rmcnair-huff@qwest.net
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Sunday, April 8, 2001
It only seems fitting that on a day when my left arm is so sore that I can barely hold it up, that I snap a photo of the garden beds in our front yard that helped get me that way. I spent a bunch of time using a weed eater in our yard yesterday, which put my arm in a bad way, but today I spent time weeding by hand, preparing garden beds for planting carrots, more lettuce, spinach, and a host of other veggies. My last task in the garden today - burying the soaker hose that will help us keep our water use to a minimum this summer...
Saturday, April 7, 2001
Today's flower closeup comes from a garden along the sidewalk that Natalie and I wandered past this morning. We woke and walked up to the Proctor District to shoot photos of the annual Junior Dafodil Parade, just on the chance that we could use the photos in the book we hope to write this year about our home town. We wanderd past a garden on our walk back home from the parade and saw the tulip.
I took advantage of sunny weather this afternoon to get a start on cleaning up our yard. I spent a couple of hours weeding and using the weed eater to trim along edges and over the grass and moss on the north side of the house...
Friday, April 6, 2001
Natalie and I returned to Puget Park this evening for what I had hoped would be a nature-filled walk at dusk, with a good chance of seeing some more wildlife in the gulch, but as it turned out, we were too early for dusk (pesky time change) and with it being a Friday evening, there were a few folks wandering around in the park providing just enough noise and distraction to keep the wildlife at bay. There were even a couple of young boys who rode their bikes to the creek side and were playing in the creek when Natalie and I walked by. We didn't walk all the way to the top of the gulch today - Natalie didn't have on great shoes for the muddy conditions. But we did venture into the old part of what was once Puget Gardens and into the less wild areas, which is where I snapped today's picture of some kind of orchid variety near the creek side. The orchid bloom was actually facing down to the ground, but I place our digital camera under the bloom and shot up toward the sky. I love the ability of out Nikon 950 digital camera to capture these closeups, as is obvious from the photos in this project so far...
Thursday, April 5, 2001
We marked this Thursday with a walk at Owen Beach down at Point Defiance. And despite the high tide, cool temperatures, breeze and drizzle, it was a good day for a walk. Besides, Natalie, M and I have taken walks together the last three Thursdays, so we had to keep the string going! I snapped quite a few good photos on this walk, despite the rain, but I really like the shot above of a patch of cowslip in bloom on a sandy embankment about a quarter of a mile west of the main part of Owen Beach.
Wednesday, April 4, 2001
Today was the most summer-like day we have had so far this spring in the Puget Sound area. The sun was out all day, after a crisp, frozen morning. But despite the cold, the garden continues to grow. The shot for today is a closeup of the peas rising from the garden bed in front of our house...accompanied by some weeds that I need to get out and pluck...
Tuesday, April 3, 2001
I ventured back to the north side of our house to snap a few spring pictures today, and when I brought the images I had taken up on my computer screen, this close up shot of the blooms of a bleeding heart plant with dew droplets on the blooms stands out as the best picture of the day. The north side of our house is a micro-climate of its own. Most of the days throughout the year, this side of the house sees no direct sunlight. The grass on the few feet of property on the north side of our house struggles to grow at all, for all the moss that covers the soil. And we let the moss take command of the area, because it is natural and this is a natural place for moss. I love moss anyway. The bleeding heart itself grows in an 18-inch swath of soil between a sidewalk and the side of the house.
Despite the dew on the bleeding heart bloom, this was a dry day. Clouds threatened to drop their payload on our slice of the Puget Sound area today, but it didn't. We remain far behind normal on our annual rainfall and according to tonight's news reports, we are still 14 inches behind on our normal rainfall for this area in a normal year between October of last year and this point in this year. We need every drop of rain we can get between now and the dry season in Western Washington...
Monday, April 2, 2001
This was one of those stereotypical spring days where the weather includes a little bit of everything. Here at home we had sun, rain, wind and the threat of thunderstorms, as shown by the thundercloud above. I took today's photo from my back yard looking to the southeast, and this thunderhead swelled up and hung in pretty much the same place until nightfall. While we had sunshine here, just 30 miles away near Graham, I spoke to a friend who said she had four inches of snow on the ground in the morning. She lives closer to Mt. Rainier and the Cascade Mountain range and farther from the temperature moderating effects of the water than I do here surrounded by Commencement Bay to the north and east and the Tacoma Narrows to the west. It was cold last night here too, but not cold enough to snow...
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