I’d like to share with you this Hemerocallis daylily. Native to parts of Asia, beautiful anywhere in the world. This one is holding down the corner by our garage.
There are always wonders in the yard. I just have to go outside to find them.
Daylillies require almost no care. I wonder why the people that used to live here didn’t have them planted everywhere. But, I suppose, you could ask that of any beautiful thing. And we have quite a few lovely things in the yard — have I noticed this daylily before? — but most of them are quite singular. And most of it takes care of itself pretty well. The rest, well, they’re stuck with us.
There’s a grapevine, and we are trying to rework it over its trellis. Nearby, the honeysuckle seems to be rebounding well from the early springtime work we did on it. Other things are coming along nicely. We had to recently remove a few bushes that had died. I view this as a personal shortcoming, a promise I never made to the sellers of our home, not that I’ve done a lot to help those planted things that struggled and died, even while others have thrived. Everything grows here (weeds best of all!), but some things stopped last year. Maybe it was that drought. Maybe it was something else.
Anyway, the daylily is lovely.
We had a nice bike ride Saturday morning with our neighbor. It’s great. He rides around the loop and right up our driveway. Then he set us out on a course that included a few roads we know, and a few we haven’t been on before. It sprinkled a bit, and the conversation was nice, and the roads were quite empty at that time of the day.
This was soon after I’d done my big turn on a Strava segment, which I felt like I managed quite well if I must say, but did not set a new PR. Our neighbor just sat patiently behind me after the sprint, through the left turn and then the quick right that turned me back up hill. As soon as it pointed up, he went around me.
I was going to sit up, but I had to keep up. And so I tried, and did.
He’s a nice guy, our neighbor, and it’s nice that we have the chance to take the occasional ride with him. You need a few people like that from time-to-time.
When I went out today — a perfectly pleasant solo ride of some of the standard routes ridden backward — I rode alongside a little boy on his BMX bike for a moment. We met at the road that enters-exits the subdivision, but from opposite directions. And that guy was fast. So I had that to think about on my perfectly average pace 27-miler. If he suggests a ride in a few years, when he’s a bit older, I’m probably going to be busy that day.
We went to a concert last night, and I’ll share tiny little clips of that to help fill up our week. Here’s the opening act. You might remember Fastball from the 1990s. A bunch of guys from Texas who scored two Grammy nominations and two or three songs at or neat the top of the charts in 1998. They also went platinum on that record. Later they had trouble because what genre even is this? But musical genres in general, and their style of rock in particular, was struggling at that same time.
I never actually liked this band. They’ve been at it all these years, honing their touring craft, and it shows. I liked their performance. They had a tight 25 minute set and held a crowd like you don’t often see for a warm up. Also, they threw in a bit of Steve Miller, just for fun, as a medley.
Maurice, by the way, means “Gangster of Love.” That was mixed in with their minor 2013 hit, which is peppy.
These days, Fastball says they “combined a fondness for melodic, Beatles-inspired pop with the alternative aesthetic of late-’90s mainstream rock,” in which case everyone should love them, right? But I just never got into them. I did enjoy this mini-set, though.
And, tomorrow, we’ll see a clip for the feature act.
On the way to the show, we passed this U-Haul truck. We passed it, it passed us back, like this photograph was meant to be. Of all of those little bits of Americana that they could share …
I just saw a television reference to that fungi. And, as I look at it now, I find I can learn more about fungi on the website, but U-Haul is of … questionable credibility on this issue.
Probably no one who’s rented that truck has thought about it, or tried to look that up on the site. When you’re trying to move, you’re on a mission: minimize the effort and aggravation of the move.
And you hope there are daylilies where you are going.
