when will the sun ever shine? (title by kevin.)

mmm, smoooooothieees….with banana, blueberries, OJ, greek yogurt, wheatgerm, baby bok choy, and mibuna, an Asian green from our CSA. So very tasty…so very nutritious. (Please admire Rebecca and Sam’s wedding day swag!)

Yummmy…

(Just so y’all know, my Sainted Mother is visiting later this week, so this is part of my campaign to show her that throwing random greens into a smoothie does not have to mean an icky gross-looking or foul-tasting debacle.)

I am feeling somewhat more photogenic today.

Me, after 4.5 miles on the treadmill (rain, rain, go away…) with a lot of random speedwork thrown in to the mix. “Speed” is, of course, a relative term. The fastest I went was a little over an 8:30 minute mile pace, in wee microbursts, with more and longer bits of a 9:00 minute mile pace, and a lot more 9:30 minute miles (whole miles, here) thrown in. With the Galloway-inspired walking breaks.

I’m weighing the cats every so often, as part of their vet- (and
sanity-) mandated weight loss program, and the scale is just…hopeless. It varies by a half pound from one minute to the next. Which I don’t so much care about for myself – that’ll all come out in the wash, and it’s a tiny fraction of my own weight – but it’s a big deal for a cat, even a portly or even stout cat. Anyway, they’re coming along. They are VERY good at sleeping. Champion sleepers.

OK on the flower report, did I tell you about the St. John’s Wort yesterday? I hope I didn’t, since that’s not what it was - ‘tis a buttercup. I think I didn’t tell you about that one. Ignore this paragraph.

I did have just a GREAT experience trying to identify this stuff (not my pictures) on a little walk today with sweetpea.

Doesn’t this look super-distinctive? Yeah, but I just could NOT key it out. And here’s why: I did not notice that this is a VINE. Makes all the difference. I finally had to resort to the (gasp) lazy technique of flipping through every-page-of-five-petaled-flowers before I finally found it. ‘Tis bittersweet nightshade! How cool is that? Ain’t it pretty? The berries are mildly poisonous, apparently. This was another one of those experiences where once I noticed the first example, we both saw it all over the place.

If you have any sun, please send it my way. My mood’s down in the basement somewhere, and it’s finally occurred to me that maybe the weather has something to do with it.