Summer Adventures

 This has to be have been one of the most gorgeous weekends of the entire year! We hit NEBCO again on Friday afternoon, and split a really delicious pizza from one of the trucks. Saturday morning we did part of the Branford trail again. Like last time, we dropped my car at the Tabor lot, and then started from the Jarvis Creek Farm portion of the trail, right along the water. The marshland had grown in beautifully since we were last there in spring, and almost all of the osprey platforms had denizens. The weir was very calm this time, so I wasn't freaked out walking over it. Just 1.5 miles brings you out into Stony Creek, which is like a mini-Cape Cod, where we had breakfast at the cafe. The service isn't quick, but that is honestly the best bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich I think I've ever had. It's always nice to see all of the locals greeting each other by name, too.

From there it's another three miles back to Tabor. I had suggested wearing pants, mostly just thinking about ticks, but it turned out to be very important because of the amount of undergrowth and poison ivy capable of touching you even on the trails! 

This time I took a picture of the rock crevice where there are helpfully ropes to help you climb it. I'm still flabbergasted that this is a town trail, right behind the fancy golf course, and yet there is no walk-around if you don't feel like doing a scramble. Sean insisted this time that it's totally doable without the ropes, and yes, probably, but it's steeper than the photo makes it look, especially at the top, and slipping would be a very nasty fall. I don't think I could do this trail in reverse and go down that slope...too afraid of heights. 

Sunday morning we had coffee in town with my friend Denise and her partner Bob, who were passing through on their way back from a vacation in Maine. It's always such a pleasure to see her! It is crazy to think that we met in Rome in 2014, she was married to Francesco, and her kids were teens. Now Gabriel is finishing up his PhD in Physics and hoping to work for a national lab or NASA, while Gregory (once a "Stalinist" Communist, whose facility with languages was so great he shocked Chinese people during a study-abroad in Chengdu) is finishing up a stint with the Peace Corps in West Africa and dating an anthropology/archeology grad student at Tulane. LIFE!

Then Sunday afternoon it was time for the rubes! Charles has gotten into cooking, so yesterday he cooked with his "sous chef" Uncle Sean! They made Armenian-style beef kabobs. Leon tried a stuffed grape leaf and acted like it was the worst thing he'd ever tasted.

I broke out a Lego set, purchased from Costco for just such an occasion. My role was simply to count out pieces and turn pages in the booklet. Unfortunately, not far into the process, something went wrong, and I frankly couldn't figure it out, so Charles came to help out -- which required starting from scratch. Cue Leon lying face-down on the living room carpet in protest. In the end I bagged it up as far as they'd gotten and Jen suggested keeping it to be continued at a future date. 

Finally, this picture: this shows my neighbor Joe watching his tractor be winched out of the creek next to his house on Saturday. We'd just come home from hiking and I was getting my lawn chair set up, vaguely aware of him cutting his front lawn, when all of a sudden the mower cuts out and I hear him yell. I look over, and there is no tractor and no Joe! I ran (limped, thank you gimpy right ankle) over there, and there's Joe sprawled on the embankment, thankfully mostly unharmed, with the tractor having stopped at the retaining wall vs. gone all the way down into the stream. He refused to attend to his bleeding foot at the time, insisting it was nothing, but later texted me that he had to get 16 stitches in his heel. This man had open heart surgery last year...

Summer Garden

Starting with the good news: Gojira-chan lives! The less-good news: the deer (I assume) have resumed nibbling the lilies, and they've also started snacking on the hostas, both their flowers and leaves. This is the first year of the nearly 6 we've been here that the hostas have had damaged, despite being described as "deer candy." I wonder what changed -- is it just that they got more comfortable coming closer to the house? They also nipped some of my coneflowers and a relatively-new black-eyed Susan. I'm a little loathe to keep investing in the disgusting-smelling deer repellent...am I going to douse all my plants forever?

