Friday, May 30, 2008
I just love the feel of warm days and nights. It's so relaxy.
Posted at 9:09:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Too (pleasantly) eXhausted to post right now. Exercise!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Posted at 8:52:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
The hounding was great! We met at MMK and drove to the Cheshire/Hamden trail ("Linear Park"!). We'd forgotten all the stuff like how to unfold and set up our hounds, and put on the baskets and all that, but it all came back to us. I even remembered how to use my Cat, and somehow knew that the trail was just about 7 miles. [Cat Report: Trip Distance: 7.2 miles / Average Speed: 10.4 mph / Max Speed: 16.3 mph / Trip Time: 41'24.] I love my bike gloves, and my squeaky breaks. And all the things to smell. One spot on the trail smelled like honey. Not honeysuckle, honey. And the wooden bridges we cross over smell just like Grandmother's attic.
Had a picnic at the little farm, and got to visit my Maaaa! friend and the peacocks. The peacock was really having a cow today because there were some dogs around, and had his tail all spread out huge forever. It was gorgeous. He kept shaking it too, rustling it like a silk fan. The two lambs are HUGE now, no longer lambs at all! They have much deeper voices and are almost as big as their mother. The change is so dramatic. But I offered my old pal Maaaa! some grass and she was really friendly. I petted and patted and wriggled her for ages, no longer even feeding her at the same time. She loved it. When her black (more brown, now) sibling came over to see what he was missing out on, she pushed him away, not wanting to share. Kept sticking her nose through the fence and rubbing her head against it, with a big smile right in my face. I was grinning like mad the whole time. Her wool is so deep right now! Deeper than my fingers. Maaaa! is my pal.
Goofy photos: 1) petting (I love this picture); 2) happy Maaaa!, 3) pretty impressive wool, 4) I know what Dean will say when he sees this one , and 5) yes, yes, fine, I will not even try to deny there's some resemblance.
Ha. I just took the "How Rare Is Your Personality?" quiz, and here are my results:
Posted at 3:29:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Your Personality is Very Rare (INTP)
I've got to say, that's pretty darned accurate, and I'm definitely not going to argue with something that says I'm incredibly rare, although I fail to see how all that was determined from only 12 questions!
Your personality type is goofy, imaginative, relaxed, and brilliant.
Only about 4% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 6% of all men. You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.
Great find: the Florida Center for Instructional Technology has made a ton of antique woodcuts and engravings available online, with a very generous free use license. I love this style of illustration. There's all kinds of cool stuff, like:
Posted at 1:02:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Corals and Sea Anemone
Crustaceans
Fish A-E, Fish E-M, Fish M-S, Shad - Z
Jellyfish
Lampreys
Sponges
Squid and Octopus
Sea Cucumbers
Sea Urchins and Sea Stars
Also, trees and trees (lots of cool palms and cycads!)
And countless others. Check out the numerous zoology sections, the molds, the mosses and lichens, the mushrooms, the... too many to name.
Meanwhile, What It Is is brilliant. I've been poring over it the past two nights. Maybe I'll comment more articulately when I'm finished.
Since I'm a complete slack and never wrote my final Maui entry about our shark dive, I'm thinking maybe I should Lynda Barry it. Especially since Jan told me she likes it when I post drawings. We'll see.
We're going to go hounding today!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Almost forgot: I took an updated photo of Kimball Farm's lobster roll yesterday. And yes, it's still my favorite.
Posted at 7:21:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
Posted at 6:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.
It's warm and rainy. And sunny at the same time! Very cool weather. Noteworthy new things as of my return from Maryland: 1) locker! 2) hula hoop! 3) What It Is! Also, "bigger than a breadbox" > 10" x 16½" x 10½". I know that because there's a breadbox in the highly entertaining Vermont Country Store catalog, which I read while waiting for our food at Kimball Farm. We stopped at Jaffrey for a lobster roll on the way home from Maryland. Yeah, it's in New Hampshire and we live in Connecticut, but, you know. We were already up in the air, so it wasn't much farther. It actually only took a little under 2 hours from Tipton (in Odenton, MD) to our home airport in Hartford, and only about 2 hours 30 minutes from Tipton all the way to Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The way home from Maryland and North Carolina is always speedy because we get a tail wind.
Anyway, the weather all weekend was fantastic, and we had a really relaxy trip. Flying down on Saturday, there were lots of big blue clouds way up above, so it was nice and un-glary and all the colors of the land down below were clear and intense. It was a little bumpy flying, but totally worth it for the patchwork of greens and blues and browns that are the earth! Absolutely beautiful. I didn't take too many photos, but here's 1) the snaky Connecticut River as we began our trip, flying away from Brainard (you can see Hartford in the center distance), 2) some random farms, either in Pennsylvania or Delaware (notice the shadows of clouds on the ground), 3) looking back at Baltimore as we neared our destination, and 4) BWI, the Baltimore/Washington International Airport, which we were routed to fly right over!
After Jan's graduation party, Diane came over to our hotel and she and I hung out in the lobby talking until late o'clock. Then on Sunday Dean and I went over to David's house and he listened to podcasts on their fantastic porch swing while I hung out with David's fam. I got a hula hoop demo (no doubt why I was able to pick up on it so quickly when I tried today!) and we went on a walk to the Greenbelt youth center where I outscored everyone else by MILES when playing foosball (which I had never played in my life and expected to be really horrible at)! I was quite amazed. The Hunter-Laura team ate the lunch of our David-Marilou competitors. We also went to the park where David, Hunter and I attempted basketball (we couldn't leave until we each made a basket) (I was very out of practice!) and Hunter and I both went on the Electric Slide and the weird new-fangled teeter-totter, and I climbed the rock wall. I wish I had a cool park near me, and someone to play with at it!
Also on Sunday was our dinner with Jan, Joe, June and Sam at Cafe Atlantico downtown. We rode on the metro to get there, which I have done a few times before in my life but all such instances have been wiped from my memory. The metro is pretty neat, and kind of scary. The weather/temperature all day was absolutely perfect and Atlantico was very tasty. I ordered the Grilled Octopus appetizer (which was a whole octopus, including the body) with warm strawberries and arugula. It was very very tender and grill-ish and delicious, and was accompanied by flavored foam of some sort and cool wispy-streaked octopus ink designs on the plate. It was great, but no wanted to try it but Jan, even though there were enough legs for everyone! Dean got a cool salad topped with what looked like maggots but what were (we think) actually some sort of crisped rice that was very tasty. Dean also ordered me a "magic" mojito, which began as a glass of cotton candy. My main dish was the Beef Cheeks, which I chose for the excellent crispy sweet breads. Yum. It also contained truffle, although I couldn't really taste the truffle (not like that intense olfactory truffle shaving experience at Per Se!). Our table at the very top of Atlantico was nice and non-noisy, well-suited for conversation.
We flew home Monday morning (the Marriott has a noon check out time; how perfect is that???), after breakfast/lunch at Chevy's. Note to future self: you actually like Chevy's! (Fish taco!) Go there when you're in Greenbelt! It was a lot hazier on the way back, but a very very smooth and easy flight. Tipton is really nice cute little airport! Here are Dean and Tango at our tiedown before we took off.
