July 17, 2009
How did it get to be Friday again already? (Yeah, yeah, okay, the 12h workdays do make time disappear…) I should have some fibery pictures to post soon, as I’ve been spinning for the Tour de Fleece (if nothing else, while walking to work), but, for now, here are a few more photos from my vacation in Vermont.
The herb robert is from a hike up Mount Philo; the Queen Anne’s lace and delphinium are from my dad’s flower garden.
July 10, 2009
I ran off to Vermont last Thursday so I could spend the 4th of July weekend with my parents. The vacation was not much like the way I’d imagined it, but it was lovely and relaxing. I did enough weeding to remind myself of how nice it is to buy veggies at the farmers’ market (the weeding itself was okay, but the mosquitoes were vicious), and I spent a while trying to free my parents’ balcony from the wisteria.
(Can you see the cat hiding in the corner?)
I cleared enough of the vines away that Whisper couldn’t really hide any more, and the chair was pretty well buried. I found another set of flowerbuds, which was a lovely prize for the work.
I also fit in some spinning around the games and singing and closet-cleaning-out; I’ll post some pictures later, along with a few from hiking and such.
April 3, 2009
It’s a grey and rainy spring day in Philly–too warm for a layer over my hoodie!–so here are some cheery photos from my parents’ yard last Saturday:
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I’m not sure what that first one is, but the second photo is rhubarb and the third is hobblebush.
April 1, 2009
Last week, I decided to skim through my airfare-deal e-mail before deleting it, and it included a really good weekend fare for visiting my parents. I quickly confirmed that they wouldn’t object to my imposing on them and then bought my tickets. I am very, very glad that I did. I love living in a (walkable!) city, and I like a lot of things about Philly, but I occasionally need to be in Not A City, preferably someplace with mountains.
I spent most of the flight up on Saturday morning staring out the window. (At least, once we were far enough north of the rain around Philly that there were occasional glimpses of land through the clouds. Before that, I was just knitting.)
I would’ve been fine with simply visiting my parents on an ordinary mud-season weekend, but it was Vermont Maple Weekend, with open houses at lots of sugarhouses all over the state, so we decided to stop at a few of them as a framework for driving around the mountains and looking at scenery.
Horses! Clearly ones that’d been living in the North all winter, too. I’m not sure whether they were working horses, since I didn’t notice any tasks which were obviously theirs, but I don’t often see shaggy horses around here. (Or cows or camels, for that matter. I guess there must be at least two farms in Vermont with camels…) The first sugarhouse where we stopped wasn’t boiling then, but they showed us their setup and described how they use a reverse osmosis filter thingy to cut the boiling volume in half (and then use some of the purified water to clean out the filters at the end of the day). I was surprised to hear of reverse osmosis being used for something other than water purification, but it seems like a really sensible idea.
Next, we went to the Green Mountain Audubon, which looked really different from the last time I was there. The sugarhouse is down the hill from much of the hiking area, but they’re still using metal buckets instead of plastic tubing for their sap collection. (It sounds like they want to change that, if for no other reason than that some of the trees are hard to get to, but I don’t know when that might happen.) They were boiling sap while we were there, which was fun to watch.
Very high-tech closure on their evaporator.
Of course, part of the reason they needed force to keep the door closed is that they have a blower under the fire, to keep the flames high.
They had fresh, warm samples of medium-amber syrup in the boiling area, which made me question my long-held preference for grade B syrup, but there was also a taste-test up the hill a bit, by the how-syrup-is-made shed and the barn where they were selling sugar on shaved ice (there not being any snow this year). The medium amber is tasty, but grade B is better. No question.
We stopped at two other sugarhouses on the way home, both of which offered samples of their syrup, and I was impressed at how much of a difference there was from one place to another, even with the standardization of grades.
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The rest of the weekend will have to wait–it’s time for cleaning and then cookie-baking.
December 12, 2008
Things are still busier and more stressful than I’d like, so I present some photos from my trip to Vermont in July. (They’re from film that I developed after Rhinebeck and only just looked at again.)
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It’s a good thing I’m only trying to knit one small holiday gift, since I’m starting to wonder whether it’ll get finished…
July 18, 2008
I keep half-composing posts (and e-mails, and letters) while walking to or from work, but actually writing anything takes a combination of time and mental energy that I don’t have for anything except science right now. Still, I have lots more pictures that haven’t been processed, much less posted, and I like looking at them… Today’s Flowerless Eye Candy is all from the Green Mountain Audubon center, near Huntington, VT. (I think the first tree is a red maple, the second one is a basswood, and the ferns are bracken.) My dad and I went hiking there on July 4th. (For those of you who live nearby, it’s got some pretty trails, and the Sensory Trail for the visually impaired, complete with braille signage, is a really wonderful concept.)
