Ten Little Celebrations – January 2022

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As I look at my list of little celebrations in January 2022, I am realizing that my surgery stands out so significantly that getting through the surgery itself (the 1st surgery, the reopening of the incision to release blood, the 2nd surgery) is the major celebration of the month! There are little celebrations around that big one: a sunrise and good grocery shopping experience before the surgery, an excellent chicken soup I made a few days after coming home, the hematoma beginning to fade (although it is still not completely gone 2+ weeks afterward…I am checking/celebrating progress every morning), and my first grocery shopping after the surgery (with the assistance of my husband).

The other celebration that stands out this month….more than a little one…is the death of our cat, Boromir. I was glad I held him close for over an hour on his last day….that he seemed at peace. We are still missing him but also celebrating that Boromir was with us for so many years and particularly through the pandemic when we were at home most of the time; he contributed to the positive vibe that seemed so natural…so easily sustained.

And then there were some ‘usual’ little celebrations:

A great meatloaf. I discovered that adding a little olive oil if the ground beef is very lean and using spaghetti sauce instead of salsa improves the texture and flavor!

Red velvet cake/carrot cake for our 49th wedding anniversary. We both savored our slice of celebratory cake…not having any leftovers!

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Peppermint snow ice cream. Celebrating a seasonal favorite and plenty of snow to make it!

A new garage door. It was awful to have a damaged door….I celebrated that we could get it replaced quickly.

Snow on the ground. Celebrating the beautiful scene from the windows of our house….and the different perspective as I walked through the neighborhood.

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Celebrating with Cake

Three days after my cancer surgery – I reminded my husband to do a pickup order from a local grocery store that included a slice of cake for each of us: carrot cake for him and red velvet for me. We were celebrating our 49th wedding anniversary! We’ve never done huge anniversary celebrations, but this was more truncated than usual since we were in the mode of assuming I might have been exposed to COVID in the hospital.  We were masked when we put the cake slices on plates and took pictures…congratulated each other on the milestone…then we each retreated to separate floors of our house with air purifiers running full tilt to enjoy the treat.

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Anniversary Celebration

My husband and I have been married for 48 years! We celebrated a day early with red velvet cake (for me) and carrot cake (for him) that we enjoyed a day early because that is when we did a pickup of other items from a store that included a bakery that makes good cakes.

I’m thinking back to the decades of our marriage

We spent the 1st 10 years in Texas. We were both in college – he was full time and I was part time. My career in computer programing was becoming well established. At the end of the 10 years, he had a PhD in Physics and I had a Masters in Mathematics.

Early in the 2nd 10 years we moved to Virginia for his post doc and I went to work for IBM. During the decade we moved to Maryland (after his post doc ended) and had our daughter.

The 3rd decade saw us moving in Maryland to the house we are in now. Our lives were focused on our daughter and our careers…trying to blend everything together at every opportunity. For several years, my work required trips to Colorado once a month. My husband and daughter joined me for before or after the workdays so often that my daughter thought everyone got on an airplane for Colorado frequently – was surprised that she was the only one in her Montessori class with Colorado t-shirts and sweatshirts. Our daughter was old enough to consider putting her on a plane to see her grandparents in Texas by the time 9/11 happened; we delayed that milestone to well into the next decade.

Our careers were important during our 4th decade – but the milestones of our daughter took the fore in our family: driver’s license, high school graduation, Cornell for undergraduate degree, internship at Northern Arizona, beginning graduate school at University of Arizona, marriage. My husband began his glide path to post-career. My last grandparent died. We dealt with some health issues of our own that slowed us down temporarily. I retired in the last year of the decade.

In the past 8 years, I’ve settled into post-career activities including volunteer gigs. My husband continued to work part time for a few years and ramping up of post-career. We both enjoy traveling (birding festivals in particular) until the pandemic stopped that; we’ll pick it back up in a year. Our daughter’s milestones were ones we shared vicariously: PhD in Astrophysics/her husband’s PhD in Biology, post docs at Penn State/University of Pittsburg, tenure track faculty positions at Missouri State University. Our health has been stable, but my sisters and I are partnered to assist our aging parents as they face health-related challenges.

We’re enjoying the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency’s Online Celebration of Cranes right now and are tentatively planning to be at the in-person festival next year to celebrate our 49th anniversary!

Filling a Day of Social Distance – 4/9/2020– Macro Luna

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Baking a carrot cake. There is plenty of time to cook these days – a special dessert is always welcome. I opted for a variation of a recipe I found online…with some modifications:

• Whole wheat flour rather than white

• Heaping teaspoon of cinnamon

• ½ cup less sugar since I was using applesauce and sweetened coconut

• No pineapple and since I didn’t have the juice I used a tablespoon on lemon juice and then added water to make 1/2 cup liquid

• No nuts

• No frosting

• Made cupcakes rather than a larger cake (We enjoyed cupcakes right out of the oven with butter, later with orange marmalade or ginger preserves…or reheated with butter). I had enough batter left to make a small sheet cake we will probably freeze for later.

