I have discovered a fabulous way to generate blog posts... Copy from past e-mails! :)
So if this looks strangely familiar... There is a reason. But the following escapades were in effect the first entries of this blog and so I am attaching them hereto:
April 25, 2007
Hello there! I thought I should send out a note saying "Hey!" and filling you in a bit on what's up with me so far post-move.
I've had many adventures since I saw you all last including, but not limited to, two eight hour Mega Bus rides up to Minnesota and back to visit friends and family over Easter, a number of days spent in the Rockford Memorial NICU with my very good friend Tina's premie (7 weeks early!),
and a 13 hour drive over the mountains with a car crammed full of stuff. With all my travels I didn't actually arrive down here until last Tuesday and I came in to find our tiny house filled to the gills with boxes...
I've still got a lot of unpacking to do! But today we got my desk reassembled and I am happy to be making real progress getting things dealt with, either tucked away or unpacked.
The end of last week was very hectic with the iO South Improv festival Dan was running. Fortunately it was very successful and Dan is exhausted but happy. I'm not sure that he wants to go through it all Again quite yet... But once he has recovered a bit he might feel differently.
Last Sunday was the first real free day I had since the drive down here. Dan was teaching class all day so as I was somewhat at loose ends anyway and longing to get out exploring I went on a Long ramble around Durham and the Duke Campus and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens http://www.hr.duke.edu/dukegardens/index.html. The garden was quite a popular place as you can well imagine on a perfect Sunday afternoon, high of 85, nice breeze and not a cloud in the sky. There were an amusing number of brides and grooms being photographed around every bush and tree and shrubbery in the gardens and I also happened upon a very serious woman with a ferret on a leash which I found rather striking.
Durham is not exactly designed for walking, not like Chicago at any rate. Sidewalks come and go in a rather haphazard and mysterious fashion and those that are present are often rather patched and more vertical than horizontal. (I was actually glad I had not found my sneakers yet and had been forced to wear my boots!) Still it is quite charming wandering around my neighborhood. The campus is beautiful and everything is green and lush in a way that you simply don't find in the city. Huge trees are everywhere, bird songs sound all day long and somewhat unkempt yards gush forth all manner of greenery and flowers. The azaleas are almost embarrassingly fecund to the point that even our sadly abused and untouched yard sports a huge bush covered in salmony pink blooms.
I suggest that you all come visit in the next 30 seconds before it gets too hot to enjoy... Oops. Too late.
May 6, 2007
Sundays are good days for adventures...
Saturday was gray and rainy and cold so I stayed in and thought serious thoughts about my future and looked at job ads and recoiled in horror at the thought of pursuing any of said jobs and thought about going to massage therapy school and researched related job prospects and training programs and worried about how I would pay for such a thing and kept Dan up until 2:00 worrying about the logistics involved and then dreamt one of those dreams where I was at school and I hadn't been to class all semester and hadn't even looked at the syllabus and not only was my room a mess so I couldn't find any information on where or when my final was but it was crazy with pop bottles exploding on everything and water running through it and...
And then today it was a Glorious day. I walked outside to say good bye to Dan this morning and knew that I must do something outside or I would never forgive myself for being such a chicken that I couldn't manage to leave the house by myself when it was so perfect. I had read in the paper about a wild flower hike organized by the Eno River Association so I girded my loins (i.e. printed out some Mapquest maps) and left myself an hour to find the place. 15 minutes later I was twiddling my thumbs in the parking lot of the Occoneechee Mountain State Park wondering if I had made the right choice...
I think I did. At first I thought I might be annoyed by the chatter of the other hikers, mostly retirees, but as we all grew a bit more winded and spread out on the trail that didn't bother me and I enjoyed the camaraderie with the other hikers. We did not see all that many kinds of wild flowers but the Mountain Laurel was just coming into glorious bloom and was everywhere on the mountain. It's a beautiful flower that grows in big white clusters. That's lovely enough from a distance but when you get right up close to it you can see how amazingly engineered it is. The buds look like shooting stars and when they open up the stamens are trapped bent back against the petals. When a bee or some such critter gets close enough to disturb the stamens then they pop out. We had some fun exploring these mechanics ourselves.
Mostly I just enjoyed the trekking through the woods on a perfect day with the golden green light spangling down on me through the glowing trees, sometimes through relatively open areas where the ground cover was bracken fern and sometimes down narrow trails with huge flowering mountain laurels on either side. At one point our guide took us out of the public area on an overgrown trail back to an area called "Panther's Cave" where there was indeed a huge rock outcropping with a cave in it and a delicate little streamlet of water chirruping past. We also visited both the top and bottom of an old railroad rock quarry. The view from the top was quite lovely but the view from the bottom was more striking. The bare stone had weathered into strips of different colors with some recent rock slides providing a jagged contrast. Very grand and lovely.
So if this looks strangely familiar... There is a reason. But the following escapades were in effect the first entries of this blog and so I am attaching them hereto:
April 25, 2007
Hello there! I thought I should send out a note saying "Hey!" and filling you in a bit on what's up with me so far post-move.
