Flowers in the rain

Shooting in the rain may be a tad unpleasant, but it makes the colors more vibrant & the flowers that much more beautiful! These peonies are in front of my house, and I love watching them spring to life every year. Incredible how fast they grow...

And a lovely rhododendron... or azalea? The orange flowers that I posted earlier are already gone.

Dunkin'... D'oh!

Guess this means the new Dunkin Donuts AT MY GYM
is almost open. I like mine sprinkled with irony.

An unexpected night at the Nelson

Last night after an EMW team happy hour, I joined some coworkers for the YFA happy hour at the Nelson. Thanks to Carrie & Andy for the invitation & for the ticket to hear retiring museum director Marc Wilson speak! Here's my favorite quote from his talk: "If you want to win, sometimes you have to go a little berzerk." I can't remember the context (I blame the "asian pear" from The Drop & the gin-and-tonic-chaser), but how funny is that?

And I say this every time I post about our museum, but every time I go, I am amazed at what an incredible jewel of a museum we have in our city. It has been fun to see it change & expand in the last 13 years. It really is world-class. I can't wait to go back & spend more time there, exploring the Bloch building & the sculpture garden.You can see one of my favorite paintings in the collection on the left side of the photo above, from the museum's website. The artist is Dirck van Baburen.

Random Hallmark Moments: My plush in Japan!

Another Centennial update from Hallmarkland: I was not lucky enough to accompany my plush Don & Dave Hall on their voyage to Japan, but check it out... top of the cake, baby! And Don looks pretty happy! 
I definitely think he should have brought me along as his translator, though. Then I could say, 「こんいちはホールさん。あなたのぬりぐるみはとてもハンサムですね。そして、そのケーキはとてもおいしさケーキですね。いっしょにお鮨を食べたがっていますか。じゃあ、行きましょうか。」Which means, "Good afternoon, Mr. Hall. Your plush look very handsome, don't they? And that cake, it looks very delicious. Would you like to eat some sushi together? Alright then, shall we go?!"   Thanks to Mark Spencer for the photo!

Awesome graphic

Sign over the sink at my allergist's office. Lots of room for interpretation for what's happening in that strange drawing, but I love it!

Crow, two weeks in a row!

Class tonight

I've been doing "Camp 24" class at my gym for over a year now; it's interval training focused on strength, cardio & endurance. And just as I'm getting good at it, Janine switches up the whole routine & it's sweet torture all over again. Tonight it was a ton of squats & lunges. Between that & the long sets of jabs & punches with hand weights, my dogs were barking! But I'll be prepared for the zombie holocaust.

A day on the farm

The cow encounter on the prairie reminded me that I have a few fun cow-related stories from my childhood.

1) On Thanksgiving day, we usually visited the farm owned by my Aunt Marion & Uncle Dick, on my dad's side of the family. Of course my sisters & I were excited to see the animals, including the cows. One year when we arrived, the cows were having their lunch of corn & grain. They were all lined up with their heads down in the troughs when we approached. I leaned in to get a closer look... and just then, one of the cows lifted her head & licked the entirety of my face in one fell swoop. And I must say that as if a full-facial lick by a cow wasn't heinous enough, the addition of massive amounts of saliva & bits of grain which she had been chewing added all kinds of rich texture to the experience. Like rubbing your face with sandpaper which someone massively sneezed into. Nice.

2) One of my best friends from school, Laura, lived on a beef cattle farm. I LOVED visiting her at home, because there were always animals to play with. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was switched at birth because I should have grown up on a farm! We would spend hours outside exploring their farmstead. And one particular memory is my favorite: her father had just finished baling the hay, and there were HUGE hay bales (like you see in Impressionist paintings; they seemed 10' tall!) spaced evenly apart all along a field. We played tag, where the "it" person was running on the ground, trying to tag the other... who was up on top of the hay bales, jumping from one to the next. (We later re-enacted this game in her room, jumping between the twin beds.) As I recall, we had some incredible games of hide-and-seek in the yard with large groups of kids, she had some wicked Play-doh playsets as well as an Atari 2600 with the tanks & planes game, and her mom was a great cook. Whenever I ate dinner with them, it was accompanied by large glasses of ice cold milk... which I would refuse at home, but I was polite enough to drink when visiting. It tasted better on a farm. (And they didn't have dairy cattle!) When I spent the night at her house, we'd get up in the morning & make pancakes from scratch. Her favorite flowers were black-eyed susans, and I believe she named one of the kittens after them. Her family didn't live particularly close to us, so during summer vacations we would concoct extravagant letters that we'd mail to each other—mock newspapers and things like that. This devolved into unabashed goofiness like taking a plastic bag & filling it with flour, sugar and spices from Mom's cupboard, which we labeled as "recipes" and sent through the mail. Can you imagine kids mailing unidentified powdered substances to each other these days?? We'd be arrested as terrorists. How times have changed. (And not always for the better.) I'm sure the recipes were the inspiration for her 4H nutrition project, for which she had to create meals & calculate the calories & nutritional value of each. I thought that was awesome.

Whew! Lots of good memories packed into that post. It's funny how your brain works, when things you think were long forgotten find their way back. Enjoy this related video.

More spring flowers

The spectacular show continues! I love watching flowers as they bud & then bloom. They all have their own unique way of unfolding:

The Asiatic lilies are going to put on quite a show.

Even the foliage is beautiful!

Mini yellow irises:

Sedum:

And Indian Carpet (Sweet William):

Look at how the buds pinwheel open:

Happy Mother's Day

Taylor & Aki wish my Mom & every mom a Happy Mother's Day!

Red Panda

I just caught a show on Animal Planet that was all about red pandas, in the wilds of Nepal. Hard to imagine a cuter animal, as evidenced by these photos I found on Google. Makes me want to visit the zoo...