at the zoo

"Hey, everybody, look at the camera and smile at the same time!"


[photo removed]

And can you believe it? They did it!

(That is C's friend A on the right)

??????

[photo removed]

HOW did she do this?

black & white

I have been playing with the settings on my camera.

This white iris is called 'Immortality'. Supposedly it will bloom again in the fall...we will see. I am a bearded iris skeptic though i am slowly being converted....
Ok, now the setting is sepia instead of black & white. I like the sepia better, i think. Here is one of the white winter pansies
and here are some bleeding hearts. Look, i finally got bleeding hearts!(long boring story behind that)

Oh, that explains it.

"Mommy, why is your shoe wet?"

"Because you peed on it."

spent

Most of the tulips are gone, and all the daffodils. We are in that few weeks between the peak of the tulips and the start of the peonies/roses. There are few things blooming in my gardens but not much really. Suzanne gave me some bearded irises, and they are supposed to carry it through this time, but they are late or something -- not opening yet. Oh well.

'Spent' describes me these days too. I should be doing research but instead i am home during the week, trying to get my house in order -- outside & inside. I do not have the weekends. Dh is stripping the window frames and so i have to leave, all day every day on the weekends when he is doing it. It is on the outside but the fumes get in the house and they have a horrible effect on me, so i don't know what they do to the little ones but it can't be good. It is not what one would call restful to be out with them all the time, though.

S's mother died last week, i had been out there visiting with her for a bit as she waited for the end, for the last several weeks. There are starlings living in the eaves of our house -- on Monday i found all their babies on the ground dead, fallen out from the nest before they were big enough to fly. I don't know why, i am guessing a squirrel got in there? Mother starling sits alone on the maple tree now, wretched, with her feathers all greasy and awry.

I have to go weed my vegetable garden, because it is a hell of a mess.

Duh.

I have been bitching about my flower photos, i can't get the pictures i want, i usually can't get the lens wide enough/close enough/sharp enough. Sometimes i can, but even then the background bugs me, it is just not *right*. How do people do this, without spending thousands on cameras?

Then i opened a magazine & found myself reading an article about photo retouching.

Oh.

Yeah, right, that's how to fuzz out the stupid stick in the background.

Duh.

Happy Birthday A.

Thinking of A. and his family today. Rosepetal, i am wishing you a peaceful day.

T has tooth #2

and about time, too. M had his two weeks ago. I really have to start writing these things it their baby books.

Mother's day

Wishing a gentle mother's day to all.

Happy Birthday Alex

Thinking of Alex and his family today....

Happy Birthday Travis

Thinking of Travis and his family today...

Tulips after rain

If you look closely, or click to see the big picture, you will see that indeed they are still wet from the rain.


The pink is 'Angelique'

and the dark is 'Black Hero'


and i looked on my blog from last year but apparently i didn't know what these red ones were called then either. And i spent the whole spring of 2007 referring to the double white ones as 'Calgary' when they are really 'Mount Tacoma'. Duh.

This week's clueless award...

...goes to the people i was talking to at the mall yesterday. Or, more correctly, were talking to me.

I was in the play area, with the boys, when a couple wheeled their grandson's stroller in. The baby was smaller than my twins, but much more mobile -- crawling and nearly walking already. The grandfather greeted me cheerly with:

"Twins! My older daughter might have twins!"

*slight pause while i try to think of an appropriate response to this information, the word might giving me some trouble*

"Or triplets!" he announced.

"Wow", i said. That seemed the appropriate response at this point. IVF, i gathered, though why he was telling some stranger at a play area was beyond me. But you would think, from his proud announcement, that the woman was at least pregnant.

But no, they are just starting the first IVF cycle...from the sound of it, it wasn't clear if they even had embryos yet. This was the information imparted upon me by the grandmother. "And you would not believe the cost! This baby is costing them so much money! $4700 just for 9 prescriptions! All out of pocket, no insurance! I cannot believe it."

as i continued to nod my head mutely. I decided that it wasn't my job to kindly explain to these folks that spending X or 10X is no guarantee of even one take-home baby, let alone two or THREE. The only thing i managed to spit out was "Well, best of luck to her!"

and she will need it, with family like that!

flowers for lost boys

Amongst the things i planted last year were white violas (little pansies) for Nicolas and yellow violas for Moksha. This year i have many volunteers in the lawn -- seedlings from those pansies & others, and the very aptly named forget-me-nots. So though i have made about 6 pots (by this point) filled with pansies of various colors, i selected out the white & yellow pansies for their own special pot. Well, they are sort of mostly-white-and-yellow... cross pollination you know. In any case i am sure the pot will look nicer in a few weeks when they fill out, but here are some pictures of it now.