Saturday afternoon, I was sitting by pond when Sean came back from a trot around the neighborhood, so he joined me. He was explaining how he's started to meet some of our further-out neighbors on his walks, including an old lady named Gwen who has lived here for decades and knew our house as the "Bolivar place" (the Bolivars being the first owners, 1961 through when Betty sold it in 2018) because she used to babysit. Among other tidbits, she told him that Don, the husband, had two very mean German shepherds (perhaps explaining why geese may not have been a concern for them...), and that she remembered helping our neighbor Joe's father-in-law when he fell into the creek beside his house, with him begging her not to tell his wife. She also told him that she is no longer on speaking terms with her own neighbor Justine, aka crazy goose lady, someone who feeds all wildlife (and once complained about the price of peanuts, which she feeds to squirrels!) and who once would have tried to dump an extra gosling in our pond, only it was not the same age as the ones there that year. Apparently Justine disapproves of our use of fencing to discourage the geese. Relations with Gwen broke down when she discovered Justine had come across the street to put up a "goose crossing" sign and water dish on Gwen's property, lol. 

While we're sitting there we start to notice a bird we don't recognize -- in fact, two of the same species, chasing each other. Then one of them starts fishing, with these very audible plops into the water, and we can't see if it got anything. It wasn't vocalizing, so I couldn't use the Merlin app on it, but following the "step by step" ID we discovered it was a belted kingfisher, which was marked "uncommon" for our area. Apparently they have a specific fishing technique where they dive headfirst and swallow the prey as they go down, so unlike the herons, we didn't see it emerge with anything. As Sean noted, our excitement over this discovery really showed that we are over 40, haha.

I was also by the pond for a bit on Sunday (when I saw Gojira-chan), and I swear I saw something in the reeds, on the far side, push the reeds aside with like a limb. Could a heron do that? I'm not sure. But I have to imagine that anything with a paw, like a raccoon, would make the reed mat move, at least a little. I needed binoculars!

One of my tasks this weekend was to remove the plastic, rip out the regrown weeds, and restart the solarizing. It was weird; the top third of the patch had successfully crumbled into dead dust, but the bottom 2/3 were thriving under the plastic. I also suited up in full Tyvek, two successive days, to battle invasive plants in areas that also contain the native-but-awful poison ivy. From the milkweed bed, I pulled as much creeping charlie as I could, as well as cutting any wineberry and multiflora rose. It was here, a few weeks ago, that I had used a plant identifier on a trailing vine-type plant and discovered it was an invasive called black swallow-wort. Bummer, I thought, I'll pull that later. Welllll then I discovered that the slope up to the road from the back of what we call the "alley" was absolutely covered in them. At first I thought it was Japanese knotweed (which can be found on the road nearby, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time), so it's not that bad, but it's bad. Terribly invasive, hard to remove or control without chemicals (and this is close to the back of the pond, so that's not a great solution), and is allopathic, meaning it changes the soil so other things can't grow. 

The bee balm is doing swimmingly, as well as the one hyssop that flowered there. We got our annual visit by a lone monarch butterfly yesterday and I wanted to say...tell your friends!!

My second round of Tyvek-warriorness was early Sunday morning, wading in to what we call "no man's land" between us and our neighbors. My primary focus was to remove the Chinese wisteria that tries to climb and eventually strangle all of the trees, though I also found an oriental bittersweet climbing my lilac. Later on I went back with my plant ID app and looked at the many seedling trees, mostly growing on the half that borders our Vietnamese neighbors - a bunch of black cherry trees, some Japanese cherry, a Japanese maple (but its leaves are green, not red like ours, so it was be a subspecies), a shagbark hickory that I need to go back and rescue from a climbing vine, a red oak, a lilac (!!), and a tiny silk tree, which I will have to pull, even though I like them. Oh, and a fuck-ton of rose of Sharon, even though ours don't even bloom. 

All in all, it was a very productive weekend, and the weather couldn't have been more beautiful! It absolutely didn't feel like mid-July, though the heat is coming back. I just planted a third trio of two orange mums and one anisse hyssop closer to our house in the center garden, so looking forward to seeing how those get established!

San Diego

 

A belated recap of our weeklong trip to San Diego to visit Ron and Kathy! We had a wonderful time, though I confess to being a little nervous about it beforehand. There's a big generational gap between us and them, and the most time I've spent with them are long, wine-soaked dinners at their house in Fairfield (Sean, of course, is more intimately acquainted with Ron from their 2019 camino journey). They were really wonderful hosts, and had thoughtfully planned an itinerary that included downtown in the afternoon (I am a talker, but Kathy is a talker, so this silent time was very much necessary).

