Happy Sunday! Egidio is hosting Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #408 and this challenge is all about things that are over the top.

My definition for “over the top” is overly grandeur or something that’s there but totally unnecessary.

The first thing I thought of was this picture of an indoor pool at Hearst Castle. If you’ve never heard of the Hearst family, you must google. This castle is located in central California and it once belonged to William Randolph Hearst. If I remember my history correctly, he was a newspaper tycoon.

When I visited the castle around 15 or 16 years ago, I had no idea of the history of the Hearst family. I only learned of this history in recent year from listening to various podcasts. Back then, I was just following my mom and the crowd, admiring the architecture and the over-the-topness of the building. I don’t know about you but I still think having an indoor pool in one’s home is a bit over-the-top, don’t you?

I don’t know about you but I find this to be too much gold for my taste. I saw this while I was in Macao handling some business for my mom. I believe this was in the lobby of the Wynn hotel there. I remember that lobby had so much golden displays that I got confused at times because I couldn’t tell one thing from the next.

Finally, this is a tray of recently sowed seedlings. It has 2 varieties of romaine lettuces, 7 varieties of bok choy and tatsoi, and 2 varieties of spinach. Is that over the top? To be honest, I think it is and I have to laugh at myself for that but most of these are new varieties to me and I am experimenting with each one to find out which does well in my climate.

If you ask my mom, she thinks my entire gardening venture is over the top and highly necessary. “Why are you growing so much when we have the supermarket?” She would often say. What about for health? For the safety of consumption? Though I may have gone a little overboard with this tray of seed-starting, I don’t think I’m over the top when I say that the food in the garden is better than the ones in the store, which comes from who knows where.