Friday, 11 January 2013
If it’s not global warming, there’s certainly plantal confusion (or whatever the term should be).
This is our new brave and lovely quince*, and I’m betting that fruit trees, even wee ornamental ones, “should” not be blooming now…in January. Even in ATL.
* LQ = lovely quince
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Picture from Conservatory in Seattle the other day….
On the flight, I read McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2012). Book club selection…(and we meet next Monday).
I didn’t finish, although I got through about fifty of the seventy years it covers. Samuel FB Morse—didn’t know he was a painter before he telegraphed. Speaking of painters: George PA Healy—how did I never note his name before?
In the later decades of the nineteenth century (the book covers 1830 to 1900), did American fellas have only one middle name?
I have through the weekend to find out….
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Sometimes the view from wifi elevations (that is, above 10K feet, at least on our Delta flight) is stunning.
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
What better to do on a rainy day when you haven’t much time than go look at flowers and colorful plants from the shelter of a conservatory?
Please enjoy this bromeliad in the Volunteer Park Conservatory…we sure did!
Monday, 7 January 2013
Seattle is quite the transportation hub. Duh.
This was in the yard near the RR car fix-it garage. Large size.
Weather report: overcast, but no rain most of the day. Yippee!
Sunday, 6 January 2013
This morning we got up and cleaned our way out the door, including shoveling the light snow accumulation so the sun and solar radiation (or whatever) could remove the icier layer beneath, and descended back to sea level. We had long-time friends over for dinner (kind of G to spearhead the cooking—steelhead and roasted veg on the grill), and told stories and laughed—the best!
Saturday, 5 January 2013
In the name of adventure and other fun reasons, we took a gondola into snow…flurries. Just gorgeous, but not the same as seeing a glistening Mount Rainier crystal-clear in the sunshine. Still, we had a grand time lunching mountaintop.
Friday, 4 January 2013
Alaska Rose descending to await RR bridge opening….
Wrong time of the year for the salmon to be jumping up the fish ladder—except for maybe a few steelheads—although we did find some action in the Ballard Locks—two locks, actually. We always call them the Ballard Locks because they’re on the south edge of the Ballard neighborhood, but they’re really the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks.
By the way, that little building off to the right of the ship in this view, and on the spit between the locks, has a rosebush at each end (that irregular shape behind the guardrail), firmly rooted in a slot about four inches wide and less than a foot long. Such tenacity plants have!
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Lots going on today, but the headliner was the early celebration of Someone’s* b-day—with a suite of relatives in attendance, and capped by this fan-TAS-tic home-made ice cream cake. Pie.
* Neither of us, obviously.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
And if you’re really lucky, you get phenomenal late-day light on the Cascades—with the scent of a Guru-late-day pot of coffee infusing the air.