                                               

Kathy and Ron properly live in La Jolla, a fancy subdivision of San Diego. I was surprised to learn that San Diego is full of very steep hills and canyons -- their house is on "La Jolla Mesa," and the neighbors on the opposite side of the street have views of the Pacific (with the corresponding property values). Their house has no views, but as soon as you're on the main street, there's an incredible view onto the coastline below. Down by the water, there are many hundreds of sea lions, as well as many thousands of pelicans. I was delighted by them at first (very Jurassic Park looking!) but oh my god, the smell was intense and unrelenting.

Seeing the Pacific, with clear skies to the horizon, was really something. (Technically I've seen it in San Francisco as a kid, but with the fog you couldn't see much!) Sean said it was like looking at the edge of the world. The power of the waves coming in was also a reminder that, although we live on a body of water, Long Island Sound is still a sound at the end of the day, mostly placid! And even our East Coast beaches don't really compare to what you're seeing out there. Truly majestic.

 

Here we're at the Maritime Museum, a flotilla of linked ships from Age of Exploration caravels to merchant steamers to the USS Dolphin, the last diesel sub. That's where we're standing above left. Very cool to have gone into a sub, but so claustrophobic, damn those poor sailors. At right, Sean and Ron are looking their piratical best. Unfortunately, Kathy suffers from intense motion sickness, so she noped out at the very first ship (which included a guide who demonstrated the utility of sea shanties for timing pulls on the ropes!)

Here we're at the Salk Institute, after our tour of Louis Kahn's iconic building overlooking the Pacific, as hang-gliders sailed past in picturesque fashion. My hair is flat as hell because I had been forced to borrow a sun hat from Kathy. I was not prepared for the strength of the sun at a lower latitude! It was our good fortune that this was our only cloudy day, because we were outside on this tour for 90 minutes in full exposure. 

Note: the concrete walls of the building were insanely smooth to the touch; the guide (a former New Haven surgeon, retired to SD) explained that Kahn had the architects shake the concrete forms to remove air pockets much more than would be typically done for this kind of work.

This was taken at their "local" Italian spot in La Jolla. I gained a better understanding of what "generational wealth" means when Kathy explained that her mother and uncle purchased the commercial block on which this restaurant sits in the 1960s as part of a real-estate 1031 exchange after selling farmland further north. Her siblings share it now, while Kathy got the house (and with Prop 19, her mom's level of taxation). Her dad also worked in the defense industry. It helps to have $$$ and to hold onto land!

On our way home, tired but happily not sunburned. We flew Breeze out of Bradley, and had first class seats on the way there, which was fantastic. Sadly, those seats had already been booked for the return leg when I bought our tickets in April, so it was back to simply "extra leg room" seats, sigh. 

Kathy and Ron encouraged us to come again, but as much as it was lovely to spend time with them, and the weather was phenomenal...I did not "fall in love" with San Diego. I missed the lushness and green of the East Coast immediately! I've never loved desert landscapes, scrub brush, canyons...not my scene. Give me a good oak tree any day!

Almost Midsummer

Things are popping! Last year's perennial bed, in a photo taken yesterday. The swamp milkweed is looking great, and hopefully this year, regular applications of Neem will prevent the aphids from sucking the life out of all of the flowers. Behind them, the coneflowers are just absolute monsters, some of them must be four feet tall! Not pictured off to the left are the Prairie Smoke plants, which had a beautiful light blue bloom and are much bigger/bushier than I was expecting. I was saying to Sean that one of my challenges in "design," a term I use loosely, knowing my own limits, is that we don't have a lot of fences to plan against, so the usual rule of putting tall stuff in the back doesn't work when you can see the garden bed from all sides.

And ditto when the bed is round. (Side note, I took the top picture yesterday, during daylight hours, but others at dusk, and you can really see a difference in how the colors appear). The touch of light purple at the lower edge of the center garden is some sort of perennial that I planted late last year -- I just checked, "triple play" phlox. I was pleasantly surprised by them. Meanwhile, the new hydrangea I planted just beyond them is blooming, but I'm wondering if it is a smaller-sized one and whether it might never achieve the large scale of the older ones. Whomp-whomp.

