In the afternoon, I was FINALLY done with the most pressing of my administrative duties and I was debating about taking a nap at my apartment vs going to the pool. I called my friend to see if she wanted to join me at the pool, and she was in the midst of cleaning. However, she was strongly in favor of my going to the pool instead of taking a nap. So, I did! It was a fabulous, fabulous suggestion!

I FINALLY feel like I’ve started my summer break. It was really glorious.
I did make the mistake of not putting on sunscreen on my chest (I DID put it on my face), because I didn’t think I’d be out there very long. But I ended out there longer than I’d expected and got a tad sunburned. It will heal pretty quickly, so I’m not kicking myself too hard.

Today, I’ve got a couple of last things to do at school related to my research lab, but then I’m pretty much free again. I’m thinking about cleaning my office. It is really disastrous right now. I’m also going to spend some time getting plants. Can you believe I haven’t actually planted annuals yet???! This is the first year I’ve delayed so long. I DID put in some pansies back in January or February that are still going strong, because I keep picking off the faded flowers (and watering them). I really thought they’d be dead from the heat by now, but I guess they are hardier than I’d expected!

I’d forgotten how gorgeous some of the flowers have been in previous years until I was looking at them on my Flickr stream. Here was one of my favorite years (2008 in MN).

These daisies continue to be one of my all time favorites.

This was 2007 in MN.

I don’t have a great photo from 2009 in MN. Just this one of a rabbit who’d hopped up the stairs to investigate the flowers.

Last year, the flowers in pots at my apartment flowers started quite small.

But got larger over the course of the summer.

Who knows what I’ll pick up today. Guess we’ll see!

On Thanksgiving morning, I was making dill pickle doobers when the sun was coming up. My hibiscus on my patio had about 4 or 5 flowers that morning, and I could see it through the window. I grabbed my camera and did a quick photoshoot while the light was spectacular.

I FINALLY posted all of my photos on Flickr of my trip out east to Rhode Island and Massachusetts to see SeaQueen and go to my science conference!

Jenski was in Rhode Island at the time too, so she met SeaQueen and I for supper at a great Indian restaurant. We had a lot of fun catching up in person and talking about all the stuff that we don’t talk about on our blogs. We had all worked together (in separate labs) in MA back when I was getting my Ph.D. They both went on to get their PhDs at different schools and are now post-docs. I’m glad we got together.

SeaQueen and I had all kinds of plans to meet up with her lab-mates and go to the beach on Memorial Day after breakfast. Well, on our drive home from breakfast, we saw a parade gathering. I got online to see where the parade was going to be (in case there was time to see a bit of it, OR if we needed to adjust our route accordingly), and the website said that the parade was canceled for severe weather!? severe weather? weren’t we going to go to the beach? Well, it turns out that everyone had assumed that someone else had looked at the weather to see if it was a good beach-going day. We started trying to come up with things to do that would be inside (like a museum) or located close by and cheap so that if we got rained out we could just bail on it really fast.
We ended up having more fun, we both think, than if we’d gone to the beach. We went to an azalea garden and spent a couple of hours taking photos!

It was one of the best times I’ve had going somewhere and taking photos. Usually, I’m with people who are NOT taking photos and thus don’t want to move at my snail’s pace. But SeaQueen had recently got a DSLR body from a friend who upgraded her camera; SeaQueen bought a lens and was ready to go super slow at the gardens too.

I have many, many photos of the gardens on Flickr. Here are a few of my favorites.

No, those are not azaleas. They are irises. But they were so gorgeous, they are my favorite photos of the day.

THOSE are azaleas.

And these next ones are rhododendrons (same family, different structure in how the blossoms cluster). They were in bloom too and were just gorgeous!

And then riiiiiiiiiight as we were taking these photos of the fencing made of vines, the rain started! We were at the end of the tour of the gardens, fortunately.

One of the things I’ve done in the 2 weeks that I’ve been off work – other than try to catch up on sleep – is make a little patio garden outside my front door of my apartment.

I saw that large plant at Home Depot, and was struck by the gorgeous colors of the leaves and the flowers of the one that was blooming. I chose a different one that was not blooming, but looked really healthy. And my patience was rewarded after about a week.

That is what they looked like about a week ago.

This was what actually popped up one evening.

And the next day, it had bloomed!

