Weekly Roundup 24: Summer Good Things

We're zooming up on July, which means bona fide summer. Here are a few seasonal things I'm into right now:

Outdoor Concerts: It was a big thrill to see the Rolling Stones live. Yes, the surviving original members are in their early 80s and the tour was sponsored by AARP (which sounds like a joke), but they still rock! That was a bucket list experience, but I'm also enjoying smaller, and often free, shows around town.

Spice-d Tea: Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Sunset teabags make the best iced tea! I found them at Target. For cinnamon lovers only.

Weed Killer: My husband is a fearless puller and poisoner of weeds. I'm trying to convert him to a home-made weed killer that is effective and non-toxic. Mix 2 cups white vinegar, 2 tablespoons salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of liquid dish soap in a spray bottle. As with all weed killers, it works best when used on a hot, dry day.

Chiller Fiction: Summer is the only time I read horror, and it's usually Stephen King. Perhaps I will choose If It Bleeds, a collection of four novellas that came out in 2020. The title story features the character Holly Gibney, who appears in other King books, including the eponymous Holly, which I read last summer.

June Pride: The end of June marks the end of Pride Month, but there's still time to show off my rainbow-themed tiny garden:

Enjoy the last days of June! See you in July!

Weekly Roundup 23: Submission Summer

Tomorrow is the summer solstice for those of us in the north. Even though we have plenty of long, hot days coming our way over the next few months, I always feel just a tiny twinge of sadness that those days will be growing shorter.

One of my fond memories of having school-aged children on summer break was participating in the reading challenge at the local library. They always had such cool themes, which are selected by an organization called the Collaborative Summer Library Program. Since 1987, they've brought summer fun such as Cosmic Connections at Your Library, Build a Better World, and this year's Adventure Begins at your Library to kids all across the country.

In the same vein, I've given myself a theme this year, which is Submission Summer. As you may or may not recall, my writer word of the year is submit. I'm sorry to say, I've fallen off the pace over the past few months and have some catching up to do. But what better time to do that than during summer afternoons when it's too hot to be outside?

It may not be as fun as Thrills and Chills at the Library or Paws, Claws, Scales, and Tales, so I might just have to think of a cool prize to give myself when it's over.

Here's wishing you a productive summer season!

 

Weekly Roundup 22: String is in the Air

String music, that is. 

I heard my first ever performance by a string octet, comprised of the Dali and Pandan string quartets, brought together by the amazing Off the Hook Arts. The venue (a local car dealership) was a little unusual, but the acoustics were good--and there was a Porsche in the room.

The piece was written by composer Felix Mendelssohn in 1825, when he was 16 (which is like middle age for a child prodigy I suppose). It is written for four violins, two violas, and two cellos. What stuck with me--aside from the spectacular music--was the anecdote about how the acclaimed third, or scherzo, movement was inspired by four lines from Goethe's Faust: 

Trails of cloud and mist
        Brighten from above;
Breeze in the trees, and wind in the reeds,
        – And all is scattered.

From those four short lines of verse, the teenaged Mendelssohn imagined and composed a piece of music which is still being performed and enjoyed almost 200 years later. 

It just makes me so happy to think about how words inspire music as much as music inspires words. I hope Goethe got to hear the Octet before his death in 1832. 

See you next week!

Weekly Roundup 21: June is for Joy

2024 has felt hectic, with some fun stuff but also some stressful stuff. On more than one occasion, I told myself that come June, things would slow down and get easier. And now that June is here, I'm trying to make it happen. 

One thing I want to focus on this month is finding something to be joyful about every day. In 2020, I blogged about my Joy Project based on Ingrid Fetell Lee's book Joyful. But a lot has happened since 2020, am I right? So I need a little bit of a joy refresher. A joy bump. A jolt of joy. Something like that.

June is a wonderful month for joy, mostly because the outdoors is so wonderful. Not to cold, not too hot, lots of things are blooming, and the grasshoppers haven't yet eaten everything down to the stem. Now that school is out for the summer, I see neighborhood kids heading to and from the pool. Baby ducks swim in the canal, people get married. 

So far, I have been joyful about seeing a hummingbird at my flowers, the baby evergreen trees that unexpectedly germinated in my backyard, the Netflix show Girls5Eva, tiny toad tadpoles, and watching my husband rescue two garter snakes from the neighbor's pond.

All month long, I'll be keeping my eye out for joyful things, and I'm also going to revisit the book to see where else I can jumpstart joy in June. 

Have a joyful week! See you next Wednesday!

Weekly Roundup 20: The Corpse Flower

It was an exciting week at Colorado State University's Plant Growth Facility when the resident corpse flower bloomed for the first time in eight years!  

Here's what the plant, nicknamed Cosmo, looked like on Friday, pre-bloom:

The much-awaited event happened on Sunday. I was out of town but am lucky to have a friend who was willing to wait in line for 90 minutes to see this:

When I returned on Monday, Cosmo's spectacular bloom had wilted:

I was also not able to smell the rotting-flesh scent the flower uses to attract pollinators, which my friend described as "nauseating but subtle." 

Nature. So cool.

One of the volunteers told me that some of the pollen will be saved in the CSU Seed Lab, which has the largest collection of its kind in the world.

More than 8,600 visitors came to experience this incredible phenomenon. In Colorado's climate, this rare tropical plant can only survive in a suitable greenhouse environment. And it helps to be cared for by a group of very dedicated humans.

Learn more about Cosmo here. 

Weekly Roundup 19: Sporting News

As my husband could tell you, I enjoy watching sports, but I can't stand listening to people talk about sports. This includes pre- and post-game analysis, interviews, press conferences, radio shows, random speculation, and any casual sports-related conversations that might cross my awareness. 

In general, I feel that sports news should not even be called news.

But when the real news is as stressful as it has been lately, a few nice sports stories aren't a bad thing.

For example, the Women's National Basketball Association--the WNBA, or just W--has instituted a charter flight program so their players no longer have to fly commercial. 

20-year-old US Open Tennis Champion Coco Gauff is preparing to vote in her first presidential election and encouraging young people to do the same.

Grey racehorses are not very common, but Seize the Grey won the Preakness Stakes last weekend. It was the first Triple Crown win for the jockey Jaime Torres, who has only been riding professionally for two years.

And this amazing story of the baseball fan who caught two consecutive foul balls:

 

Be a good sport this week!

Weekly Roundup 18: Aurora Skies

Aurora Skies sounds like a good book title, maybe, or a band name. But last Friday, much of the northern hemisphere was treated to an unusually widespread display of Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights, courtesy of an extreme solar storm.

The sun's activity waxes and wanes over an 11 year cycle called Solar Cycle 25, which is reaching its peak. Here's the nutshell explanation of what causes aurora skies: Coronal Mass Ejections (basically explosions) on the sun blast charged particles into space. If these particles are captured by the earth's magnetic field, they heat up the gases in our atmosphere. Different gases emit different colors, which results in the characteristic waves of blue, green, violet, and red.

In the US, the Northern Lights were seen as far south as the Florida Keys. And they were seen less than an hour from my house. But I missed them! For no good reason other than I was tired and didn't want to hop in my car and drive around in the dark.

This is a decision I regretted first thing the next morning when the pictures began popping up all over social media. I mean, people travel to the top of the dang world to see the Northern Lights. I just had to drive toward Wyoming.

Saturday night, we had cloudy skies, so no second chance.

Oh, well. Life is full of missed opportunities, and this was one of them. I can only hope the sun decides to put on another show before Solar Cycle 25 winds down.

If you saw the aurora, I hope your experience was magical!

See some of the gorgeous photos from around the world here.

Have a great week!