Noticing that the Dark Eyed Juncos are gone. I looked back at our birdfeeder camera and the last day they were recorded at the feeder was 4/6. Last year they left around the same time. In 2018 they were still around on 4/7 but were gone by the 9th.The birds are only in our area for the winter. They may go north for the rest of the year…or just a little west to the higher elevations of the Appalachians.

Blooming azaleas.  Several buds have opened since yesterday. I took pictures between the rain showers.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts  here.

And now for the second installment of macro photography with our mail-order bugs. Today I am featuring the Luna Moth. It’s the one pictured in the upper right of this picture – our order from The Butterfly Co.

I saw one at a Missouri rest stop last summer; they can be found in the US east of the Great Plains. So - Luna moths are native to Maryland – like the Cecropia Moth. It’s smaller and not as brightly colored. The antennae of the male Luna Moth are tan colored rather than deep brown of the Cecropia’s. But the antennae are arranged similarly in pairs along the rib.

The wings have eye spots that are very different than the Cecropia. The Luna’s have a clear membrane in the center! The bit of color seen is the color of the Styrofoam that The Butterfly Co. used to pen the specimens. Also notice that the ‘scales’ on the Luna wing look more hair-like.

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The wings are a pale green outlined in brown and with a few brown marks.  The shape of the wing looks like an exaggerated swallowtail.

Ten Little Celebrations – September 2019

September was a transition month…the end of the Wings of Fancy exhibit and the gearing up for the Howard County Conservancy’s fall field trips for county schools. That overall theme carried over to almost all the little celebrations I’m featuring in this month’s post.

Beginning yoga. I was surprised that I could do some of the poses with relative ease….and others with a little practice. It’s surprising how quickly the benefits begin to be noticeable.

Question Mark Butterfly. I was thrilled to notice the butterfly in the mulch at Brookside Gardens when its wings were open. I would have never seen it had its wings been closed. I celebrated a second time after I got home and figured out what kind of butterfly it was.

Mount Vernon. What a place for a volunteer appreciation day…and the weather was perfect! I celebrated the place and the people I was meeting all day long.

Longwood Gardens. The place is always special – because of what we see there during our visit and the memories of other visits.

Toad near the stream. There are always those serendipity events that make an ordinary hike extraordinary.  During one of our training sessions at Belmont we hiked to the small stream….and were finding mushrooms and moss and macroinvertebrates….and then a small toad jumped into our midst! Being naturalists…we all celebrated.

Large monarch caterpillar. My milkweed didn’t have many caterpillars this year…but one morning when I looked there was a large one (obviously had been there eating). I celebrated that he was probably big enough to make a chrysalis.

Casemaker caddisfly. We’ve had almost no rain for the past month or so and the stream was low…but we found several casemaker caddisfly larvae! They looked like a small clump of debris at first….and then they moved. It’s good to see living things in the water even when there is not much water around.

Carrot cake. I was celebrating something but the carrot cake itself overwhelmed whatever I was celebrating. Yummy!

Wings of Fancy. The next to the last volunteer shift in the Wings of Fancy exhibit was a light day for visitors and I celebrated some quiet time with the butterflies.

Day at Little Patuxent River. High schoolers in the river….interested and focused. The water was low but they found some macroinvertebrates and they were so organized in the chemical tests of water quality (my station for this field trip) that we finished everything with a little time to spare. Celebrating high schoolers!

Ten Little Celebrations – December 2017

Merry Christmas!

It’s be a month full of little celebrations too! I’ve picked 10 to highlight.

There has been luscious food all through the month. I managed to spread it out and enjoy it more:

My birthday slice of carrot cake has so much icing that I saved half of it to spread on toast for two days following my birthday!

There were a large variety of homemade cookies to enjoy at the annual Howard Count Conservancy (HCC) Natural Holiday sale. It’s wonderful to enjoy just one of my favorite kinds rather than having to bake a whole batch myself.

A few days afterward there was a surprise event for HCC volunteers…as celebration of our 2017 activities.

I did make oatmeal cranberry bars and enjoyed the cookie dough first…and then the bars (another multiple day celebration).

I celebrated a hike in the woods…seeing a lot of different kinds of shelf fungus…

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And a conference about water monitoring….well worth the registration fee and time.

We had our first snow – it was easy to celebrate because it didn’t snarl traffic but stuck enough to make a surface for animal tracks.

There is something to celebrate in almost every shift I do with the Brookside model trains because there are always young children there enjoying the trains – a vicarious celebration.

I also celebrated a special engine during one of the shifts: it has smoke swirling out of its smokestack!

Finally – we’ve had such dry weather recently, I found myself celebrating a rainy day – realizing that even in winter, plants need moisture. I also celebrated that it was a day I was spending at home.