It is a Canna var. “Phasion” – the label from Home Depot called it a Tropicanna from Anthony Tesselaar USA Inc. in Lawndale, CA. The Home Depot cashier who checked me out told me that it is actually a bulb plant and will come back year after year! With being in a container, I’ll likely have to do something to keep it from freezing during the winter. But the price was right (I think it was under $15), so I decided to get it even if it was only good for this one year. I’ve been thrilled with it so far! It is on its 5th or 6th flower right now!

I’m really hoping that everything survives my vacation. I’ve got friends and family coming in to check on Max (rabbit) and water my flowers. Max is clearly more important, but the plants are living things too, so I’d like to see them survive. It has been really hot here; in the 90′s – but my place is partly shaded during the day, so they all seem to be thriving.

I’m headed to RI and MA for vacation to see SeaQueen and for a scientific conference! I need to go finish my packing, I fly out today. It won’t be long now!

I know I haven’t blogged in forever, and the dearth of information is going to continue a bit longer.
But this one only needs a couple of sentences, so I thought I’d post it.

I entered this photo in a Biology Photo contest at school in the “plants/fungi” category. The photo had to have been taken this semester, which meant that I pretty much had to intentionally look for something to photograph. I happened upon this vase by pure accident.

I was at Mom and Dad’s new house, and after coming back from attempting to take a photo of the deer in the neighborhood (which didn’t really work), I spotted the vase as I was walking up the driveway! I ended up spending a while taking photos of it, and they looked better than anything else I’d taken, so I entered it, and I won the category! I was particularly excited, because while I didn’t get to see the other faculty entries, I know that one of the other profs takes beautiful flower photos.

They are getting matted and hung in one of our buildings, which is rather cool.

BTW: here is the only deer photo I got.

Obviously, not one that would work for a contest. But rather funny all the same.

Last week, Mom and Dad were here in TX. They drove some things down (and across) from IN on Saturday that can’t be moved by the movers. They also wanted to use the week to make a decision about tile and carpet for a large percentage of their new house here in TX. And to top it off, there was the possibility that some of it could actually be installed that very same week!

On Monday, they chose tile and carpet, and I worked on a manuscript for some of my research. oodles of fun, that.

On Tuesday, they came down to my apartment so that Dad could see it for the first time in person and so that Mom could see the latest stage. I had hoped to get the last two boxes of decorative things unpacked before they arrived, because I had visions of them helping me hang framed art that day. However, it just took me too long to do the manuscript on Monday and other unpacking/cleaning on Tuesday morning.

Consequently, we used our Tuesday to go out to a fabulous, fabulous German lunch and go site-seeing. Lunch was just amazing. I had three kinds of sausages, sauerkraut, red cabbage, and what they called “German potatoes.” Turns out German potatoes are fried/sauteed potatoes cooked with baaaaaaaaaaaaaacon that have baaaaaaaaaaaaaaacon bits on them. OMG were they ever good. The sausages were fabulous.

Did I say the food was amazing?

Anyway, on the way to shopping in the historic part of town, I drove them past a couple of things that my town is known for. And we happened to go past the library.

Note that these were taken on one of my prior visits to the library; we did not go inside on this trip.

I love the high ceiling, natural light, and light fixtures inside.

And this library is the one that has the Starbucks machine inside; that is very funny to me, since I didn’t even know they existed.

Here is one of the landscaping features you see as you walk to the front door of the library.

And on my way to the parking lot, I spotted this sign.

That sign for the reading garden intrigued me, so I decided to venture to the back of the library

Turns out, it was just a very open space with benches and minimal landscaping. But I did see a lovely crepe myrtle that was in bloom.

And then we headed to the historic and tourist-y shopping district in town.

I hadn’t taken my camera with me, which was a shame, because there were some lovely places that were really photo-worthy, but that just means that I’ll have to go back!

We had a really fun time there. We were mostly just browsing, but we did keep an eye out for a breezy gardening hat for Mom. We saw a LOT of various decorative things for inside and outside. In fact, Mom found a great wrought iron, glass, bead and bell hanging piece; I guess it could be considered a windchime. She was hesitant to buy it, but the price was so low, that Dad and I went back to buy it for her.

I found this really interesting stone that is in the shape of a smooth egg that changes color inside (very subtly) depending on the angle from which you view it. And I scoped out clogs. I have been debating with myself about buying a pair of clogs for school. Not being able to wear open-toed shoes in labs means that I have to think a bit differently about what kinds of shoes are wearable for work.

