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.

Bambi, unfortunately, loves my back yard--my so-called fenced back yard. Top picture shows her under the deck. Love those eyelashes!

 I spotted her yesterday morning and escorted her out of the back yard.  She left via one of her secret entrances, then trotted around to the front yard, where I got this shaky video of her.  The back yard is so full of deer treats that I know she'll find her way back inside again.  Here's how the yard looks now.  At least the ferns and the astilbe will survive.

Cardinal climber seedlings. From 2009 seeds.

I'm overly proud of these little plantlets.  Three years ago I bought and planted one small cardinal creeper plant and it had a successful summer in my vegetable garden, growing up, over, around, and  through lots of other plants in my garden. I saved some seeds and finally got around to planting them this year. They did very well which shows that seeds can linger a few years and still be viable.  The hummingbirds like the flowers and deer will only occasionally nip at the plant. 

A nice healthy what? [Locust? Kat's guess. Sounds right.]

I don't think it's wisteria but I can't be sure.  Any ideas what it is?

A wedding next June!

The home that became this Inn (top picture) was built in1829 and is about 50 miles west of Washington, DC, and just east (and maybe a little north?) of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.

Up until the 1930s the building in the second picture was a one-room school house in this tiny town of about 65 people. 

Third picture from the bottom shows Becca, clipboard in hand, and Sean, camera in hand, and the Innkeeper.

I may be getting excited but it's a very, very low-key excitement.  And I keep telling Becca that I will do whatever she wants, in terms of planning, but she has to give me specific instructions.  I'm not in any way at all interested in events planning.  Sounds too much like work.  In fact, I hope to be the reverse of an interfering mother of the bride (or mother-in-law-to-be).  Maybe a little too much as a matter of fact.