Second sight?

Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone reviewed The Royal Scam in 1976.  

Steely Dan's next album, Aja, was indeed a pop killer.

Second chance

Last year about this time, I spied one white flower standing out in a fallow field of green.  

Yesterday evening, I returned to the area because from a distance, I could see...

...and then I got closer.

There's just one plant this year, but it's the same drooping star-of-Bethlehem that I spotted on April 21, 2024.  The location data in my phone confirms it's the same place this year.  The red 11 and blue 6 were last year's images, and the other 9 were from last night. 

     

Look out

 

Wildflower at sunset

Seen this evening in the same field that last summer held soybeans.  Henbit deadnettle is the tag Google gave it, and instead of linking to the usual "noxious weed" rundown, here's Blue Ridge Botanic with a much more complimentary description.  

Down it goes, too

Remember that red maple we planted on April 14?  Here's a good close look at it now.  Rabbits?  The missing parts were seemingly too tall for a rabbit to reach them.  But something nibbled them off.

Down it goes

At 8:00 this morning, work began on roof replacement of our next-door neighbor's house.  Good Cat Nora has her eyes on the workers as they strip away the 25-year-old shingles and roofing paper.

In bloom

For quite a few years, we've had a dogwood tree growing just at the near end of our driveway.  Like much of our landscaping, it just appeared one year and we let nature take its course.  

In 2019, we had landscapers work on the non-lawn portions of our yard, which we regretted.  Areas where they spread black mulch looked fine at first, but as the summer went along, the grass died alongside the mulched areas, as though the mulch had contained Roundup or some other powerful herbicide.  

A cherry tree declined to the point where only two limbs remained alive.  Next to the shed, a magnolia tree got sick and died.  The area containing the volunteer dogwood also suffered, but the tree remained alive, although several branches stopped producing leaves and were pruned last year.  This spring, it's looking better than it has since before the misbegotten mulching. 

A particularly good specimen

A wildflower at its peak before it goes to seed.   It's worth recording, I feel.

Outside looking in

Good Queen Swirly makes the acquaintance of the visiting neighbor cat from a respectful distance.  The little moocher was here to eat breakfast early this morning, again for a mid-morning feeding, and showed up late this afternoon to ask for another meal.
 

Strolling with a camera-phone

Walked around the development just before sunset today and saw a number of rabbits, including this one.  All of them were in the grass, except this cottontail.  

Our back yard

One wildflower and one freshly planted tree.

Let me see...

 "Rory McIlroy got a huge monkey off his back on Sunday afternoon, and he replaced it with a green jacket."  

Coincidence?

Although past champions Sergio Garcia and Mike Weir would need a miracle to make the cut, no doubt they were grateful for the opportunity to compete.

 

A Good Day

I baked a cinnamon streusel coffee cake early this afternoon.  Then, went to Costco for one or two things and came home with four or five.  (The eggs were $5.79, but that was for a dozen and a half; the Diamond Crystal salt was 37 cents a pound; the pint of Kirkland vanilla, as yet unaffected by the Trump tariffs, was $10; and the Kerry Gold butter and the Rao's marinara sauce both had sale prices that put them below those on supermarket shelves (less than $6 a pound for the former and less than $5 a quart jar for the latter).  

As mentioned above, the coffee cake was made with cinnamon, but our open container of Kirkland (again) cinnamon, although it contained enough for the cake, was at a low level that made it difficult to reach with a measuring spoon.  The answer was readily at hand, though.  

Both PG and I save glass jars just for occasions like this.  There's a shelf in the pantry that holds a dozen or more jelly jars, home canning jars, and other glass containers, and from the stack I picked out one that had held Bonne Maman preserves.  

Maybe a visitor would wonder, but maybe not, if they understood that's how both of us were raised.  Our mothers and fathers had to quit school in their early teens and were thereafter blocked from high-paying jobs, which is why they insisted that their children get as much education as possible.  My mother said again and again that when you had an education, nobody could take it away from you.  

I got there in a roundabout way, which I can attribute to being the first in the family to go to college, but the inexperience that led me to take the scenic route on the road to a diploma also resulted in lasting memories of interesting detours.  That was back when a young person and average student could pay for college with federal grants without signing up for student loan debt.  Any advice I might give now based on that era is as out of date as cookbooks from the 19th Century.

Supper was homemade pizza, washed down with Pepsi, which I've otherwise given up to keep my blood sugar score out of triple digits.  It tasted terrific.  I'll be craving it for days to come.  

Rather than buy Pepsi in bulk, which would be a mighty temptation, I got two cold 20-ounce bottles at Wawa.  The price was $2.59 each, or two 20's for $4.00.  (Don't want to forget that I saw a caramel Lindt bar at Wawa and picked one up for PG.)

That's enough detail about the past day.  Time to go upstairs.

Spring in name only

Wildflowers by a stream, Ringoes, New Jersey, April 4.  Lesser celandine, Google Images claims.  As is customary with most wildflowers I consider attractive, it is considered invasive and is unwelcome in many states.  

I'm grateful to see any sign of spring these days, which have been either gray, damp, and chilly, or bright, dry, windy and cold.

Still at it

Just nothing particularly noteworthy these days.  I'll know it when I see it, and then I'll write about it.