It’s a Double Rainbow!

This was a Saturday surprise, not technically a Sunday Surprise, but I’m posting it today anyway – yesterday evening when we came home from our date night (thai food!) we had something amazing out our back window: a double rainbow!

It was brilliant and crisp and amazing in real life, and sadly through the screen and double paned windows, my photo of it looks rather wan and blurry – but it really was spectacular.  I suddenly understood the feelings of the double rainbow auto-tuned-song guy, and we weren’t even in Yosemite….

One interesting thing to note: the colors are flipped between the first rainbow (blue on bottom, red on top) and the second (red on bottom, blue on top).  According to Wikipedia, this is because the double rainbow is a result of light reflecting off the inside of the water droplet twice instead of once – here’s Descartes’ sketch:

(Hooray for Wikipedia!)

Someone Likes Me!

I had a very happy surprise a couple of weeks ago – a fellow blogger, Tracy at Jottings with Jasmine, very kindly passed a “blogging award” nomination my way.  I didn’t see her post at first (oops!) but am grateful for her recognition, and very glad to know that what I post is in some way inspiring to others!  Thanks again, Tracy!

—-

And since I feel itchy and weird when I write a blog post without including any photos, here’s a random but timely one.  Now that the weather’s turned warmer, and the rain appears to have stopped, it’s time for me to break out the summer sandals – and be reminded that my left foot is significantly shorter than my right one.

With the raised outline of the birkenstock footbed, the difference seems glaringly obvious to me.  (*embarassed*)  Hopefully no one else notices.

Or since I’m now supposed to be inspiring, maybe I should say: I hope everyone notices, and appreciates how I embrace my defects and wear the shoes I love, regardless of my large-ish, mismatched feet!

A Rhododendron, or an Azalea

I’m not sure I know how to tell the difference, but our neighborhood has been overwhelmed with beautiful blooms, whatever they are…

I do know that it’s a rhododendron; but is it an azalea?

Actual Size

If we ever get a Mini, I want one of these stickers:

Although even Minis seem to be getting bigger and bigger these days.

Dutch Skin Suit Cauliflower

A few days after we arrived home from our trip, I was preparing some vegetables for dinner and realized that they looked startlingly … familiar.

I soon realized why: we’d seen the same colors again and again on the podium and on the ice at the WSDCs.  The Dutch skin suits have an orange upper body with green trim (and blue legs), and their warmup suits consist of orange pants, and white jackets with one green shoulder and one blue shoulder.

See?

All that’s missing is the blue.

Sunday Sink

For today’s Sunday Surprise, I present the sink from our bathroom at Huis ten Wolde – where we stayed on our trip to the Netherlands.

It was an excellent drop-in sink, especially for people like me who don’t like to have fancy soap dishes or jars around.  My preferred method of dealing with soap is to rest it on the ledge, next to the faucet – but with many sinks, the soap easily falls off the ledge into the sink or onto the counter, or soapy, slimy water builds up under the soap or at the edge of the sink on the countertop.

This sink had the perfect solution – a shallow dip next to the faucet that held the soap perfectly, keeping it from falling off in either direction or from sliding around at all, in fact.  But the soapy water dripping from it didn’t build up underneath; the sink provided perfectly for drainage with a narrow channel running off to the side and into the sink bowl.

The downside is that the sink is by Villeroy and Boch; I haven’t looked it up but I imagine it’s pretty pricy for a sink.

 

Free Rice and Vocab Practice

For your weekly Sunday Surprise I present Free Rice – an excellent and free way to practice vocabulary while donating food to people in need.  It does not quite deliver what Ben Franklin meant by his aphorism “Do well by doing good,” but if you have an SAT or ACT or GRE or other sort of standardized test coming up on which your vocabulary will be tested, it might fit the bill.

If you go to the home page, you’ll see a word and four definitions; pick one, and if you chose correctly, Free Rice donates “10 grains” of rice to the World Food Programme, the UN’s food assistance branch.  (I imagine they do it by average weight, of course, rather than counting out 10 exactly for each of your words.)  If you get a couple right, you rise a level, and 10 more grains are donated for each correct response.  Repeat, repeat, repeat!

It’s not only useful if you need to study up for an exam, but quite fun if you like to test or strengthen your vocabulary for personal use.  I tried jumping around to various levels, and discovered that I’m hovering around 46/47.  I can climb a little higher, but not maintain it.  Those levels could become addictive, I think, as well as the little bowl of rice and running tally of how much rice you’ve donated during your stay on the website.  (You can also sign up for an account to keep track of your long-term achievements and donations.)  I hope this site will be fun and useful for someone else, too!

Thanks to The Pioneer Woman for pointing out this site last week!

Sunday Surprise

Last weekend, Jonathan suggested posting short posts on Sunday, which was a great idea; I thought I’d start the Sunday Surprise series with an excellent surprise that John and I received on our trip from the couple with whom Maxwell was staying.

They’d taken photos of Max throughout the first two days he stayed with them, and made an awesome collage, and emailed it to us:

Photos and collage by Gordon Campbell.

We were thrilled to get the cute photos, and to have a reminder of home, and best – to see that Max was happy and doing well and enjoying his life as a houseguest at the Campbells’ home.

Four days later, on Friday, another photo montage showed up in my inbox….

Photos and collage by Gordon Campbell.

Again – we were extremely glad and grateful to see how well he was doing!

Later, Gordon sent two more photos from Maxwell’s final day…