Thursday, Jun. 06, 2002 – 11:41 p.m.
2002-06-06 11:41
The Picnic
Now for the rest of the weekend… Sunday I slept in. What this really means is that I got up at the usual time of about 7am, fed the cats, ate a bowl of cereal, and flopped back into bed for another couple hours of sleep. In the end I got up at about 9:30 but then I proceeded to lounge around and watch a movie on video. Yes, a very lazy morning.
I did have one thing I needed to do before I went to the Raleigh Rose Society Summer Picnic at 4pm. I had promise Rich, the guy who maintains the RRS (Raleigh Rose Society) webpage, that I would burn the pictures that I took at the rose show on a CD and bring it to the picnic. Sound simple right? It would have been if I hadn’t tried editing the pictures late one night last week. I had kept falling asleep as I was working so I have lots of copies of the same files with names like “copy of copy of…” or “Copy(3) of …”. It took me about 90 minutes just to get back to the original list of files and then I still needed to go through and do rotations on a number of the photots. Once I had everything sorted out and oriented correctly, it was a simple process to burn it to the CD. A shower and I was off to the picnic (after a stop at Lowes Foods to get some food to take to the picnic…) I also took the remaining MORCs (Manus’s Oatmeal Raisan Cookies) since if they stayed in the house, I would eat them…. I just don’t have a lot of control when it comes to these cookies.
The picnic was at the Witherspoon rose garden in Durham. Witherspoon is a local rose supplier and they have a nice garden with a bunch of the roses that they sell. The store is closed on Sundays but the Garden is open until sunset. By the time I got there, most folk were already there. A nice spread of food but the weather was quite warm. Who would have thought it would be 95 degrees on June 2nd? Fortunately there was a nice area under some trees so in the shade it wasn’t that bad. However, to look at the flowers, you had to get out in the sun… I took some pictures of some stuff and won a set of three “plugs” of The Fairy, a popular pink polyantha that is quite hardy and disease resistant. Now I need to figure out where to put them…. I will have to look to see how shade tolerant they are. Supposedly thay also spread well.
After leaving the picnic, I stopped by the new mall to see what movies were playing. I ended up going to see “Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones” I enjoyed it but would have thought that the Jedi would have figured out how to recognize and deal with teenage angst. I guess one could chock it up to Obi Wan’s inexperience or the Dark Side fogging the Jedi Council’s sense of the Force. That night I had some pretty weird dreams…. Star Wars meets West Wing…
The Rest of the Week
Monday night was gaming with Galen and folk. Tuesday night I went and shot archery at Steafan Oreilly’s near Angier then back to Cary for supper with Nia and Nikulai. Tuesday was another warm day and my equipment had sat in the car all day. I had just finish stringing my bow when I notice that it had become frayed in one of the loops. Too bad my spare string was at home… Not shooting with that bow that day…. I guess 5 years of use is pretty good for a bowstring. Steafan had a 46 pound bow that I could borrow. So I grabbed my 7 good arrows (the other 5 in the dozen had either broken or or needed new tips.) It took me a couple of rounds to get the arrows grouped into the target but by that time, I was down to 4 arrows having lost the tips on 3 of them (only one of which I was able salvage the tip from the target form). I think I need to reglue the tips on these arrows. Having them it all day in a warm car did not help, Since it was 7pm at that point, it was time to drive back to meet Nia and Nikulia at The Loop in Cary. After supper it was home to the redesign of these pages.
I have been trying to spray on Wednesday mornings but it just wasnt’ going to happen after being up until 3AM. I did take a look at the roses, however, and noticed, to my dismay, that the Rosa Mundi has gotten what appears to be a case of powdery mildew!
Wednesday I did go over and look at the roses in the Raleigh Rose Garden. They have some nice looking bushes but they need to spend some time headheading (cutting off the spent blossoms). It made my hands itch….
I also finished reading C.C. Hurst’s article from the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society (1941) yesterday. A facinating article about how the different varieties of roses ended up getting developped. I was thinking about what I needed to update in my rose talk when I came up with the idea of teaching the class as a “field trip” the next time. Elvegast is hosting Atlantian University on NC State campus in the fall. Assuming the weather cooperates, I am thinking that I make the class 2 hours and walk over to the Raleigh Rose Garden to live specimens. Cool! In the evening, I went to the woodshop and did repairs on a bench that had lost one of its legs and finish up the doll bench for Nia.
In view of the mildew, I was up early this morning and out spraying. It was another week of Orthenex. Hopefully this should address the mildew problem. I may have to look to see what other solutions there are….
Oh, I also took some additional pictures concentrating on the red ones. One of the comments I received regarding my diarypage format changes was that the “Old Musings” section was a little hard to read with the Rose de Rescht as the background. I have replace the Rose de Rescht photo with a picture of Cesar Chavez.
Ok… I am falling asleap again so I am going to quit…