Yellow bunting for the Pope

Here in the DC area we're all atwitter about The Pope coming from Tuesday through Thursday. I am. Atwitter I mean. I'm not Catholic, never was, and I'm not even a Christian. But like a lot of other people who are neutral on the subject of religion I'm a Pope fan.

As the visiting days approach, the local twitter is mostly about traffic: How many roads will be closed and when, how many residents will be restricted to walking to and from their homes since cars can't come and go, how many businesses will be forced to close for chunks of time, that sort of thing. Federal employees, a huge (yuuugh) part of the DC workforce, are asked to telecommute if possible. Or take the days off as vacation days if possible. Meanwhile there are thousands of people coming into town today and tomorrow (and Tuesday and Wednesday) and they'll all be confused by the city, and they'll all be crowding up around Francis while he moves from place to place in the city.

So the message to those of us who live, work, and play in the DC area is STAY AWAY. And that's exactly what I'll do. I may like the Pope but not enough to try to see him.

The Monastery above is 10 blocks or so from a church where the Pope will deliver (is that the right verb?) a mass on Wednesday. Since this Monastery houses Franciscans (as in St. Francis), there is a small hope that Pope Francis will at least drive by.

I 'work' here a few hours once a week, in the office doing officey kinds of things. So I feel a little attached to the papal visit. I hope it all goes well here, in NYC, and in Philadelphia.

[See the blue mailbox? It's going to be removed before Wednesday, per the Secret Service, which has been all over the neighborhood looking for possible bomb-hiding spots. Thanks bin Laden.]

Shipping container apartments. If I were younger....

 

This shipping container apartment building is in Northeast DC, near the Franciscan Monastery where I spend several hours each Friday in the office sort of working. I read about this apartment and invited a friend to join me in a drive-by inspection after work last week. I had hopes of getting inside to see an actual unit, but they're already rented and occupied. And I wasn't nervy enough to ask the young man carrying in some boxes if we could barge in and check out his place. The building is in walking distance of Catholic University and the residents we saw entering and leaving certainly looked like students.

The idea of living in a shipping container is so appealing. In theory. Though I'm not sure I'd want to be on the top floor in August, even with air conditioning. I'll bet electrical storms are exciting!

 

[This is one of the first pictures I've taken with my new iPhone (oh the fun!); I hope to get better at it when I know what I'm doing. Plus I don't have user-friendly photo editing software right now so my photos are published raw, with no tweaking. I need to tweak.]

Roses at the Monastery.

A few years ago my gardening friend Susan invited me along to see the gardens at this local Monastery, and I've been in love with the place ever since.  I spend a few hours each week helping out in the office -- filing, uploading pictures, just general office work. So every week for the past year I've walked through these gardens to the business office and I've been able to see all the gradual changes from season to season. Yesterday the roses were in full bloom and oh how beautiful they were. One of the guards who saw me taking pictures as I left insisted on taking mine. As usual, I'm loaded down with an armful of 'necessities,' including cans of seeds Brother Sebastian gave me. This picture reminds me to get some sun before my daughter's wedding in a few weeks. Not to mention a decent haircut. An eyelid lift would be nice too. Must remember to get a manicure. Pedicure. Lose 5 lbs. Stay calm.

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.)