And Being A Sunny Afternoon

I decided to give these roses a photo session.

Sunny Door

It’s a bright, sunny day in the ‘hood. Temperature is 73° F with 29% humidity. Nice.

Hello, Red Baron

Every once in a while, in a moment of weakness, I’ll eat a slice of pizza. Usually I’ll buy Red Baron “By-the-Slice” pizza. The photo below shows the Red Baron Supreme Pizza box with one of the two slices that were inside the box (it’s still frozen):

Looking at the picture on the box, who wouldn’t want a pizza that looked like that? To be sure, the pizza is tasty, and it’s convenient. But, obviously, the photo on the box is not a photo of the product in the box. I’m not suggesting they change the photo. I want them to make their supreme pizza a little more … supreme.

First slice, heated:

Second slice, heated:

Spring Roses

The rose bushes beside my house are budding and flowering.

I have a yellow rosebush that somehow got a red rosebush growing up within it. The yellow roses have cross-pollinated with the red roses and now the yellow roses have red tinges.

The pink oxalis around my house is flowering now, too.

Feline Visitation

I was sitting on my front porch steps enjoying the evening air and sounds – kids at the playground, birds chirping in the trees – when I saw one of the neighborhood cat personnel crossing the street and coming straight at me. It walked up to me like it lived with me. It then proceeded to rub itself back and forth across the front of my bottom step and after a while it hopped up onto the porch with me. It kept looking at me expectantly. I petted it and it seemed to just want to hang out with me. After a while – maybe thirty minutes – I got up and came inside the house. I turned to look at the cat. It came close to my door and stood there looking at me, then looked past me into the house, then looked back at me. It was very obvious the cat wanted to come inside. It looked like a very well cared-for cat. I’m sure it was someone’s pet. Sorry, cat, although your company was nice, you can’t live with me. But I’ll put you in my blog. You’re probably the only cat in the ‘hood with your photo on the Web.

Tulip

A single tulip grows in the weeds beside my garage door.

Zooming …

Zooming …

Zooming …

Zooming …

I confess to misleading you a bit when I put the word “Zooming” above each photo. It looks like I’m zooming, but I’m really cropping. I took one photo and cropped it to successively smaller sizes and displayed the resulting images at the same on-screen width of 460 pixels. You’re looking at smaller and smaller areas of the same image.

It’s a beautiful flower, n'est pas?

Summer Is A Feeling

Today was a reasonably bodacious day for early spring in the Heights: sunny and 68°. I walked around the ‘hood and saw a lot of people outside their homes. One man was perched on a ladder, scraping old paint off the awning above his porch steps. A mother and daughter were painting the trim on their porch. The mother smiled and said “Hello,” and went back to painting her door frame. A man was out walking with his young daughter, who was pushing a toy baby stroller with a doll baby. I asked her the name of her doll. “Baby Claudia,” was her reply. I saw that Baby Claudia was totally bald. Don’t babies have some hair? I walked on.

I passed by the Cucumber tree. Though most trees have leaves now and many have flowers, the Cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata) is still bare. Maybe the tree is tired of standing there sprouting leaves every spring since before the Revolutionary War. Three children who looked to be about 8 to 10 years old played around its enormous truck, scampering among the huge limbs that reached down to the ground before growing skyward again. I thought, “Where will those children be when they are as old as I am? Will they be living in this city with families of their own? Will they be scattered across the country? Will they remember the huge Cucumber tree they played under in their childhood? And what will their world be like?”

A man in a pickup truck drove up and stopped in front of his house. His truck towed a boat. He put the truck into reverse and steered the trailer first into his driveway, then off the driveway and into the front yard between the house and a white picket fence, then around the end of the house into the side yard. He did it in one continuous motion without stopping or having to go forward. I was mildly impressed. Of course, this might have been the hundredth time he’s done that maneuver.

Sometimes when I walk around the ‘hood, I think of Paul Simon’s song My Little Town. Mainly, I remember its refrain:

Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town

Of course, every city and town in the world is someone’s “town". So maybe Mr. Simon wasn’t talking about his little town as much as he was talking about himself. I know that feeling. Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen too, too many summers.

Website Changes

[EDIT: The first half of this blog post was about a website I had at the time. The website is no more and so the first half of this post has been deleted.]

I did write a blog entry one day, but I didn’t publish it. About half of the time, when I write a blog entry, I decide it’s not good enough to post. I know that’s hard to believe, considering the quality of the stuff I do post, but believe it or not, this is the good stuff. This is VirtualWayne’s top shelf in the blogosphere.

The weather for the past few days has been suited to sitting at the computer: cloudy, gloomy, a little rain at times. Chilly. The last sunny day was also a warm day. I think it was on Wednesday. I took some photos in the late afternoon as the sun slanted through the storm door and lit up the hardwood floor. There’s something very warm and mellow about sunlight on a hardwood floor. In the photo you can see the doorknob and the arch above the entrance to the small, brick alcove that shelters the front door.

And I ate the last of the strawberries I had in the house. So I took a picture of it, too. And I started thinking about strawberry season. Usually, it’s from June to mid-August around here. I wonder where these strawberries were grown. They sure were delicious.

No, the strawberry above is NOT on my floor, it’s on my cutting board. See? …

The smaller strawberries tend to be tastier, but the ones I bought were both large and tasty. Besides just eating them as strawberries, I diced them and put them on a chicken salad dish I made using poppy seed dressing. It was an excellent combination.

Mexican Made Easy

This morning I happened across a TV show called Mexican Made Easy. The hostess and chef is a vivacious young woman named Marcela Valladolid. She’s cute as a button – maybe the cutest chef on Food Network. It’s a tossup between Marcela and Giada.

Her bio says she is a professional chef and cookbook author. How does someone who is so obviously about 16 years old get to be a professional chef and a cookbook author? I mean, did she start cooking school when she was 13? (I went to night school when I was 13, so it’s possible.) Her Wikipedia entry says she was born in 1978, which would make her 33 years old this year. Hah. No way. Look at her.

On top of having a TV show and a published cookbook, Marcela teaches cooking to 40 students at her home and runs a catering company.

I watched her make Mexican Rice. I thought it was interesting because I’ve made Mexican Rice many times, and she makes it differently. My Mexican Rice is really delicious – partly because I put bacon in it, and as we all know, everything tastes better with bacon in it, on it, or wrapped with bacon. Marcela uses chicken broth in her Mexican Rice. Chicken broth!

Ah well, she’s young. She’ll learn.