I've had many adventures since I saw you all last including, but not limited to, two eight hour Mega Bus rides up to Minnesota and back to visit friends and family over Easter, a number of days spent in the Rockford Memorial NICU with my very good friend Tina's premie (7 weeks early!),
and a 13 hour drive over the mountains with a car crammed full of stuff. With all my travels I didn't actually arrive down here until last Tuesday and I came in to find our tiny house filled to the gills with boxes... I've still got a lot of unpacking to do! But today we got my desk reassembled and I am happy to be making real progress getting things dealt with, either tucked away or unpacked.
The end of last week was very hectic with the iO South Improv festival Dan was running. Fortunately it was very successful and Dan is exhausted but happy. I'm not sure that he wants to go through it all Again quite yet... But once he has recovered a bit he might feel differently.
Last Sunday was the first real free day I had since the drive down here. Dan was teaching class all day so as I was somewhat at loose ends anyway and longing to get out exploring I went on a Long ramble around Durham and the Duke Campus and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens http://www.hr.duke.edu/dukegardens/index.html. The garden was quite a popular place as you can well imagine on a perfect Sunday afternoon, high of 85, nice breeze and not a cloud in the sky. There were an amusing number of brides and grooms being photographed around every bush and tree and shrubbery in the gardens and I also happened upon a very serious woman with a ferret on a leash which I found rather striking.
Durham is not exactly designed for walking, not like Chicago at any rate. Sidewalks come and go in a rather haphazard and mysterious fashion and those that are present are often rather patched and more vertical than horizontal. (I was actually glad I had not found my sneakers yet and had been forced to wear my boots!) Still it is quite charming wandering around my neighborhood. The campus is beautiful and everything is green and lush in a way that you simply don't find in the city. Huge trees are everywhere, bird songs sound all day long and somewhat unkempt yards gush forth all manner of greenery and flowers. The azaleas are almost embarrassingly fecund to the point that even our sadly abused and untouched yard sports a huge bush covered in salmony pink blooms.
I suggest that you all come visit in the next 30 seconds before it gets too hot to enjoy... Oops. Too late.
May 6, 2007
Sundays are good days for adventures...
Saturday was gray and rainy and cold so I stayed in and thought serious thoughts about my future and looked at job ads and recoiled in horror at the thought of pursuing any of said jobs and thought about going to massage therapy school and researched related job prospects and training programs and worried about how I would pay for such a thing and kept Dan up until 2:00 worrying about the logistics involved and then dreamt one of those dreams where I was at school and I hadn't been to class all semester and hadn't even looked at the syllabus and not only was my room a mess so I couldn't find any information on where or when my final was but it was crazy with pop bottles exploding on everything and water running through it and...
And then today it was a Glorious day. I walked outside to say good bye to Dan this morning and knew that I must do something outside or I would never forgive myself for being such a chicken that I couldn't manage to leave the house by myself when it was so perfect. I had read in the paper about a wild flower hike organized by the Eno River Association so I girded my loins (i.e. printed out some Mapquest maps) and left myself an hour to find the place. 15 minutes later I was twiddling my thumbs in the parking lot of the Occoneechee Mountain State Park wondering if I had made the right choice...
I think I did. At first I thought I might be annoyed by the chatter of the other hikers, mostly retirees, but as we all grew a bit more winded and spread out on the trail that didn't bother me and I enjoyed the camaraderie with the other hikers. We did not see all that many kinds of wild flowers but the Mountain Laurel was just coming into glorious bloom and was everywhere on the mountain. It's a beautiful flower that grows in big white clusters. That's lovely enough from a distance but when you get right up close to it you can see how amazingly engineered it is. The buds look like shooting stars and when they open up the stamens are trapped bent back against the petals. When a bee or some such critter gets close enough to disturb the stamens then they pop out. We had some fun exploring these mechanics ourselves.
Mostly I just enjoyed the trekking through the woods on a perfect day with the golden green light spangling down on me through the glowing trees, sometimes through relatively open areas where the ground cover was bracken fern and sometimes down narrow trails with huge flowering mountain laurels on either side. At one point our guide took us out of the public area on an overgrown trail back to an area called "Panther's Cave" where there was indeed a huge rock outcropping with a cave in it and a delicate little streamlet of water chirruping past. We also visited both the top and bottom of an old railroad rock quarry. The view from the top was quite lovely but the view from the bottom was more striking. The bare stone had weathered into strips of different colors with some recent rock slides providing a jagged contrast. Very grand and lovely.
5 comments:
You're off to a great start! Your writing is lovely and evocative, and you amused me describing couples photography in Duke Gardens.
One of the cool things about blogging is that like scrapbooking, it's very easy to include illustrations of what you're talking about. First hit for Google images:mountain laurel.
Here's to many more wonderful adventures.
Thanks! I figured I could do it but hadn't figured out how yet. Now I am inspired. Let's see if I can get this right...
Wow, fabulous picture of you, cool one of the preemie family. and you got the blogroll happening!
Leggy?
Oh, my boss used to use my initials for everything so my email was leg@bddc.com. After mocking me about it, certain of my improv friends began to call me Leggy as a result. Of all my nonexistent nicknames I thought this one sounded the most blog worthy. :)
Ahhhh. Light dawns.
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