This is the kind of story that would have made me roll my eyes SO HARD before I started going to the gym, but my Sunday morning workouts have included Bulgarian split squats for the last few weeks and they make my quads hurt so much that hiking anything steep that same day is right out (I made Doc turn around last week!).
So instead, we went to Red Butte Garden to look at the roses in bloom:
Well, attempting to read:
Either way, it was a good, easy weekend. Here’s to an easy week.
The sun was shining all weekend so instead of a hike in the mountains where we’d still need snow gear, we went to the botanical garden where we wore light jackets and saw flowers in bloom.
Toby did not join us for the outing but he enjoyed the sun nonetheless.
(Pet portraiture by Doc, of course. He takes all the good ones.)
The sun was out all weekend and it really felt like this winter may not last forever. Blue skies, small blessings.
(Post title from “The Poems of Our Climate,” by our buddy Wallace Stevens.)
We got the tree up
And someone has jellybean toes
(Photo by Doc, of course)
It was a great long weekend–my brother did a bang-up job with Thanksgiving, we were all there to celebrate, I made a huge dent in some top-secret projects, my friends sent flowers, and the mountains got some snow.
There’s a lot that’s wrong in the world but there’s a lot that’s good, too.
It was a brisk 45 degrees and threatening rain but we made it up the canyon for a bit yesterday. I had to look up this Hopkins poem when I got back home–because who cares about the weather when you can write ecstatic verse in sprung rhythm about nature?
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(from “Inversnaid,” by our buddy Gerard Manley Hopkins)
When we were hiking in Yellowstone, we passed a couple who were focused on something on the trail and the man turned to us and whispered, with an Eastern European accent, “Weeldlife.” So now I say that in my head when I see weeldlife. Here is the weekend with various wild encounters:
…but you talk yourself into a hike instead (because: fitness!!) then decide the hike is too hot and get in the stream, you see some delightful things:
Hike rating: meh. Stream rating: 10/10, would play “Wind in the Willows” again.
There was a lot less going on this weekend–“just” the gym and cleaning the house and restocking groceries and seeing family and making a couple weeks’ worth of freezer burritos–along with looking at some wildflowers and an excellent sunset.
10/10, would repeat this weekend again.