July 5, 2008
Eye candy this week is a bit late, due to vacationing, but I’ve taken so many pictures since Tuesday that I figured I’d pop in (from my parents’ house) to post a few:
The sunset is from Tuesday, just outside Brattleboro, where my train was stuck for about 5h total. At least it was more scenic than an airport. The zinnia bud is from the flowerbeds at my parents’ CSA, where we spent a while on Wednesday afternoon doing our pick-your-owns for this week (okay, my parents’, but I helped). The geranium, evening primrose, and maple are from my parents’ yard.
It’s beautiful up here, and I love the weather. And I really miss mountains (and water) in Philly. (Here, though, I’m missing science and Mel. So I won’t mind going home, especially if we don’t have another 5h delay.)
September 14, 2007
The first picture was taken from the plane on Monday morning, the second is from my parents’ front yard, and the last two are from Chapin Orchard.
This week has been busy, and my computer’s broken, and I’ve spent my spare time on reading (Freddy and Fredericka is an excellent book) rather than much knitting, but I did finally spin on my wheel again last night. That was a good thing.
September 10, 2007
As I said, I spent last week (Tuesday through early this morning) visiting my parents at their home in Burlington, VT. Most of the week went more or less as planned–lounging around, running errands with my mom, picking raspberries and grapes and such, jamming (and chutneying) with my dad, generally hanging out with my parents and grandmother… And then, on Saturday morning, we wound up taking my grandmother to the hospital because she was having trouble breathing. As I understand it, she’s doing okay, considering, and should be out of the hospital soon (probably with some sort of home hospice arrangement), but that’s not exactly going to stop me from worrying.
I did still go to the Vermont Sheep & Wool for an hour or so–my mom chased my dad and me out of the hospital for a while–and I was very glad to run into a bunch of friends, even if I wasn’t exactly in the best of moods for socializing. (I know I was trying to act more chipper than I felt, but if I seemed upset or unfriendly, or just spacey, well, now you know why.)
This is the fiber I bought while I was there:
One ounce (more or less) each of Icelandic lamb/angora bunny, Icelandic lamb, and Icelandic lamb/tussah, all from Frelsi Farm. I’m finding the greys to be soothing (not to mention the soothing properties of all that softness), and I think these’ll go nicely with the grey shetland that I bought last spring. (I also picked up a couple of colors of dye, but the other yarns & fibers that really caught my eye were either way out of my price range or small enough lots that I wasn’t sure they’d be useful.)
*Sigh*. Well, I’m home again now, which means I’m back with a snuggly cat (my parents’ cat is not unfriendly, but she doesn’t like contact beyond head-scritching), but also means I don’t have live-in help assembling dinner. (Mel will only eat dry cat food, which I’m not interested in sharing.) Time to go work on some real food.
September 7, 2007
raspberries, originally uploaded by enting.
I’m on vacation again, this time visiting my parents. They’ve got lots of raspberry bushes in the backyard, which are about at the peak of the second crop of this season. Mmmm, raspberries. (I can’t share the actual raspberries, but I thought I’d share at least this picture.)
Time to go pick some more!
August 25, 2006
These are all pictures from my dad’s front garden.
August 18, 2006
cosmos, in my dad’s garden
August 11, 2006
I think it’s about time to share a few of my vacation pictures…so here they are. (This batch, anyway.) There are more…plants, scenery, more plants, different scenery…but I think I’ll save some of them for Eye Candy Friday (look for a button here soon).
the Winooski River, a few miles away from my parents’ house
a stinging nettle, in the woods by the river
a tiger lily, in the [my dad's] front garden
obedient plant and a ladybug, on the other side of the driveway
trees in the backyard: grey birch, striped maple, copper beech
purple meadowrue, sort of under the trees
jewelweed in the backyard, between the vegetable garden and the compost. Note that this picture was taken at my eye level, a bit more than 5 feet up.
Also note that I changed the color scheme again. I was getting awfully tired of the “hey, look! it’s spring!” one…that mood doesn’t hold up very well in the sweltering heat that is a Philadelphia summer. At least it was gorgeous out today. And I had lunch outside, even if I did spend much of my afternoon in a dark, windowless room. Oh, and the photo from which I derived the new title bar is from the path by the Winooski River.
