Flower and Garden Show, Home Edition

 This week is the Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle. For five days, the downtown convention center gets turned into a fantasy land of gobsmacking display gardens, complete with charming pathways and garden features and piles upon piles of blooming flowers. Primroses by the hundreds, stands of daffodils, tulips, hellebore, budding trees, mosses: it's pretty amazing the first time you go. I was utterly enchanted on my initial visit many many years ago. I've been a few times since and, sadly, you never get that full "Oh my god, I'm in Oz" experience again--or at least I never have. But it's a good place to buy stuff, too: I love what I call my Idaho tool that I bought at the show several years ago--alas, I can't find the name of the vendor now or I'd share. [[UPDATED because of course I can find the name by looking at the beloved tool; it's HoeDag.]] I think Noel came from the flower & garden show, as have any number of other fine things.

The Idaho Tool after several years of use and abuse

  But I'm not going to the show this year. As I say, it becomes less striking after you've been a few times, and spending time in a packed convention center just doesn't hold a lot of appeal these days. Instead, before I started working this morning, I took a few minutes to wander around here to be amazed, gobsmacked, and entranced by the local show in the backyard. Photos were taken. Photos are shared, in no particular order:

The green hellebore that was here when we moved in; it has since spread to cracks in the patio, though this is the original, mother plant.

The abstract entry of the photos: an old birdhouse that has been slowly deconstucting over the years.

Extra large, because it features Noel and the snowdrops leading to Gradka's step

The Lenten roses we planted a few years ago: they're the first to bloom each year and are thriving.

Sadly, the metal arches over this bench completely disappear in this shot,

 but I assure you that it is quite charming and will be all the more amazing once the clematis and honeysuckle get going.*

 

 

And, cheating a little by adding in a photo from a few days ago, when the ground was covered in the previous night's hail:

The icy morning birdbath

*absolutely no idea why the captions formatting is so weird or what to do about it.

HA!HA!HA!HA! stolen comic strips

 I've just been tidying up my computer desktop because, by god, that's what some of us do on Friday nights these days. Hidden amongst the many, many screenshots of receipts for cat food I found several comic strips that I'd cut and pasted (mostly out of the Seattle Times) over the last little while. I'm sticking them up here for posterity because, by gum, some of them are quite droll.

Assorted Short Videos for Posterity

Atmospheric River, Christmas Eve walk:

Puget Sound off Constellation Point, West Seattle (with harlequin duck cameo):

Grace Christmas morning:

It's been fun, 2022, but it's time for you to go home

 For whatever reason, I feel like I should post before the month and the year end. Just why I should think that, I can't say though there are a few weird little acts of kindness that I feel I should mark. In truth, I meant to post one of these weeks ago but, well, life intervened in its not very interesting but still time-consuming way.

 Some weeks ago I'd had A Day at work and Scott wasn't feeling particularly lively either so I ordered pizza because, by god, sometimes that's just what you have to do. It's relatively rare for me to actually order--or pay for--the pizza, but this was one of those occasions. It was, therefore, quite a surprise to find that Pagliacci's decided I deserved to get my pizza for free:

It was a damned fine pizza, too, though oddly heavy on the garlic.

Fast forward a few weeks and I walked up the hill in the snow (though not the ice--that day I stayed home like a sensible person) to mail some packages and stock up on bird seed. I had a coupon for $10 off a $50 purchase at Junction True Value and, given the current price of bird seed, it seemed an ideal time to use it. Sadly, my ability with math seems to have slipped a bit with age, and it turned out my total purchase was just under $50. The clerk, without missing a beat, quickly invented a $.02 item in my basket to get me to the $50 threshold, thus saving me $9.98. Which just struck me as darned nice of her.

And sure, these two little incidents are very slight and don't do a damned thing to redress the ills of the world, but I call them islands of niceness and I'm taking them. I truly despise and hate the expression "pay it forward," but I will keep these in mind when I'm feeling particularly cranky with my fellow Seattleites because sometimes people are nice for no damned reason and that's a good thing and worth remembering.

 Also nice:

the varied thrush that chose to hang out in our yard in the aftermath of the ice storm:

 this year's cookie box:

 Scott working on his latest so-excellent novel:

and, of course, Grace, once more posing under the tree:

Happy New Year, you old Building and Loan!

Christmas Grace

 Early for Christmas, but too dear not to share immediately.

Brief seasonal photo post

 Today we dressed appropriately for the weather (wet) and activity (tree fetching) and trudged up the hill to buy this year's tree at the Holy Rosary lot and then carried it back down the hill again as is our custom. We are probably somewhat unusual in considering weight as a factor in our selection process. And possibly that figures into why every tree we get is pretty much the same as the previous year's tree, especially once decorated. For posterity, this year's tree:

I call her Gloria

The angle of the photo hides the quite large gap on the left side that I didn't fully appreciate until I took a photo. I've also discovered that there's nothing quite like a holiday snap to make one realize how many cobwebs one has on the living room ceiling. 

After we brought the tree home but before her official installation, I trimmed off some of the lower branches and then went out to snip some rosemary and lavender. The neighbor was doing some pruning of her shrubs with reddish berries and kindly gave me a few branches. I spent some time putting all that, and a few other bits and bobs, together to create this year's wreath. The asymmetry is a feature, not a bug, mind you:

Not quite final wreath

Tomorrow is supposed to be less rainy so the plan is to get the outdoor lights up in the afternoon. I tell myself I'll also write Christmas cards. I tell myself a lot of things.

Fa-a-la-la-la, la-la la laaaaaaaaa

Goodness me, it's been a month since my last post. I really intended to reform, but somehow November was hard. Thinking back, it was the stress and anxiety leading up to election day, as well as some illness and then preparing for Thanksgiving and the like. 

But this last week there has been snow (so early!) and those gold-star events on my calendar--Figgy Pudding and West Seattle Tree Lighting-- and, by gum, such things cannot pass unnoted. As it happens, the only photo I took at Figgy Pudding was some neon signage at Pike Place, but the Seattle Times had a photographer on the job, though I'm not sure when that last photo (if you click the link) was taken; the space was pretty crowded during the actual event.

The easiest way to get from group to group was via the covered market

I went so far as to snag videos of some musical acts in West Seattle this evening, though I'm not sure how readily I can share them here. If this works, it should be a snippet of the Endolyne Children's Choir doing their bullet:

Earlier in the day, I went on a errand that took me to the Thistle Street Stairs which were truly quite charming:

I like that people decorate them for the holidays,

and that they have some more year-round art as well.

This is but a fraction of the 367 stairs--but look at that blue sky!

I'm sure there should be something I could say about my reading or biking or yardwork over the last month, but aside from Bessie and me being about a dozen miles short of our goal for the year (a lacklustre 89 miles in November), puttenesca made earlier this week with some of the garden tomatoes I brought in before we planted all the tulip bulbs in the hillside block early in November, and God's Teeth and Other Phenomena being a bit on the stinko end of the scale, I got nothing.