I notice the pot is cracked. Well, i suppose that is fairly apt too.

May 5th

May 5th is Nicolas' due date....it is not a date that bothers me really but it is one that i mark in my mind. I actually should write a post on the subject but i am a little short on time right now so hopefully i can wax eloquent (ha ha) later.

I have started doing Nicolas' scrapbook -- actually i have picked it up again, for the nth time, and hope that now i can do more than just spend lots of money at scrapbook stores...maybe i can start putting it together. I am looking through all the old photos of my time being pregnant with him (which are not that many because they were all backed up somewhere and then lost). Here is a picture from the Cevennes, which is where we were vacationing when he was conceived. I do have pictures somewhere from around his due date (which we spent taking a vacation in Spain trying to 'get away', whatever) but i look like crap in them...this one i like instead, it seems so peaceful.

backyard

The post below is mostly macro shots and i remember Zoey complaining about that in the past -- we all know what tulips look like, so enough with the tulip closeups -- it is more interesting to see how people put things together. So i popped my head out the 2nd floor window & took a picture of the whole border. You can see if you look closely that the grass desperately needs cutting, but first i have to dig the remaining volunteer pansies out of the lawn. The vegetable garden is on the right -- fallow as of yet, as i didn't manage to get any cool weather crops in. Putting that in order is a project for this month. There is a bunch to do there.

Some year we will do something with that damned garage. It will not be this year. At this point i am seriously leaning toward demolishing it and putting in a swing set.
This view from the middle of the yard, where you can see a lot of Nicolas' tulips.
This is the border nearer the house that needs some work. In fact all this needs to be redone and extended toward the house and probably we need to make the patio bigger or something. This is something we are debating doing this summer.
This is the back patio as it is now. I got these pots new this year, and put in the boxwood bushes that were in the garden but were annoying the hell out of me because they looked stupid. What is cool about these pots is that they really look like those expensive italian painted terracotta ones but they are fake fiberglass ones instead -- you can leave them out all winter. I got them at Home Depot. We may extend the patio just as far on the right side of the picture (where there is nothing now but sand & dirt, so i didn't photograph it) and put a table there, or something like that. It is in discussion.... Please ignore the grill/trash can/kid's toys/crap that is around. This is in fact as neat as it gets around here. Maybe my husband has a point, with all his complaining.

OK, you can't really see anything with these pictures being so little on the screen, but you can always click to make them bigger if you want.

Late April garden pictures

In no particular order...
I love violas (the little pansies), i have them in pots all over the place. I bought a load of them several weeks ago, but am assisted by the fact that i have tons of them as volunteers growing in my lawn. I should do a post just about that. The ones above were bought...
...but these grew in the lawn. A painted this pot, probably 10 years ago or so.
Narcissus 'Thalia'. My Thalias are beautiful this year, all the other daffodils are kind of measly. My mother has the opposite effect, oddly enough.
Lenten Rose (Hellebore)

This is a special primrose but i have no idea the name because i lost the tag. It is an heirloom variety that i bought at a local plant sale. The flowers are very small but i have got a month of bloom out of it.
Tulip 'Mount Tacoma' in Nicolas' garden. And some 'White Emperor' too.
Garden-variety, almost dead(note lack of foliage), cheap primrose nevertheless puts on a show.
Tulip 'Mount Tacoma' with Nicolas' peony which has set alot of buds this year! Looking forward to that!
Here is Nicolas' garden in full tulip glory! (Easy to accomplish when you spend 70 bucks on bulbs, Jesus Christ) I now have 4 different kinds of white tulips in there which should continue to bloom in sequence -- there are only 2 kinds open now. I am also planning to lift the bulbs after the foliage dies back & store them over the summer so that hopefully i can get them to keep going next year. Because, really, an outlay like that on the same bulbs every year is not an option.
'Thalia' and one of the winter pansies.
I have forgotten this tulip's name, this is it's third year. Cecilia, maybe? It is probably on my blog in previous years but i am too lazy to look.
This plant is called 'epimedium' and it is a bitch to photograph. I see i have failed this year yet again.
The leaves are pretty & the flowers are very small but form a kind of cloud of red under the leaves. I just can't get a picture that really captures the effect.
These are some of C's tulips -- her choices. The pink are 'Angelique' but i forget the name of the red/purple one.
Narcissus 'Yellow Cheerfulness'. I love these (they are double & little) but they are doing very poorly in my garden. Each year they have less flowers! Not right for daffodils!

This is the best-looking clump of 'Cheerfulness' and 'Yellow Cheerfulness'. I didn't realize i took the picture of the back of them! Ooops!

Well, babies are no longer happy sitting in their chairs eating goldfish crackers so i guess i am done here.