I confess I’m a little jealous of all my fest-going friends and family this time of year.  Even if we had the cool kind of festivals here in humdrum working-class OH that they have in PA and TN, we couldn’t pull it off, cost-or-age-wise.  Anyway, I’ve had my good times, and my days of higher alcohol tolerance.  I pass the torch along to more worthy successors.

Here, it’s cold and rainy, which is perfect for my herbaceous friends, while inside I’m counting down to chametz drinks!  All in all, not a bad Pesach, in a low-key, non-eventful sort of way.  I don’t miss the old legalistic ordeal one bit.  And E is just thankful for someone’s cultural tradition to celebrate, having not had any of her own.

I seem to be having a writer’s off-day, but I wanted to at least drop in and say hey.

Here’s some of what’s happening in the rain-garden.  Sorry for poor definition; I think my cam may have had a tear in its eye.  (Good excuse, anyway.)

The grand finale of Pesach and countdown to real booze are almost upon us!  Meanwhile, erev preps are under way.  A matzoh kugel, roast chicken, sweet potato tzimmes,  eggplant and zucchini are in the works.  And outside, all my veggies and flowers are happily coming up.  More on that later.

Here are flowers, a cool tree trunk of fungus, and progress on the cabin restoration.  We wish we could just airlift it to our future TN mountain location!

The waterfall looked like a foaming chocolate deluge:

The river was raging, practically white water rapids, and very high.  Large carp were struggling upstream against the current.  Pairs of Canada geese perched precariously on rocks out in the rushing river.  Much of the usual trail was under water.  The falls was a thundering foaming muddy cataract, very awesome.  Lots of different wildflowers were blooming in and around the rock cliffs.  As I sometimes do, I’ve divided this hike into photo categories.  Here is the rushing river:

Yesterday (Monday) we hiked about 4 miles of John Bryan.  I got to see other wildflowers that I hadn’t seen yet elsewhere.  My favorite, although my cell cam couldn’t really capture it, were the wild red and yellow columbines growing out of the rock formations.  There are fascinating whole habitats of assorted natives growing in all the rocks and boulders.  Plenty of lovely pale wild woodland geraniums, and my favorite, Virginia bluebells, were in masses all over the hillsides.  I got to see jack-in-the-pulpits, and there were pink trilliums!  OK, so they’re all my favorite.  Of course  blue, pink, lavender, and purple shades of wild phlox were everywhere, but since they’re ubiquitous, I didn’t add more photos here.  Geese were cruising the stream.  It was a flower wonderland.  It was almost like Hobbiton in the Shire.  A clever segue to our LotR marathon, which began later that evening.

That same Saturday evening, after our 7 mile hike at the Narrows, we dropped by the Fen to see what we had missed.  Many of the old dead trees have fallen, and a whole new green wetland “meadow” has taken over.  We saw a young beaver.  It’s an ever-changing habitat.

Some highlights:

These were some seriously impressive fungi: