Blue Poppies and Gold Mines

When summer's only two months long, you have to enjoy your garden while you can, and there are some amazing gardens here. I haven't been brave enough to take any shots of people's yards yet, so you'll have to take my word for it. Anyway, the majority of the yards around here (ours excluded) are full of all types of flowers, blooming like crazy. I'm familiar with most of them, and I always appreciate a nice flower, but there was a particular bloom I noticed one day that stopped me in my tracks.


(lifted from meconopsis.org)

It's a blue poppy -- the bluest flower I've ever seen. Not a trace of violet. At first, I thought it was fake, and wondered why there were fake flowers in the midst of a bunch of real pansies. But they're real -- and they're spectacular. (heh)

So I started thinking, Hey, I've never seen these before! I should find out where to get them and grow them at home, and I'll have the best garden ever! Well, DUH, Kirsten, there's a reason you haven't seen them in New England. You'd have to keep them in the freezer for eight months and then under a 24-hour grow-light in the fridge for the other four. It would be totally worth it, though.

In other news, we've been trying to do more cool Alaska things when Chris isn't off dealing with mortgages and inspections and other fun home-buying things. A couple weeks ago, we visited the Girdwood Forest Fair, which is pretty much a fair in the forest. Run by hippies. I haven't seen that many tie-dyed hemp skirts since my last Phish concert. There were lots of cool booths full of art and knitted items and funnel cakes and such, plus an AMAZING playground for the kids. It might be worth driving an hour just to go back to that playground. I don't have a picture that encompasses the whole thing, but here's one of the playground-tower-thingies against a lovely mountain backdrop:



And Mr. Baby in a swing:



Last weekend, we drove up to Hatcher Pass and visited the Independence Mine, which shut down in the 1950's. It's a beautiful alpine setting dotted with picturesque wreckage (no, really).





One of the notable things about the area was that recreational gold mining was allowed. Not panning, mind you -- mining. We're wondering how much TNT counts as a "recreational" amount.