radiata

A couple days ago, I pulled out of the driveway and noticed that one of my hurricane lilies had bloomed with full regalia. These gals are gorgeous and fully deserve the "radiata" of their full name (Lycoris radiata). Well, I finally got myself out there to take some photos today, and got a couple decent shots. The gaura is threatening to overpower the lycoris, but that blistering red is impossible to cover!

In other news, I am playing with aperture. I was going to go crazy if I didn't figure out the aperture settings, because the autos are not good enough. And I've been pleased with the results.

June 28, 2007: The Last June Pictures

It's about time to take a colorful break from spreadsheets and numbers. I've been trying to fit some of my data with an inormal function all day, and it is driving me crazy. The first dataset fit nicely within an hour, but it took some skillful maneuvring. The second dataset passes the eyeball test with flying colors -- the fit that should appear is obvious just from looking at the data -- but the fit program ignores the data points unless I mess with the parameters until they make no mathematical sense and obscure the true beauty of the data. It drive me crazy. Crazy. Screamingly crazy.

So I took a break. There were a few garden photos from June sitting around on my hard drive, and these are some of my favorites: clematis, hibiscus, and tomato. Of course there are a couple more pictures sitting around in the June folder.

First.

I just arranged my first purchase of "original art".

This feels really strange. It's just a couple of small paintings, but most of the art that decorates my walls is my photography or reproductions, and I don't actually have any paintings. Last weekend my mom and sister and I visited an artists' space together, and I noticed one pair of paintings that I really liked. Enough that I could see them on one of my walls. And the prices were reasonable, so I took one of the artist's cards home with me.

Well, after a week of procrastinating and mulling it over, I finally got around to calling the artist, and she said she'd hold them for me for purchase in November or December. I am *so* excited.

Luxury...

Luxury...
is walking outside over the hot pavement to pick tomatoes and basil from the garden for lunch.

Self-control...
is walking back inside to continue working.


...the taste of the sun and the warmth of the grass...

June 21, 2007

Today:
-3 ripe raspberries
-2 almost-ripe strawberries
-yard waste out for collection
-worried that tomatoes may not ripen before departure

Growing Season (June 6-11, 2007)

Oddly enough, after complaining about not having time to take pictures and not really being pleased with a lot of pictures, I did have a number of pictures that I liked. (I still deleted the bad ones) The mass of pictures are posted, but here are some favorites.

I finally planted the hibiscus that mom got:

and the raspberries are cool whether in or out of focus


My beautyberry/callicarpus has lovely flowers, and I'm really really looking forward to seeing the purple berries in the fall. This is one of the "Passalong Plants" that Bender and Rushing talk about, and it's really exciting to finally be able to watch it grow.


Another passalong from Sandy:


Chamomile -- it just looks so funny.

Trouts; next Tritomas (June 1, 2007 & May 22, 2007; next starts June pics)

Next up in the topsy-turvy compilation of photographs and other random things: Troutsies! Technically there was only 1 trout. And Josie caught it. But there were lots of tadpoles.

And I apparently already wrote a fly-fishing report for Facebook/Myspace.
"Fly-fishing report (June 1):
Off to a not-quite-so-early start due to requests to please turn off the alarm for 20 minutes. Lovely drive despite Gaitlinburg and such; Cherokee National Forest has some lovely winding hilly roads (for much of which Bill gallantly vacated the driver's seat for me ). Bought fishing licenses and was severely offended by the requirement to list one's race ("color") on the license. (Wrote "tan" because "white" not currently accurate.)
Drove around a good 30 minutes looking for the ideal fishing spot. Waded into the ice-cold, frigid, toe-numbing water and spent a good couple of hours whipping fishing lines around without catching anything. Bill caught a massive 5-inch trout just before we climbed back up the bank to the car.
Spent another couple of hours at the stocked fish pond watching a fisherman across the other side pulling out a fish every 15 minutes. Caught a crawfish, let it crawl back into the water. Josi caught a decent-sized trout, which we brought home.
The building maintenance man here was disgusted that we caught one fish among 3 people. Says we should use nightcrawlers next time (Bill, we should try this someday). Little piece of night crawler on a tiny hook, maybe a little weight, and invisible line. Let it float along the surface of the water. Recommends a spin rod but figures the same thing would work with a fly rod."
Why would I do something like that without properly including pictures? (probably because I hadn't uploaded them and they weren't particularly stunning. Other photos from the day are here.)

