A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

♫... I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine
There's gotta be a little rain sometime... ♫
Lynn Anderson (1970)

Photos from the Rose Garden in the park in our city centre today; taken on my way back from having been to pick up my new glasses. The grey skies in the background brought Lynn Anderson's song to mind for me. The weather has been "back and forth" again a lot this week. Rain one day, 25C the next, and then again so stormy that one hesitates to go out just because of all the debris flying around. However, today the wind had once more subsided, the temperature was quite pleasant for walking - around 18C (64F) - and the rain actually kept away until I was safely back home again.

If you followed my July adventures, you may remember that I went to see my optician about a month ago; and after her examination decided to buy a pair new glasses, even if the results from the eye test only showed "minor" changes. (But it might have some impact on my ability to read small print.) You may also recall that I took a couple of frames home with me to ponder about over the weekend after the examination; but then ended up deciding on a third one in the shop instead, when I got back there. (Decicions, decisions...) 

What did not really strike me until today when I tried on the new ones again in the shop, now with glass fitted... was how very little the new frame that I finally decided on really differs from my old one! I almost had to laugh. The new ones are a bit more rounded in shape but that's about it...

 Old glasses: top/left, new ones: bottom/right.
I'm calling this collage: "Me and My Twin"...

There's a little bit more of a slight tinge towards green in the new frame compared to the old one (which is more just dark blue). But it's not really obvious...

Ah well. I guess I shall just have to claim that I've "found my style" and am sticking with it!

What I'm primarily hoping for is that the new glasses might make it a little bit easier to read small print on paper again. The main problem is macular degeneration in the left eye, though - diagnosed ~3 years ago. And that can neither be cured nor compensated with glasses. (But at least it does not really seem to have got any worse; which is good.) 

I did not bother to also get new separate glasses for computer work, though - my old "computer glasses" still work well enough.

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The sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem "Sacred Emily", which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays. In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a person. Stein later used variations on the sentence in other writings, and the shortened form "A rose is a rose is a rose" is among her most famous quotations, often interpreted as meaning "things are what they are", a statement of the law of identity, "A is A." (Wikipedia) 

 

Dinosaurius Aurantiacus

 

 On my short walk this afternoon, I spotted an orange dinosaur grazing on the football field.

Back home, I asked AI what would be its Latin name, and learned that it would be either a Dinosaurius Aurantiacus, or possibly an Aurantiosaurus. **

Letting my phone camera zoom it in through a hole in the mesh fence, it became a little clearer what was going on, though:

They are now obviously getting started on the project of turning the big empty football field into a park - which I wrote about back in May, in a post entitled A Field Day. According to the information I took part of then, the corner where they have now started digging is where they plan to build a gigantic outdoor stage. 

In case you don't want to bother about going back to that post, below is the image of what they are planning to construct, again. (Please note the size of the people inside it.) How it tall it might in the end turn out to be compared to an Aurantiosaurus with its neck upright, I'm still not sure.

  

* * * * *

** Because the ancient Romans did not know about dinosaurs, modern scientists and linguists created Neo-Latin words to describe them. 

The literal translation of "orange dinosaur" into New Latin is dinosaurus aurantiacus. 

The translation is broken down as follows: 

Component Breakdown

Orange: Aurantiacus (or aurantius) is the standard Neo-Latin adjective for the color orange.
Dinosaur: Dinosaurus is the accepted Neo-Latin noun. (Note that while dinosaurus uses a Latin suffix, it originally derives from the ancient Greek words deinos, meaning "terrible", and sauros, meaning "lizard").

Scientific Nomenclature Style

If you are looking to name a specific, fictional dinosaur species using standard scientific naming conventions (binomial nomenclature), you would combine Latin and Greek roots: 

Aurantiosaurus: Meaning "Orange Lizard" (Combining the Latin root for orange with the Greek root for lizard).
Dinosaurus aurantiacus: Meaning "Orange-colored Dinosaur" (Written as a specific species type). 

(Source: Google AI)

 

August Calendar Photo

 ... and memories from Västervik, 2025...

In my own photo calendar for 2026, the photo for August (above) shows a view from Västervik, on the east coast of Sweden. 

