We had a lovely Easter with family. There were … let me count … 15 people in a house where four grew up. And then six more people came over. There were eggs to hunt in the backyard for the little kids, family photos in the front yard and football in the street. Ham and football, that’s what is done.
I threw two touchdown passes and scored another on a trick play. It helps when the receiver you’re throwing the ball to doesn’t know how to drop the thing. The first time I let the ball go and said, “Nope, that’s over her head,” and she caught it. The second was a timing pass that was out of my hand before she made her cut on the ol’ flag route. It just landed in her hands and looked like it refused to leave.
If you need a teammate, pick a field hockey player, that’s what I decided.
Some of the kids hid eggs for a few of the adults and I don’t remember that being as stressful as it was. We each had a color to find, which is a great idea for kids spread from 3-16. I had to find yellow eggs and so I watched everyone else to see if they’d bend down and not pick up an egg. Waiting for an “Ah-ha! Oops, not my color moment.” It was not a winning strategy.
The kids did great, though. Inside their eggs was money. Change here. A single there. Someone made a map of all of the eggs and presumably there was a degree of difficult to the Easter wealth redistribution plan.
We had ham, which was delicious, and I never really get, and so Easter dinner was a test of How much of this can I get before people notice? But there was also ice cream cake, so it worked out just fine.
We were, of course, the last ones to leave. We have to work on that, as a skill set, but the company is so pleasant sometimes you don’t want to.
And what a lovely Easter weekend it was. Saturday we spent a large part of the afternoon outside. It was perfect weather for …
We have many trees. They shed many branches. Bits of the tree cast off for the greater good, aided by wind and rain and now sitting about everywhere on the property. At first I despaired. They shed many branches. And then I remembered: we have a fire pit and fires need kindling. Now, those bits of the tree cast off for the greater good can serve us once more.
There are a lot of sticks. Just enough, in fact, to make you see the romance of self sufficiency, but not so many that you come to realize the harder work and challenges that can from time-to-time come with it.
It’s like playing at using the whole buffalo.
The forsythia out by the road looks splendid, and I just wanted you to know how elegant and beautiful it is.
I really do wish they stayed like that all year long.
Also, the humble, noble, sometimes underappreciated dandelions, Taraxacum officinale, have made their appearance. It’s a shame we won’t allow them to stick around. But, as you can see, they’re going to be in the way, eventually.
We lit the fire pit on Saturday night. Used some of those sticks, from above. Did not make the first dent in the pile of them, at all.
And when I say we lit the fire pit, this time I mean I did it. I got outside before my lovely bride, and so I could set things up. I used the drier wood, which I’ve been stacking in the greenhouse away from the other stuff, exposed to the most recent elements. The wood that we have here is old and seasoned and so the effort means little more than keeping the most recent rains off the graying splinter distributors, but that’s enough.
I put some pine straw down under a teepee-style arrangement of those sticks. Around all of that I built a log cabin-style stack of wood. I put two sparks on it, it wooshed to life and I was able to sit back and enjoy the blaze. If I don’t get outside first, I spend the next hour or so trying to bring efficient combustion to chaos.
The lesson is clear: let me build the fire.
This little sprig of moss is thriving in the dark behind the grill. I’m not even sure, now, how I noticed him. But I did, and so here we are. The light got in there just right and now this will soon wind up as one of the new banners on the blog.
Perhaps you’ve had a busy Monday, and you need to unwind. I have just the idea: take a brief vacation to the California coastline in this video.
Perhaps I’m the only one amused by slow motion waves. That’d be OK too. But on the off chance you like them, too …
And now, I must head over to campus and teach a class. Tonight we will discuss the battle for our attention online, and then I will try to keep the class’ attention while I introduce them to video editing via Adobe Premiere Pro. It is no one’s favorite class, but it figures into the rapidly approaching final for this class. So a remarkable thing happens. We all learn to love it.
