Spring Has Sprung

One of the good things about being back in the northeast is the existence of four distinct seasons. I like that. We are now fully in the throes of a beautiful, fresh green spring. It's taken the trees a while to get with the program, but our view is slowly being taken away by leaves. I'm ok with that.

My favorite botanical part of spring -- by far -- is the bright shiny appearance of daffodils. I love daffies of all sizes and color combinations (although I don't really love doubles; a terrible thing to do to a daffodil). So we recently made a trip south to Longwood Gardens to admire the daffies at their peak. I meant to take the camera, but forgot it and was at the mercy of Michael and the iPhone for photos. I think he took less than 20. So sad. But here are a few of them for your viewing pleasure:

Darcy and the forsythia. 

The toothless garden princess. Wish it was a better view of her missing upper teeth!

In a field of small blue flowers.

In the amazing conservatory, where there is an expanded, awesome kids area since I last visited these gardens.

And finally, the bathrooms. Yes, this beautiful hall of living walls is the new(er) bathroom wing of the conservatory. Each of these doorways leads to a spherical, bright red private bathroom. They're awesome. You can see the interior here. (There are also YouTube videos of the bathrooms, but that seems excessive.)

We had a great day. If you live within striking distance of Kennett Square, PA, where the garden is located, you should treat yourself and go visit sometime. It was a great way to welcome and enjoy spring in the northeast.

World War I Reminders

Some of my regular readers might know that April 25th is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, commemorating the day when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) troops first landed at Gallipoli. By the time that unsuccessful campaign ended, 8,700 Australian soldiers and 2,700 Kiwi soldiers had died. 

The campaign has been immortalized in film (Gallipoli, one of Mel Gibson's positive contributions to cinema) and song (I'll get to that in a bit). If you've never watched Gallipoli and feel a need to renew your anti-war stance, Gallipoli will do it. As I've learned this year, so will almost anything else that gives a moderately realistic view of the horrors of trench warfare. I had read some classic World War I fiction and poetry in the past, but this year seems to be the year of the first world war for me and the inhumanity of war has screamed out loud and clear.

In particular, Birdsong, a novel by Sebastian Faulk, caught me off-guard. It's part of the famous list of posts past. Yes, I'm still working my way through those hundred books. Many of the books I haven't read are books I know very little about, so when I borrowed Birdsong from the library, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. Turns out that much of the novel is very graphic description of life in and under the trenches, with several key characters being members of a unit working to tunnel under and blow up the German trenches.

Much less graphic, but still a vivid reminder was, of all things, Downton Abbey's WWI episodes. They were the first bookend of my fictional foray into the trenches. I don't think I've yet come to the end of it and that's ok. As awful as it was to see and read about the horrors and incredible waste of trench warfare, it was infinitely worse to live (or die) through it or any other war and it's important to remember the sacrifices and work to make sure there aren't more in the future.

And so, on the American eve of ANZAC Day (it's almost over in the countries that actually celebrate it already), I'll leave you with a very classic song about Gallipoli, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, as performed very nicely by The Pogues.

Kitten!

At Christmas, Santa Claus left very serious notes in stockings about Darcy getting a cat once we were settled in a house. We visited the local animal shelter a few times, and last week Darcy chose a small tabby-and-white older kitten named Paige:

She's six months old and very sweet, but she hadn't been tested for infectious diseases when we saw her, so we couldn't take her home. For whatever reason, the tests took a long time and our house got more and more ready for the kitten who was not here. A cat door was installed in the door to the basement. A litter box was purchased. Food, too, was added to the Christmas kitten-presents of a carrier and dishes and toys.

For the past few days, I've been keeping my fingers crossed that Paige would be given the ok before the storm hits tomorrow. I can't think of a better way to keep Darcy occupied during a snow storm than a new kitten. And with not much more than an hour left of the shelter's operating hours, we got the call: Paige is negative for all possible diseases and we could come pick her up. 

So we did! 

She behaved beautifully in her carrier on the drive home and allowed us to pet her for a minute or two before going to explore and hide. But she came around by the end of the evening and played a little before crawling under Darcy's dresser for a bath during Harry Potter. She is still up there now, sleeping, just as Darcy hoped.

During her exploration, she showed good taste in books by draping herself across my cookbooks for a while. Didn't look very comfortable to me, but Paige seemed perfectly happy:

She sports a bow-tie-like mustache and extra toes, one of my favorite traits in a cat! I hadn't noticed them at the shelter, but they're obvious now that she's made it home.

