When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" - Balanchine

Sorry fellow readers; I understand it has been a very long time since my last post - almost three months in fact, but in addition to the general insanity of life, I was felled by a Teratoma. I forewarn however, that you do not look at pictures of said benign tumor that was removed along with a ladypart UNLESS you have a strong stomach. It is NOT delicious nor appetizing. Apparently, 1 in 1,000,000,000 people get these so I can officially say I am 1 in a million.

Now that I have returned, fully recovered, from my "sick leave" I wanted to share the status of our garden this year. We tilled and soiled and mulched in the beginning and discovered the gladiola bulbs that were the size of maybe two walnuts had grown to the size of our palms! So far, we have two that have shot up and more on the way, as you can see by the images. Additionally, some wildflowers, a tiny cherry tree, a rhododendron, and two rose bushes. If you have been following since last year, you can see we have reused the same storage bins for our two large containers of green goodness. The cherry tree and the rhododendron are in containers we found in the alley running behind the houses on our block AND we decided that a $4 pink "beer bucket" was good enough for our roses :) Happy End-of-June-almost-July.

Lost and Found: Wings to Go?

Philadelphia is known for many things: Rocky Balboa, Cheeseteaks, South Street...and wings? Yes. Wings. I'm not going to spend time on the infamous and trashy Wing Bowl that occurs every year at the Sports Complex in South Philly (how fitting, really), but instead on Hot Wings. Or more precisely, this plastic bowl of hot wings that someone left on The Inky's newsstand at 22nd & Arch. Interestingly enough, I smelled it before I saw it, so these were fairly fresh and recently left behind. Perhaps by a conscientious SEPTA passenger, though I personally surmise it was more forgetfulness than thoughtfulness which led me to my strange discovery.

Without question, I felt a picture was in order. Later, after contemplating just how often the staggering number and variety of chicken wings (and those remnants of what once were said chicken wings) which I stumble upon in Philly - i.e, on the bus, in the street, sometimes hanging out of the mouths of and being gnawed on by pedestrians, in the gutter, on sidewalks, being eaten by pigeons on sidewalks - in places that have been listed, yet are not limited to, I decided a short ode for entertainment's sake was in order.