I Like #114

Welcome to another week of things to like!

1.  This weekend was the OKC Memorial Marathon.  It's a memorial for the tragic Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing that occurred in 1995.  I was teenager then, and I remember I was staying with my grandparents because my mom and dad were on a trip.  I've never participated in the Memorial Marathon before, but this year we got together two relay teams from work.  For the relay, you have five people that run the full marathon distance, so I only had to run a 10k leg.  For me, even that was a lot, but the whole event was really fun.  There were 25,000 runners all together, and it's a really big deal here.  Next year I think my friend and sister and I are all going to run the half, which is only a little more than two 10ks. The marathon starts right outside the bombing memorial downtown and is very moving.

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2. Evidently one of the bags of potting soil I bought for my most recent set of houseplants must have been infested with the eggs of fungus gnats, because I have a terrible infestation of them.  I've had them before, but never this bad.  This year, they're only in newly potted plants too which is why I think it must be the soil.  Unfortunately, most of those newly potted plants were destined for my office, so now there are swarms of gnats in my office.  My next door neighbor is about to kill me because even though he has no plants they're migrating into his office.  I've tried bug killing sprays which worked before, but that hasn't been enough to eliminate the infestation, so now I've but these yellow sticky traps everywhere.  Unfortunately, they seem to be drawn both to people and to the light of my computer monitor so they tend to swarm around my head while I try to work.  In case you were confused, this is not and "I Like".  It's a testament to how much I love my plants that I'm going to such desperate lengths.  Any suggestion for fungus gnats (different from fruit flies), I'm all ears.

3.  It's been raining buckets and buckets and then raining some more (we lucked out SOOOOO MUCH for the marathon), so of course my back yard is a giant mud swimming pool, but on the upside, these cool mushrooms are growing in one of my pots of bulbs.  Nifty!  And almost all my dahlias have sprouted (not in this picture) so bonus there too!

4.  Here's a look at one of the quilts I've been working on; I cut out all those little squares to use as musical notes.  It turned out I didn't need that many, so now I have extras to use as decoration in the borders.  I love the array of colors.  Lots of them are from hand dyed or hand painted fabrics, so up close there's lots more variation than you can see here.

5.  The tiny Bullett bush has a clump of beautiful pink flowers!  I'm so excited, I think that means I will have one elderberry!

6.  And the cacti are growing well.  They're starting to develop secondary groups of spines (rather than just the ones on top).

7.  I really liked these two recent history posts.  One was on the British Library blog and is a short article about an exhibit on the history of writing (so cool).  The second is from the history blog and is about some new 3D reconstructions of neolithic dogs and the role they played in neolithic society (even cooler).

Add https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2019/04/writing-the-story-of-writing-a-new-exhibition.html

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/54982

And now, I'm going off to the microscope, largely because I need to get out of the swarms of gnats in my office.  Wishing everyone a happy Thursday!  Click over to LeeAnnas for more I like!