Butterflies (and two caterpillars)!

I finally visited the annual Brookside Gardens Wings of Fancy butterfly exhibit. It's just down the road from me but I've never gone; today I went sort of by chance. It was very busy at this tiny and other-worldly exhibit, so I plan to go back mid-week when I can avoid so many 3-foot high people, who were adorable and enchanting in their own way but they made it hard to get good pictures. The butterflies land on you! A beautiful black and white butterfly friend followed me around the exhibit, landing on my shoulder or back from time to time. An attendant had to remove him or her manually before I left the room. I was wearing a shade of blue that may have been especially appealing. Next time I'll wear something bright pink or orange.

Can someone identify this flower? [Yes! I do believe that Jane nailed it: Torenia fournieri AKA wishbone flower. It looks so much like johnny-jump-up but there are subtle differences.]

I think it's a pretty common annual but I can't remember what it's called.

Not a political comment, just a fashion comment.

Those shoes! That belt! The whole package!  I'm drawn to and repelled by this picture in equal measure. Sarah is quite an amazing person in a way. She brings out such high emotions, both in those who agree with her and those who don't (that would include me). She's got something that I can't give a name to: not charisma exactly, not a high Q score exactly, but something that draws people to her. As long as she just stays behind a podium entertaining me I'm OK with her. Those shoes!

I wish my friend Paula hadn't posted this on Facebook.

You can probably figure out the question ("how many squares are in this diagram?") but do you know the answer. The Facebook guesses, of which there are currently 214,094, range from 27 to 90. I get a different number every time I try (usually in the 34-36 range) but I'm getting dizzy so I hope someone will know the answer and let me know.

Brain Hat! Gotta make one.

The pattern is here. It will cost you $5 but it's for a good cause, or so the author says and I choose to believe her. She says this:
Jan 31, 2011
I do not have any hats for sale. Unfortunately medical school takes up enough of my time that I am unable to make any hats for sale at this point. My best recommendation is to find a friend or family member that knits and bribe them with some delicious cookies.

The wormy looking things are called gyri and the grooves they create are called sulci (or fissures). Explained clearly here.

I hope to make a hat but we'll see. I follow through on about 25% of the projects I start. And I'm more or less OK on that. Better than 20%.

Note: Thanks to Natalie F. for sending me this link. It's good, no it's great, to have so many thoughtful friends from my years at NIH.

Another loss, but he made it to 86 so that's not bad. And we still have Cavett. I hope there's some kind of heaven so Vidal can see this headline.

I'm really getting weary of all these great writers dying lately -- Nora Ephron was one I failed to note on my blog. (Talk about a funny lady -- and a class act.) At least Ephron, Hitchens, and Vidal leave behind books to be read and re-read.

And for anyone who loves a good political confrontation check out Vidal vs Buckley discussing life as we knew it in August 1968 here. Please do not watch if you'll be offended by the words "queer" and "crypto-Nazi." In my opinion Vidal won the battle because he never really lost his cool and he didn't lunge out of his chair the way Buckley did.

Anyone know what kind of flower this is? It's growing in the park next door. [Nancy from WY ID'ed it as Gaillardia, or Firewheel (Gaillardia pulchella).]

Isn't it a great color? Speaking of color, Tanya from Suburban Jubilee, in Tasmania, posted this wonderful hue test, a very quick and fun way to see how well you can see differences in colors.  Go here to take the test. I won't brag just yet about how well I scored but I suspect I'll have to let it out eventually. For someone with old bad eyes I was pleased.

My grand-nephew Porky and my grand-niece Rosie.

Rosie and Porky are living a wonderful life up in Western Maryland. And I'm sure they'll make wonderful pork chops next winter. I'm very, very proud of my niece Sarah, her husband Kevin, and their three little adorable kidlets. They are living a real life, where they sometimes look their dinner in the face. That just seems ethically, mentally, ecologically, and morally healthy to me.

But I admit that it's much easier to watch someone else live this life than to live it myself. My fantasies of living a Willa Cather life can be played out by my niece while I watch from the comforts of my home. If I were 30 years old again maybe I would attempt such a life. Maybe. But not anywhere close to the Washington, DC, area.  I like my air conditioning too much.

Truth embedded in comedy.

At the Opening Ceremony to the Olympics in London.

I'm sort of reading this book (which my brain is not big enough to fully understand) and it made me buy this salad dressing. Which is delicious.

I've read a lot of Gary Taubes' writing over the years. His 2002 story for the NYT about how dietary fat may not be as bad as we're told by the experts, his 2007 NYT story on hormone replacement therapy and health advice in general, and his 2011 NYT story about how sugar is toxic. He writes clearly. He makes interesting and believable points. He cites scientific studies from reputable sources (New England J of Med, for example). But the total package of info is just baffling (to me).  I'll continue reading -- or skimming actually -- but it's very, very hard to believe he's right. His thoughts do, however, give me permission to ignore for yet another year my high-ish cholesterol readings.  It seems like everyone I know takes a statin for cholesterol. Which of course makes me dig in my heels and say "not me!" Thanks Dad for all this idiotic stubbornness.

What's this? A lily of some kind I'm sure. But not a traditional tiger lily I don't think. [Update: it's a blackberry lily (Iris domestica). Thanks Jane P! SIL to my SIL and therefore a sort of relative.]

Was this me?

My adult son assured me yesterday that my mothering style hasn't caused him to despair for his future. Haven't checked with my daughter yet but she seems happy enough so I'm hoping she'll say the same. But this cartoon seemed just a little too familiar.

What a life.

Have you heard about the upcoming first-ever Internet Cat Video Film Festival in Minneapolis? One pundit said that we watch cat videos at work because cats are usually doing the two things that everyone wants to do: hang out at home and nap.

