Oh My. How fast the weekends fly by.
This is a shot of one of the flowers on the red yucca out back. So pretty, yet so fleeting.
And, this is the tickseed that I planted several weeks ago.
Pretty yellow flowers. It is also called jethro tull flower. So, I’ll leave you with this:
Jethro Tull’s Songs from the Wood.
G’nite!
This is the last of the lettuce that Monte planted about 6 weeks ago. It’s all rinsed and spun and ready to eat.
In its place, lots of basil seed has been sown — right next to the carrots, broccoli, and mystery squash.
I do love driving up north of New York City. In about a span of 5-10 minutes the scenery quickly turns from city sprawl to forest, hills, rocks and streams. I can drive the route between La Guardia Aiport to Somers in my sleep. There’s one sight on the Hutchinson River Parkway at about exit 24 that always makes me chuckle – a curious looking pine tree.
I decided to take of picture of it as I was zooming by in traffic today, on my way back to the airport.
Tree or not a tree? 🙂
“And we must study through reading, listening, discussing, observing and thinking. We must not neglect any one of those ways of study. The trouble with most of us is that we fall down on the latter — thinking — because it’s hard work for people to think. And, as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler said recently, ‘all of the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think.'”
— Thomas J. Watson, 1915 (audio)
IBM founder Thomas J. Watson was an inspiring figure and entrepreneur. He introduced the “THINK” slogan in the early days of the company to motivate and inspire IBMers. It was the first US trademark registered by IBM. Over the century, this one-word slogan has adorned IBM buildings, publications, ads and presentations. Back in the day, IBMers carried around small, leatherbound THINK note pads to capture great thoughts and ideas.
Those little notebooks later inspired the name of the IBM ThinkPad line of laptops in the 1990s. I’ve always thought that was clever. I think TJ Watson would, too.
Just a quick post before “punching out” for the night. The meetings I’m attending this week are at an IBM facility. IBM celebrated 100 years of innovation in 2011. Let’s hope the next 100 are as impact-ful. These and other former state-of-the-art artifacts grace the lobby. The placard for this one says:
IBM 016 Electrical Duplicating Keypunch. The development of automatic feeding and ejecting mechanisms for keypunches and duplicators helped to increase the speed of key punching and reduce operator fatigue. The Type 016, introduced in 1929, fed cards into the punching unit and automatically removed or ejected the cards after punching. It was withdrawn from marketing in 1960.
This one’s even older. Not electric. Notice the hand crank.
And it says:
IBM 501 Automatic Numbering Gang Punch. Brought to market in 1926, the Type 501 automatically recorded on a series of punched cards common fixed data from a master card. This punch operated at the rate of 125 cards per minute, and was withdrawn from marketing in April 1948.
I guess progress is always relative to where you’ve been…
This morning started early, as usual. I’m leaving for NY again this morning and I still had to pack. I took a walk out back after a few calls. This is a shot of one of the recently planted pentas, well in bloom; with droplets from this morning’s watering still there.
I made it to La Guardia without incident. This is a shot going over the Whitestone Bridge – perennially under construction. The sunset was pretty. I was hoping to get a shot of Manhattan from the port side of the plane, but for some reason, the plane approached from the east on landing, instead of the west, so I missed getting a shot.
I had a nice time last night. First, dinner at the Grove Wine Bar. Can you believe that appetizer plate?! I had wine flight #1, bubblies from Italy & France. Monte had flight #8, Italian reds. The cappuccino afterwards was almost too pretty to drink, but I’m glad I did, it was one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
Then we headed to One World Theatre for the Diane Schuur concert, which was great. She played for about 2 hours… with someone on drums, sax and bass. She sang numbers from Duke Ellington, Chuck Mangione, Stevie Wonder, and Patsy Cline, to name a few, and ended with Amazing Grace, one of my favorites.
A lovely evening, indeed.
Keeto is about 8 months old. His flight feathers are in and he has mastered flying. He loves to sit on his perch in the window, which is about 2 feet away from a hummingbird feeder. When the hummingbirds fly up to the feeder, I don’t know who is more freaked out, the hummingbirds or Keeto. He also will fly between Monte and I when we are all sitting down to watch TV. He seems to be pretty house-trained. Good thing. …and he loves to give kisses.
