Sunday's Sentiments for 10-29-2017

Yesterday, Saturday, October 28th, marked the one hundred and twenty-first anniversary of the dedication of The Statue of Liberty. According to a Wikipedia page, the statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886. She can be standing in NYC's harbor (from the vantage point of Red Hook in Brooklyn), in the first image atop this entry. The second image features a driftwood sculpture of her.

That particular image (which was was included in an entry here on Blogger this past June), was taken by yours truly when I made a trip to Long Beach (on Long Island in NY) with my sister a number of years ago.

In any event, today, October 29th 2017, marks the two week anniversary (October 15, 2017) of my second trip to Long Beach for this year; and at time I saw Lady Liberty in driftwood again. She is featured in the next set of images which include other sculptures that are conceived in this material.

The artist, according to the picture directly below,

is Mitch Van Duff, who only lists his phone number as a point of contact, therefore I know very little about the driftwood sculptures' creator. Be that as it may, the images directly above illustrate how the creations of Van Duff's looked on October 15, 2017.

It was such a blessing to be at Long Beach that day, especially since it was only the second time that I was able to go in the beach in this year of 2017. On both days, the weather conditions as well as the stats for the Atlantic ocean, were fairly remarkable as evidenced in the next pictures.

The first one of the photographs directly above was featured in a recent blog entry where I discussed my first 2017 day at the beach. I'm including it here in order for you to compare the October weather conditions on my two beach trips.

In any event, besides the usual cast of characters (seagulls) that were there on my second beach day, , I saw an Iguana, alighting on his caretaker's shoulder, when I was in a refreshment stand on the boardwalk.

I got the iguana owner's permission to take the creature's picture. I've concealed his eyes as  it was impossible to get a picture of the creature without including the caretaker, as evidenced in the following pictures.

The caretaker told me the creature's name and I think he said it was Pugsy, but I'm not certain and I don't want to be reporting fake news here on Blogger. I will say this, no matter what the creature's name is, he/she is damn cute.

And there was another damn cute creature on the beach, a dog, seen in the photographs below.

He/she took advantage of the fact that there were no lifeguards around to enforce the no-pets-on-the-beach rule. People also took advantage of the fact that there were no lifeguards around to enforce the rule to keep off the jetties (or be subject to a $500.00 fine) as evidenced in the next image.

Normally, seagulls also violate the keep-off-the-jetties rule, but when I was there, a few of them were busy with another activity: rummaging through some belongings of a couple of beach bums who had left their stuff unattended to take a walk along the shoreline; as evidenced in these next pictures.

But there were  also a number of seagulls who didn't violate the stay-off-the-jetties law and who didn't ransack the belongings that were unattended by a pair of beach bums.

Some of them spent their time up in arms, or rather, up in wings, as seen below.

When I returned to my home, I told Cam, my visiting cardinal (whose book I co-authored),

about the gulls's wing flapping.

I had wondered if she thought the motive of these seagulls was similar to hers when it comes to gesturing with wings. After all, in her book, Cam spoke about her own flapping of wings (as she is doing in the photos below).

Cam wasn't sure if the gulls had similar motives to her when it came to wing flapping, but she wasn't surprised that I asked her. And I'll tell you why by letting you in on a secret! Cam has included a shorebird variety (but it's not a seagull) in volume two of her book series, Words In Our Beak.

ADDENDUM FALL 2018: 

The digital versions of Volume One within the Words In Our Beak book series that are mentioned in this entry may only remain available for a limited time, but hardcover versions of Volume One, Two and Three can now be found wherever books are sold. Please click here to go to my blog post that provides details as to where you can get these books.

MY BOOK SERIES

Additionally, I have rendered some images from these books into other formats and they are available via Fine Art America (FAA). Some of my other photographs (Black & White Collection, Kaleidoscopic Images and the famous Mandarin duck who visited NYC) can also be found on my FAA pages.