My Mis-spent Youth, Or The Book Quest Continues

I swear to you that I was a good student in high school. Let me just start there. I went to class, did my homework (albeit often at the last minute), I didn't give my teachers much sass except for those times that sass was well-deserved (I'm looking at you, 10th grade English teacher from hell), and every summer I made my way through my assigned summer reading lists. 

Except for the summer of '85, apparently, when I spent a month with my good friend EB with her father's cousins in England. The summer before junior year, which in New York, is the year of English literature in English class. I mention this because one of my big gaps in the list of 100 books is good British classics. As a Jane Austen fan(atic), it surprised me that there were so many British authors I'd just glossed over. I remember having a conversation with my parents in high school in which they both assured me that I'd love Thomas Hardy. But in the summer of 1985, while walking galumphing labs on Lord Bath's private roads and visiting Liverpool and Kew Gardens, the summer reading list sort of slipped my mind.

I took it with me to England, along with a big suitcase of good intentions. But when I actually brought it out to show my lovely hostess, she patted my arm and said we could probably find most of them on books on tape so I could listen to them on trains. And so it was that I listened to about two thirds of a Tess of the D'Urbervilles so abridged that it took up only two cassettes, and called my reading list done. The shame.

But now I have a second chance to make things right. While I have not yet read Tess, the second book I read on my Kindle was another of Hardy's novels, Far from the Madding Crowd. The first was A Tale of Two Cities, which won the Christmas straw poll for everyone's favorite Dickens' novel. Both of these classics were on the unread portion of my list. And now they've been read and enjoyed and given a star on the printed list that I've been toting around since Cima House. I'll never look at people knitting in public the same way again.

But it's not just classic English novels that have been crossed off the list. The first vacation rental had an eclectic, but very interesting collection of books, and I managed to read Memoirs of a Geisha and Notes from a Small Island while we were there. Memoirs is one of those books that make you wonder how a member of one sex can get inside the head of a member of the other sex so well. (Although I think Wally Lamb does that almost better than anyone else.) I enjoyed Small Island, too, but none of Bill Bryson's books have captured me quite as much as A Walk in the Woods and its discussion of bear-human treaties, or lack thereof.

I thought there was another book that I was able to cross off at the second vacation rental, but it's not jumping out at me right now. I did, of course, read the Dickens there, but it wasn't thanks to the owners, who mostly had mystery-thrillers on their copious bookshelves.

Right now, I'm in the midst of a mad rush of reading. I'm rereading Pride and Prejudice for its 200th birthday, reread all of the Hunger Game books and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets Nest over the last week, and I'm going through all of Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books two at a time from the library. I didn't love the first one when I read it, but I love all of her non-Mary Russell books so much that I thought they deserved another try. It was the right decision.

Some of the most exciting reading I'm doing these days, though, is the slowest reading. Most of my rereading happens at the rate of a book a day or a day and a half, in the case of Hornets Nest, but each evening, we are reading about half a chapter of the first Harry Potter with Darcy. We'll pause for a long while between each of the books so she will be old enough by the time we get to Book 4, but it's exciting to introduce her to that world.

And what are you reading?

Oh My, How Time Flies

For anyone reading this who does not already know, we finally have a house! It's a townhouse, which wasn't really what we were looking for, and it's a rental (also not exactly what we had planned), but it is ours and it has all our stuff in it. After the almost-three-months of being what is classified as "warm" homeless, it is wonderful to come home to the same place every day and not feel like we're living out of suitcases.

The reality took a while to settle in: four or five days after we'd taken delivery of way too many moving boxes, I noticed my phone charger plugged into a not-very-obvious outlet and thought, "Oh! I'd better move that now so we don't forget and leave it here." And then I realized that we're not leaving! Whew!

I have a blog post planned about my recent reading. Between the book collections at the two vacation rentals we dallied in and my Christmas Kindle, I've made some progress on the infamous list of 100 books. It's all very exciting, but I'll wait to tell you about that sometime in the next few days. Tonight, I'll just present some pictures of Darcy and how she has entertained herself and us over the past few months:

During one of our stays at a comfy Staybridge Suites (we stayed at this particular hotel three different times, once for about a week and a half), we got some real snow. Darcy and I made a snowman. Really, I made it, because Darcy wouldn't wear gloves or mittens and so her hands were too cold to handle the snow. It was, according to Darcy, just about "Theo sized". It hung around for several days, even after the snow around it had mostly melted away. This photo was taken almost a week after we made it, when it had devolved into a snow cat. The next day, Darcy declared it was a snow turtle.