Today is day 2 of an absolutely beautiful weekend. Monte has headed to the lake, and I am working. Ok. Well. I will be as soon as I post this.
We are looking forward to a fun evening at the One World Theatre. For Christmas, I gave monte tickets for 2 for the Diane Schuur concert this evening. I made him humongous paper tickets for the gift. The real tix are actually at will-call. But we’re bringing the home-made tickets with us to see if they’ll let us in with them anyway 🙂
Oh, and Happy Earth Day!
Lantana grows here in abundance, without needing anything from humans to help it along. It is one of the great native flowering plants in Central Texas.
We have yellow, orange, purple and white lantana in different places in our yard. But my favorite is the multi-colored pink & yellow lantana. Before we built the shop, there was a beautiful, huge multi-colored lantana growing right in the middle of where the slab was to be poured. It ended up getting torn out. I’ve mourned the loss of that lantana ever since.
So, today I was very happy to see a new lantana growing in the backyard that is just starting to pop out with those great multi-colored blooms.
Yay!
This is the weekend of the annual Houston-to-Austin MS-150 bike ride. I don’t ride, but I am a sherpa (along with Irene) for 3 friends that are riding: Lori, Doray and Laura. For the last 10 years or so, they have been riding and fundraising for the MS-150. And I ride in the truck with them from Austin to Houston. We eat every year at Lomonte’s, an awesome Italian restaurant right off I-10. We stay in the hotel overnight. I take them to the start line in the morning, and then drive the truck back home. It’s a sweet deal for me, because I’m home by 10AM saturday morning. They pedal their way back all-day saturday and sunday.
It’s a fun girls’ weekend – for a good cause. 🙂
Nuff said. Nite nite.
I made it home tonight by about 11:30. Yay for no delays or major travel issues.
I am an aisle seat person. If you want to ask me to swap my aisle seat with your non-aisle seat on a flight so that you can sit next to your honey or your friend, you’d better be a little old lady, or a newlywed. Ok. Well. If it was a window seat, I’d probably swap with you, but *that’s* what I’d be thinking. You’ll have to bribe me (alot) to swap for the dreaded middle seat.
That being said, I do love looking out the window. I suspect I look a lot one of those people that you’d think was on their first plane ride. Oh, and I take pictures out the window, too. Sometimes even when my electronic devices are supposed to be turned to the off position and stowed.
The plane I flew from White Plains to Chicago today had single seats on the port side of the plane, so my window seat was also an aisle seat. About as good as it gets on a little regional jet.
Here’s your meaningless factoid of the day… did you know that American Airlines saves lots of $ a year in lower fuel costs (plane weighs less) because they don’t paint their planes? Now ya know.
I had a long day of meetings today. Tomorrow evening I fly back home – always the best part of a business trip.
I didn’t take my camera with me this morning, so by the time I got back to the hotel it was dark, I was tired, had little material to work with, and was searching for inspiration for a blog post. During my daily catch-up on blogs I read a post on the wordpress blog itself from last week. It was an announcement for the 2nd annual WorldWide WordPress 5K, on Sunday, April 29th. The WWWP5K is a virtual 5K, originally conceived by the employees at Automattic, the company behind WordPress, to get their geographically-dispersed fellow employees to run or walk a 5K “together,” each in their own locations. They invited the entire blogging community to join them and to blog about it. Last year I did. And I plan to again this year.
Thanks WordPress for a fun idea, and for providing me with the inspiration for a photo for today. I didn’t bring my running shoes on this trip, so these will have to do.
Mark your calendars, and walk with me!
At the party, over the weekend, several little kids were there… all about 2 years old. Monte brought out a box of toy trains and track that they played with at the picnic table on the patio. I think these were toys that he had as a kid. In the box was an old troll doll. Remember these guys? I couldn’t resist….
To those fellow-procrastinators out there…. get those tax returns in today!
I’m off to New York for the week. Ta-ta!
A Monday haiku for you. Have a great week!
More tulips in bloom.
Tall, pink, yellow…one bent down.
A star is inside.
Sheila365 