Recently I haven't been as positively impressed by my flower pictures in general. Some of the clematis pictures are marvelous and remind me of sand dollars. Overall, though, I think the garden has been at an in-between lull and I haven't had (or taken) as much time to photograph; and I haven't been pleased with the white balance and focus for a number of shots. A couple weeks ago I signed up to take a 3-week Monday night photography class so I would have an excuse to figure out how to control things like WB and depth of field and such on my camera, but when I showed up for the first class this week the security guard told me that the start date had been moved. So I can't take the class and (horror!) will have to figure out the electronic controls again if I want. It's not that hard, though.

New May Photos (May 22)
My favorites

cardinal climber -- still not satisfied with this photo, but the dead vine needs to be cut down.


pink spikes (name? it's not coming right now) -- i like the lines and patterns and lighting here.


wild honeysuckle -- this stuff was so cool. it was hard to get the light balance/focus right on these, so i had to dig through a bunch of just-out-of-focus pictures to find the good ones.


euphorbia


rose :)


old ironsides


Clematis


Miscellaneous or kind of... whatever
sedum


oh yeah?


spirea:


dill, cinnamon basil

Detroit and Grandparent Pictures (May 18-19, 2007)

Not technically garden pictures -- but some of my favorites from a May weekend in Detroit. Dad let me play with his 70-200mm lens. It's good for portraits (see below). The boys took advantage of a two-handled saw to demonstrate their manly prowess by sawing down a massive tree stump.


Pictures, here in no particular order:

Victoria (out of focus but cute :), Justin, Arwen (courtesy of dad)


Alex


Sawing the tree:


Mi familia (dad's picture):


Todos mi familia:


Grandpa and Grandma:

post-Buenos Aires Blues blues (June 4, 2007)

Today was a lousy day. Got home around 2 am, slept in, had unexpected equipment malfunctions, had additional unrelated experimental issues. Took a nap when I got home. Weeds in the garden. Typical post-exchange/workshop blues, but oh oh oh I love tango. The tango leads who went to Buenos Aires Blues were just lovely. Some of them gave me some really helpful pointers, and by the end of the weekend I was really feeling comfortable dancing tango. Sunday afternoon I danced one tango with Clint (from Atlanta) that was beautiful beyond words (and he thought it was awesome too!).

AND In the Garden...

My chamomile are flowering, the tritoma has way way more red-hot pokers sticking out of it than I expected, the Confederate rose is amazing, and my sea holly flowers are turning blue. Plus some of the flowers in my purple garden are blooming and looking beautiful; and the butterfly bush in the back is now massive -- it's as tall as the railing on my deck!

There were two mockingbirds using my front stoop railing as their sitting grounds when I got home today. I think they're nesting in one of the beastly Bartlet pear trees.

Less than a month to Australia, and I'm feeling that tenterhooks combination of excitement and nervousness.

That's the quick overview...

more catching up (May 7-17, 2007)

My first attempt [of the day] to type this note was aborted by the realization that I should really pack for tomorrow's departure to Michigan. My family is travelling in stages to see my grandparents, and I'll be the last to depart from North Carolina (and the first to return). The problem is that I've lost track of time this week and suddenly realized this morning that I am leaving *tomorrow* and not in two or three days. For some reason, the reality that I will need to bring clothing hadn't occurred to me.

Now I am packed, at least as much as I need be for a 26 hour trip. The dishes are put away, and I guess the laundry just won't be folded until I return.

The last week plus has been full and overfilled, but it hasn't lacked leisure. When my committee met, my professor's final suggestion was that I run an electrophysiology data collection blitz starting as soon as possible. I spent about a week setting up my experimental rig, and then started running experiments. Practically, this means that I added about 4 hours of experiments to the already extant 2-5 hours of experiments. Ouch. I'm averaging about 6-8 hours a day of experimental time, which is fairly tiring. I am, however, glad to finally be running experiments the way I think they should be run -- concurrently with analysis. Today I copied today's electrophysiology data over to my mac and ran the data through matlab while finishing the necessary, mindless busy work at the end of the experiment. It would be nice if the data looked halfway decent, but it looks pretty lousy right now.

