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Saturday
May212011

Garden sale

What's almost as good as the monthly library book sale? The annual garden club plant sale. Local plants, cultivated locally by local gardeners. With all that new garden footage in the back yard to fill we did quite a bit of shopping today, and then we spent the warm, sunny afternoon planting our fifteen some odd new plants (which cost us but a song and supported a local club). We also stopped by the locally owned garden center for some dirt, and explored their ornamental pond while there, something we do every year...because it's always home to a frog or two.

And normally after a day of planting I'd be thankful for the rain that is gently falling outside right now, watering the newly installed plants, but really, I think we've had enough rain this week.

Friday
May202011

Getting up and doing

Most of our days start exactly the same way—with some quiet reading while we slowly wake up to the day's possibilities. I vaguely remember days, before Calvin was born, when waking up on a weekday morning meant rushing to get to get to work where I spent most of my time doing what needed to be done, then getting home in time to eat and retire for the night. Waking up in the morning to a day that can hold almost anything our hearts desire is a new and rather expansive feeling for me. What can we do? Almost anything! But the other side of that coin is that it is surprisingly easy to end up doing almost nothing. I (and now Calvin also) can get too lost in a book that we start in the morning and end up spending most of the day there. At the end of days like that, even being the book lovers that we are, I feel like we have failed to use our time well.  With all the rainy, dreary weather that we've been treated to this spring we've had more days like that than I care to count.

But maybe those days have their place, too. Activity in waves. We've spent much of the past couple of weeks (when we weren't on vacation) lost in books, our imaginations wending their way through other places and times, then today the sun came out and our energy to get up and do came with it, and so, after our usual morning, we got up and did. And it turns out that the things we've been reading make their way into the things we are doing, and vice versa. Plus, after so many languorous days we were ready for a busy one or two, and then again we'll be ready to recline in repose.

Today we played volcano games on the iPad, we made Roman face pots (an activity from our ancient Rome explorations), we played Qwirkle, we watched birds and Calvin wrote in his journal about them.


Qwirkle on the back deck, where we could watch the birds in our birch.

And at the end of the day we're still reading while we watch for our bird friends out the front window.

Thursday
May192011

It's about the weather again

Yesterday was so dreary, so dark, that I wasn't able to take any pictures. And last night was the season finale for our one and only weekly show. How depressing.

We checked our frog (rain gauge) this afternoon. Three inches of rain in two days. I'm worried about our new trees, but the gardens look so beautiful when the sun comes out and they're still wet with rain, and that is the kind of weather we finally got this afternoon. Finally. Though we spent the morning reading, writing in our journals, playing games, and visiting the library, we spent the afternoon with the windows open, watching the birds while we waited for the outside to dry a bit, and then we broke out of our prison and toured the gardens. We played more games, we made granola, we made play dough. We read books in the garden. And the house is still open, long after dark.

Tuesday
May172011

Post vacation ennui

Whenever I finish a book I feel lost, like I'm dangling in space. It's as though an ending has arrived too soon, and it's not until I've connected, really connected, to the next book that I begin to feel found again. Or sometimes, after a particularly good book, I wait a little while before I start another, still tasting and basking in the glow of the now lost world before moving on to the next. Events can be much the same way so when we got back from vacation I was kind of hanging in space, waiting for my wheels to catch on the road to the next thing. I am feeling a little lost. I guess the next big event will be Calvin's birthday in June, or maybe Memorial Day.

In the meantime at least the laundry is getting done and the house put back out of order, because an overly orderly house with a child is about as depressing as the sterile nature of a hospital. Calvin is helping to liven things up by getting out every Lego we own, plus felt, and books, and crayons. It's an improvment. This afternoon he assembled my old medieval castle, then dove into his books to find out what castles in ancient Roman times would have looked like. Perhaps we'll try to design and build one of those next.

And after too many missed opportunities I've taken to leaving the camera by the front window when we are home, big lens attached. And look who we happened to spy today (plus the hummingbird came and sampled from both her own feeder, and the oriole's).


Tomorrow we go to the store to get more oranges for our newest denizen, and we'll go for a walk, we'll read, we'll find the energy for crafts. We can't give into this ennui forever.

Monday
May162011

Home

It is good to be home. Even piles of laundry and depressing weather cannot attenuate that feeling. And the limited backyard view, after a week of truly limitless lake views, feels strangely contenting, although I could easily be persuaded to accept the latter in exchange where a soft, sandy beach is also present. I think the homecoming has been softened by the return of rotten weather (since who wants to be on the beach when it's raining and not even fifty degrees), and by a day of undemanding schedule. Sometimes it's good to have a day that isn't calling you outside with sunshine. Those days are good for things like laundry, reading, and games. We played Carcassonne again today, and Camp and Mammoth Hunt.


We spent a lot of time with books today, returning to the Aeneid, which had been much neglected on our trip, and with some favored picture books from our shelves. And I made some headway with Shogun (because when they say epic, they mean it). Upon taking a walk through our yard in the morning we discovered signs that the oriole had returned to enjoy the oranges we left out for him, so when we were out we bought an oriole feeder. We equipped it with both orange and nectar when we got home and then ate our lunch picnic style on the floor of the playroom in hopes of catching sight of him. We didn't see him at all, but we did see the hummingbird visit his nectar feeder, along with our usual finches, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, sparrows, and doves at their seed feeders. We refilled the suet for our starlings and woodpeckers, but saw only the first of those two today. The bluebirds, who have been strangely absent for a few weeks, were back on our deck in the mid afternoon. Bird feeding and watching has become an important part of our daily activities. It's something I've always enjoyed, and a love that I have now passed on to Calvin. We have four several feeders in our seed front garden, where birds can perch happily without leaving gifts in our preferred play spaces, and nectar feeders on our front porch and in our nectar garden in back. Almost every morning, while I am enjoying coffee and a crossword and Jon is still getting ready for work, Calvin will tiptoe from the front window to give me a "feeder attendance call" for the day. I expect those now as much as I expect bad news in my New York Times updates.

I have no pictures of birds from today. Sometimes it's fun to just sit and watch them. But around noon, as we came out of our library, we were treated to the only blue sky moment of our otherwise gloomy day. A helpful five minutes, since I had been charged with capturing a good photo for the new library brochure. This is one of the fifty I grabbed while there today.