The link goes to a post of mine from August 2025, with some more photos from this charming old seaside town. My brother and I spent an afternoon/evening (and night) there on our holiday trip. The sky was cloudy when we arrived, but the sun came out later on in the evening. Looking up that post now, I see that I also wrote there that "I took so many photos that I won't use them all in this post, but will save some for later."  I'm not sure if I ever got round to showing some more - but as it can still be said to be "later", here are some additional ones now... ;)

 

This year, we are not planning any "longer" trip . I for one have been feeling rather tired all summer. Besides "weird weather" a lot of the time, I'm still feeling limited by my knee, and am not sure how I'd cope with full days of travelling and touristing. Hopefully my brother will be able to drive down here for a visit towards the end of August, though (I spoke to him yesterday), and we may just make some shorter outing or two from here. (For me just now it doesn't have to be neither far nor long to make a bit of a change - while for him it will be a a few days away from home anyway.) 

Skywatch Friday

 

Sunset views from last Sunday, 26 July (at 21:16) 

Since then we've had a "mixed" weather week, starting with rain (showers), followed by hot weather from further south in Europe suddenly visiting again for a couple of days (culminating on Thursday with around 31'C) - but then, without much drama, back to cooler temperatures around 20'C again yesterday...

Not all easy to keep up, but I'm thankful that the heat only lasted a couple of days this time, as that meant it didn't have time to heat up the indoors temperature much. Wednesday was laundry afternoon for me, which kept me inside. On Thursday I went for a short walk before noon (i.e. before it got "too" hot), but then shut myself in behind closed curtains etc during the afternoon. On Friday it was cooler but instead very windy, so I wasn't out for very long then either - but was able to let some cool air in at home... :)

Kept to shadowy paths on the old cemetery on Thursday...

Linking to Skywatch Friday 

 

Second Childhood

 

English title: Poo-Poo and the Dragons; originally published in 1942.
My copy in Swedish translation was printed in 1952.
Available for Kindle for about USD 1.05

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This month of July, with the weather shifting between too hot and too wet, and my bad knee still limiting me a bit as well, I seem to have reverted to a "second childhood" in my reading. On a whim, I started checking if some old childhood favourites of mine in Swedish (which I still also have in print) were also available in audio format from one of my library services - and as they were, I have been re-reading some of those "the lazy way" - i.e. by listening while resting, when too tired to do anything more productive... 

Alas the series that I dived into first (about "Kulla-Gulla") does not seem to be available in English: Only one or two of the books were ever translated to English at all, and none seem to have been turned into e-books. So the only chance of finding even the first two seems to be second-hand. (The series does seem to have been translated to German, but probably the same thing there - not likely to have been more recently re-published.) 

So really not much point in reviewing them here... But I'll give you a brief summary anyway - hopefully you might understand why I still feel inspired to do so, before I get to the end. 

I read these books more than once in my childhood/early teens, when visiting my maternal grandfather. Originally they belonged to my mum and my aunt - and later on, when that house was sold, they were among a few books that I decided to keep from there. 

Published in the 1940s, the story in these books takes place a few decades earlier (early 1900s). The main character is a girl (Gulla) who grew up in an orphanage, and then had to go into service very early on (still really just a child herself) to help in the household of a poor crofter with many children. (The croft called Kulla, and thus the girl came to be known as Kulla-Gulla.) Back in those days, orphanage children were "auctioned" out as servants to whoever demanded the least money from the village authorities to keep them. As things turn out for Gulla, though, it is discovered after some time, that she's really the illegitimate grand-daughter of the lord of the manor in the village. So in the later books, we find her having moved to live with her grandfather at the manor, and struggling to balance between having grown up extremely poor but then suddenly being expected to become a "lady". 

It's been several decades since I last read these books, but to my surprise I found I still liked them better than I expected. In some ways I can probably relate to them even more now, because of in later years also having learned more about my other grandfather's childhood: He was born the only child of an unmarried mother, and grew up in poor circumstances in a small croft cottage, too. After only a few years in the village school he became a shoemaker's apprentice - but then managed to change his career and became a journalist instead; and wrote a book about crofts in the village where he grew up (which was published after his death, by my parents).
...

Another of my old childhood books that I recently managed to find to listen to in Swedish is the book at the top of this post: Poo-Poo and the Dragons, originally written in English - and available cheap for Kindle if anyone should feel tempted...

It seems that this author, C.G. Forester, wrote many novels - and this one is not among the those he's best known for. (You can look him up in Wikipedia if you want to know more.) Personally I can only recall having read this one, though. Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942) was created as a series of stories told to his son George to encourage him to finish his meals. (The boy had mild food allergies and needed encouragement to eat.) It is a totally whimsical story (involving dragons kind of "taken for granted"), but I found myself still enjoying it!

Now I'm curious to know if others among my blogging friends who have reached "senior" years also still have kept some of your old childhood favourites - and perhaps even re-read them now and then... ? (In my own case, as I don't have grandchildren, I can't "hide" my re-reading of children's books behind such excuses!)