snakes

HOW IS MICHELE BACHMAN POSSIBLE?
HOW
HOW
HOW
HOW
HOW

from her wikipedia page:

Bachmann has charged that global warming is a hoax^[60] and has been a vocal skeptic of global warming.^[61] She has asserted that since carbon dioxide is "a natural byproduct of nature", it is a beneficial gas required by plant life. She stated that because life requires carbon dioxide and it is part of the planet's life cycle, it cannot be harmful. In a statement she made on the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Bachmann stated she was against the cap and trade climate legislation, stating: "Carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural; it is not harmful.... We're being told we have to reduce this natural substance to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the earth."^[62]

flashback

SPRING WEDDING SEASON IS OVER PRAISE GOD!
I feel broken and exhausted. And so in my dumpy hot apartment under the slight breeze of a dust encrusted ceiling fan I revisit my old vacation photos...

This is the deserted beach called Playuela on the island of Vieques where in February I rolled in the surf, a solo interpretation of the Wicked Game video sans swimsuit...because what else do you do on a deserted beach?



My sister Jess and I collected seashells and washed up coral





We cooked a lot of huevos rancheros and drank mango juice



We saw lots of wild ponies. Just out there doing their pony thing





We explored ancient ruins without the recommended tour guide



Got lost. Ran from swarming wasps. I learned about Jesse's fear of spiders in a rather dramatic jungle performance.





We hiked out to an 18th century lighthouse





and crawled inside.
You go first
No, you go first



The view from the top and you couldn't see no body in sight:



We rented a jeep and jeeped around to all the secret beaches.



We borrowed some snorkle gear and explored the shallow coral reefs. I felt like we were in the Little Mermaid. Until we ran into a piranha. He just sat there and looked at us. Stuck to seashelling after that..





We bummed around in town, catching internet connections where we could and buying more cans of goya beans and bananas





I drank coffee in a hammock every morning and every evening. Watch the sunset over the hills.



Re-reading the Nin diaries, boring myself with The Castle, and writing postcards that I never sent...

quick post

Found a half&half peony today. It's probably going to be the last peony week, which makes me sad, but I did get the first dinnerplate dahlias (which I've started calling double DeeeeeS!)

Also started posting occasionally on the Garden Design website; I'd love for you to read it. It's about my container garden. It feels nice to write about flowers and plants for such a neat magazine. I almost feel like a pro!

solstice meditation

let it be said here that summer is my least favorite season.
we've talked about this before - i'm well aware - but hey, blogs get repetitive.

it's probably my scandinavian blood. my propensity for butter and oily fish has landed me with an extra thick skin, ill suited for heat and humidity.
don't like a damn thing about bar-b-ques.
could write a memoir on my experience with thunderstorms.

but turns out that most of the things I do love take center stage in summer months, flowers, fruit, vegetables; you know the drill. so i'll grin and bear it for a 30th year, waiting patiently for labor day.
making hay while the sun shines, if you will.

this morning on my walk with Nea (who, incidentally, shares in my distaste for the warmer months) I happened across a small parcel of happy weeds with purple flowers tucked amongst the evergreens. But what the hell was it called? We continued on, my mind painfully sloughing through my repertoire of plant nomenclature. Trying to extract something from your brain can be a strange, almost physical experience.

Crown Vetch! - how could I forget? i was obsessed with this weed for a few weeks last summer...it's soft abundant takeover of a marshy field...it's myriad lavender flowers. Believe it or not, vetch holds up great as a cut in water.

so the dog and me, we backtracked and I grabbed it up roots and all; dutifully filling my role as the NYC parks department's faithful weeder.

it is such things that give me small pleasures this time of year...when all the swiss chard, rosé and raspberries fall short.

happy summer, fools.

roses and escapism

sitting at the computer in the dark, procrastinating. eric is sleeping on the couch and i'm alone and it's very quiet. it's 7:47 right now! like the airplane!
i wish i was on an airplane right now... to Italy! I would arrive and one of those guys would be holding a cardboard sign that said RYHANEN and I would go with him, speechless. He would take me to a fantastic sidestreet buried deep in...what city should we be in? Florence? Sienna?

...and i would get out, knock on a small door and be greeted by fabulous (but not FABULOUS like you know what i mean, ew gross) people who had wine in their hands and some kind of delicious cured meats. we'd eat and drink and talk for a while about relationships and flowers and life and then I would feel tired and excuse myself to my quarters which are small, like a monestary. a bed, plaster walls, a simple sink. i'd wash up and hit the sack!

in the morning? strong coffee, a slice of lemon-baked ricotta, and the keys to my scooter to go traveling.

