Full moon, clouds - and tulips

February almost always ends too soon, even in leap years. Tonight there's a valedictory full moon, moving in and out of high clouds, and it's the anniversary of our last big earthquake. Much too easy to think "We're next,"after recent events in Haiti, Okinawa, and now Chile.

I've just displaced Sparky, who was curled in a favorite warm spot (corner of the couch, directly under the reading lamp) but she has found enough space to regroup. We also "share" a favorite chair (translation: she commandeers it the minute I get up.)

Cheers for the Canadian men's hockey team. I was, after all, born in Kamloops, and spent some formative years in a frozen-over prairie town where the ice rink was the entertainment and recreation center. Cigar smoke on a cold day still reminds me of going to curling matches with my grandfather.

Ian and I checked out the Ballard Sunday Market, where kale and cabbages and apples and honey and cheese and fresh fish and flowers and shoppers and dogs and musicians and stuffed toys and knitted hats and jewelry and pastries and hot dogs and home-made ice cream bars all co-exist on two blocks of Ballard Avenue.

What I really wanted was a better picture of the small dog in the pink sweater. It was only a bit larger than the stuffed cats and monkeys.

Random Thursday (or the adventure of the black slug)

Or Thursday random. I've tried it both ways.

Spring approaches. Although we've had very little winter, with flowers in bloom since December, there's a distinct change now. More flowers and blossoming trees, more people in flip-flops (even when it's raining,) more people sitting outside in the sun.

And more strangeness. Today, at the coffee shop, I at first thought the man sitting by the window had a newfangled bluetooth receiver in his ear. It was large and smooth and black and curled, and looked very much like this picture of almost-entwined banana slugs (except for the color.)

Here in the Pacific NW we know about slugs - common brown ones that infest the garden, and the exotic yellow, spotted or black slugs that live in the rain forest. When I googled "black slug" I found 450 pictures on Flick'r alone, proving that these slithery natives can be as fascinating as they are off-putting.

If I lived somewhere else, I might have thought of another image when I saw the gentleman's very specialized earring (an earring it was, by the way - he wore two of them, and neither one looked electronic) but here - no contest. Slugs.

I wasn't quite close enough to read the words tattooed around his neck.

The amaryllis bloomed gloriously, then faded away. As a memento I'm using its picture as a screen saver for a while.

Time for primroses

High time, since for days a box of plants has sat on the deck, safe from the rain under an overhang. Today the weather was mild, dry and lovely, and it was the perfect time to get flowers into pots.

I still have one big empty one to fill, but it needs something larger than primroses.

The miniature narcissi started blooming in January.

Back to Transylvania...

At least in the imagination. Because I'm working on a project connected with the upcoming 20th anniversary of the partnership between our Unitarian church and the Unitarian church in the Romanian village of Torockószentgyörgy, I've been immersed in pictures from many people and many trips. They all bring back good memories.

The first picture combines two icons of our partner village - the ruined fortress on a nearby hilltop, and a typical Transylvanian haystack. The fortress will last, but I suspect the haystacks will, sooner or later, give way to conventional hay bales.

As will ox-drawn wagons. I'm just glad to have seen them in action.




In honor of Valentine's Day, I include this picture, of a box painted in the characteristic colors and designs of the region. For years an elderly woman in the village painted boxes like these, and now one of the younger residents has taken up the craft.

Unitarian churches in Transylvania are MUCH more colorful than their North American counterparts. All that red and white trim is embroidery work, done by generations of village women.

It's almost that time again...

For a valentine:

or a valentine:

That's a veggie Valentine the orang is munching. And he probably doesn't care that it's heart-shaped (though he may like the color.)

I prefer chocolate - dark chocolate! Champagne is nice, too.

The flowers that bloom in spring (if planted at Christmas...)

A friend often gives me an amaryllis bulb at Christmas - the kind that comes in a square box with a beautiful picture on the outside.

Inside you find a dry, unpromising-looking bulb, a green plastic pot, an English muffin-shaped cake of compressed peat, and directions for producing your very own Georgia O'Keefe moment.

After immersion in an astonishing amount of water, the peat muffin expands exponentially, more than enough to fill the plastic pot. (My other pot plants love the leftovers!) After burying the bulb in the pot, you move it to a warm sunny place, and in a very short time voilà - a strong, proud, distinctly phallic green stalk springs up.

No leaves - they are cut back to the point of invisibility before the bulb is packaged. Lack of leaves emphasizes the beauty of the flowers when they emerge.

Last year's amaryllis was a deep, vibrant red. After the flowers were gone, I left the pot alone, watering only if it dried out - and by mid-summer it had sprouted two or three tall, sword-shaped leaves.

Usually we need these indoor bulbs to remind us of spring, but this year we've had almost no winter, and outside all kinds of flowers are out. A huge camellia across the street from our building popped its first hot pink blooms at the end of December, and by now has dropped a pink carpet of fading flowers all the way down a flight of concrete steps.

An uproar of crows

Late yesterday afternoon a murder of crows (that's the proper group name - check here for a whole list of wonderful collective names for birds. I like "an ostentation of peacocks," too) took over the maple tree outside my window. What a cacophony - and what hopping and flapping to find just the right branch.

An uproar of crows in that tree usually means four or five birds screaming (from a safe distance) at a perching eagle or red-tailed hawk. From time to time one or two birds will fly close to the interloper. When the big bird is ready, it leaves, with a lazy flap of its wings, and the crows settle down.

This gathering turned out to be a rest stop on the way to somewhere else, as at a certain moment, the whole group rose into the air and flew off across the lake.

I like crows. Occasionally, one lands on the deck, strutting along the rail as if it owns the place. There are nests in the neighborhood, too, and in late summer, when the young are emerging, parent birds take turns dive-bombing pedestrians.

No one believes me when I tell them this, but baby crows have blue eyes and striped legs. I was able to get close to one that had either fallen from the nest or tried to fly too soon, and I know what I saw. I tried to get close enough to the chick to lift it into the tree, but it flapped and squawked and dared me to come close enough to peck.