Flowers and Such

This plant was hanging onto the rain water.
See the big, fat drops in there?The community gardens by my apartment are coming back to life and look amazing.
Hyacinth flowers in bloom


Pink trees!?!
The robins are back.


There’s masonry work being done on the exterior wall of my apartment building. Men walk along the fire escape outside my 4th floor windows and there’s a lot of banging around. But the men laugh and sing, and the lilt of their accents makes it much more tolerable.

Boston Marathon

The 114th Boston Marathon is tomorrow. It's Patriots' Day, which commemorates the anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which kicked off the Revolutionary War. Patriots' Day is a Massachusetts holiday that now coincides with the marathon and a Red Sox home game. Not all businesses close, but many of those who don't get the day off end up working from home if they can. The marathon is almost a straight line, 26.2 miles outside the city into downtown Boston. If you normally cross the marathon route to get to work, you're pretty much out of luck on Marathon Monday.

Greg is running for the second year in a row, so I'm taking the day off to watch. Greg's parents are coming up from Connecticut, and his brother, sister-in-law, and aunt are also going to be there. You can only run the Boston Marathon (officially) under one of three circumstances: You can run for charity, you can be given one of the two spots each local running club is given, or you can qualify. For the men's 18-34 age group, you have to run a marathon in 3 hours 10 minutes. Greg qualified last January at the Disney Marathon in Orlando, which qualified him for two consecutive years.

It should be a very exciting day!

Loving the Gradual Spring

There are flowers everywhere these days.

I took my second knitting class and made a snowflake hat - just in time for spring.

Below you can see it was rainy as I walked to work. This March was the rainiest on record for Boston. You can also see the leaves are just starting to pop open.
The apartment buildings in my neighborhood are run by management companies that hire groundskeepers to plant flowers for spring.
The flowering trees haven't started blooming yet - these are the regular trees' blossoms.