Sticking with our theme of winter fun, we had overnight park service friends as guests while at our first vacation rental. There was a large puddle/small pond that we had to drive through to get to the pedestrian bridge that led to the house. For several of the days we were there, it froze over with about 3/4 inch thick ice every night. Four adults and a six year old spent about 20-25 minutes breaking and playing with the ice. Because we really know how to show our guests a good time. Here are J, S, and Darcy with ice balanced on their heads, walking back to the bridge and house.

This has nothing to do with winter fun. We made a day trip to an aquarium to give our ocean-addicted child a fix in mid-November. Here, Darcy and Michael are in a bubble in a reef tank. The ocean addiction, by the way, having lasted longer than her usual obsessions, is waning. It's replacement: the Beatles!

There were weird trees in the community that held our second vacation rental. This one is growing over and around this leaning rock. Others grew straight out of seemingly solid rock. And at the entrance, two trees were hugging each other. One had grown completely twisted around the other over the years -- and they were not small trees!

That vacation rental happened to supply Darcy-sized snow shoes and we had PLENTY of snow, so she took a couple tries at that. 

And then last weekend, Michael and Darcy went to see the New York Philharmonic for one of their Young People's Concerts. It was my brilliant mother's idea for Michael's Christmas present. I walked up Broadway from Lincoln Center almost back up to Columbia, window shopping, and actually shopping at Zabar's and a couple other foodie destinations while they were concerting. Darcy got to compose a short melody during the pre-concert Kids Zone time, and a violinist came by and played it for her when it was finished! We ate bagels and rode the subway (a lot). Other than the joy of being with family and friends for the holidays, this was the first weekend that reminded me why we wanted to live on the east coast for a while. After the concert, the music-lovers detoured over to Central Park to indulge Darcy's newest obsession:

Resiliency

That's our word for today: Resiliency. 

When we picked Darcy up on her last day of school at Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods (KRECR), she came with bags of gifts from her class and after-school program, and a pea seedling in a plastic cup. The pea had five or six leaves at most and barely peeked over the top of the cup. We didn't have high hopes of keeping the pea alive as we drove straight from KRECR to Ashland, OR (Bed #2 for those keeping track), and beyond across this great nation.

The pea mostly lived in one of the back seat cup holders, where it got a little sun most days. On the first desert-y days, we watered frequently and took it into hotels at night to prevent freezing. In St. Louis, it found a cozy kitchen window with our friends for two days, high above the reach of curious cats. It lived for almost a week in my parents' south-facing windows and for a week and a half in the shadowy light of Bed #16 with the great view.

Over the five weeks (FIVE WEEKS) since the pea joined our traveling circus across the country, it has survived and occasionally thrived. It wasn't getting enough sun at Bed #16 and had grown pale, but it is soaking up the rays in abundance at Bed #17. I expect it to make a full, deep green recovery.

Like the pea, the pea's caretaker-in-chief has also demonstrated her resiliency over the past five weeks. She misses being in school and we hope to have her registered next week, as soon as we know which house will become our next permanent bed. She has put up with all 17 beds with grace and (mostly) good humor. She has entertained herself with a limited collection of her own things and has taken opportunities as they've been presented (anyone else been massaging fan-tail pigeons recently or riding their bike around a hotel's empty parking lot?).

We hope to hear today whether our offer on our first-choice house is accepted and then the pea and the girl can settle in for the long haul and put down more permanent roots.

So. About That Blogging Daily Business...

Bed number 16 is quite comfy and has a beautiful view in the morning:

It has its own bridge that leads from where we can park to the house:

And it has more beautiful views from the dining table. The first day, Darcy and I watched an osprey flying around while we ate lunch:

This view includes my car (on the left) and the bridge (on the right). And of course, the stream. I think we figured out what the stream is, but I've forgotten again. 

What our house does not have, most unfortunately, is internet service. It's supposed to and it has a wireless modem that flashes its seductive lights at us around the clock, but there is a password required for access and nobody seems to be able to tell us what that is.

Although it's hard to be completely sad that I have to come to the lovely Patisserie Fauchere for internet, there have to be some limits on how many of their pastries I consume for the sake of using their free wi-fi. This morning, I tried to be restrained and had one of their homemade English muffins. A revelation of crispness! But I can't pretend that I can still blog every day when I am constantly seeking internet connections. The patisserie isn't open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for instance.

I'll blog when I can and enjoy the views of bed number 16 while we search for bed number 17, which will hopefully be our own!