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Showing posts from February, 2014

Winter Honeysuckle

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This past weekend we had two glorious warm days with bright sunshine.  It was 70 degrees here on Sunday.  Honey bees were out in force, taking advantage of a magical reprise from the otherwise blustery frigid winter weather.  There was a sweet fragrance in our barn yard.  Our Lonicera fragrantissima  (a happy scientific term to say), which I had hardly noticed before this season, burst forth in its sweetly subdued glory.  The bush is robust this year with plentiful wet weather and it doesn't seem to mind the cold.   The Sunday sunshine caused it to bloom its simple flowers. Jennifer and I enjoyed placing our faces in the middle of it and inhaling the sweetness. Along with the daffodils that bloom every year at this time , our rather common and unspectacular winter honeysuckle bush promises spring is coming. None-to-soon for my taste this year. None-to-soon. On Saturday I got my chainsaws out and spent a couple of hours cleaning up the broken branches and brush from the recent s

Recent Life and Art

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Dinner and a movie for Valentine's Day, a Pat Metheny concert, and dance choreography by Alvin Ailey hit on three consecutive nights over the recent weekend.   The speed of life often overtakes my ability or desire to blog about it all.  This post is a montage of recent life and art. The Alvin Ailey performance was supposed to be last Thursday night at the Fox Theatre .  But, it was rescheduled for Sunday evening after we experienced a winter storm here last week .  At our place we got about 8 inches of snow, mixed in with some sleet and freezing rain , between Tuesday and Thursday.  That is the most snow we have experienced here since 1993. We lost power for about nine hours on Thursday but fortunately it went out during the daylight hours instead of at night when the temperatures were much colder.  It was a bit of an ordeal.  I managed to get into work in my trusty Subaru on Tuesday but I was the only one there.  After a few hours, with the snow falling more heavily, I d

Turtle on the Rock

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Turtle stretching under heat lamps on the rock in his penthouse aquarium. A little over two years ago we "rescued" a Trachemys scripta scripta from its prison. The yellow-bellied slider was kept by a friend of my daughter's in a small fish bowl with the water rarely changed. The friend did not really relate to the turtle. Turtles can be fascinating and colorful but they are not really what you might call "affectionate".  Still, my daughter took pity on it. She also took the initiative and brought it home, showing it to my wife, who was horrified by the poor turtle's living circumstances. Before I knew it we had a new member of our family.  From the beginning there was no major discussion as to what to name the reptile.  His name was "Franklin" according to the friend but to us he was simply "Turtle".  He is a turtle, after all, and he really doesn't care what you call him.  Just give him plenty of room, clean water, and f

Binge-watching Sherlock

Jennifer and I recently completed a bit of binge TV viewing. Normally, neither of us is that into television. Now and then we catch an episode of Modern Family but the last TV show we watched with regularity was Fringe .  That series ended a little over a year ago.  Instead of watching TV we read, address hobbies, tend to our house and property, listen to music, watch movies, and explore on our iPads. In January I heard the BBC series Sherlock praised by a couple of people at work in separate conversations over the period of a few days.  That caused me to take note but I didn't really act on it until, quite by accident (or so it seemed), I found a documentary in the PBS App on my iPad about the Sherlock series - the third set of episodes was about to be broadcast on that network.  The documentary was part-promotion of the series, part-history of the " Sherlock Holmes " phenomenon.  Did you know that no other fictional character in the world has been more portrayed