[brian ferry you did it to me]

[I wish you all could smell these roses, they are absolutely intoxicating. if i ever said ranunculus was my favorite flower, i take it back and say roses now.]

Old Field Farm

One of our volunteers this summer is a really superior woman named Cerise Mayo who aside from being a magician with Rhubarb, works as a consultant helping small farms get the exposure, help, funding, product placement, etc. they need.

She sent this over this morning, artist and farmer Peter Nadin's new work and products presented later this month at Gavin Brown. I am happy to read about his work this morning, and click through his website.

yarrow et al

Never been able to grow yarrow, but love it. Fortunately I have a good source for cottage yarrow. It's not a secret; Bernadette from River Garden grows them and I feel lucky today for that. You can find her flowers at the Union Square Green market Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
The peach color is my favorite.

We're in between weddings here mid-week. I have not shared a lot of wedding stuff here lately, have I? Well here's a bit from our last wedding at Bedford Post Inn.
I guess lots of time I just don't have the energy to talk about weddings here. Many of these events take a lot out of me...attempt to restore my energy and enthusiasm for flowers with a little color study like the one above, share it here, bask in your comments for a few days :) and then go back into the thick of it. That's right I did just emoticon you. Weird, right?

I've been avoiding the computer and the internet a lot lately. Quit my facebook. Thinking of quitting twitter too...it sucks my time and I'd rather just look out the window than know who's boinking who (metaphorically) in the blog-o-sphere. but it's weird how addictive that shit is, we discussed this at lunch today. how you check those things 40 times a day to find out what's happening (nothing)
just a lot of borrowed images tumbling around. lots of cats self mythologizing in 46 characters or less, furiously licking each other... grooming one another
>:(

but then there's martha. twittering away out there in Seoul, now western China. her twitter feed is one of a few little gems in the rough and tumble of useless drab. so i'll probably keep on keeping on for now..
my twitter, my titillation

\,,/
this apparently means rock on, so there it is.

i just don't want the earth to keep getting hotter.

[old stone structures on one of my favorite hikes with nea]

that's all.
I just want things to stay the same, and for the next generation to be able to experience nature in the same way that we did. but shits just not going to pan out that way and we have to think about it sometime.

saw the new woody allen movie last night, have you seen it? it's about time travel and is worth it for the adorable portrayals of hemingway, gertrude stein, dali, man ray... yada yada yada

but today, reading this great article in the OP ed section and thinking about the movie last night. i came to an interesting cross section in my brain; we have to let go of living in the past. we have to take the future into our own hands right now. what does that mean exactly I'm not sure. when I get wrapped up in thinking about the environment and my own contributions to the problem I get overwhelmed. let me tell you the flower business is far far far from green.

i've been saving tin foil. and plastic wrap. which makes me feel sort of crazy. actually i broke the crazy limit a few weeks ago when I carried an old bucket of flower water down 2 flights of stairs at a fancy upper east side club to the ladies room to flush the toilet with it. actually i was in the stall and automatically flushed without thinking. then almost I almost cried because i wasted the water.

sounds wacky, but shits going to get real like that i think. pay per flush sort of thing.
go read that article, it's more optimistic than you'd think.

and this is the most i ever want to use the words toilet and flush with you.

flinging deep personal monday morning thoughts at you

I've spent most of my life feeling like i needed something else, you know? If I just had...

But the nice thing about getting older is that you feel that less. I can say right now I feel I need nothing more and this is a fucking huge bit of progress for me.

I mean.. I would like to have a house with a garden. And you know I want a copper colored camaro. I would like more close friends, and I've probably always wanted to be thinner. I would like to have a boat. A cleaner kitchen, another dog like Nea, time for yoga and cooking. I would like to not have a headache right now. I would like to cry more instead of being such a robot. I would like to be able to ask for things I want - just be able to ask - and tell people how I really feel when I see them and feel those things. And I would really like to travel more, especially to Petra this morning.

I have to look at my horoscope because in the last few months I've been feeling overwhelmed with a strange sense of compassion. Grand emotions I can't verbalize, even to Eric. It has to be a Neptune aspect or something else in the stars. It means nothing really, but everything too.

We are all our own little universes, aren't we?

long hazy days we're floating through
but this is when things get interesting
i feel like kate bush speaks directly to me from across the room
it's uncanny

coleus, corydalis and clematis!! you've come at last