sun + Nikon = happiness

Friday Friday Friday! The day I go put my hands on strangers. Doing Reiki. The signal-to-noise ratio wasn't ideal - a lot of patients not in their rooms, or passed out, or about to be discharged, or visiting with family - but I did have some great conversations, and I put two people to sleep, so I count it a win.

AND AND AND I started the day off with a run, first thing. I have three half marathons in mind for this season - I'll choose two of them and register this week. They're not for a few months, so I'll have plenty of time to build up my base again after a crappy stint of missing too many runs due to the Epic Boomerang Cold of '17, that gift that kept on giving. When I was first starting up again after missing oh my god, like two or three weeks, I could hardly do a tenth of a mile first thing in the morning. Grrr. Summer running requires being able to fall out of bed and into your running shoes; it just gets too hot to wait til consciousness and whatnot.

Coming across foamflower in our woods today was just, the icing on the cake.

And can you believe it, that's an iPhone shot, above. Then I remembered: THE NIKON.

Ahhhhh...o yeah, baby.

Then the dear boy and I went for a walk, where I found ANOTHER jack! So we're up to five now. 

Can you spot the boy? The very top tip of the jack is pointing to him.

Closer to home, let's check in on the magnolia, still going strong:

And I think we're ready now for the saxifrage as seen through the Nikon. Each of these flowers is no more than 1/16th of an inch. For our metric friends, < 2mm.

Last but not least, daffodil exploration.

I guess I come by it honestly

Howdy, folks! Sorry I disappeared on you for a bit there – my sister and I were helping my mom move. When I was first getting ready for this trip, I contemplated bringing various things with me: the camera. the work laptop... In the end, I brought neither, and a good thing too, since we were on the go from ~8:00 am every day until we collapsed, rigid and wired, into bed each night no earlier than 11 or midnight. Lordy.

 

There was a whole lot of this.

My sister and I are very different from my mom in a couple of ways that become very apparent during a move: neither one of us has much use for fashion, for one. I am, as I type this, wearing a t-shirt, track pants, and a flannel shirt ca 1991. My sister’s even more of an ascetic – she can’t abide buttons, for instance. My mom, on the other hand, has an extensive wardrobe featuring fabulous colors and textures, with more than one pair of shoes to match each outfit. She’s also got multiple sets of china and dinnerware, all of which she actually uses, and approximately eighty thousand wine glasses. She probably wonders where we came from.

I mention all of this by way of saying that despite the fact that I am a Simple Country Girl at heart, I am now the owner of two mink stoles and a full length Persian lamb coat. I couldn’t help myself – I got all sentimental: these have been in our family for decades. Where I’ll wear them is anyone’s guess. Probably not to the grocery store. I’d love to think of myself as eccentric, but I’m not that eccentric. Yet.

Another thing I am now the proud owner of is my grandmother’s botanical journal. Here’s just a preliminary sample of how she spent the summer of 1927, when she was twelve:

Wow. I guess I come by this fascination honestly, although it took longer to manifest with me. At age 12 I believe I had my nose in a book.

I got home yesterday afternoon and I’ve been busy recombobulating myself. Today was Reiki day at the hospital – that’s always restorative – and in the afternoon, Best Beloved and I set off for the mailbox. Here’s what we found.

 

Golden alexander (Zizia aurea)

Kevin proved to be a veritable jack-in-the-pulpit whisperer, conjuring up four separate flowers.

Check out those glossy leaves. Often, jacks don’t have flowers, and I can see how coming across their threesomes of leaves might make you wary that this is poison ivy.

This one’s encouraging, because it’s managed to come up from a swathe of gravel our neighbors dumped and smoothed on the banks of the stream in the wake of That Bitch Irene, who caused the stream to jump its banks and flood the meadow.

I found one on my own that hadn’t actually unfurled:

 

There was also this really cool, blond kind:

 

Kevin also scouted out some foamflower for me.

Tiarella cordifolia.

We have a stash of forget-me-nots (Myosotis sp.)

 

And some kind of grass in the lawn is flowering – same type that I found the syrphid fly on last week.

This is a Charlie-approved post.

we have a wood turtle! we have a wood turtle!

Today was mostly about “ooops”. As in

• “Oops, I spent so long wandering around with the camera this morning that I’m 45 minutes later than I intended to be getting over to the hospital to do Reiki”. “
• “Oops, my phone battery is dead.”
• “Oops, I left my lights on and my car battery’s dead.”
• “Oops, I missed my dentist appointment because my car battery died.”
• “Ooops, I’m four days late putting Toxic Death Gel on the cat and as a result, I have a tick. On my back. Where I can’t reach it.”

On many a day, all this would have freaked me out, but all I can think is, “WE HAVE A WOOD TURTLE! WE HAVE A WOOD TURTLE!” and all is well in my world! All batteries have since been recharged, my own included. The tick’s been removed and flushed to its greater reward.
To rewind, this is how my day started:
The very first thing I did this morning, before even making coffee, was, I went outside to see if the turtle was still there. It wasn’t. Rats. As I turned around to head back inside, I froze in surprise as I saw it was ten feet away from me, staring at the garage door. I tiptoed inside and grabbed the camera…and the compost bucket, which was full.

I headed back out. I apologized to the turtle, dumped the compost, and invited him (her?) to check it out.


I think I’m in love.
Turtle headed toward the compost, but changed his (her?) mind, and then over the the course of a half hour or so, wandered toward the pole barn and up into the woods.

The journey begins.
Since I was already outside with the camera, I went a-visitin’…

Bluets are still going strong, mostly because I spared them the wrath of the lawnmower the other day.

Lily-of-the-valley.

A hosta has taken over a spot formerly inhabited by spring beauties and trillium, at the base of the yellow birch tree.

Foamflower, aka false miterwort, is still going strong.

So’s the actual miterwort. I love how each flower is connected by spiderwebs.

The azalea over by the garden shed is the current noisy thing in the yard.
Speaking of noisy, since the Handel concert last Sunday was a smash success, standing ovation, etc. woo hoo! – we’ve now got five, count ‘em five, rehearsals to figure out the chorale in Movement 4 of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. For some idiotic reason I’ll be singing the soprano part. The one that has a whoooooole lot of over-the-staff singing. Super, super high. A whole page of high “A”, as a f’rinstance.
I can easily nail a high A in the shower, in the car, while minding my own business. But put a score in front of me? And the words in German? I won’t be able to hit anything above a D (a D, for cryin’ out loud!) until I’m pretty comfortable with the music. I’m like a fair-weather soprano, I guess. But the choir director is overloaded with altos on this one, and wants me to stay with the sopranos on this one. Gulp.