pomp and circumstance and pomp

It’s been a busy spring for getting back to the midwest for family events. Most recently, we flew to Missouri for Nancy’s niece Shelby’s graduation.

After the ceremony and big dinner, Shelby went off for the seniors’ overnight event at the school. Grandma Neva, proud papa Robert, Nancy, I, plus Aaron and his girlfriend Amanda settled into the hotel’s lounge for a friendly poker game. Amanda turned out to be a pretty cool card sharp, so it’s a good thing we weren’t playing for money or Nancy and I might not have been able to get back home! :-)

Last month Nancy and I flew back to Iowa for my family’s big event. My family sure do love a party, so this was a combination 50th anniversary for my folks, pre-graduation celebration for niece Margie, and birthday party for niece Hannah! As you can see, we were all on our best behavior :-)

A quick look through the wayback machine at Ma ‘n’ Pa:

neighbor of the week

Not far from our house is a steep hillside, and of course some people like to build houses on them. One such house stabilizes their slope with very large rocks. (For scale, these rocks are probably a foot or two across.)

There is what looks like a kind of pressure-release pipe near the bottom of the slope, with a styrofoam cap duct-taped on. Some wise guy (not me! :-) added a few extra touches for a stylish look.

Bonus neighbor-of-the-week:

japanese garden

Visiting Portland’s Japanese Garden with Bo & Amber and Chris.

(For our earlier visits to the Japanese Garden, see this post and this one too.)

extreme closeup!

Spring has fully sprung here in Portland. with our dogwood and cherry trees in bloom. On a neighborhood walk with the pups I noticed the tiny little daisies scattered through the lawns, so I took out the camera and turned on the “macro” setting for an extreme closeup.

Those little daisies inspired me to look for more tiny things during the rest of that walk.

Here’s an experiment in 3D: cross your eyes until the two pictures merge.

It’s amazing what you can miss if you don’t take the time to look up close.

Returning home, I finished up with a pair of final extreme closeups — the dogwood and cherry blossoms right outside my own front door.

how to use a chair

In today’s installment of our ongoing lecture series, here are six additional uses for a chair:

The yoga “cat pose”, demonstrated by an expert:

(This last chair was previously seen in this blog almost two years ago, here.)