Gratitude Monday: testing

Gratitude Monday—my, my, my. Here’s what I’m grateful for today:

Got an email Friday announcing that the office in the People’s Republic had been exposed to COVID last Tuesday and Wednesday. Everyone should be aware, etc., etc. etc.

I’m in the office Mondays and Tuesdays, so I was there during the exposure period. I was disinclined to get fussed, because on a typical day I might have a brief convo with someone once, but the truth is that—except for training sessions—I’ve never seen more than 7 people working on my floor, and this past week was no exception.

However, we no longer have to wear masks to move around the office, and I don’t know who was carrying, so to speak, so during a conference call Friday afternoon, I pulled out one of my free US Government rapid tests, read and followed all the instructions, swapped both nostrils (ugh) and waited the 20 minutes.

With this result:

Yay.

 

 

Arrows of desire

Today’s earworm is not a song because I’m honoring the composer/performer Vangelis, who died yesterday at age 79. His Oscar-winning score for the 1980 film Chariots of Fire was a key component in the amazing story being told, so here’s the opening titles cut.

Crank up the volume.

 

Petals

As a liberal arts major and new military historian, I cannot tell you how much I love the story about a Canadian of Ukrainian descent who is painting flowers around the bullet holes left in Bucha. Ivanka Siolkowsky began doing that after talking with a man who had lost his son and his home and pointed to the scores of holes in the fence around his garden. In her efforts, she’s been aided by a four-year-old, painting daffodils, poppies daisies and other flowers in a kind of pivot on the swords-into-ploughshares thing.

There is so much unbearable pain, horror and ugliness in this war; tbh, in the whole world. And it's going to take so much and so long to repair all the loss. I am encouraged that anyone with a heart and a brush (no major artistic talent necessary, as Siolkowsky admits) can help to replace them with blooms, love and beauty. What would it be like if everyone metaphorically picked up a brush and did this? 

You know: cultivate a space for beauty.

 

 

 

Another look

 

I confess I’m not the world’s biggest fan of azaleas. Not sure what the deal is; maybe it’s that they’re shrubs. Although I have a gardenia bush, and I like camellias, the rest of shrubdom is kind of meh for me. Not that I don’t enjoy hydrangeas, peonies and azaleas, but I just…whatever.

However, this year I’ve made a concerted effort to pay attention to them. With these results, from initial bud to full-on flowering.

Not bad.

 

 

Timely reminder

I’ve started taking my daily walks before I go to the office because even when the temperature is in the 60s, the dag-blamed humidity around here makes it feel equatorial. As it is, halfway through my circuit my tee-shirt is soaked and the gym towel I carry is on the wet side of damp.

And we’re only halfway through May.

Well, as you might imagine, by the last leg of my walk I’m usually pretty much focused on getting indoors and into a shower. But yesterday morning I passed another walker who’d stopped and pulled out her mobile phone. She pointed to the sun breaking through the morning clouds and declared its beauty.

She was right; it was gorgeous. And she was right to stop and appreciate it. And to remind me.

Gratitude Monday: bluebells

Today I’m grateful that my understanding of the beauty around me has been expanded by a friend of mine who’s something of an expert on wildflowers.

It’s kind of easy to ignore wildflowers because they tend to be outnumbered or shoved out of sight by cultivated flowers and shrubs. Also, in my view, they seem to be mostly small and low to the ground.

But a few weeks ago on one of my #tulipmania forays into the District They Call Columbia, I was introduced to Virginia bluebells, which are (as you might expect) mostly blue bell-shaped flowers. But imagine my surprise a week or so later to discover a patch of bluebells right down the block from me, in a park.

Even bees love them.

They’re gorgeous, and I’m grateful I now know what they are and where to look for them.

 

You better think

Today’s earworm is for those old skeletal White men (also looking at you, Amy Coney Barrett, Marsha Blackburn and Susan Collins, you gormless tools) who think half the population are going to go gently into that second-class night of the 1950s.

 

Just a salad, please

One critter I have not recently seen in my back yard is the brown bunny I caught on camera last year. It would certainly make sense if BB wanted to chow down on bird seed, rather than Foxy, but I’ve seen no signs of that.

However, I have spotted him around the cluster.

He was lunching a while ago on one of my neighbor’s lily stems.

I probably should have intervened, but when I came across him, he had already bent the stalk, so I reckoned the damage was done. This is the aftermath:

At least he cleaned his plate.

 

 

Rounded diet

Okay, I confess—I frequently toss bits of food that may be unappetizing to me out on the patio; almost every time, it’s gone by the next morning.

I’m talking crusts of Gruyere or Romano or really old scraps of mozzarella and the ricotta at the bottom of the little carton that’s gone kind of pinkish. Birds and squirrels ignore them, but someone must like them because they disappear overnight. (And, yes—the little plastic tubs are gone, so whoever it is takes them away to clean out at leisure. I keep picturing some little den with eight or ten Wegman’s ricotta containers, like family heirloom China.)

Same goes for cupcake papers—I fling them out at dusk and they’re gone by dawn. And salmon skins. And the occasional lamb chop bone. (I don’t put out chicken bones, because I don’t want to be responsible for someone getting throat or mouth splinters.)

For the longest time, I didn’t know who was dining Chez Bas Bleu; as you know, I’ve been visited by a skunk, a fox, racoons and an opossum (no pix/vid). Whoever it was, was bold and fast—some evenings I’d chuck out the bone, skin, cheese or paper and ten or 15 minutes later it would be gone, notwithstanding the fact that I’d been sitting in the lighted livingroom not six feet from the patio door. My money was on the trash pandas, but turns out I’d have lost that money. Because one night I heard a fox’s cry nearby, turned on the outside light and discovered Foxy chowing down on the lamb chop bone.

(The next night—and I swear I am not making this up—I heard that cry around midnight, right outside my window, waking me up; I told him, “Dude—this is not the International House of Lamb Chop Bones. You’re not getting them every night.”)

Well, since then, I’ve occasionally seen him making the rounds in the afternoon, having a sniff and passing through. The cheese rinds, salmon skins, ricotta cartons and cupcake papers continue to disappear, but I don’t see him in the act.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I’d tossed out some Fine Tunes bird seed just before I sat down to my own dinner, and blow me if Foxy didn’t come round and start Hoovering up the seed.

No way, you say?

Way.

Because I have video.

There is nothing on that patio but bird seed.

We are living in strange times, folks. Strange times.

 

 

 

Expanding beauty

When I was putting together yesterday’s post about cultivating beauty around me, I almost added this photo, but didn’t because it wasn’t “starry”.

But if you only look for the obviously, jump-out-and-smack-you-upside-the-head beauty, I think you’re going to miss out on a lot. I try to permit myself to expand on the notion of beauty, even to patterns on asphalt.

Honestly, I don't think you can too much of it in your life.