the Olympic trials for the Kenyan 10,000 meter team were held in Eugene last night (June 1). These guys ran the 10K (about 6.2 miles) in 27 minutes.
evening at the inner harbor in Victoria B.C.
A group of six over-seventy-year-old grandmothers are in the final round of the Eurovision song contest. They sing in Udmert, wear red babushka dresses, take a pan of something that looks like cookies out of the oven near the end of their performance, and just in general make everybody happy. Toward the end of the song you can hear “Party for Everybody” in English, but the rest of the song you have to just understand without knowing the words. The video is about three minutes long.
Clematis this morning on our back deck. I think the cool weather is preserving the blooms, like a florist’s refrigerator.
hellebores in the spring
taken at King Estate a few weeks ago when we went there for lunch with a friend.
Soon to be planted, birthday cherry tree, self-pollinating, five varieties on one tree.
“Baudelaire honored reveries of travel as a mark of those noble, questing souls whom he described as ‘poets’, who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillated between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm.” — p. 32, The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (2002, Pantheon Books)
We’ve noticed this tree before on trips to the hospital at Cayes Jacmel in Haiti, and we’ve wondered what it is without making much effort to find out. As a fan of the University of British Columbia’s botany photo of the day, I decided to take a shot at asking the experts, and sent off a picture to the email address on the website. Less than two hours later I got this response: Pseudobombax ellipticum. (Click on the picture above for a link to the page they referenced.)