I already mentioned that I stopped by Sandy's garden on the way home from work last Wednesday. Her garden looks lovely, as always, despite her complaints about its [nonexistent] disarray. I took Sandy down to the little Vietnamese place that Claudia recommended and introduced her to bubble tea. She liked it, Mike didn't. Mike's cancer is growing again, so he is starting chemo again, I think today. In the interim between my Saturday visit and yesterday, when Sandy and I found eachother by mistake in front of Whole Foods, one of Sandy's cats started to demonstrate signs of an illness that is apparently a tick-borne illness. This seems strange, since I thought that the tick parasites didn't bother the cats and dogs and rats, but only humans.

Saturday night most of my family appeared at my house, and the disarmingly cute dogs that arrived with my sister around 1am Sunday were nasty beasts and threw themselves around their crates until about 5:30am. V and I had planned to garden Monday afternoon but ended up taking a walk in the Duke gardens instead. Of course we ran into a few funky flowers...
I suspect that this one was probably some type of allium:

V wanted a picture of the foxglove throats, which may mean that she hadn't seen my pictures from Sandy's garden. Here is the result, though (and yet another foxglove picture):

Then there was a proverbial sea of snapdragons and a peony with its bud (I love the stamen and pistil arrangements on flowers! They add so much texture and interest...)

Not surprisingly, using a 300mm lens is a handicap for photographing people from any reasonable proximity (more pictures here). The little point-n-clickie works a little bit better (more pictures here), but I'll maybe add specific links later.

I think that the only recent garden pictures I have are from Saturday -- I just haven't been out to take pictures... or weed...
The gauria are flowering, although I'm not entirely pleased with the light and colors in those photos. I'd rather take them in full sun.

My verbascum is flowering, and it attracts some colorful guests:

There are more pictures here, in varying configurations of bee plus flower and flower plus bee.

The sea holly is approaching bloom. Apparently those flowers will eventually become the blueish flowers one sees in florist shops, but I've been surprised by the evolution of the blooms.

Other random social things... had Vietnamese Pho for the first time (*yummmm*) and a delightful conversation to accompany it; took my undergrad out for ice cream to celebrate her successful thesis viva and graduation; watched all of Dancing with the Stars; had a really really wonderful social gathering/happy hour/whatever with peeps from my school program. That was awesome... partly because we've had some major administrative upheaval over the last year, and we just got an announcement of another development this week. I and a couple other people were a wee bit worried that we might end up stuck on the developments, but we barely even talked about them. (When the foundations are shaken...) My program peeps are awesome. And I think it's really funny that antisocial Arwen is turning into the current social event planner, at least temporarily.

Bedtime... I'm going to regret staying up this late. Grandparents tomorrow, geckos on Sunday... it's going to be a good weekend. :D

catching up! (Sandy's garden pics May 7-14, 2007)

Last week I got sick, so some things stopped happening while I caught some extra sleep and spent time making myself honey'n'lemon tea. Betwixt and between, though, I took a couple hundred garden pictures.

I ran through the pics pretty quickly to pick out the ones that might be worth posting, so there are some repeats and such, but that's partly so Sandy can see more than just the better pics. More later on pics from my garden etc.

On Wednesday I paused in front of Sandy's house to stare at a foxglove. I was debating stopping vs calling on my way home, but Sandy beat me to the decision. She came rushing out of the house to holler at me, and of course I couldn't stop with the tour of the front gardens. Pictures, mostly from the back garden, are up. Some of my favorites:

(in order, Sandy's elephant ear corm, goldfish, lily reflection, baby mantis, foxglove throats)

I clearly needed to come back with a 300mm lens, and on Saturday morning I took my camera with me when I went in to lab to work. It was such a good idea. After work and lunch, I gave Sandy a call (from in front of her house ). She and Mike were finishing some apple fritters (ooooh, Mike's mom makes good apple fritters. never had'em that good.) and it was ~just~ threatening to rain. We ate a couple fritters and then I dragged Sandy out for pictures before rain started. The resulting pictures are here, and again I have some favorites:


Mike. dahlias, i think - the buds are SO adorable.
Then:

lily, mahonia in the rain

lettuce :D, wheelbarrow in rain (i love this one)

roses in the rain, sandy in the rain

clay dish, bunny (for sandy :)