Anyone know what kind of bird this is?

Permanent beeswax room coming to the Phillips Gallery in DC.

Yes, a beeswax room. Described here in the Washington Post. One huge problem with the article is that it never even mentions bees. The bees that produced all the wax to be used.  Bees get no respect.

Projected installation date is early 2013 and I'll be there. I wonder if it will smell like beeswax? And how will they keep people (like me) from touching the walls?

Photo credit: Wolfgang Laib or Sperone Westwater (confusing caption). The Post will probably make the photo disappear anyway. Copyright infringement. It's complicated in the Internet copyright world.

Cute, yes. Do I want them to go away? No, not exactly. Do I curse them daily? Yes.

Two of the (at least) five fawns that hang out around my house. Here they are next door in a neighbor's back yard. (I don't even try to be a good videographer. I'm lucky to hold the camera the right way. But I am sort of proud of this little vignette -- see definition No. 4.*)

*Noun

1. a decorative design or small illustration ....

2. an engraving, drawing, photograph, or the like ....

3. a decorative design representing branches, leaves, grapes, or the like...

4. any small, pleasing picture or view.

Honey harvester for a day. (More like for a morning.)

That's what I got to be a few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning after a big storm. I was with members of the Franciscan Monastery Garden Guild, extracting honey from the 14 hives they keep on the Monastery grounds. I met the head beekeeper a week or so ago, and I helped him move some frames of bees from one hive to another. It was the first time I've had on The Veil and Worked The Bees since I gave away my hive in May 2011. Extracting the honey great fun. We had no electricity but that didn't interfere with the project, every step of which requires no electricity. The tasks ranged from carrying (into an upstairs work room) the big heavy boxes of honey-filled frames, to carefully scraping off the top layer of wax on each frame, to hand-spinning the frames in those metal contraptions, to pouring the honey into a bucket with a screen on it, to pouring that filtered honey into bottles, to labeling the bottles. It was great fun.

The honey is sold in the gift store for the Monastery.  And each volunteer got a bottle of honey and here's mine! Tasty. It would be nice to make honey my only sweet, replacing store-bought cookies and chocolate and ice cream and pies and blahblahblah, but that's oh-so unlikely. (And it's too bad I put my wet thumb over the label.)

Heard a very good interview with Marie Tillman today, widow of Pat Tillman. She experienced the healing powers of New York City.

Marie Tillman:  About a year and a half, I guess, after Pat was killed, I had still been living in Washington State, which is where we were stationed. And I just -- I felt like I needed a change and always wanted to move to New York. So I was able, through the job that I was working at the time, to transfer to the office in Manhattan. And so I took the opportunity and just sort of threw myself into, you know, this big, crazy city, which was in hindsight one of the best decisions I could ever make.

And why do you think it was such a good decision to make?

MT: You know it just -- it gave me an opportunity to get out of my environment and really to just immerse  myself in the city. And New York is a place where there's a lot of chaos and commotion and people and, you know, I felt like I could be anonymous in a lot of ways and just start to, you know, go out into the world a little bit more.

Her book is here.  The interview is here.

Two recent trips: 3 hours, 19 mins to the west and we're at my sister's house. 3 hrs and 1 min to the east and we're at Bethany Beach. Both trips wonderful.

Bottom two pictures are from Bethany Beach, Delaware, last week. Weather was perfect. I swam with the fishes. (Those are people on stand-up surf boards -- the proper name of which I cannot remember at the moment.)  Top two pictures are going through (literally) and over the mountains to my sister's house on the Potomac in Western Maryland a week earlier.  I love her patio!  She let wildflowers grow freely between the flagstones and they look fabulous. She planted what she thought was chamomile but what grew turned out to something else.

106 degrees tomorrow. (And where did the degree symbol go on the keyboard?)

Miscellaneous.

My lone bedraggled sunflower survived the deadly storm that blew through town yesterday, but the next door neighbors' picnic table did not.

We were very very lucky, and lost power for just about 15 hours. But there are more storms heading our way.

"Forward"??

The last time I thought I'd found a typo I quickly learned that I was wrong, as you can see if you go here.  Recently I came across another apparent typo (in the May 14th New Yorker) but maybe I'm wrong again. But I'm not, right? It should be "Foreword," right?

The article is a good one. About geoengineering. Depressing of course but what's new. The link is here.

How great is this? SF Friend M. becomes a foster beekeeper.

It's a long story, which I'll report later. Margo lives in San Francisco in a really old house. Details to follow.

[note: I'm trying to type using only one space between sentences; mostly I'm forgetting, so I have to go back and delete one space -- very annoying]

One space or two? How did I miss this debate?

This is wrong.  Because there are two spaces before the word "Because."

This is correct. Because there is only one space before the word "Because."


At least according to this January 2011 article from Slate.com.  Very interesting little history of typography, and I feel like I should have known this long before 2012.  I guess I could start using only one space but it would be hard.

About 15 years ago, maybe more like 18?, a smart, talented, polite young writer came to work with me, and after a few months she smilingly and casually told me that, in a previous job, she had learned that one space was the more appropriate style.  I smilingly thanked her for telling me about her former employer's interesting thoughts on spaces but I also told her that we would stick with the two-space rule.  My boss agreed with me so that was that.

Now, all these years later, I want to apologize to Natalie.  She was right, I was wrong.  I wonder if I would care about this at all if I still worked?

Daughter on a rooftop somewhere in Brooklyn. Last week, before the heat arrived.

Two weeks more or less in the life of my lone sunflower. He's in a pot on the back deck and he stares in the dining room window at us.