on my little blog)

All that art made me happy. Just as playing a little in that water and getting a bit wet made me happy.

And the shelves of the liquorice shop made me happy.

Even spending a good half an hour discussing things with three of the fundamentalist preachers in Sunderland city centre couldn't bring me down, and they were of a particularly vile variety!

30^th October

Grateful to have been able to be at a certain event and to be mentally well enough to get to the end and still feel okay.

Grateful for going for lunch with SA people afterwards. It was great.

Grateful for my hunt for a robot and taking enough photos on the hunt to fill another blog post.

31^st October

Grateful for a really good morning, spent alone, on a quest to take a photo of a duck. This simple challenge transformed my day completely.

Grateful for free museums. Grateful for walking into random buildings I didn't really have any business in. Grateful for the fun of a slide in the play area. Grateful for dinosaurs. Grateful for swans. And trees.

Grateful to have taken enough photos to fill two blog posts.

And grateful to have photographed a duck!

1^st November

Grateful for having a lot of fun on a dog related challenge.

All I had to do was photograph a white dog. And I knew where it was before I began. But the adventure has turned into three blog posts! In part because Newcastle is such an awesome place.

2^nd November

Grateful for a moment of absolute clarity when standing at the top of a cliff. I wrote a sentence about that moment and it turned into a blog post.

Grateful for another silly photo challenge because without the challenge there would have been no adventuring and without the adventuring there would not have been the clarity.