Ducky

It was a fairly good weekend.

I went down to KT's on Saturday for our monthly visit. We made some sushi for lunch and ate with Jess and Kevin, then the two of us went to see the Norfolk Botanical Gardens.



I'm not sure how much KT enjoyed it, since I spent most of our time there either bitching about the heat, or limping slowly along the paths trying not to let on that I was feeling dizzy and nauseous. When she'd suggested the gardens, the weather had been mildly overwarm but certainly bearable; this weekend, just for us, it skyrocketed up into triple digits. Half the plants were literally cooking, leaves and petals withering into seared brown around the edges.

So we didn't do the whole park. But we started with the garden we wanted to see the most -- the rose garden -- and despite the quietly frying flowers, we managed to find a lot of impressive beauty. (We wandered about making "back to Alanis" jokes and trying to figure out who would have which flowers. If none of the previous sentence makes sense to you, it's an in-joke based on some gaming and writing we collaborated on.)



Across the river from the rose garden I could see a lot of interesting-looking statues, so we went in search of it. It took longer to get to than it should have -- we had to backtrack to a bridge and then follow a long and winding path around -- but once we got there, the statues were really quite interesting. Apparently they're going to be part of an exhibit on African sculpture that opens in a couple of weeks.



After that, we sat in the lobby for a while to cool off, then went to look at the Japanese garden. That was very nice, too. There was a spot just on one side of the water that we agreed needed a bench or some chairs, because it was the perfect place to just sit and take it all in.



(Many more pictures over on my flickr account.)

When I came home, Matt was outside, watching Penny and Ray play in Ray's pool. Alex was asleep, so I went inside (ah, air conditioning!) to wait for him to wake up. While I'd been gone, Matt had taken the kids to the library, where Penny got a free (to keep) book for being an up-and-coming kindergartener, and she found four more books to bring home to read.

Sunday was that peculiar mix of rushed and relaxed that seems to happen to us a lot. Matt mowed the lawn and did the laundry; I did the grocery shopping and went down to Sam's Club for more shopping, and cleaned up the kitchen. And between those, I tried to get some sleep. Every time I went upstairs, it seemed, I'd sit down on the bed with the intention of finishing a chapter in my book, and then wake up an hour later.