Wordless Wednesday: Adirondacks South

A good spring for flowers

It's really amazing what happens when we get adequate rainfall! I've been very impressed on my morning walks (which I can take every day now!) with the profusion of blooms in the neighborhood this year.

Our wonderful crape myrtles are reliable bloomers even when moisture is scarce. But they seem to have responded especially well to the recent rains and are outdoing themselves. The tree above and on the right is a few blocks away, on my generic walking route. What a treat, to have such sights so easy to hand.

Going through my photos from the past couple of months, I found good snaps further afield as well. Here are some that especially caught my eye, from far and near...

a lovely exotic on the St. Mary's campus...can anyone tell me what it is?

another lovely I can't identify...on the Trinity campus

yet another mystery...there are lots of these little lilies all over...this was at Trinity

sunflower on a neighborhood walk

oodles of lantana everywhere...these are on the beautifully-maintained Trinity campus

lots of yards in the neighborhood like these showy Pride of Barbados

one of my neighbors has this delightful bit of wild meadow in their lawn

I'm not much of a gardener, but even my poor yard has given us some floral bounty. I've never seen this many blooms on my white althea...

please ignore trim that badly needs to be painted

so pretty!

...and it's been a few years since we've had blooms on these severely-neglected day-lilies...

I'll close with a very unusual "flower" that I've seen all over the neighborhood, although not on our own sago palms. (They might not get enough sunlight to be able to produce these amazing cones.) Impressive, eh?

Our neighborhood school

The weather here on Christmas day was delightful. A front was on its way in, so it was breezy, but it wasn't all the way here yet, so it was cool but not cold.

I had planned to take a calorie-burning walk, and at the last minute Henry decided to join me. I wanted to walk the few blocks over to Trinity University and see what was up with the large new science building that they've been working on the past several months.

(One of our nephews recently graduated from Trinity, with a degree in physics, and expressed his disappointment that they hadn't built this massive new science building a few years earlier. This lament reminded us of our days at library and law school in Austin at UT; the student union building was closed for a spiffy renovation almost the whole time we were there!)

this is just part of the new building!

We ended up taking a much longer walk than I had originally planned, but it was a lot of fun. The Trinity campus is really beautiful, partly due to its hilly location (the site of a former quarry) and abundant beautiful trees...

...but also because of its lavish buildings and other facilities...

[I'm going to try not to be snarky in my descriptions of the Trinity campus because it really is lovely, and the school is an asset to the city. But they obviously have so much more money than my school across town. However, they just as obviously don't have as much money as Rice, my alma mater, so I guess I can't complain too much.

And, I do like the bronze Rattler statue outside of our gym more than Trinity's tiger (see left). Although the latter is quite handsome. When I get back to work next month I'll snap a photo of the snake and let you decide.]

Since the buildings were all closed up for the holidays, our sight-seeing was limited to exteriors on the campus, but that meant we could take in a lot of athletic facilities. Wow! They play a lot of sports over there, for a D-III school, and they play them in some pretty nice accommodations.

We've been to some games in their very attractive soccer stadium. They came up with a great way to make room for a lot of spectators in a relatively small space (reminiscent of English football's terraces, but without the enormous crowds that made those places so dangerous).

It would be fun to go to a lacrosse game (or LAX, as I've learned to call it, thanks to another nephew who plays regularly); we'll have to keep an eye on the schedule. I made Henry out-stand in the field so that I could showcase his handsome office building in the background. He can watch games out of his office window, should he need to take a break from work—occasionally.

There's also tennis, in this and yet another tennis stadium:

And swimming, in this very nice outdoor pool:

And, of course, football. Although the fact that St. Mary's doesn't have a football team is one of things I like most about it...

[last Wednesday's Wordless post was taken on the track that encircles the football field]

I've often said that if St. Mary's, where I love my job, could just swap places with Trinity, I could walk or ride my bike to work. But, since that's not how things are, I ride the bus instead. However, it's nice to have Trinity close by, to provide a pleasant walk on a balmy Christmas day, all the same.

Wordless Wednesday: countdown (to a new year)