I was so sleepy last night and busy on chat that I didn't note in yesterday's entry the one thing that struck me the most on the way to the Marlay House—spring has sprung. I don't get out much during the week, except when I drive to work, and then it's pitch dark. On the way home I usually have a headache from the fluorescents and I need to keep my eyes peeled to the road anyway because of the sheer idiocy of commuter traffic. I have noticed an increase in flowers, if nothing else because of sneezing and itchy eyes!

But going into DeKalb County...holy smokes, wisteria everywhere! You couldn't turn more than two corners without seeing wisteria vines spilling from the sides of overpasses, or draped over dead trees, down the sides of freeway cuts, on old fences, a wash of violet and green. And the dogwoods are out! They have a different white color from the flowering cherry trees; the cherry blossoms look a purer white, but the dogwood blossoms have this odd luminosity—during a full moon they almost glow.

Not to mention the azaleas dotted everywhere: rich magenta, carmine red, pink, white, salmon.

A funny: we hadn't been in that neighborhood in ages, so I plugged the address into my phone. It kept searching for GPS, kind of silently "popped" and suddenly I was in North Carolina, or, rather, it said I was in North Carolina. LOL. Google Maps sometimes freaks out like that. So I plugged the address into the GPS and we went on; in the meantime I rebooted the phone and then I was back in place racing down I-75 southbound. The GPS and the phone indicated two different routes; the phone wanted us to get off the freeway one exit further down (Freedom Parkway). Traffic was backing up, though, so we took the earlier exit (North Avenue), but turned left where the phone told us to (Piedmont Road) rather than turning left at Peachtree (the GPS route) which was backed up (apparently something was being held at the Fox Theatre). It was funny hearing the two navigation systems talking; the GPS pronounces things better—you should hear the Droid GPS do "Smyrna"; it comes out as "Smy-er-na"—but it pronounces Ponce de Leon as no one in Atlanta does. To everyone here it's always just "Poncey."

Labels: allergies, seasons, travel

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:08:00 AM

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