Growing my own vegatables

I still don't have any.  Vegetables, that is.

I bought tomato, radish, purplette onion, and a chocolate variety of sweet pepper seeds in the spring from Johnny's Selected Seeds.  (Love them!)  Oh and lettuce.

I thought I had the makings for a pretty nice salad.

My seedlings got off to a nice start.  This time around, I even took the time to harden them off--a step I usually skip.

After all that, my tomato sprouts are thriving.  That's about it.

Since the spring was unusually chilly, I didn't want to put out the radishes or lettuce for fear the chill would kill them off.  So I waited for warmer weather.  Turns out, I waited too long.

The intense heat from our deck fried the radish and lettuce sprouts to nothingness.   Even though our deck has great dappled morning sunlight, by 3pm, it's hot as hades out there.  The tomatoes love that but not much else.

I have one pepper sprout and one purplette onion hanging on.  I need to transplant the pepper seedling and see how it goes.  I have a basil plant limping along.  The mint is slowly growing.  The rosemary?  Long dead.

In the fall, I'll try planting radishes and lettuce again since they seem to like the cooler temperatures.  In the meantime, I'm gonna germinate another batch of tomatoes since that seems to be the only thing I'm capable of growing.

I'm imagining the bountiful harvest of sweet tomatoes right now.  Good thing I love a caprese salad.  

A trip to the zoo!

Yesterday, we gathered ourselves and drove down to the Smithsonian National Zoo.  We left just after 9 am, so traffic wasn't too bad.  It took us just over an hour.

Joseph is the picture taker in the family.  He didn't waste any time.  You meet this triceratops very quickly entering the park, and we needed a picture.  (It's not everyday one meets a triceratops).  I don't know what Ethan is looking at off camera.

The weather forecast called for a partly cloudy sky and little humidity.  They got that wrong.  The humidity was stifling and the sun was full on bright.



Joseph got some really good pictures of the lions, especially of this young one frolicking in the pool that surrounded their habitat.  There were four lions altogether.

 

 

 

There is a female lion in the foreground and a male lion against the wall, though it's difficult to see him since he blends into the concrete wall and the spotlight of sun.  Joseph didn't get a picture of the fourth lion.

A tiger looking regal.  

 


Both boys emerging from the water misters.  Believe me, it felt so good on such a humid day.

When we emerge from the Small Mammal House, we saw this:

 

Those are two orangoutangs walking on those ropes above the trees.  There are platforms at strategically placed intervals for the orangoutangs to climb on before moving along the ropes to the next platform.  They can access the platforms and ropes from their habitat.  What isn't pictured is the way both the orangoutangs helped each other.  One of the orangoutangs reached a platform first, he (maybe it was a she?) reached behind him to help the other one get onto the platform!

We were at the right place at the right time to catch this.

 

Here is another orangoutang inside her habitat.  She is playing with pooh in case you are wondering what she is doing.  That's the back of Ethan's head.  Like most of the kids surrounding him, they were enraptured with the pooh playing orangoutang.

In the same building, there were gorillas, although they were in a different room.  The gorillas were being fed by the zoo keepers.  One male ate very quickly, gobbling down banana slices one after the other.  I guess he was afraid someone was going to steal it.  Another male gorilla took his meal up to the tallest part of a tree and gobbled it down.  He seemed quite particular about not sharing it with the other gorillas.

By the time we got to the cheetahs, it was mid afternoon.  The sun was sweltering.  The humidity oppressive.  The cheetahs were sprawled on the grass of their habitat, napping in the shade.  Then, one gets up and trots over to the shade in another part of the habitat (pictured below).  Two others follow that cheetah.  Their bodies are so sleek and slender.  Did you know that a cheetah's stride is 23 feet when running at top speed during a hunt?  Yes, 23 feet!  (I know, right?)  

We tried following the cheetahs, moving along to another side of the habitat.  By the time we got there, however, the cheetahs were hiding in either tall grass or a den.  We weren't sure which.    But, we were still in for a nice treat.  In the next habitat over was another cheetah by himself (or herself?) pacing around.  Joseph caught it on video, although I'm having difficulty uploading the video to this blog.  (I'll try posting it to FB instead).  

A elephant house and the surrounding habitat was under re-construction.  We got a glimpse of one elephant hanging out amidst the construction.  No giraffes.  No rhinos.  No ostriches.  Not sure if those savannah animals were displaced during construction or what.  

We saw two giant pandas, one male and one female, in different rooms.  Both of the pandas sat with their backs to us gawking humans, noshing on bamboo.  

We skipped the bird house.  By this time it was late afternoon.  The heat was sweltering.  All of us were tired.  The boys were perilously close to a temper meltdown, so we decided to leave.  

Elias's favorite thing about the zoo was everything!  Ethan's favorite thing at the zoo?  Nothing!  I think he inherited the contrarian attitude from his mother.  

We had a good day all in all.  We'd like to return to the zoo once the construction is complete.  And I have a new family rule: no zoo visiting during the summer. It's just too darn hot.   I'd like to go back in the fall instead.  

Summer Vacation

On the second official day of summer vacation, we visited the Smithsonian Aerospace Museum near Dulles Airport.

Seeing the space shuttle Discovery was awesome!

Here is another picture for perspective.

Aside from the space shuttle, there were all sorts of planes and helicopters, ranging from early models to a stealth jet and a Concord.  The Enola Gay was there too.  It's so massive.  It's difficult to imagine that hulking plane ever getting off the ground.  Some of the early versions of helicopters were little more than a seat attached to rotors and a mechanism to steer it.  The person who flew that was seriously brave. 

Later in the afternoon, we went up to an observation tower, which was a former air traffic control tower.  Since it was raining, we could barely make out the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Unfortunately, we didn't see any planes coming in for a landing at Dulles Airport.  

We also watched an IMAX film about the Hubble Satellite, seeing pictures of the furtherest reaches of space known to man.  Some of these pictures were simply amazing.  The film also revealed a little about how astronauts train for space flight and showed actual footage of an astronaut crew repairing the Hubble.  

The boys had fun.  They were fascinated by all of the planes.  Ethan wanted to take some of the planes home.  He said Daddy could fly it home and then we could keep it in the living room.  (Oh sure, no problem.)  

Getting home was a headache.  It took two hours to drive 50 miles.  We got stuck on the Capital Beltway.  I'm glad I don't have to drive that everyday.  

Next week, it's the National Zoo.