And then, pretty soon it was time for us to end our day of site-seeing. But we made plans for another outing for Wednesday.

- to be continued in part 2 -

Last week, I was at Port Aransas, TX, near Corpus Christi on the eastern coast of TX, for vacation. I was with Texas Seestor (TS), Trainwreck (Tr), older niece (M) and younger niece (YN).

I had an exceptionally great time. Floating around, swimming, bouncing around, and playing in the pool for pretty much all day from 8:00am to 4 pm was just fantastic.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I am definitely a “water” when it comes to the whole water, air, earth, fire personality types. My dreams are usually water dreams, and I just love the feel of being in the water. I never dream about earth. If fire or air is in my dreams, it is usually a nightmare of some sort.

Anyway, mornings were usually a time when I sort of took care of M, because she and I both wake up early (6:00ish). Most mornings, I was only able to occupy here and allow TS and Tr to “sleep in” until 6:30, maybe closer to 7:00 if we were all lucky.
One morning after she woke me up at 5:00am, I really wanted to go out to the water and take photos of the sunrise. You might recall that last year, I was able to take sunrise photos every morning from our condo’s patio and I wrote a blog post this spring with a few of my best shots.

This year, due to the location of our room, I actually had to take more time to do it, because I had to take the boardwalk out to the beach to get shots.

But I love the boardwalk, because it allowed me to experience this interesting transition from condo and building to ocean. And on the way, I was walking past the dunes which were actually still green this year and not all dried out; I guess all of the rain they got a couple of weeks ago due to hurricane Andrew was actually helpful.

Here is the end of the boardwalk before I got onto the sand.

And then just as I was setting up my tripod at the bottom of the steps, this group of about 8 (or so) teenage girls dressed in white gauzy dresses start walking past me onto the beach. Right into the sunrise area.
ugh.
But the adult who was with them, with the big fancy camera, stopped and talked to me about how it was their last morning here and how the sunset the previous night didn’t work out. How she had to get them all up and ready by 6:00 am, blah, blah, blah. I was sort of sympathetic, but I also knew this might be my only morning to get out and take photos. She ended up saying that she’d try to keep them down the beach and out of my line of images. They were only partly successful. Thus, some of my photos do not have the sun actually centered. *sigh*

But, I caught the first glimmer of the sun over the clouds.

And one of my favorite parts is the sound of the seagulls calling out to each other over the background sound of the ocean waves.

Once the sun rose a little more, I decided to try to capture my joy in being out there. This required me to use the self-timer on my camera and to sort of guess where I needed to be in the photo.

For the first one, I only had the timer set at 10 seconds, because I didn’t check it ahead of time, and when I got out there, I realized that I’d left my shoes on. As I was trying to pull off my shoes, the camera snapped the shot.

oops.

setting it for 20 seconds worked out a bit better.

of course, when I ran back to the camera, there was that girl in the photo again.

it isn’t perfect, but it is all that I had energy for.

I realized it is quite difficult holding ones balance with ones arms raised in joy while not knowing when the waves were going to come in. Once a wave comes in and the water sucks back out, it is rather hard to keep ones balance.

Then attempts with the sun shining on me.

oops.

try again.

then back to the ocean and the birds and some close ups.

After some photos of the seaweed, I headed back.

It was a beautiful way to start the day. It made up for waking up at 5:00 am.

And then, after breakfast, it was back to the pool with M. We had it all to ourselves for about an hour.

It was really wonderful.

These flowers were ordered for me before I wrote my post where I mentioned that I hadn’t bought flowers for myself. When Texas Seestor saw my comment, she got a good chuckle out of it, because unbeknownst to me, she had gone in with Mom and Dad to buy me this bouquet!

It was delivered this afternoon, and as you can see, is just gorgeous!

I’ll be taking more photos soon. But for now, this is what I was able to shoot quickly with my normal lens.

I can’t decide which of these 4 photos I like the best. So, I’m posting them all.

Last Saturday, I took a vase out into our front yard and cut these out of our landscaping. I decided I might as well have them inside where I could enjoy them the most.

I think that this brown blanket background might show off the details on the yellow flowers better than the black.

As the weeks/days go on, I’ll post the close-ups. I took 75 good photos (88 total), so I’ll have a fair number to post.

even though this last one is overexposed, I kinda like it.

Happy Easter everyone!