EGGSTRAVAGANT EASTER FUN

Easter Eve and Lynda and I, who have about as little interest in a religious holiday as anybody I know, decided we should dye easter eggs.  Of course this was in large part due to the fact that I had shown her those pictures of the eggs that are dyed out of the shells.  

We started by boiling the eggs. of course, and then both of us ended up going to the store to buy some dye and Easter egg decorating kits.  She bought a cute kit with all these cute little cups and holders and little "pills" that are make the colors.  They were fun to use because when you put water in them they didn't do much, but when you put the vinegar into the water they fizzed up.  They made nice intense colors.  We thought we knew how to make crackled eggs by crackling the shells first and dyeing the shells and letting the color bleed through, but the result disappeared once we peeled the eggs, because we hadn't pierced the interior membrane.  We also think it may be because we didn't really let the eggs soak long enough to go all the way through.  But we just wanted to play. 

In this picture you can see how all the color went away when we peeled off the interior membrane. 

While we were doing this project Dennise came by and joined us.  She added a new dimension to the project by just drawing on the eggs with straight dye.  Of course then we all had to start trying to decorate the eggs we had already dyed.











This dish is Lynda's final result.  She says Dennise's egg is the best one on here, but I think they're all cool.  {Dennise's egg is the one with the white center.   

These are y eggs.  I decorated some but mostly just dyed them.  The white one in the middle is a good idea for Halloween, with blue center and bloodshot eye. 

This morning we had deviled eggs and Russian Easter bread (which I've made twice this year and gobbled it all up) for breakfast.  I think we'll still be having some egg salad sandwiches later on this week. 

Update:the next day I made egg salad sandwiches. Kind of weird looking.

GARDENING FUN

We had a lot of fun today. This morning John and I were going to go to Panama Pottery to buy some pots. And we also had plans to go to Green Acres to buy a tomato plant.  Eventually this turned into a fun outing which included Lynda and Kim as well as John and me, and everybody ended up buying numerous plants, soil, and pots.  We only made it to Green Acres. Green Acres is a really cool nursery and we all love going there.  They also sell pots, so we  never got to Panama Pottery.  

Linda has gardens where she lives next door to us, at the duplex she owns, and has now taken over the old firehouse down the street from us as a gardening project.

Kim lives next door to her brother and she takes care of the gardens for both those houses. John mostly takes care of all our gardening and I also take care of the traffic circle for the neighborhood association.

We did buy the tomato plant and we also bought a well-established foxglove,  a really interesting red and pink geranium, some columbine, and a big pink impatiens.  It's a good thing we took Kim's car.  We couldn't have gotten all this stuff in the Corolla.

The columbine and the impatiens are slated to go in the front corner garden. The geranium will be added to the plethora of geraniums we already have which are many interesting varieties and colors.  And then I bought a petunia to put in the hanging pot and some coleus which, once I got it home, I realized would make a nice border around some ferns in the backyard, so we have another trip coming.

When we got home Dennise and Dave were here with the cute little dogs Dennise has adopted, and we all went over to Café Daneli and had a very late brunch, actually, since it was my only meal today, and now at 7 pm I'm still not hungry, I'm thinking it was brunner.  On the way back we took Kim over to see the tile house.

Tonight Lynda and I and maybe Kim, are dyeing Easter eggs.  

The cool thing about this house is that it it entirely covered with handmade tiles.  It's an old house like ours, so I imagine there was a lot of resistence to this in the neighborhood as the project went along.  I think it's been in progress for at least twenty or so years.  I can remember at least 15 years ago that they had mostly one wall done. 

EASTER EGGS

. I have to admit right off the top that today's pictures are all culled from the Internet, and I probably won't have the time to do the ridiculous amount of work-arounds it takes to put pictures in any kind of order on blogspot when you are working from the iPad.

Zoe and I are going to Ukraine next month, (May) so I have been looking on the Internet for ideas of what kinds of treasures I might want to bring home so I can decide how full my suitcase wlll be on the way out.
And of course, my "problem" is that I love decorated eggs, which I have been collecting for more years than I care to admit. And Ukraine is Mecca for this.
But if you look at enough google images of ukrainian Easter eggs, you will eventually find other kinds of Easter eggs, and then I just go into overload with the pictures. So here they are. The first picture is of the Ukrainian pysanka museum, which is too far away from our tour to make a side trip to see it, but the museum itself is built to make you feel you are walking into an egg.  The next four pictures are eggs in that museum:  an egg decorated in straw, a picture of two beaded eggs, (sort of atypical decorations,) one that's described as a bead appliqué, and one that appears to be decorated with cloth.

The next few pictures are from a site called Mental Floss and include various eggs made by artists.

And finally, the very last picture is a very cool bunch of deviled eggs. The key to these is to peel the hard boiled eggs and then dye them. I can't wait to try this. If mine work, I'll post a picture.

MUSEUM DAY

Bouquets to Art is an annual event at the de Young museum in San Francisco.  The premise of the event is that many florists and floral designers in the Bay Area contribute works that either stand alone or are meant to reflect the art work.  

