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 :)

rain! (5/9/07)

It's raining!

And this time, it is a real downpour, not some dinky drizzle that leaves no evidence of its appearance. My garden babies are getting a real cloudburst.

:D

(more eventually -- i have pictures from sandy's garden too!)

the gardener's birthday (May 6, 2007)

They say that one's perception of time speeds up with age. I think that mine has now doubled, since I think my birthday actually happened across two days this year. Saturday morning I got up at one of those early morning hours and went in to work for a couple hours before getting my hair cut. More appropriately, I had my hair shorn, and it looks like a red, slightly young version of those side-scalped Dutch lady hair cuts. Extra short on the sides but with "body" on top. Blah. It'll grow out... always does... however, I think the haircut should be excluded from anything related to my birthday.

Then I worked until mom and dad appeared with puppy, and instead of gardening we hung around and talked. I needed some serious mommy-cuddles, and it was good to talk about various developments in lab and such. Mom pulled out a box of birthday presents -- per recent family trends, unwrapped -- and I had fun sequentially removing random travel gifts. For example, she picked out Cera Lyte 70 (Natural and Artificial Lemon Flavor), a Rice-Based Oral Electrolyte "designed to effectively correct or prevent dehydration". That sounds... umm... great. Perfect for the plane trip. The front of the package however, is incomplete. CeraLyte 70 is, in fact, "a rice-based electrolyte solution to help prevent dehydration from diarrhea". Other items included "toothettes", which the package describes as "disposable oral brushes" but which I know as "the things one gives a patient to wet his mouth when the patient is not allowed to drink", a personal travel toothbrush sanitizer, and "Flight Spray: The First Nasal Hydration Spray for Airline Travelers". Oh! And just in case I'm wandering around the wilds of Australia without running water, a personal sized water purification/filtration kit. Since it removes "99.9% of waterborne protozoa such as Giardia" (giardia is the reason you should not EVER, EVER, EVER drink from a beautiful mountain stream) as well as "99.9999% of waterborne bacteria" (which I hope means E. coli, the cause of most uncomplicated traveller's diarrhea) and "99.99% of waterborne viruses", I hope that I will have NO excuse to use the CeraLyte!

For dinner, we went to Cafe Verde, a pleasant eatery in Durham, and I had a singularly uninspiring meal with a relatively pleasant dessert. Their food has generally been good in the past, but the skate just wasn't quite right. I really didn't feel like doing anything energetic, and I singularly lacked a desire to dance*, so we rented Casino Royale and watched it and fed Squiggles licorice.

Today we gardened and it was wonderful. I slept in a little because my alarm clock snooze didn't work, but I was still up before the sun warmed the air much, so no big deal. We cleaned out a bunch of weeds in the front, and mom finished tearing up the clover that has been threatening my strawberry plants. She and dad put some fencing around the strawberry and tomato and pepper plants on the south side of the house, and they also fenced around the maple and flowering almond trees that we planted last year. (I'll have to take pictures, especially of the maple!)

Just a few pictures from the day: silver artemisia (artemisia = wormwood, this is just one of the species; not exactly the shot I *wanted* but that's my fault for only taking one) and flowers on my sage, which I don't remember blooming before.

But for today... Michael and Dan made my day with their uniquely different birthday greetings. Dan in his unique way screeched so loudly that it took me a minute to realize that he was "saying" happy birthday, and then proceeded to talk for 30 minutes about Buenos Aires Blues.** Thanks, guys. :)


*i would have gone out to asheville for the regional tango event, but didn't have time and needed the quiet evening...
**i have permission from myself to tease dan. we actually had a good and i think productive conversation about blues, tango, and planning/administration/publicity for the weekend.

mom's clematis opened today (5/4/07)

I don't remember looking out the back deck this morning, but I am pretty sure the clematis was not open yesterday. Today I glanced out and was struck by a splotch of white. Oddly enough, this isn't one of the buds that I expected to open soon.



As a side note, there are about 50 garden pictures from April at this location now. I have a few more to upload.

more from today (May 2, 2007)

It's barely still today, but pictures are slowly uploading!! http://picasaweb.google.com/arwen.long

The coreopsis is looking amazing. That thing scares me *every* year by looking like a dry stick, and then it pokes all these lovely ferny leaves through new places in the ground. It's spread to at least double, if not triple, the surface area it covered last year.

That verbascum is awesome. I think it has 3-4 buds on it already.

The hibiscus are doing ok. The leaves on top are going to die and fall off (they're pretty shriveled!) but there are some healthy leaves with good turgor pressure beneath. I took a picture of a hibiscus bud against the shriveled leaves late last week (?), and when I came home Monday night it was blooming happily. The bloom didn't last very long.

I moved the rain barrel, so Justin will have to admire my ripped muscles instead of flexing his. It's where my little portable greenhouse was sitting. When I moved the greenhouse, I found a turtle! It was hanging out in the shade by the water barrel and probably enjoyed the damp from the runoff spout. It's back in it's place now, between two water barrels, but I redirected the runoff spout from the one attached to the gutters so it now points into the unattached barrel. It's an... interesting (?) setup. Hopefully picture soon, because it looks a little bit funny.

I am severely overdue for a good garden gossip with Sandy.

speedy gander (May 2, 2007)

Leptodermis' first bloom is open! It's a tiny purple trumpet, looks very fragile, but may be really stunning when the whole bush is covered.

1st blooms also on the ice plant in the sedum garden (so bright!!); the little portulaca are both adorable and bright.

The yellow & red rose in the back is also opening blooms; and the monster on the front porch has gone beyond open buds to almost aging flowers.

Yellow garden in front -- the sea holly is slowly getting ready to bloom, as is the spiky verbascum.

I need to make an updated garden map -- my old ones are a bit outdated.