So early Tuesday morning

Hm. Tuesday. What can be said about it? It's after Monday and before Wednesday. Not the first day of the workweek. Not the middle, "hump," day.

I think in the old nursery song, it was the day "we iron our clothes." I don't own an ironing board at this point in my life. I figure wrinkles will fall out of my clothes as I wear them.

Coffee is brewing as I write. Oh, coffee, wonderful coffee. Meanwhile I must put on my dog-walking clothes and walk the dog.

According to the weather forecast, it will stay cool today, but get warmer every day, and be downright hot by the weekend.

Flowers, please

The last couple Saturdays, I've been disappointed when -- up in good time to watch P. Allen Smith's Garden Home on KCTS (a local PBS station) at 7:30 a.m. -- instead I see P. Allen Smith's Garden to Table. I like to see shows about flowers and landscaping and, while I don't precisely dislike cooking shows, I am less interested in them. Yesterday the Garden to Table show featured a recipe for kale soup, which is something I am very, very unlikely either to make or to eat.

There is a serious shortage of gardening shows in this world. I am down to two: P. Allen Smith's Garden Home and The Victory Garden. The Victory Garden also spends time on vegetarian recipes that don't interest me. "Chef Michel" always cuts up a bunch of vegetables and cooks them into fare that does not appeal to me in the least.

What can I say? I like red meat.

And when I tune into a gardening show I want to see gardens.

No rift in the lute

This week at bedtime I've been helping myself relax by finding long-playing sets of Renaissance instrumental music at youtube, particularly lute music.  Here is just a two and a half minute sample of the kind of thing I like.

Special occasions

Today the weather felt like spring! It was great.

Today was also Administrative Professionals Day. Once upon a time, that was Secretaries Day, but for some reason the term "secretary" has gone out of fashion and been replaced with "administrative assistant." My job title is "Legal Assistant." I fancy at one time "legal assistants" were "legal secretaries." Call me what you will. Just don't call me late for dinner.

My kind co-workers gave me and my fellow legal assistant each a card, signed by everyone in the office. I am touched to receive that kindness.

The other occasion, according to my sister's book blog, is that April is National Poetry Month. This spring, as the trees have leafed out, their yellow tinge kept making me think of the Robert Frost line, "Nature's first green is gold."

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

1923

All flesh is grass

Here is a picture from last September of my calla lily, including a ceramic fleur-de-lis on the table next to it.



Today I found the fleur-de-lis broken. Perhaps the wind blew it over. Maybe a cat, possum, or some other creature knocked into the table and made it fall. Perhaps a small child is the cause. Oh, well. The wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.



In other back porch news, the honeysuckle has filled out with leaves and even is getting buds. I almost wrote "blooms," but they are "pre-blooms."



The honeysuckle picture is from Saturday, when it was rainy. Today was sunny. I was home from work recovering from my cold or flu or whatever it was. It was beautiful outside all day.

I do feel better. I think I was wise to stay home and rest, and I anticipate that I will return to work tomorrow.

Wordless

Tweet of the week

THIS. “This week is so bad that an Elvis-impersonating conspiracy theorist sent poison to Obama and THAT'S LIKE THE TENTH BIGGEST STORY.”
— Laura Mitchell (@ljmabouttown) April 19, 2013

Like a faucet

Well, I guess it was about a month ago that I started a cold, and only a couple weeks ago that I had an allergic reaction to an antibiotic I took for an ear infection, and now my nose is running and my sinuses are congested again. Ugh, yuck, and bleah.

Reading

Reading Introverts in the Church. Liking it.

A day in the life

Worked. Read. Walked the dog.

Partly sunny, partly cloudy. Cool but not cold. A bit windy at times.

Now, sleepy.

Boston massacre

Prayer, sympathy, and sorrow for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing and their families.

Like a duck

Took this through the windshield as I left for church Sunday morning.



This blog is becoming just ducky!

The bouquet residence

On the already cluttered top of my dishwasher, I have three hyacinths.



The empty pop tart box is there to prop up one that is starting to fall over. That is a thing hyacinths seem to do.

They're pretty enough, but I didn't buy them for their looks but for their fragrance. A couple years ago when I went to the Home and Garden Show in early March, I was longing for spring at the tail end of winter -- February is a hard month, and the Home and Garden Show is usually the first weekend in March, sort of the first sign of spring.

Anyway, when I walked into the garden section of exhibit, such lovely colors everywhere and -- heavenly -- a fresh, sweet fragrance. I tried not to be obvious in sniffing around various blooms to try to find the source, and it turned out to be some hyacinth.