The art

Some of the designs are very far out.

One funny thing that happened while we were there was that while I was examining a piece of art, someone came up to me and said, you look like the art.  She and her friends were having a really good time with this idea, and in fact, it was kind of true.  

Me as art

Now that you've seen the best stuff, I'm uploading a bunch of the other pictures of art we took. We actually saw two things by the way. The other exhibit was called "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" and featured both that painting and a number of other Rembrandts and Dutch masters. They wouldn't let us take pictures of those, though.

KILLING TREES (I HOPE NOT)

Wednesday we are having a potluck here, and since today is Sunday I should be cleaning the house.
So of course I spent most of the day fiddling around and moving a tree out in the backyard and finally building my shelving for my succulents.
The tree in question is actually the world's most gigantic rosemary bush which is about a foot and a half taller than I am. It is at its most beautiful right now with a long fronds of blue flowers. Or at least it was this morning. Now it might be dying.
The goal was to move it about 2 feet away from where it was which was in a half barrel. As we started trying to move it, it became obvious that a the bottom of the barrel was going to fall out and that the roots of the plant went down into the ground underneath the barrel.
Anyone who didn't want to kill the plants would have stopped right there and just left it where it was. But we called Michael to come over and help us move it.
He was a good sport and came over even though he was promised it would only take 20 minutes and he was here for about an hour.
After we finally got it moved it looks pretty good, although we had to put it into a new barrel and ended up with tons of dirt all over the place. And it seems to be dying.
Then I built my little shelf system which I actually built three different times lifting those damn cement blocks up every time. But my little cactus garden looks quite cute now.

OUR PRESENTATIONS AT RENAISSANCE SOCIETY

John and I belong to the Renaissance Society, which is a sort of partnership between CSUS and a group of seniors who want to continue learning in retirement. Our group of about 1300 or so seniors is allowed to use the campus on Fridays, when there are few classes for the regular students.
The fun class we take, in my opinion, is a drop-in class devoted to the use of the iPad and iPhone. We get presentations by our instructors, but they get tired of us sitting there like dolts and today we were all supposed to give a presentation about various ways you can look up information about how to use your devices.

John had a presentation on using Apple on-line support. I can now see why he was a successful student. He spent several days researching the ways you could use the support, working through the options and putting together a nice, useful presentation.

I, on the other hand, waited until 11 pm last night and then tried to put together a Keynote presentation about the Apple on-line manual using an app I had never used before. I will admit that Keynote is the Apple version of Power Point and more intuitive than a lot of programs.

Of course, I didn't actually see anything I could actually tell people about that they didn't already know, since someone had given a very professional presentation a couple of weeks ago.

So I went to the Internet and downloaded a bunch of pictures of cats with computers and then wrote some very short statements, like, open the web page, look at the table of contents, etc. and then there were all these cute cat pictures.
I introduced my presentation by saying that I had worked in politics for many years and learned that if you can actually answer the question you are asked, answer the question you want to answer.

MORE HOUSE WORK.

It seems to me as if we have been working on our house forever. But then I guess that is the essence of an old house.
About three years ago, or maybe four, I decided that it would be nice to replace the aluminum windows in the back upstairs sunporch with wood windows.
There have been many twists and turns to this project, including a couple of premade window companies who were interested in the job.
They wanted exorbitant amounts of money, and we really did not think we would like the job once it was done.
Then we got the house painted, and while that project was being done we finally decided that perhaps we would like to have my pseudo-cousin Richard do the windows.

Richard is really a stained-glass artisan, and he's my pseudo-cousin by virtue of the fact that we have the same surname and our families are from the same town in Germany a few generations back. These windows are plain and not what Richard would prefer to be doing, which is restoring staned glass windows in churches or making new commissioned stained glass, which he has also done for us, but he is so meticulous that he's the best choice for the job. And fortunately for us, there aren't any churches right now with money to replace their windows.

So a year and a half ago we started thinking about getting the permits, which in a historical district is a problem. More of a problem in my mind than it turned out to be, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through.
Last summer the windows finally got made and they have been sitting around for several months and finally Richard is working on installing them. Of course nothing is plumb. I believe we are probably within a month of the windows being finished.

. This picture shows the size of the crummy old aluminum windows on the sides of the sunporch. They are being replaced with these larger,lower windows which make the whole room look really great. In the meantime I met a roofer who was doing a job down the street, and I really liked him so we are also having our roof replaced. He and his crew have done a really good job and I think they are finished as of today so now we only have the ongoing window project.
When I read in my favorite magazines like American Bungalow, or Style 1900, about people who have done these fabulous rehabs to old houses while they had another job and while they were living in them, with three small children, I am constantly amazed. This job is way at the back of the house, and they did a lot of the job while we were in Hawaii, but there is still a lot of traipsing around

Anyway, the windows are starting to look really wonderful. I doubt it will be done by March 20 when we are having CALS here, which is too bad, because I'd like to show them off.