My father sent email giving me directions to his house for next Saturday, and added he's going to put me to work spreading chicken manure on his new plants. "It'll give you that farm fresh fragrance," he said jovially. You can take the country boy out of the country, send him to the University of Oregon, force him to work 35 years for a big insurance company, require him to live in a series of gorgeous, exquisitely decorated homes and take exotic vacations around the world, and teach him to invest so wisely that he eventually sets up his own scholarship at his former high school so that others may have the opportunities he had, but you can't take the country out of the boy. Chicken manure it is. I'd better bring my overalls.
My own plants are now supplemented by French marigolds, a showy trailing creeper called Gold Flash Lotus, a new purple euphorbia, and a big, rangy flowering maple more correctly known as an abutilon. I was so excited to see some on the table next to the dicentras at the nursery today I exclaimed aloud. I don't think anyone noticed, but it was a moment of extreme garden dorkitude. It really was thrilling, though. I've wanted one of these since I bought my first gardening book two years ago. Don't know what they are? Digital camera to the rescue!
While I was at the garden center shrieking at plants John was home excitedly waiting for the first beam collisions to take place at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center using BaBar(tm). The BaBar detector was built at SLAC to study the millions of B mesons produced by the PEP-II storage ring. John's been waiting years for this. He kept up with it by checking the BaBar Shift Logbook on the Web. It was hard for me to get enthusiastic about it, though. Cutting edge physics looks kind of dull when all you see are reports of adjusting the solenoid.
We are two major thrill seekers, n'est-ce pas? Plants and beams. It was quite a day. I'm totally worn down by the adrenaline rush. Time to relax and get ready for tomorrow morning's expedition to see the new Star Wars movie. The fun never stops.
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