I spent a good portion of Sunday wandering Reiman Garens with Mom, Grandma, Teresa and Logan.
Don’t believe me?
Here is photographic evidence:
I learned plenty about gnomes. I might just have to invest in a gnome someday, but the gigantic toad in the Reiman Gardens gift shop might be calling my name first.
My goal for Personal Photo Project of the Week No. 18 was to capture a tulip picture. I visited tulips in my Mom’s yard, my Grandma’s yard and in Pella. After taking a lot of pictures, the photo below is the picture that best captures my tulip vision.
Here are a few other pictures from the Amen Photo Session(s).
Reviewing these pictures makes me excited for my trip to the State Center Rose Garden I have planned in a couple of weeks. I like roses more than I like tulips, but that might because of the Chuggler Incident that happened in Pella many a year ago. I suppose I should let that go…
I should also take somebody other than Jay to State Center. He didn’t enjoy waiting for me to get done taking pictures of roses last time.
I had my, what could theoretically become, annual Birthday Barbecue on Saturday. I would like to thank all of the people that attended and made the evening special:
Next year, I will move the barbecue back to its traditional spot of the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Feel free to circle the date May 28 on your 2011 calendar that you have yet to purchase. It will perhaps be an even smaller and more intimate gathering. I might start instituting a survivor type invitation policy similar to the fashion of invites that Jay uses for Symposium.
Special thanks need to be extended to the following people:
Sara for taking the pictures for the invitations.
Sara for providing the s’mores goodies.
Jay for making three desserts: chocolate raspberry cookies, key lime bars and apple crisp.
Steve for providing homemade salsa and chips.
Becky for making a pasta salad.
Scott and Melissa for bringing a banana creme pie.
Shannon for baking a fresh rhubarb pie with rhubarb picked from my personal rhubarb patch.
Johnathan for bringing over cornhole.
Logan and Russ for running the grill.
Mom for baking a cake and creating a watermelon fruit thing.
Derrick for being the fire-starter.
Andree for being the best dressed person at the party.
Shannon for opening the party.
Willy for closing the party.
There isn’t any photographic evidence to support that this party existed. I was too busy to touch a camera and Sara didn’t take any pictures this year. Maybe next year I will add “Party Photographer” to the list of Staff positions for this shindig.
If you wish to be hired for this position (no pay, no benefits, possibly a STAFF t-shirt*) simply send the answer to the following question to bennett@photography139.com:
Why would I make an awesome Party Photographer?
I suppose I should start planning Friendsmas now. It can wait a couple of months.
*That is not a joke. There will be staff t-shirts next year.
I broke Day 9 into two post because of the large amount of pictures, if you recall. You are about to see the rest of those pictures.
After all the flowers were planted, we all went our separate ways to wash up. Then the family reunited at the Stensland home to celebrate Mother’s Day a week early since Teresa was going to be in the Bluegrass State for Mother’s Day.
Here are some pictures of the celebration:
I know… I overuse this technique…
At this point, Alexis wanted to take some pictures, so I let her take some pictures.
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Then Alexis gave me the camera back to take a few pictures of her hamsters.
The celebration concluded a pretty special week. I think I might be ready for vacation again though.
I’m going to split my final day of vacation into two posts due to what could be a large amount of photos.
After church on Sunday I went with my Mom to Northwest Greenhouse to get new flowers for the yard. I prefer perennials because I don’t really want to keep planting flowers every year, but I know that I have to have a certain amount of annuals to fill out my flower boxes, buckets, onion containers and various other miscellaneous flower holders.
We hung out with Mr. Salama for a small period of time. I was able to leave there with a testimony about how wonderful my Mom is from Mr. Salama and I stayed a good $40 bucks under my flower budget. (Although I also got a bonus this past Sunday when I scored a collection of free yellow and peach lilies and a couple of primroses at church. Now I just need to make the coneflower and daisy transfers from my Mom’s house and I will be practically done with flower planting for the year. Okay, I will probably make a couple of purchases as the Arboretum’s annual lily sale though…)
Here are some pictures of my Mom and Alexis planting my purchases from Northwest Greenhouse.
Alexis used to hate getting her picture taken. Now when she senses that her picture is being taken she stops what she is doing and poses. A little annoying.
I woke up on Saturday morning and decided today was a good day to do yard work. I don’t normally reward myself because just being me is quite its own reward, but I knew that I wanted to work up an extremely healthy appetite for the night’s dining. I was going to The Open Flame with Derrick, Jen, Sara and Cousin Amy.
I’m not a person that embarrasses easy. It is the residue of not really caring all that much what other people think. However, there are a couple things that do embarrass me.
One of the many reasons that I enjoy dining with Derrick is that I know that he will not commit a dining faux pas that will leave me having to make apologies for being seen with the chap. He doesn’t order his steak well done. He doesn’t order boneless wings.*
I was looking forward to grilling a steak rare-medium rare while standing next to a man doing the same thing. After having a healthy portion of The Open Flame’s legendary appetizer Sampler Platter. We’re talking about almost a foot tall of onion rings, potato skins, cheese balls and mushrooms!
Before I could even make it out my door to start on yardwork, my Mom and Grandma pulled into the driveway and headed to my backyard for the year’s first rhubarb harvest.
