Splendid Saturday

What a gorgeous, gorgeous day it was today! It got up to almost 60 degrees! There were people out there walking, running, motorcycling, riding bikes and cleaning up their yards. After a somewhat easy winter, we are all raring and ready to get outside!

I worked in our back yard for about two hours. Man, what a mess! It's going to need quite a few more hours, but it's vastly improved already. I cleared out mounds of branches and cut down this evil, terrible weed called bittersweet. I used to think it was sort of a nice looking vine and it makes the cutest berries in the fall, but now I cannot stand the stuff! It spreads and takes over EVERYthing. Nasty nasty stuff. I'm sure you've seen it:

The pretty leafy part looks nice, and it likes to wind around and around and around anything in a perfect spiral, but then it starts winding on itself and ends up looking like a big ball of ick. It took me a good 20 minutes to cut down this one spot that had grown up 15 feet or so into the stairs that lead up to our deck. MAN, what a tangled mess. Anyway, I'm hoping to keep the damn stuff at bay in our back yard this year!

In other news, I took some photos yesterday while I was on my power walk, but the the battery died on my camera in about five minutes! I can show you what I was able to get!

Here's Derby Wharf. I like to start my power walks out there, because it eats up about 20 minutes and it's a really beautiful walk on a nice day!

Here's the Friendship. It is all handmade using traditional tools. Really something else when you see it in full sail! This isn't the greatest picture, but gives you an idea:
Here are some of the cute little gulls that are always down there. I love their little knobbity knees and how they rest on one foot!


I will take more photos of my power walking routes and post them sometime this week!

Tomorrow, of course, is the Academy Awards! SOOO exciting! We are going to watch The Hurt Locker tomorrow in preparation, and then will start watching the red carpet coverage in the early evening. I'll be taking notes and will post about our thoughts on the dresses, of course, and who won.

Have a good Sunday!

Happy as a Clam!

Why is that a saying? Are they really happy down there in the mud sucking water in and out all day? That really does NOT seem like a happy existence. I'm just sayin!

Anyway, the reason I'm over here all clammy and being happy is that I saw my first, real, live, colorful, sweet, little yellow crocus while I was walking the dogs this morning! Yiiiipppppeeeeeeee! There was actual color amongst all the drab icky grayness!

Of course, I immediately started wondering about the status of the umpteen bulbs I planted last fall...And this is what I found!
See that little bit of creamy yellow? That's the first flower in our yard! Isn't it cute? I'm sure it will open up tomorrow since we're supposed to get to about 50 degrees and it's going to be sun sun sunny finally!

Here are some of the other crocuses and tulips trying to emerge:



I also found this little guy in my garden!
See the little kitty butt there? He was most friendly and apparently appreciates the bulbs coming up, as well!

Happy almost spring, everyone!

The Haitian Family update and other odds and ends

We saw the Haitian family again yesterday. They were supposed to move into a place yesterday, but called us sort of in a panic because the Department of Transisitional Assisstance was going to send them to a place that is about 80 miles away. They have family here, and also we had sort of made friends with the mother, and just adore her kids! We didn't want them to have to be so far away, but it turns out the eldest daughter cannot live anywhere that there is carpeting. She has a rare respiratory condition, partly because she had one lobe of her left lung removed a few years ago. They found some sort of large mass on her lung and removed it, so now she has limited lung function...

Annnnywho, the only place that has no carpeting is this place in Southbridge (wherever that is!). They were going to be shuttled there this morning.

So, to sort of send them off on a high note, my husband and I took them out for dinner last night. We found out over the course of the evening that the mother often times does not eat so that she can give food to the kids instead. Her dinner last night was the one and only meal she had eaten all day.

I'm SOOO spoiled! I get grouchy if I don't eat every few hours! Jeez.

In other news, we are getting a little bit of snow today. We also had a few flurries yesterday, but that's okay - it didn't stick. Pretty soon it'll be time for the snowdrops to bloom! They are our official first sign of spring here in New England! Can't wait! Can you tell I'm ready for spring?

Also, it's my friend's birthday who lives out there in California! I hope she has a lovely day. This woman is a peach! One of the nicest, coolest, smartest and sweetest people you'd ever find in the world! She and I became fast friends after I invited her to sit on the board of a charity for whom I volunteer my time. She readily agreed to become part of that board and that was that! She's another only child, too, so we sort of really understand each other! In any case, she went from living literally up the street from me to living on the other side of the country. Her husband was the Dean of a very good school in Boston, but then was courted by a school out in California. So, they unfortunately left...Boo HOOO!!! I miss my good friend being here.

Last, if you are at all feeling a bit sad or depressed or even pretty good? Watch this here video and you will have no choice but to feel completely JOYOUS! Watch it in full-screen mode if you can. It makes me SOOO happy every single time I see it!

