Cherry blossom time

A spring tradition, going to see the cherry blossoms at the Washington Park Arboretum.  Here's a few of this year's pictures:


Cherry blossoms by dbvictoria on deviantART






I ended up spending a lot of time looking at tree trunks and branches this year, it seems.


Mossy tree by dbvictoria on deviantART


Moss on red birch by dbvictoria on deviantART






The full set is here.



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Winter is coming!

We had our first heavy frosts of the season this week.  I'm not a big fan of the cold in general, but it does make with the pretty.
















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Eat Me!

The parking lot for my nearest Trader Joe's is full of huge, glorious, albeit poisonous mushrooms.  We saw them when we went grocery shopping a couple of weekends ago, and I made at trip back with the good camera a few days later.  The biggest ones most glorious had been stomped on, sadly, but there were still plenty remaining.








We also have a large stump in our back yard, after having a dying cottonwood tree removed, and it's developed quite a collection of shelf fungi.

A year in the making, day 355

What a wonderful weekend! Yesterday was the husband's birthday (mine is next Wednesday), and another friend of ours has her birthday on the 24th. She decided she wanted to celebrate her birthday by helping clear invasive species from one of our local parks, so we spent 4 hours yesterday hacking down and ripping out blackberries. Rough work, and I found out how woefully out of shape I was! But we cleared about 1000 square feet of blackberry brambles, and also policed an area that had been previously cleared looking for new growth and rooting it out.

And today we went to a 6-year-old birthday party, for a daughter of friends of ours. There was a ninja pinata!



He was soundly beaten and looted:





The birthday girl's current favorite color is red, so I made her a cloak out of red corduroy:



What birthday party would be complete without doggie kisses?


Good dog by *dbvictoria on deviantART

The weather stayed beautiful, despite some threatening-looking clouds.


Cumulous Clouds by *dbvictoria on deviantART

And now I am faced with a decision - do we have sandwiches with the leftover pork steaks from last night, or with the grilled chicken from the night before? Hmmmmm. My belly is a'rumbling, so I'll have to make my mind up soon.