The newest perennial bed by the pond is doing...okay. The split hostas are getting some bleached leaves from a little too much sun exposure. The rudbeckia and the swamp milkweed are doing okay, but 2/3 of the columbine plants have already given up the ghost. In one case, a weed had so perfectly taken the place of one of the plants that Sean had been happily watering it assuming it was the desired organism!

Down at the wild pond patch, things are looking good! I got my first sniff of a just-about-to-open milkweed, ahh.

The wild bergamot are massive, some of these must also be four feet tall. I still can't believe that nothing else I winter sowed here survived. Damn.

After we get back from CA, I'm going to take the plastic off, weedwhack, and re-tarp. This has been tarped for a couple of months and it's still clearly growing under there (a few weeds have even poked right through!).

And last but not least, a few fish browsing in the shallow end. We've seen a few huge schools in the center, so clearly the winter fish kill didn't hurt them that much. Our frog chorus is going strong in the evenings and mornings, but I haven't seen many of the turtles, including the surviving (?) snapper.

Next week we're off to San Diego to visit Ron and Kathy. Our potted herbs we're going to pass over to a neighbor, but I feel weird asking anyone else to come drag a hose around to water perennials, so they're going to have to tough it out!

Philadelphia

 Last week Sara and I went to Philly together for a few days! Our original intention was to hit the Princeton Art Museum on our way down. It just reopened after a major expansion and reinstallation, and now that our much more modest new building campaign is officially underway, seeing what everyone else is doing with their spaces is of increased interest. Unfortunately, it turned out that the day we were headed south was also Princeton's commencement, which would make the town, and parking, a zoo, so we decided to skip. Carey suggested that she and I might go later this summer, perhaps combining with a trip to a donor's house nearby.

Since I moved back to CT in 2012, I've been back to Philly a bunch of times, but since Covid I think only once, in 2023, when Carey and I went down for the opening of the Maguire Museum at St. Joseph's, which took over the former Barnes Museum building. I also really didn't spend that much time in Center City, which is where we stayed and mostly ate; Mt. Airy was a suburban neighborhood 20 outside the city on the SEPTA trains, and Temple was in North Philly. It was also kind of ironic the number of times Sara asked if I had done this or that during my four years in Philadelphia and the answer was generally "no" unless it was an art museum. I guess I really was focused on being a student back then, damn!

The first place we went was the Penn Museum. I could not tell you the last time I visited, though I have memories of bringing Temple undergraduates as a baby TA for Arts of the Western World. They've done a partial expansion/reconstruction, so some galleries, including Egypt, are still closed, but others are brand new and beautifully installed. I did find it interesting that Greek, Roman, and Etruscan were exactly the same as 20 years ago -- right now to the display of Greek pottery that included a Geometric vessel with a swastika, which I used to enjoy watching my students notice with concern before explaining its history. It was both nostalgic to see as well as a little disappointed to find it not updated at all (even the smell seemed to be...stale). 

The only "miss" of our cultural events was a place called the Magic Garden, which was a multi-building, multi-level folk art and mosaic project, done in the 1970s and 1980s by a man who really enjoyed depicted himself as a three-armed figure in the nude (eye roll). Worthy of note: our Gen-Z tour guide, in describing the artist's life, mentioned a time when his mental health was so poor that he "attempted to un-alive himself." I couldn't believe that someone actually used TikTok self-censoring phrases in real life, which after the tour was over I learned Sara couldn't either. Are we old? NO. It is the children who are wrong!

On Thursday we did a heavy one-two punch of the PMA and the Barnes Foundation. I was so delighted to visit the PMA again. It too has a "scent" that was familiar to me from 20 years ago, but without the arid feeling of being stuck in time that I felt at the Penn Museum. Some old friends were still in place, like Alma-Tadema's A Reading From Homer, or nearby where I expected to see them, although it was a little sad that the room of Abstract Expressionists, where I used to stare at Klein and Motherwell and Newmann and try to "get them," was totally different. I think the Duchamp material must be mostly on loan -- no fountain or bicycle wheel, no Nude Descending the Staircase, only The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (yawn) and Étant donnés (which I gleefully led Sara to look at in disturbance, remembering lining up my Temple students to do the same, with one kid asking if Duchamp was a serial killer).

