Poem for Sunday and Mount Vernon

Oh Have You Heard
By Shel Silverstein

Oh have you heard it's time for vaccinations?
I think someone put salt in your tea.
They're giving us eleven-month vacations.
And Florida has sunk into the sea.

Oh have you heard the President has measles?
The principal has just burned down the school.
Your hair is full of ants and purple weasels—
APRIL FOOL!

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Happy Easter! I shall be quick after a lovely afternoon at Mount Vernon with Paul and Cheryl where we went to see the lambs and various other animals. We did not do the house tour this time with the spring break crowds but instead walked down to the dock to see the osprey nest, then walked through the lower farm and the woods to visit the flower and herb gardens.

















Our Passover obervance was interrupted by the NCAA tournament -- many people we know had the Michigan game on during their seders -- then after Cheryl got home and we all were organized, we watched Ant-Man, which could use some Bechdel Test improvements and less of the standard Marvel parental issues, but is still fun and limits its violence to small scale, which I appreciate!

Greetings from the Seder

Happy Passover! We are back from a lovely seder at which I ate much too much at the home of the Goldmans, my parents' friends since they were teenagers, watching Avengers: Age of Ultron which is where we are with Cheryl in our MCU marathon (the Thor-Vision stuff just gets better every time, the Nat-Bruce stuff is even more ridiculous after Civil War and Ragnarok). Here are the people, the plagues, Pharaoh, Elijah, and some of the food -- more tomorrow!

Poem for Friday, GOTG, Brookside Outdoors

Oversight
By Melissa Ginsburg

Our subjects were nice. We kept

our distance. We brewed detachment
in bottles. “We kept our distance”

is an anecdote. Her name

is Anecdote. She was born in the study.
Cages, bottles. Books all around.

She was our favorite / forbid us

to see her. She was the muse
for the bottles marked “Distance”

from which we drank. Could not

get by without. We buried the results;
they were dead. It was painless

for us. Thanks

to detachment. Our hypothesis held up
a snapshot. Braces, barrettes.

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It was over 70 degrees in my area on Thursday, so I spent as much of the day as possible outdoors! I had a bunch of shopping to do, which made it easy to find excuses to walk from, say, AC Moore to Target (which is already sold out of their special edition of Star Wars: The Last Jedi). I also walked in Cabin John Park, partly just to enjoy it and partly to do a raid at the last gym there at which I don't have a gold badge. Paul and I had a California Pizza Kitchen coupon that needed to be used by the end of the month, so we went there for dinner; I had kung pao spaghetti, which is such a big dish that I always get two meals out of it, so I know what I'm having for lunch tomorrow before the seder in the evening.

I watched Guardians of the Galaxy with Paul and Cheryl, since that's where we are in the MCU marathon. I love pieces of the movie better than I love the movie overall, though I think that may be retconning because I was irritated by a lot of the sequel, which pushes the women to the side for yet another guy-and-his-daddy-issues drama; I really wanted Ronan to go away so Nebula and Gamora could talk about something other than what he wanted, and in general I wanted Gamora to spend more time rescuing herself. Of course the soundtrack is still awesome and there are lots of funny moments but this part of the franchise doesn't ring my bells like The Avengers do. From Brookside this month:

Poem for Thursday, Winterthur, Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Evening
By H.D.

The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint—
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.

The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.

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So after spending a ridiculous amount of Tuesday working on a Shutterfly photo book, I spent a ridiculous amount of Wednesday rearranging my bookshelves to make my previous Shutterfly books easier to get to so other people can read them (and I can too without having to move action figures out of the way -- the Princess Margaret biographies I put behind the action figures are less likely to be missed). That, getting laundry folded, catching another shiny Lugia, and getting in a walk in the park while it was only raining enough to get me moderately damp. Thursday is supposed to be 70 degrees so no rain will bother me!

