Rachel’s spring recital was this afternoon. Her voice teacher of four years assembles his students twice a year for a formal recital at the Berkeley City Club (a gorgeous Julia Morgan building near the UC Berkeley campus)
so all the parents, friends, and significant others of our favorite singers can hear their progress. It is always an enjoyable event, but today’s was bittersweet because Rachel is heading off to college in the fall and this was most likely her final recital with her teacher, Jonathan Nadel. Although she already had a naturally sweet soprano voice, Jonathan’s instruction has helped her achieve vocal maturity and depth.
Her singing was lovely (not that I’m biased…) and it was a gorgeous afternoon. I won’t make any snarky comments about some of the other performances because although the level of professionalism varied widely, none was downright painful to hear and everyone did his or her best – it showed.
On the way home, we spied these adorable little guys:
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munching and scavenging their way around the hills just before the entrance to the Caldecott Tunnel on our way back home. Goats are so darned cute! At first we thought there was just the usual traffic back-up near the tunnel entrance, and then we realized all the rubbernecking was due to the official Weed Control Goats on the job! Keeping the Berkeley hills weeded and the grass short is their raison d’etre, apparently – they all seemed perfectly content to graze their way across the hills in full view of and close proximity to the freeway traffic.
She’d tiptoe out of her dorm room at four in the morning with a pair of sharp scissors in her back pack and a basket handle over the crook of her arm. Dressed all in black and padding quietly out of the quad in her sneakers, she’d slink over to the residential neighborhoods that flanked our campus in order to 
Back in her dorm room an hour later, she’d fill small glass jars with these unique bouquets, wrap a wire handle around the lip of each jar, and – still before sunrise – quietly hang her May Day floral arrangements over the doorknobs of her friends’ dorm rooms. These utterly charming nosegays were what we’d find when we first opened our doors to greet the day. And I’ve never forgotten them, even years later.
In the spirit of May Day, thought I’d share a few more beauties from my garden. It’s really outdone itself this year.
The shaping idea was a detail I’d seen in an old issue of Interweave Knits, and the Dot Stitch texture on the bodice is straight out of the Barbara Walker Treasuries. That picot edging around the neckline was a simple but elegant finishing touch where a collar would have been too much. The goal here was feminine, fitted but not too, enough coverage for a cool summer evening. A little romantic. A little dressy. A little old-fashioned. You get the idea.
Alas, I fear this may be my final NaKniSweMoDo project until the end of the summer. I hate to wimp out, but my left hand in particular has been in terrible shape. It feels as if the fingers are sprained in spite of the cortisone injections I recently had. Work on the computer doesn’t help but – Gasp! Hard to believe – has to be my priority until the end of July when I have a major deadline. Asking me to choose between knitting and writing was like asking me to pick a favorite child, but nonetheless the choice had to be made. It’s a temporary setback, but these hands need a break. I’ll still knit – it’s like breathing, after all – but not at the pace I kept up for the first quarter of this year. I’ll still have show-and-tell, but the going may be slow.
Forget eating out of her hand, I want to nibble her lips! Squawk!
This was no ordinary bird – it could bark like a dog, which was most confusing to the various canines promenading along the pier. Made me wonder what else it could say…
Amazing, too, are the delicate pink blooms of our only dogwood tree. Dogwoods always remind me of growing up back east, where one sees them everywhere. The pink ones are not as common and I didn’t have great hope that this one would fare well in my garden, but every year it surprises me by making its comeback.
And these little bluebell flowers are volunteers. Their bulbs were turned under when we relandscaped a couple of years ago, and I thought we had lost them. But no, they made their way back up to the surface to delight us every spring.
This was taken at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, and they still look pretty damned spry. Congratulations, Mom and Dad!
I am obsessed with the spot stitch employed for the upper bodice, which looks like a variation of seed stitch but is, to my eye, so much prettier. And I love the delicate finishing touch of the picot edge around the neckline.
Now all that remains is to sew on the buttons and take some modelled shots: this week’s task.
There are other surprises as well. I bought a bag of tiny bulbs at Costco last fall, then forgot all about them. At the tail end of the planting season, seized by gardener’s remorse, I flung them into the ground by the handful. They looked a bit shrivelled up after sitting out on the back stoop for several weeks, and I had little hope that they’d actually survive the winter. Oh, me of little faith. For there they are, and I can’t even remember their name – only that they are native to Africa but perform well in our semi-arid climate as well. 
And here it is, in all its apricot-shaded glory:
In other news, it looks like we will have peaches this summer. After last year’s homicidal pruning by the gardener (OK, yes, I know – I should have done it myself), we didn’t have a single peach… not even one. So sad. And the year prior, peach leaf curl decimated all the new growth (hence the radical pruning last year), resulting in spindly little twigs that were too fragile to produce any fruit. But this year, finally, a full recovery appears to have been made. The tree is covered with rosy pink blossoms, and I am already dreaming of fresh and frosty peach sherbet.
