A Month in 18 seconds

Here it is - a time lapse video of our garden in 18 seconds. The camera was up for just about 1 month, pointed at the vegetable beds. It got jostled a couple of times, so the frame shifts a bit, but not too bad otherwise for a first attempt!

The batteries died at the end of the month span, which is why the video isn't longer. I might put it up again later in the summer, or wait for fall. I haven't decided yet. When I do put it back up, I am going to choose a different location, one a little closer to the garden. The camera is really made to do close up shots, like a time lapse of a flower opening, so the focus doesn't work as well so far away. And the different lighting conditions every day made the pictures all very different - most of them were taken at 11 or noon (can't remember at the moment which), but have the look of very different times of day.

Poem in Your Pocket Day

As I was getting ready for work this morning, listening to NPR as usual, I heard a story that inspired me to write an actual, non-whining post! So here you go - and I liked the topic so much I am making it do double duty, since I also posted the first part of it on my work blog: Tomorrow, Thursday April 26th, is Poem in Your Pocket Day. What is Poem in Your Pocket Day? Here is the description from Poets.org:

The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends. You can also share your poem selection on Twitter by using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

Need help finding a poem? There are many good resources available online, including the Poetry and Literature page of the Library of Congress,  the Scottish Poetry Library, the Poem-a-Day email from Poets.org, and Poetry Archive. I hate to admit how little poetry I have read, for an English major and literature lover, but I do have my favorites, including William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Liz Lochhead, Norman MacCaig, Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Nizar Qabbani, and Billy Collins.

Here is one of my favorite poems, the one I insisted we put on our program at our wedding:

Fidelity
Man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae,
older than plasm altogether is the soul underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild chaos of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks,
a man’s heart and a woman’s,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Cleopatra in her element

Here, Cleo shows her displeasure at being asked to move from her throne, er, the bed. We left her alone, and the bed did not get made that day.

Did you know that silly cat pictures, often with captions, predate the internet by over 100 years? It's true. Victorian photographers did it.