Thanksgiving day 4-mile road race

We do a local run each Thanksgiving that starts from Davis Square, a lively nexus of college students close to our North Cambridge abode. Sunny's old running club, the Somerville Road Runners, puts on the event and the course (all city streets) measures about 4 miles (4.2, according to the MyMapRun tracker below).



No problems with the weather this year, as the high-30s chill didn't include wind or rain. Our friend Rosanna joined us with her dog Luna, who exuberantly dragged her up and down the course without minding the throngs a-clogging the roadways.

The clock read about 35:30 at the finish line, a healthy 8:24 mile time! Not bad for a race we didn't really train for.

Brooklyn and NYC with Chelsea

More photos from our visit to Chelsea, Prospect Park, and the New Museum of art in NYC are in the Brooklyn, July 2008 photo set on flickr. Captions and stories behind each photo are in flickr -- run the slideshow or click through the set!

Garden progress!

This year saw leap-and-bounding changes to the garden "space" (not much) that surrounds our house. Although the house reaches almost the boundary of the property, the trained eye can detect patches on non-house that I believe gardeners call "dirt." Naturally, the largest amount of this growth-enabling substance is right where the sun doesn't shine, along our house's eastern side and in shade of the neighbors and two trees. Here's how that area looked in April of 2006.

To improve the space in general, we added a gravel path to the side yard in 2007. This meant pulling up the bony bricks, lining the path with something practical, and adding an initial line of plants to the front sidewalk, which runs along the top edge of this photo. In went a pair of rhododendrons, some pachysandras, and a couple of other flowering plants. That helped, but looks even better this year after the new terracing and a half-dozen flora species.

Of all the flowers, I look forward to the lilies the most. They come in a beautiful orange-red, as seen below. If only they stuck around more than a couple of weeks! Maybe a complement of long-bloomers will add some balance to their burn-out-young mentality. 

Our best shot of this year's lilies, which bloom a gorgeous deep red.