I felt a sense of casually re-encountering a friend, without what I sometimes feel in a museum: a drive to see deeply, to absorb everything, to take lots of pictures, which then makes me exhausted. I think I was conscious that we were going to be seeing a lot of art that day, so I needed to pace myself, and it wound up feeling chill and relaxed, instead. After we had lunch in the cafe, I wanted to find Eakins -- alas, The Gross Clinic was on loan to PAFA, but I stared at The Agnew Clinic instead, and showed Sara one of my favorite works, H. O. Tanner's Annunciation. Mary is convincingly a frightened Palestinian teenager, and the angel is a glowing slit of light appearing in her convincingly poor MENA interior! 

I was also delighted to see or notice new things. In the Penn Museum, Sara was intently studying jewelry, no matter the type of gallery we were in, and in the PMA, she was pointing out a lot of porcelain and other decorative objects that I often would have paid less attention to. That's one of the joys of going to a museum with another person! Another new discovery was Daniel Garber's portrait of his daughter, Tanis -- incredibly luminous, with a palette of cool blues, greens, and yellows that struck me as a perfect complement to the warmth of the Tanner painting I had just been admiring in a gallery nearby.

Next we hit the Barnes, which Sara absolutely loved. I was happy to re-discover that Barnes collected a few Venetian Renaissance paintings, including a lovely Veronese Baptism. In both museums Sara was drawn to the pastel palette of Puvis de Chavannes, who Wikipedia informs me is considered a Symbolist painter. (Oh, and in the PMA, of course I looked for the painting called The Source of Life, aka the river of babies, aka what Sean once called the "goyim"). Later we chilled on the patio at the Barnes as I enjoyed the most expensive tiny plastic cup of wine ($15!) known to man. Then we backtracked to the PMA, as we had forgotten to visit the gift shop to satisfy Sara's desire for postcards (and she kindly got me one of Tanner!)

On Friday, on our way out of Philadelphia, we stopped in Chestnut Hill. I had forgotten how beautiful the drive is from Center City, along Kelly Drive to Lincoln Drive. We didn't stop in my actual old neighborhood, because Chestnut Hill is the fancier adjacent one! Killian's Hardware, where Phyllis had to buy fuses for her ancient wiring, the Weavers Way Co-op - I can't say it was nostalgia I felt, because I didn't feel any desire to return, either to the place itself or to the time of my life where I lived there. It was just a peaceful enjoyment of the moment and seeing it with Sara.

We ate well and Sara chased down many a bougie coffee, but the outstanding meal, hands down, was the French restaurant, Parc. Massive and sprawling, right on Rittenhouse Square, and incredibly loud inside, but the food was fantastic. They're apparently famous for this overflowing bread basket with four or five different types, plus herb butter, but we were slightly stymied by the additional bread that accompanied the cheese plate (which also had honey, raspberry, and some crunchy nuts, so good). We held ourselves back from going all-in on the bread out of concern for displacing our entrees, and the table was so small that they had to whisk our overflowing basket away to serve them (sniff). I got beef bourguignon, which so good I could have wept, velvety mashed potatoes, the pearl onions I can never find when I make it myself, and Sara got lamb shank Moroccan style.

I don't think I'll be in a rush to go back to Philly. Truly I am a suburban girl, because streets that smell like urine, and a panhandler who threw water on Sara when she declined to give him money, are enough to remind me that I'd like to visit, briefly, and never stay. But it was awesome to experience with Sara! Somehow despite our decades of friendship, I don't think we've ever actually traveled just the two of us. There is, of course, the much-mourned Florence/Rome 2022 voyage that she didn't get to take, so one day...one day! :-)

Some Spring Matters

On Saturday, the town environmental commission was giving away free bare-root native trees at the library! We were deciding between a red maple or a black cherry, and in the end I picked the cherry. Hopefully it likes its new home in the front yard - it's currently protected by chicken wire around a tomato cage, but will need some better anti-deer protection as it goes. 

Last year's new garden addition is waking up! Most of the plants seem to have come back, which is a good sign. 