Have a good Thursday!

A hint of spring

It's not exactly what you would call warm outside, but spring is definitely on its way. This morning when I opened up the shades, the sun was above the building across the street and came streaming into the living room. THAT was nice! I love when the sun gets up high in the sky again. You can actually feel its warmth on your face now, too. A definite bonus!

I took the dogs on a nice long walk out Derby Wharf this morning and it still looks like a disaster zone down there! We had SUCH a storm last Thursday! Winds were higher than the last hurricane that came through here in 1991, Hurricane Bob. Not a very dignified-sounding hurricane! Something like 65,000 people in our region lost power and some just got it back yesterday! Yikes!

Here is Derby Wharf:
It's a bit over 1/2 mile long and is a really nice walk. At the end is a little lighthouse and from that vantage point, you can really see the pretty architecture of the homes along Derby Street, and there are views of the pretty islands out at the mouth of our harbor.

Here's what it looks like right now:

Ha ha! Just kidding!

Suffice it to say that the wharf is covered in huge rocks and seaweed and other flotsam. It's really a mess out there!

Happy almost-spring, everyone! Only 12 more days until we spring-forward the clocks! Yipppeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Dinner with the family

Last night was our dinner with the Haitian family that my husband met on Friday. They are absolutely lovely. It was the mother, her 12 year-old daughter, 4 year-old daughter and her 2 month-old baby. The mother is a very sweet, VERY thankful woman, intelligent, well-spoken and very scared about the future here with her children. She had come to the States to stay with relatives here and to have her baby here where the health care system is obviously far better. The earthquake happened shortly thereafter.

The older daughters were in Port-au-Prince with their father during the earthquake and experienced the horror of the aftermath in person. The adorable little 4-year old went through a psychological evaluation when she got here in the States, and she has all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that you might imagine. We didn't see anything at dinner - here she was a VERY well-behaved, sweet, giggly little thing that fell in love with our girl dog, Sadie! She just followed Sadie around petting her and petting her and then giggling wildly with happiness! It was very, very cute!

The older daughter is VERY smart, speaks perfect English and is already attending school here. She attended private school in Haiti, as the parents were seemingly pretty well off. Both parents worked in one capacity or another for the government; she was a secretary and he was a journalist and professor. Of course, there is no money coming in any more, they scraped everything together to get the two girls here with their mother and baby sister. The father is still in Haiti, injured, and living on the streets. It sounds terrifying.

The mother, with her kids, are all living with a cousin in a nearby city. There is absolutely no room for all of them - they already had 9 people crammed into a very modest house, and then you add 4 more and it's not do-able for long. I drove her to a few places today to try and find help for her - food and diapers; not luxury stuff at all. She and the kids are moving into a shelter on Wednesday; no idea where at this point.

All this stuff is so scary and it makes me realize how fragile our comfortable existence is! Three months ago, they were a well-off family living in Haiti. Now they're basically homeless, with three kids, starting all over again with nothing but the clothes they had.

Be thankful for what you've got! I know I am!

Shutter Island will NOT make you shudder

Yesterday the hubby and I were sort of bored so we decided we'd go to the movies. We tried to be all cool and go to one of the documentaries playing here in town as part of the Salem Film Festival. Unfortunately there was nothing appealing to us during the day, so we went the big-budget Hollywood movie route instead. Nothing esoterical about seeing Martin Scorsese's latest film, Shutter Island.

Now, it took really a lot of courage for me to go see this. On the trailer it looks scare scare scary and I'm really not one to see horror movies AT ALL. I'm a big big chicken, really. One of the scariest movies I've ever seen, in fact, was Blair Witch Project. That movie gives me the creeps every.single.time. I watch it. We used to have a tradition of watching that movie on Halloween night, but had to give it up because we were so skeeved out after watching it! And to make matters worse, some masochistic, rotten person put those pentagram stick thingies up in the trees in the woods where we walk the dogs and that just sent me to the moon with scaredy-cat-ness! EEEEEEEK!

OK. Back to Shutter Island.

Decidedly NOT scary. I thought I was being so brave and that I was going to be jumping out of my seat, but it was just not that kind of movie even though they make you want to believe it from all the ads and stuff. Leonardo DiCaprio was REALLY good in this, as was Mark Ruffalo (he's also quite cute!) and Ben Kingsley. Has Ben Kingsley ever done ANYthing bad? That man is one good actor!

Anyway, so, if you want to see a good movie that will not scare the bejesus out of you, Shutter Island is your movie. And it has an interesting twist to it a la Sixth Sense or Identity.

PS, please note the new cute fishy gadget over there -> on my blog! I love this thing!