Afternoon Light on the Water

This is the resident pair. Don't they look well fed? A cracked corn winter! Little bits of spring green adorn the landscape. Today I even found some buds on the tulips that keep coming up in the old bed! Just hoping, since the two dozen I planted in big ceramic pots have only made three sprouts. Next year: MORE BULBS! I love bulbs; they do better here, most of them, than in California. Irises coming along nicely. I wish I knew when I should have fertilized them! Big hopes for the landscape plan for the back yard, but I have to wait another week to see the preliminary ones because my landscape guy just got a big hospital landscaping contract. Anyway, we won't be able to afford all of it. . ..
I just this minute finished the old miniseries of Middlemarch. The book was better, but this was fun! Now I have to do some research on sewing and tailoring in the early Nineteenth Century, One of the funny things about this production is that all the clothes looked new, like they had never been worn before. Many of the collars and such were even kind of rounded as if they had only been slightly pressed. When was the sewing machine invented? I think later than this. Through the magic of the internet I will study up on this before I go to bed! ( Just made a quick check-- sewing machines were being figured out for almost a hundred years, but never really worked until a few years before the American Civil War! So the people in Middlemarch would all have been wearing clothes that were hand-tailored. I'll bet they mostly wouldn't have looked that new either.
Today's reading milestone was passing the halfway mark on the SERIOUS biography of George Eliot. She is both more intelligent and more emotionally comoplicated than I had suspected. Where I am now, she is beginning to write the Mill On The Floss amid the deafening rumors as to her real identity that swirl through the drawing rooms. But she has made some good money on Adam Bede and she and Mr. Lewes are able to live much more comfortably. That's good, And so Good Night!