To my surprise, the portion of the slope by the pond where I previously solarized and scattered seeds has finally generated some plants! That's the section with fresh mulch below. So far, it's mostly bee balm, with one anisse hyssop. No sign yet of the Joe Pye weed, coneflower, or whatever the other seed I threw down was. Granted, I had read that in wildflower terms, in year 1 they sleep, year 2 they creep, and year 3 they leap. So we're in the "creep" year. I decided to start solarizing the patch next to that, and this fall I'll repeat the process for winter sowing. I'm reluctant to do anything to the other side, because from there to the end of the pond is the milkweed patch. I've toyed with the idea of inserting some sort of physical barrier to make it look neater, but at the end of the day, I do need to be able to run through with the lawnmower at the start of the spring. Plus, I'd rather not insert anything plastic into the ground, which is what most inexpensive garden "fences" are made of. 

The best part? We can't actually see this slope from inside the house, so we don't have to stare at plastic for six months! 

 

Happy New Year!

 Keeping this brief, because I opened this window to write a post this afternoon, then saw a WhatsApp message from Carla (who turned out to be in Iceland with Marco!), got distracted and never came back. It snowed a couple of inches overnight, so between dealing with that, a quick workout, and our earliest-ever removal of the Christmas tree, and the shocking fact that we actually made it to midnight last night...I am le tired. We have a delicious-smelling beef bourguinon that won't be ready for another hour, at least.

I don't like to make resolutions in the new year, but I do have some fitness-related goals to work toward this year! I'm going to be working on my grip strength, for one thing. I've worked up to being able to deadhang for 40 seconds, but ideally I'd like to make it to a minute. My right hand is weaker than the left. I just acquired liquid chalk, so I can try doing this without gloves. I also asked for, and received, these handles for Christmas that allow you to do farmer's walks/farmer's carries with plates. I've done it twice this week, and with 35 lbs in each hand, I can do just over 40 seconds -- again, my right hand gives out first. I saw one of those "function fitness" statements that women in their 40s should be able to farmer's carry 75% of their body weight for 60 seconds. Yeah, that would be 120 lbs in each hand for me. Holy shit. 

Improving my grip strength is related to another goal: moving toward being able to do a pull-up. I've hand band-assisted chin-ups in my workout program for a long time, but I've never tried a band-assisted pullup. Unfortunately, given the basement's ceiling height, my pull-up set-up requires me to basically reach up, grab the bar, and bend my knees/cross my legs, so it's hard to follow some of the advice for building toward a pull-up. I did re-insert inverted rows/floor pull-ups into my program, and I'm going to try the band-assisted pull-up tomorrow. 

I'm weaker on my entire right side, which being a lefty, isn't terribly surprising, but with MS it's also always in my mind the question of "how much of this is affected...?" So I noticed this week that my right bicep is smaller, visibly, than the left one when flexed. Which makes sense, because for example when I overhead press or bench, that side struggles first. My hip flexors have always been weak overall, but my right leg gives out almost immediately when I do seated leg raises, etc. I saw a PT a few months ago, referred by my neurologist because, again, it's never quite clear when the MS is playing a role, and described this, plus my right foot floppiness. She looked at my program and suggested adding more single-leg accessories, so now I do single-leg hip thrust, calf raises, and Bulgarians (I had single-leg barbell RDLs in there in the last cycle, but dropped them in this round).  

I also realized very recently that my right hip is also just slightly lower than the left one. I told Sean I had sort of guessed at this, because when I wear a pair of loose sweatpants, I always wind up hitching up the right side, because the hem will start to drag by my heel. I encountered a PT whose content was focused on addressing those imbalances, so I'm try to work those stretches into my lifting days a couple of times a week.

Of course, vacation has meant being able to work out whenever I want to, and given my druthers I always prefer to work out first thing in the morning. Especially as a program goes on, and the weights get heavier, I need longer rest times between sets, so right now it takes me about 90 minutes, including a warm-up. So next week it's back to fitting in a couple of after-work sessions. Wednesdays (wfh) and weekends are still flexible, thankfully. And even more thankfully, my gym is where I live! I actually had a dream this week that included a stressful interaction in a commercial gym (someone accusing me of moving their equipment I think), and I woke up and was like, damn, I only have to share this with Sean, and he's mostly interested in the elliptical, haha. 

Anyway, here's to 2026. 2025 was a dumpster fire (speaking from a world perspective). I hope this year improves!