Blue Bottle Gardens

My Little Blue Bottle Collection

Our church women's groups had a combined Spring meeting not long ago.  The speakers were Master Gardeners, one from the Lauritzen Botanical Garden and the other a nice former teacher friend who is a member of our congregation.

I had the pleasure of sitting with him and his wife for the luncheon and he asked me if I was familiar with blue bottle gardens.  The concept was new to me as well as intriguing.  There are a few hits within blogs for Blue Bottle Gardens I discovered.

My hunt was on for blue bottles.  I had three small ones that I placed in a pot of ivy; and as my dearest walked by the wines at Aldi's last week, he selected two in blue bottles.  It is a Landshut Riesling Mosel 2011 from Germany.  I guess the next pleasure will be to open them, but not for a while.  Being no wine connoisseur, I have no idea what it will be like.

Our Cozy Corner

The afternoon sun pours through the blue glass into this window facing west.  As you can see one of the chairs is used a great deal more than the other one.  This is a sight that I see nearly every afternoon after lunch.

One Large Leap

They, whoever "they" are, say that time flies when one is having fun.  I have come to believe that one season flies after the other.  Is this the blessing reserved to the old?  Or is the curse of those of us that would prefer to have a few more years of good eyesight and the brains to read.

And there is a darling, yes darling, camera in its new box under the Math Card Catalog in our bedroom. The high school librarians chose the physical catalogs for a symbolic putting away of the cards when the collection was digitized. I have an assortment of prized things in that catalog.  I kept one drawer of the math cards and now wish I had gone into the collection and chosen a few from each drawer.  This is what is meant by older and wiser, perhaps. 

The one year old, new camera awaits my fumbling fingers and the two inch manual awaits my numb brain.  A person has to move around and pretzel oneself into many positions to take reasonably good pictures.  I don't know what happened to my once agile self.  I have to practice getting off of the floor now and do it sporadically.  A couple of decades ago I took a goodly number of photographs from the ground.  Little grand-kids are not tall and even though a stumpy 5 foot, I find that is not low enough to take pictures of my unfolding ferns, flowers, or little children.

On Wednesday I will be taking a four and a half hour test to see if I can still think.  If I can, I will clean out the Jeep Wrangler and dust off my driver's license and practice on the busy Omaha streets.  I might have a book or two in this old wise noggin and I have a book to clean up and send off to the Library of Congress.  During all of this testing and doctoring I now know I have no brain bleeds nor any brain tumors.  All I have left is plain old age atrophy of the frontal lobes and who knows what else.

Test or no test life is very enjoyable and I have a houseful of wonderful reading head of me.  We (He Who Must Be Obeyed) and I, the reader, started "Dust to Dust: A Memoir" by Benjamin Busch.  I learned of it on C Span II's Book TV and it is going to be as good as I expected.  I am easily captivated by a good book.