Lilies are blooming...

I have been slogging my way through computer issues so will combine two posts that had to be set aside while I made friends with the lovely men and women at the Support Desk. We've all been there- one of life's great love-hate relationships: technology..

I have a new Daily Amazing below, in a video I put together of an artist who creates digital magic using stock photos and imagination. But first:

It was a glorious day here. A bit on the warm side, but clear and sunny and green, and NOT the horrible heat wave others are having and are predicted to keep having. If I may digress.... no climate change, eh? 

Our garden is blooming a second round of perennials and new annuals we planted about two weeks ago. My dream is to have a garden exploding in color and greens of all shades, flowers ready for cutting and shrubs filling the empty spaces a fledging garden still has. While I worked, I didn't enjoy gardening. It was just one more thing to try to fit into the stuff I was cramming into a short summer. Now that I am retired, not only do the back-to-school ads NOT raise my shackles, I am enjoying growing things. We have beautiful zucchini we are cooking, basil at the ready hand, lettuce that won't stop growing (I planted WAY too much and it loves where it lives in the sun, I guess!) and even the start of some acorn squash and pumpkins. And the flowers never fail to delight me. 

Today, the tall pink-purple lilies spread out and announced their arrival. Looks like there are some others bursting to be bloomed. Who doesn't love a lily?

The quote in the header is by Jack Gilbert and I read it in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, I will tell you more about it in the July Tub o' Books, but, for now, it's a lovely little book with brief chapters written by various authors, whose names you will mostly recognize, and their thoughts on writing and their personal inspirations. 

I love this snippet: 

"Part of the reason memorization appealed to me is i felt like I want these lines available to me at certain times of my life - if something is difficult, or something is joyous, I want to feel like I have access to words that will help me think about and express what I'm feeling. And the more the better. We can be so vague in our memory of books. Paragraphs that we loved become slippery, then gone. Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words."     Aimee Bender

And here is another Daily Amazing. His story is inside the video.