So a week or so ago when I saw hyacinth at Safeway I picked up a few and brought them home just to make the place smell good, and it worked. They're starting to fade a bit now, but for a week or so I would come home to a lovely fragrance in my house.

And, of course, no mention of hyacinth is complete without:

Spring weather report

Windy, cold, rainy.

Cold and damp

So today I took my camera along when I walked my dog, thinking maybe I'd see that funny looking duck again. I did not see it, although I did see the pair of mallard ducks I usually see.



As you can see, it's a rather wet morning here in the great Pacific Northwest. Fine weather for ducks, as they say.

Because I was looking for a webbed-footed fowl and because it was kind of chilly and rainy, I had running through my head a silly song I learned when I was a little girl:

Be kind to your webbed-footed friends
For a duck may be somebody's mother.
Be kind to your friends in the swamp
Where the weather is very cold and damp.
Now you may think that this is the end.
Well, it is.

It's sung to a fragment of the John Philip Sousa march, The Stars and Stripes Forever.

Today, I am the friend where the weather is very cold and damp to whom you should be kind. :-)  But my feet are not webbed. Yet.

Quack

This morning, while walking my dog, I saw, as is my wont, a pair of ducks. They were the typical ducks we see around here a lot, called, apparently, mallard ducks.


This picture was realized by Richard Bartz by using a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

But they were accompanied by a larger fowl. At first I thought it was a bigger duck, from the way it waddled (if it walks like a duck, etc.) and shook its tail, but when I saw its face with red skin surrounding the eyes, and its mottled gray feathers, I though maybe it was some kind of turkey or chicken that had escaped somebody's keeping. I could not see its feet because it was in the grass of someone's lawn.

When I was came by the birds on my way back home, they were in the street (fortunately a quiet, low-traffic residential area), and I saw that the big one had webbed feet. Later in the day, when I had time, I looked online to try to identify it and decided it must have been a type of Muscovy duck. The picture below shows the kind of face it had, although the one I saw had a more dappled gray feather pattern.


CC-BY-2.5 / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

In other news, I took my dog to the groomer for a hair cut. He went in shaggy and came out smooth and short-haired. Visually, he shrank in size. What had appeared to be his bulk turned out to have been fuzz.

While he was having his makeover, I went to Bakerview Nursery and picked out a small dieffenbachia and some creeping fig, along with a ceramic pot to plant them in. I plan to take the pot to work and adorn my work space.

Strange new worlds

I don't watch that much TV but tonight for some reason I channel-surfed a bit and found Star Trek: Nemesis, the last movie based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I never got around to seeing it in the theater, so I watched it, and it was okay.

In my mis-spent youth, I was something of a Trekkie. Until I was in my mid-20s, there was only one Star Trek, and that was the original series. I was too young to watch or remember seeing it when it was new, but re-runs of it were constantly on TV while I was growing up. Since the original series was only three seasons long, I saw every episode many, many times.

When I was in 9th grade, every movie we were shown in my science class started with a space motif, so I would always mutter to my friend:

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Occasionally I would top that performance with some Ooo-OOOO-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo musical effects. And sometimes the teacher would send me out into the hall.



By the time I was in college I pretty much knew the series by heart. My senior year, Star Trek was on late Sunday night, and I would turn it on and watch the first line or two of dialogue, and then I would know which episode it was and decide whether to watch it.

When The Next Generation started, I don't think I watched it right away, but eventually I did watch it and liked it. I never got to know it by heart, like the first one. And when they had the series (serieses?) Deep Space Nine and Voyager, I only watched them occasionally, and I saw the most recent, "prequel" series, Enterprise, only once that I recall. So my Star Trek enthusiasm tapered off as the number of Star Trek storylines multiplied, but I still have a soft spot for Captain James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, and the rest of the original gang.

Maundering*

I saw a church sign last week in Bellingham with a list of Holy Week services, including one for "Maunday" Thursday. I remember the first time I heard anyone say "Maundy Thursday"; I thought they were saying "Monday Thursday," which made no sense at all. But the word "Maundy" is never heard in any other context, so it's no wonder it's unfamiliar. Wikipedia says "Maundy" either derives from the Latin mandatum, as in Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos, meaning "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you," which Jesus said to his disciples at their seder supper, or else it's from the Latin mendicare or French mendier: to beg.

Which brings me to my point. Actually, I don't have a point.* I just find etymologies interesting.