beepily

A few weeks ago we had a few rosebuds. The one I took a picture of did this:

This rosebush is a sort of tree-like entity. I don’t really notice its size when it’s not blossoming, but when it is, it’s a pretty imposing feature. It holds a small rowan tree in a sloppy embrace.

Its loose, fluffy, blushing white blooms are pretty, but their superpower is their scent. They simply blow away the florist’s demure long-stemmed rose, so obsessed with its elegantly-wrapped petals that it can’t even remember what it smells like to be a rose.

Here’s what it looks like now:

Poof! It’s festooned.

In the summer, and deep into autumn, this bush blooms with abandon. The summer I was pregnant, it provided a fresh rose for my bedside table every night. I was lucky that this was one of the few smells I could enjoy at the time. Coming from Ontario, where the plants are hardier and stingier, such abundance still feels unreal.

There’s actually another kind of rose engulfed in this mass:

These ones are floofy and pink and remind me of prom dresses for a reason I can’t quite pinpoint, because I can’t really picture a dress I could blame for that.

Around the front of the house there are more roses.

Among these are flowers of such an intense fuchsia that they make me think of the pink popsicles of my youth. I don’t know what flavour they were meant to be. We called them pink.

Orange popsicles! California poppy-sicles? A quick internet hunt suggests to me these flowers are California poppies, and that they are the official flower of California. The stuff I don’t know… I’d heard of California Raisins, but not California poppies.

Orange popsicles tasted like orange, only better. At least that’s what I remember.

Pink popsicles!

White popsicles! Those did exist, if I remember correctly, and I was not impressed. Coconut or something.

Green (lime) was probably my all-time favourite, and yellow (banana) was weird but occasionally enjoyable.

I doubt I’d be happy to let G have these now, although life is full of compromises.

For now, we have it easy. She’s blissfully ignorant of most of the treats I associate with summertime in childhood, and is thus far happy enough to suck on a frozen ball of spinach.

I am not Dave Barry. I mean, I am not making this up.

So that whole sleeping-more-so-I’ll-be-more-productive thing…

I’d say I have probably become more productive per unit time, but sleeping is taking up some units of time I’d otherwise be using to produce something: blog posts, photos, travel plans, cookies. What it probably has been good for is my productivity at work. But that’s neither here.

(Because I was going to say that’s neither here nor there, but actually it is there.)

Because I like blog posts, and because I like blog posts to have pictures in them, here is the top of a building, somewhere in the north of the Netherlands, that looks kind of like a Dalek.

I took that picture seven years ago, almost to the day, through the back window of a car as we passed by. I am still very pleased with myself.

What do you mean, it doesn’t look like a Dalek? You sound just like the other two people in the car at the time.