American Pie

After a Newsweek article listed Grand Rapids, Michigan as one of America's Dying Cities, the town responded with this privately funded and amazing video. It gave me goosebumps. Hope you like it too.




Remembering all who have sacrificed their lives for their country on this Memorial Day.

Blogger sucks - Again...

I can't comment on most of your posts. Once in a while I get through, maybe 1 out of 20 tries.. I click on any blog I follow and I'm logged out. I have logged in to blogger probably 50 times in the last three days. I am tired of trying. I am still reading all my favorite blogs and would comment if I could.

Blogger should be ashamed. They have issued a one sentence update indicating  a "known issue with login errors" since May 24, or as I like to call it, 5 freaking days ago, with no fix in sight. After the complete outage earlier this month and the permanent loss of comments from so many sites I frequent, I can't help but wonder what is next, because from where I sit, it looks like the wheels are falling off.

I used to blog on the ning, and I've dabbled in Wordpress, and there are so many other options for blogging that I wonder how much longer I'll put up with a faulty product before I just move on.  The only thing that's keeping me tethered here is the community and the friends I've come to know and love, and the sheer headache involved with starting over.

Thanks, Blogger, for giving me a voice and an incredible network of great blogs, and then hitting the mute button so I can only watch, silent and furious from the sidelines, while you give no indication you are even working on this problem, or a clue when it might be fixed. 

There you have it. Blogger sucks, again.

In the blink of an eye...

I wish I could slow down Spring and watch it in slow motion, rewind, pause, and make it last longer. I am greedy that way. I've been doing what I do every May - taking an insane amount of pictures, fighting with my digital point and shoot camera, trying to catch what I'm seeing so I can look at it some more. I keep all my pictures archived on my hard drive by date, partly so I can compare variations in bloom time over the years.I used to keep one of those garden journals, but photos are my shorthand these days. I guess this is what retired lab geeks must do with their spare brain capacity, so I can know that the lovely yellow-green narcissus bud from my last post bloomed in all it's glory last week, May 1st to be exact.

Last year, April 15th:

2009, April 30:

2008, May 1st:

And so on. I think there might be a trend with the two week back and forth thing, but I didn't look back any farther. I've lived here 14 years and I never cease to be amazed and surprised by what will and won't grow here, and how different and yet the same each year can be.

Anyhow, I've been wallowing in this Spring, begging it to slow down, just like every year. I can take all the pictures I want, nature doesn't care. She just marches on in her mysterious ways.

Here are a few more pretty things that had made me happy since my last post, some wild or native, some cultivated, all loved.

It's almost too much isn't it?

Every time I snap pictures like this, I hear a voice in my head, from the finale of one of my favorite shows, Six Feet Under, where Nate's ghost tells his sister Claire who takes one last photo of her family before she leaves home to start her life:  You can't take a picture of this, it's already gone. 

Maybe so. But still we try to, don't we?

Finally, here are two things I love most, my babies all grown up on Mother's Day.

Now I really, really wish I had a pause and rewind button for my life!

Hope something lovely is growing and blooming where ever you are.

p.s.

If you want to hear the wisdom of Nate, it's on the video link at the bottom of the page, 2:16.
I miss that show.