May 1

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I mentioned that we ran our Saturday errands later on May 1st than we usually do, in order to avoid the traffic from the stadium after graduation.

It never did clear up. Here's what the sky looked like in the late afternoon from the post office parking lot.





Library branch parking-lot shrub. There are lots of these around the parking lot at the Pittsfield branch. The flower clusters are small. An inch long, maybe. They look to my naked eye like yellow fuzz.....





I mentioned that our usual Saturday-errand route takes us quite close to the University's stadium.

Here we are, coming (mostly) north on 7th Street toward Pioneer high school (the red brick). The dark area, looming above Pioneer, is the stadium (which is kitty-corner across Stadium and Main from Pioneer). You can see the upper left corner of the bright yellow block M on the stadium just left of the light pole.....

You didn't used to be able to see the stadium from here, but they decided it was worth spending millions and millions of dollars to add fancy schmancy boxes for rich people (and corporations with too much money) to watch (or perhaps, more realistically, "attend"...) games in luxury, and the stadium's height (and unfortunate impact on the landscape) grew a great deal.

Anyway, you can see how close we are to a place which releases tens of thousands of people all at once. Something to be assiduously avoided!





Home.

Between our house and our neighbors grows a lot of stuff that doesn't get much attention. Scrubby trees. And wisteria.

Wisteria is very invasive, but wow does it smell good............





We took Wibble out for his constitutional.

The dogwood this year has been very pitiful, in comparison to everything else (which has burgeoned), so I haven't shown you any till now.

A very nice pink one, shown off against a white house.





Nice pink crab against nice blue house.





Tulips and grape hyacinth. The red looks like I jacked it up, but I didn't......... This is exactly what the camera remembered.





Reds and greens.





I think this may be the largest redbud I've ever seen.





That same white lilac we saw the other day, on a less-windy afternoon.





It was the teensy baby Japanese maple which caught my eye. Then I noticed the "slice of suburban life" aspect -- the mossy bark of the mature maple, the dandelion, the bits of walnut shell which are evidence of squirrels..............





Of course, even in our pleasant neighborhood, all is not flowers and cute baby trees.



Apparently they are doing some serious sewer replacement. One of those projects you'd just as soon not experience, but whose results make temporary annoyance trivial.....





It had stormed a bit, overnight. Lots of small things had been blown to the ground.

These are the petals of the quince flowers we enjoyed before.





Maple seeds and a leaf cluster.





Some of the maples are pretty much fully leafed out.





Lily of the valley. I keep trying, but keep failing to capture a truly sharp image. Not sure why the camera finds these hard to focus on.



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