Paul, Cheryl, and I were up to Captain America: The Winter Soldier in our MCU marathon. I often tell myself I prefer the first Captain America movie because it has so much more Peggy Carter and I love period pieces, but I love pretty much everything about The Winter Soldier. Chris Evans gives a really wonderful performance and I love Steve and Sam, Steve and Bucky, Nick Fury, and everything Natasha and Maria do, plus the brief Peggy bits we do get. (Natasha has more chemistry with Steve and Sam both than she ever gets with Bruce.) From Winterthur, the early March Bank bloom:

Poem for Wednesday, Longwood Orchids, Thor: The Dark World

Photographs
By Barbara Guest

In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.
Alive, active. What had been distance was memory.    Dusk came,
Pushed us forward,   emptying the laboratory   each night undisturbed by
Erasure.

      In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips
soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the
window, street lamps at the single tree.

      Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
photographs of the improved city. The camera, once
commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.
The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,
unreliable.

      Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are
forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.

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I spent a ridiculous amount of Tuesday working on a Shutterfly photo book to be bought with a coupon that was about to expire, due to two glitches in the site (note: if you use Shutterfly, for the love of all that is holy, upload your photos to an album before putting a book together rather than trusting the upload button within the pop-up where you choose your photos, because if you try to upload more than a couple, it freezes and crashes and even the chat help person admitted it). In good news, I conveyed my irritation so effectively that she gave me free shipping, so although it took half the afternoon, I am getting my book for no money whatsoever.

Maddy was out looking at apartments almost all day. In MCU marathon news, Paul, Cheryl, and I watched Thor: The Dark World, which I tend to think of as having a pretty dumb plot and not being very good, but the Thunderfrost scenes are so good that they make up for pretty much everything, and I watched all the extras I never saw before, including the Mandarin actor one-shot, the two-part feature on Thor and Loki across three films, the gag reel, and (though I had seen it before) the clip of Tom Hiddleston playing Loki playing Captain America. Here are some photos from Longwood Gardens' orchid extravaganza earlier this year:

Poem for Tuesday, Iron Man 3, Great Falls

Economics
By Victoria Redel

There were strollers, outgrown, circulated till a wheel fell off.

Anna’s infant RockaRoo went to Francesca then to Sophia

who gave it back to Anna when she had the twins.

Travel cribs traveled between homes and the green vest

Sophia knitted for Ming’s first was worn by all the next babies.

Onesies, drawstring gowns, snap-legged overalls,

snowsuits, sweatpants, jeans, t-shirts, jumpers,

all sorted, washed, boxed then sent on

till they were sorted, washed, boxed and sent again.

Pj’s worn to that silkiest perfection, then worn

wholly through, reluctantly tossed. A blue dress

with applique lilacs was the favorite of each girl

and who knew where the velvet blazer came from,

but it did the job for more than one holiday concert.

Even this year, a photograph of Francesca’s youngest in Prague,

handsome in that hand-me-down wool pea coat. Sophia hit reply all:

Our last? No! Well, fits yours better than it ever did mine.

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Paul worked from home on Monday so we could drive Daniel to National Airport for his 11:30 a.m. flight, then we had lunch together and both worked on our computers while catching up on some of the shows we missed while the kids were here (good terrorist-chasing Blindspot, great old Hollywood Timeless). Then we went out to get some fresh air in the park and I caught a Blastoise down by the creek.

In the evening, Paul, Cheryl, and watched Iron Man 3, which is my favorite of the Iron Mans though the framing narrative is probably why (plus I never watched the extras before, and the gag reel and Peggy Carter improve anything). Madeline worked all weekend and was home only briefly -- she's going apartment-hunting with future roommates tomorrow -- so I only saw her for a bit. From Great Falls yesterday:

Greetings from Home

Extreme quickie as Adam is about to drive back to College Park and Daniel is flying back to Seattle in the morning. We had a nice low-key day; Daniel had thought he might be meeting a friend for lunch in Baltimore, so we thought we might be driving him there, but she was unavailable, so instead we had brunch here and went to Great Falls to enjoy the great weather before going to my parents' for pizza and very early birthday cake for my father, since neither of my kids can be here on his actual birthday. When we got home, we played some Cards Against Humanity, then watched The Avengers, which we all saw together back when it was new. Here are a couple of pics from dinner: