being not doing

After weeks of anticipation, the first of the daylilies are blooming in our front bed. We have yet to see any flower stems in the row of the larger orange variety, but the smaller yellow ones are off to the races. I’ve heard that daylilies are edible, but I haven’t tried them yet. […]

Something Rotten is only the second book I’ve read by Jasper Fforde. The other was The Big Over Easy, which I liked quite a bit (it was one that I picked up from the ‘3 for the price of 2′ table, where I can invariably find two books that I’ve been wanting to get […]

This morning I rode with an acquaintance up to Lake Artemesia for some birding. Once there, we walked our bikes, and just enjoyed being out on the path (nearly) alone. The lake was beautiful, and we spotted a female Wood Duck out in the middle just after we arrived. Our next sighting […]

On Sunday afternoon, I took my recently repaired and returned to me babycam up to the University Hills pond. This past week irises have popped into bloom all around the banks of the pond, which pleases me greatly. Irises are my favorite flower, and yellow is my favorite color, so I couldn’t have […]

This morning delivered the first peony bloom of the summer. The bloom is on the plant that came with the house, and there are a dozen or so more buds to look forward to. While the transplanted peonies seem to have survived, they are unlikely to bloom this year. My grandmother claims […]

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, by Kim Edwards, was another book that caught my eye at the bookstore and didn’t pan out for me. I don’t know what I was expecting, really. The plot was as advertised: doctor delivers his own babies, and gives away the one that has Down’s syndrome without telling his […]

I had been interested in reading Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau, for some time when it showed up as a donation to the bookstore where I was volunteering. Education per se is not where my sociological interests lie, but Lareau’s study promised to be more than just another study about how the public education […]

This past week, I cracked open Backgammon Games and Strategies, which we’ve had for a few years now, to learn how to play Plakoto.
It bears saying here that I have been playing Backgammon since I was a small child, and it’s always been one of my favorite games. Perhaps it’s one of my favorites […]

Today was another beautiful day at the pond. I went around midday this time, and saw three more life birds! This is the first time I’ve actively tried to catch species on their spring migration, and so far I have to say it’s been well worth the effort.
Before I reached the […]

This past week has been a full one: I’ve added a half dozen new birds to my lifelist, sighted in or near my town! Over the past few days I’ve spotted a Lousiana Waterthrush, Yellow-crowned Night Heron, and Yellow-rumped Warbler, in Wells Run, the creek that runs through University Park. A few weeks […]