Lily season

The first lilies bloomed a while back, but now they are here in full force, just as the hydrangeas are fading.  You can see the Humongous Lawn, as I refer to it on Facebook, in the first picture.  I spend my time mowing. Then again, it burns calories and it beats going to the gym, except for the heat and the bugs.  Speaking of the bugs, who just love me, I think the proper order of things is 1) apply sunscreen, 2) apply bug spray.  For a while I wasn't sure.  But I digress.

I took the three photos above in the bright sun on Sunday after returning from church, sometime after 1:00 p.m.

Yesterday, La Virgencita got some day lilies.  (The first photo is a bit fuzzy.)

Same lilies, close up.  They look Van Gogh-ish in this photo.  They are a much brighter orange in reality.

 

 Here endeth the tour of the day lilies.

Hydrangea catch-up

Good heavens.  I neglected to put up pictures of the hydrangeas when they got really blue.  Though there is one small bush of purple hydrangeas (the color of hydrangeas has to do with the acidity of the soil) the other small bush and the really huge one are both blue, and they went from pale blue (mixed with cream at the core of the flowers when they were just "ripening") to periwinkle.  I took most of the photos with the BlackBerry camera, which distorts the color a bit, so the periwinkle-ness is not obvious, but you can see that the blue is more intense than it was in the first week or too of hydrangea blooming. 

The hydrangea is the only thing I've taken care of this year.  The garden is my landlady's doing and the flowers pop up in due season, one wave after the other.  The hydrangea bushes were full of dead wood --no one had trimmed or pulled it out in years-- so in the late winter or very early spring I got rid of it.  It took a long time and the wood filled about three garbage bins.  I had scratched arms after that, having been attacked by the hydrangeas as I worked.  I now understand why garden ladies garden in long sleeves. The reward was a huge, really huge hydrangea bush, much larger than last year, and even more flowers than last year. Spectacular.

Otherwise, all due credit to the house's owner, to Mother Nature, and to Godde, not necessarily in that order.

 

This is a little purple hydrangea flower after the rain.

In the variegated bouquet below, the middle flower was in fact more blue-purple than the dark blue it appears to be and the right hand flower was more of a dark purple than it appears in the photo.

I'll take photos with a regular camera next time around, but it is handy to have the BBerry in pocket - I just whip it out and click over to the camera function and take a picture.  The camera is especially good with flowers.  It is a little less so with pictures of +Maya and even less so with people pictures, though in a pinch it is helpful to take quick snaps of humans.

I've had flowers next to the Guadalupe candle for weeks now.  Here is Guadalupe with the last of the hydrangeas.

  And this is what some of these flowers looked like as early adolescents.

 And here is the way one looked as a green, unripe baby flower.

Good news re: the Adorable Godson

The Adorable Godson has a job!  Hurrah for him.  It didn't take long for him to find it.  He graduated with his second bachelor's degree in May (physics - the first bachelor's was a couple of years ago with a double major in computer science and math) and received the job offer about a month later.  He will be doing Serious Tech-y Things for an Interesting and Useful Company beginning in July.  The company is in California, so off he goes ten days from now.  I --and we in his little congregation-- will miss him, but we are all very happy for him and proud of him.  

In addition to this, he got a haircut for the job interview (not a short short one, mind you; he has much too beautiful hair to go for a buzz cut, but the hair was a little too much in his eyes and down toward the shoulders to look professional, even for the high tech world) and looks very handsome. 

Of course this is all very first-time-ish and scary too, so we welcome both your prayers of celebration and your prayers for a smooth landing in the world of full-time employment.  I haven't yet asked him whether I can use his real first name here, so for now, you can just pray for Jane's Adorable Godson and Godde will know quite well whom you mean.  Thanks!

Be Right or in Relationship?

Well, I just has a two-week involuntary hiatus, and what happens? Well, essentially, the entire Anglican Communion goes nuts. Meanwhile, my friend Nathan Humphrey tries to urge us all to consider relationship over rightness. As the responses he generates show, rightness is winning the straw poll. I appreciate Nathan's effort to reach both sides, but it seems to me that he's bucking the tide, quite possibly on the Progressive side as well as on the Reasserter. My own views on this is that the level of hostility toward TEC suggests that relationship at this point may not be a viable option, for now. We may need to take a break from each other, and let history--and the Holy Spirit--lead us to the next phase. It's sad to me that this is where we are, but I think the emotions in the air may require a time out. I certainly don't believe we should be the whipping boy for the Communion, but that we should remain always open to reconciliation.

Baptism (Been Busy)

We recently baptized a second daughter in Daytona, Sophia. This picture captures the scene just a few minutes before the procession back to the baptismal font, near the old entrance to the church building.

On the left is my older daughter, adjusting her younger sister's baptismal gown; we're up near the front of the nave, missing a bit of the sermon. They are, in fact, both dressed up for Baptism--my older daughter having some sense of the rite as a re-affirmation. My wife, Susan, is to my right, and a young friend of my older daughter looks on, rather intently curious--this whole deal is not a part of her liturgy where she goes to worship. Further down in the pew, a young fellow whose mother--not visible in this pic--worships at another Episcopal parish sits with a friend of his, who is turning around to say something in hushed tones to his mother, seated behind him. Interestingly, entirely of their own accord, some members of our party refrained from participating in Communion--even some who were baptized. One of these was my oldest daughter, not yet confirmed. But another, old enough and perfectly knowledgeable, was--as best I can tell--carrying out a kind of "conscientious objection".

A couple points here: (1) two children is alot of fascinating work, and we wish we had gotten started earlier, in our twenties, when three or so would have--who knows?--seemed more reasonable. The thirties are fine, mind you, but we are on the verge of "Slow down, junior!", and we would have happily brushed aside much of what we considered precious in grad school if we knew then what we know now. Word to the wise. (2) Communion can be really quite significant for a wide variety of people with different practices of faith, to the point where they feel compelled to take private, and earnestly heartfelt, stands on the practice without discussing or debating them. I wonder how common that kind of reticence is. I would love to have a clearer sense for how the experience of the Baptismal liturgy proper, up at the font, impacted their decisions on Communion, if the experience had a significant impact (I think it most definitely did, but it is difficult to say just what).