In between bushes I got a text from Jill wanting to know if I had seen the ultrasound pictures yet. I had not. She told me that she thinks that Baby Gorshe is a boy. I told her I would get back to her after I had watched the video.
After I concluded my yardwork I showered up and headed to the Gorshes.
I looked at the photos. We watched the 11 minute video. It was both in 2D and 3D. I weighed all of the information and came to the conclusion that I have NO CLUE about the sex of Baby Gorshe. Jen did tell me that most people seem to think that Baby Gorshe is a girl, but the more that Jen watches the video the more she is inclined to think that maybe it is a boy. I guess we’ll find out in September.
The Open Flame is as awesome as I remembered it. I can’t quite figure out why I only make it there every few years. This is a flaw in my life that I shall remedy in the future.
The meal was awesome and the conversation was 95% baby. Except for a part where I think I regrettably offended Cousin Amy by referring to The Black Crowes as has-beens. The truth is that I would go see The Black Crowes in concert for like 15 bucks, but not 50.
Although in fairness, there are very few bands I would pay 50 bucks to see.
Everybody else that I would pay that much money to see is dead.
Either way, after the meal I was way too full. I considered the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to eat at all on my last day of vacation.
*I admittedly will give a pass to most women in my life for ordering boneless wings because let’s face it, women don’t know anything about chicken wings.
Thursday was my Mom’s last day showing up on the job. She isn’t “officially” retired yet, because she has to file some paperwork, but she doesn’t have to get up and go to work ever again.
Yesterday, I took a tour around my Mom’s work history. Here is the photographic results.
Then she moved to Oak-Elm.
Her final stop was Linden.
So now Mom is officially-unofficially retired. A great way to celebrate Mother’s Day!
“I have never known birds of different species to flock together. The very concept is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t stand a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them? ”
– The Birds
I spent a good portion of my first day of vacation working on a couple of different photo projects, but I also had time to head over to Teresa’s house to take pictures of the nest that a robin has built on the wreath on her front door.
Part of my day took me to Ledges where I startled a turkey vulture. I got this shot of it flying away.
I also photographed the two nests that are in my backyard and the nest that is on my neighbor’s house near my driveway.
Pigeon Nest
Robin Nest
Later in the day I went to Pella with my Mom. After a brief rainy stop in their town square to photograph their tulips we went to Des Moines for supper.
We ate at Smitty’s Tenderloin Shop. Their tenderloin was a little bit disappointing. It didn’t quite live up to the hype, but it was still pretty good.
When I get to Vacation Day 5, what I’m about to write will sound hypocritical, but hopefully your memory won’t last that long.
The people that were sitting in the booth next to ours were extremely snotty to the waittress. They also spent sometime mocking the fact that the restaurant was featured in Gourmet magazine.
They were the type of annoying customer that caused us to leave a larger than ordinary tip because I got the sense that the snotty people were going to stiff the waittress.
After supper we met up with Sara and hit up Snookie’s for the first time this year.
It was a pretty wonderful Day 1 of vacation.
This has been a week where I have unexpectedly walked down family history lane. That continued this morning when I went over to assist in the installation of my Mom’s new fridge. She showed me a newspaper clipping from the February 6 edition of the Boone News Republican.
The clipping was part of the column Kelley’s Korner. It read:
We heard from lots of folks this week, many from this area and a few from afar… one clear down in Luther.
We talked awhile back about the Centennial production and conjunctive beard contest and that brought a reply from Jacksonville, Fla. of all places.
Former residents Terry and Sheryl Johnson left Boone four years ago to reside in Jacksonville and, by the way, in August, they’ll celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary.
Terry and I worked together many years ago at the “older” BN-R.
Anyway, Sheryl, the former Sheryl Paris, recalled how she and Terry were kidnapped following their wedding ceremony, Aug. 27, 1965.
Yes, a group of Boone men dressed as bearded “Keystone Cops” captured the pair and drove them down the center of Story Street with sirens blasting and red lights flashing.
Their wedding worked, unknowingly, right into the Centennial scene.
Sheryl said, “We were put in a portable jail cell and released only after we were interviewed in front of a large crowd of folks shopping in downtown on a Friday night. Wasn’t that the greatest? All the many stores open and people doing lots of visiting as well as shopping.”
Sheryl said that lots of people thought their little excursion was a rehearsed thing. It wasn’t. It was organized by her brother-in-law, Gerald Bennett.
Gerald was one of the candidates in that beard contest that was part of the Centennial.
This was a family story that I did not know, but it is one that I will have to add to the family story repertoire. A fitting conclusion to a week that started with telling Jen a series of family stories (The Secret Wedding, Grandpa Firing Dad, The Half-Sister, Cousin Troy Comes to Teresa’s Wedding to name a few…) and is certainly more heartwarming than the “You’ve Eaten. That is what you were here for. Get out!” story that I told Shannon during the kitchen downsizing on Wednesday.
Shakespeare warned of the Ides of March. I don’t know what he was so worked up about. Carla was born on the Ides of March. Happy Birthday Carla!
It is also Monica’s birthday. Happy Birthday Monica!
Seems strange to me that so many people would choose to be born in March.