I'm taking it easy today, this day most including me refer to as "Good Friday", but our politically correct university calendar dubs "Spring Holiday". This is necessary in a large multi-cultural institution like the university, but I don't think anyone cares what it is called so long as they have the day off!


Dallas is unseasonably colder today which I don't mind since the furnace of summer is not long off now. Robert and I went out and did some work in the backyard. The roses are blooming and smell great. The irises are also blooming. The smell of irises is one of those smells that takes me back to childhood. It's a very comforting smell to me made more special because it's only around in nature for a short time every year. Roses and other flowers bloom quite often and also tend to show up in products like lotions, perfumes, etc, but irises only seem to be around for a brief time in spring and then are gone. The bulbs also take sometimes two years to bloom. When I was a very small child still living in Connecticut we had irises all over the yard and being about 3 feet high at the time, I was immersed in their scent. So today I had a little trip down memory lane to a very old but comforting place.

One odd thing, unrelated to that, is we've been hearing a lot of low flying jets today. We live near the airport, but these aren't airliners or even leer jets. These sound like military jets. We haven't been able to catch sight of them because of the clouds, but I'm wondering what's going on around Dallas today.

Hope everyone who has a holiday this weekend has a good one!