Hot. Hot. Hot.

It's been a busy week away from home. My SIL and her two children are visiting this week from Texas. Yesterday, we rented bikes to tour the monuments in Washington D.C.

Honestly, it's a wonderful way to visit all the monuments and all the museums.  But yesterday?  A heat wave has hit the East Coast so it was about 105ºF (41ºC)!!

To say it was hot was an understatement.   The kids were tough and powered through.

This is Cate.

She was a good sport in humoring her Aunt Susan by taking this picture.  Unfortunately, I couldn't see the screen in the sun to line up her finger correctly, so I missed it.   But her face was so cute that I have to share it anyway.

Unfortunately, the Mall was all torn up while they re-furbish the lawn and...the reflecting pool is still empty and therefore, not reflectng...



You can see Jim in the picture guarding the bikes while the rest of us went up to visit the Lincoln Memorial.

This is Travis riding under the Cherry trees in the Tidal Basin.

He was a complete trooper and hardly made a peep about the ungodly heat.

And even though the reflecting pool wasn't reflecting, the Tidal Basin was...



But my favorite part of that most very hot day was our stop at the Jefferson Memorial.  It's open to the elements so for what little breeze there was, we felt it there.   It was quiet there.

A time to sit and reflect and think.  It's a serene place to visit...not as crowded especially on this hot day because it's a bit of trek to get there from the main Mall.    A bike makes it much easier.

And my favorite shot was this one of Jack.

He must have sat for 10 minutes against that column, taking in the words of Jefferson... 

And considering the dome above....

He's a thinker, that Jack.  

Finally he got up and came over to me to tell me that because there were not carvings in the center of the dome, there was no depth perception either.  You couldn't tell if the center dome was 5 ft deep or 20 ft deep.  And did I notice the spiral design that resulted from the decreasing diagonals of the squares?  (You can't really see those too well in the picture but I hadn't noticed them until he said something.)  So THAT was what he was thinking...

I love this age.  So many neurons are firing.  And he's absorbing information at lightning speed and drawing his own conclusions.  We're having some really thought-provoking conversations these days...it sure is keeping us on our toes...

I should be back to stitching tomorrow.  Have a great weekend!

Cherry Blossoms on the Brain

It's another gloomy Spring day here in the Baltimore/Washington Metropolitan area. As you can see from the National Park Service's Cherry Blossom web cam, the skies are rainy and overcast.


And I am working on my Bead Journal Project for March. I wanted to show you a progress picture this morning, but the weather is not cooperating for good pictures...so I'll just put you in the mindset of what I'm doing.

Image courtesy of Blue Lotus

I'm stitching a few cherry blossoms and I'm stitching them according to the method I learned in Japanese embroidery. It's my first time taking a Japanese motif that I have typically stitched on silk fabric, on a stretched frame with silk thread and translated it into something that is more mixed media. But the cherry blossom, or sakura, is by far one of my favorite Japanese embroidery motifs. The silk thread really represents the delicacy of the cherry blossom well.


These examples are taken from an antique embroidery fragment given to me by my Japanese embroidery teacher.


Cherry blossom viewing has its own word in the Japanese language, hanami (literally to "view flowers"). And hanami is a huge deal in Japan when hundreds of thousands of Japanese people will flock to parks to walk, play and eat under the flowered canopies of the cherry blossoms. One of my favorite memories is hanami bento or special lunch boxes that were prepared to eat while cherry blossom viewing. They were always so beautifully presented that it seemed to taste better because it looked so good.

Image courtesy of Blue Lotus

I just discovered Amy of Blue Lotus who moved to Japan in 1996 and married a Japanese man. She chronicles her love of Japan, especially Japanese cooking on her very beautiful and informative blog.

We're lucky to have our own celebration here in Washington, D.C., the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which is held for two weeks every Spring to coincide with the peak blooming of the cherry trees that surround the tidal basin and Potomac Park in downtown Washington, D.C. The festival commemorates the 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city of Washington, honoring the lasting friendship between the United States and Japan and representing the hope for continued closeness between the two cultures.

Photo courtesy of Mireille on Flickr

And, I'm happy to report at the writing of this post, that the peak blossom time is NOW! In the rain. But that's OK, I'm hoping to go over on Sunday at sunrise to sneak a peek at the spring spectacle...

Maybe by then, I will have better weather to take some pics and have more to share.

And, one last thing, I just happen to love the artwork for this year Festival poster...isnt' it great?

104 Degrees in D.C. with no A.C...

Sweltering,

blistering,

stifling, and

Suffocatingly

HOT!!

No breeze,

No air conditioning,

Stuck inside...

But this made it all worthwhile...