Great photographs Julia! I didn’t know there was a German section of Italy.

There are zoo babies in the hot mess…

Too cute… i’d love to know what they are each thinking.

The one on the left is definitely the cuter of the two.

Beautiful pictures Julia! Yes, thank you for sharing your travels with us!🥰

Aaawwww, new friends at the zoo! 🥰

Cute little peanut!

fiss, she will undoubtedly change so much by this next Christmas but if the family does photo cards - and maybe even ones with a collage of photos - that one has to be in the mix! 🦍

Wow, Julia!

Cuteness overload, Fiss. I agree with Jay. That’s a really great photo!

Cutie zoo babies!!!

In a Drury Inn w Cyster and Hyster. Highly recommend these inns for the hospitality and breakfast and dinner buffets daily plus happy hour free drinks! Was a great celebration of life today. Nice to be with my cousins and uncle and my uncle's huge family... I lost count of the times I was told today how much I resemble and even share mannerisms of my aunt. I will tell you more about it when I am home with my laptop... Driving back tomorrow. Hyster catches her flight back to Oregon at ten or eleven in the morning, so we will hang out here until then and enjoy another breakfast buffet together. LOL

fiss, how very cute! Looks like the black-haired primate is really interested too.

Beautiful, julia! I understand that you are getting tired of the food and wine, however, I find your itinerary inspiring. Maybe someday...

lia, not only does Italy have a German-speaking part, Switzerland has an Italian-speaking part. It's all a bit mixed up in the mountain regions 🙂

Babo, very interesting. Shows you what I don’t know about Europe… I hope none of that Sahara desert sand is reaching your vicinity!

…

People here might be interested in the Cornell University bird app. It’s called Merlin and you can identify birds that you hear in the environment, as it will record their songs and identify them. I have so many small birds here with complex songs, it’s been a great discovery.. Pine Siskin was identified yesterday by my daughter-in-law.

Sam “ Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. 😂

Well, so much for my repaired patio. Get to do it over again.

Oh no 😩

Another leak bites the dust, Duckie.

The leak detection guy clocked that under patio leak at losing 5.4 gallons per minute. Nothing like making a big contribution to the earth's water table.

TSFP had a running toilet recently. The water company called.

Oy vey, Duckie.... bummer to tear up that patio again, and bummer about the leak, but yay for finding it, fixing it and moving on. And yay again for the safety of that leaning tree.

I have had Cornell bird song app and it's a good one! Pine siskins visit our feeder occasionally. I'd never seen them until we lived here in the woods. They are cool little birbs!

I made it home about two hours ago, and still feel like I'm traveling at 80mph. It's wonderful to be home, fed, and greeted appropriately enthusiastically, and now I'm gonna veg out a bit. LOL 48 hours of socializing, 12 hours of it being trapped in a car with Cyster, has tapped me out completely. LOL

My two day travelogue. First we got some gas...

Then we hit the road. On the way to St. Louis, we stopped to say hi to Mom, Grandma and Grandpa, and "the babies" (mom's infant sisters, who were buried there first). Cyster was on it with the flowers this year, and had them ready to go way before the "Memorial Day rush." Gotta hand it to her for being ready for that much of the trip! LOL

Got to the hotel and they had a dinner and drinks buffet waiting just for us. (and 400 other people) Nice!

Next morning, Sunday, we ate a huge breakfast (again, on the house hot food/buffet format, and amazingly yummy!) and had a morning to kill before Hyster's flight arrived, so we decided to look for a nursery/garden center to shop. Alas, Sunday mornings are not best for that, so the one garden-y place we found near the airport was the local Menards (which we have here in abundance too) but LOOK!

They had the red pole beans I'd been hunting for! Well, similar enough anyhow. Red "Asparagus beans" (top right corner) grow 12-24" long and are pole climbing beans. That fit the parameters I've been searching for pretty perfectly.

I snatched up a few packs of those, for sure!

Cyster got herself some bifocal sunglasses there. LOL I mean Menards has everything!

Then we hit another strip mall so she could run into a Ross Dress for Less, and I sat waiting in the car, because the car across from where we parked had this anti theft device on the steering wheel, and it alarmed me a bit. This whole "near the airport" neighborhood was a bit sketchy...

Thank goodness, no more shopping with Cyster. It was time to pick up Hyster and drive to the celebration of life venue, a half hour away...

Cyster and Hyster meeting one of the service dogs at the service. Guess which one is "the ornamental" one and which one is the practical one who just got off the plane?

This is Pete. He is a service dog in training, 10 months old, and from the last of the many litters of service labs my aunt had midwived/raised to 8 weeks old. That he came to her "service" was so cool.

This is my aunt with Pete and his littermates just a week or so old...

This litter was all named for tennis players. Pete is for Sampras, there was a Coco, a Mac for McEnroe, an Evert, a Martina, well you get the idea. They usually had a theme for naming the puppies, and this litter had a good batch of names. LOL

My aunt did this as a full time job for about 20 years... after being a docent at the St Louis zoo for many years, too.

Other service dogs in attendance:

Wilbur, a retired service dog who is 9 years old now, and is just a sweetheart. His litter was all named after characters in "Charlotte's Web." Willie now lives with my uncle and cousin. He was my aunt's dog, for sure, too, obviously.

This is Laney, one of the mother dogs to other litters in my aunt's organization. She too is retired, and now living the life of a housepet, also with my cousin/uncle. She is also a very goode girle.

It was a lovely party for my aunt. This morning, we ate with my dad's wife, who was also staying at the hotel we were in, and hung out around the breakfast buffet until it was time for Hyster to catch the shuttle to the airport, and then Cyster and I drove back here. But we stopped this time in Pella, because it was on the way home, and stretched our legs among the tulips which had come on early, and may not make it until this weekend's Tulip Time festival. I had a feeling we needed to be there now, and I wasn't wrong.

Looks like you had a whirlwind but beautiful time, Rred. It’s always refreshing to see family, catch up, etc., except for the circumstances.

Right now we’re doing the wedding and baby events. Happier occasions yet we (sisters and I) still find something to gripe about ‘cause we’re old. 😂

Today I went through a box of photos OS received after his dad passed. Hard to believe that’s now coming up to ten years ago. In there were pics from our honeymoon. Gosh….i left those behind…. Other than that most were duplicates of OS as a baby/toddler which I have in my own stash. I always got duplicates made.

Sign me up for a celebration of life involving the dogs. Sounds perfect! Nice tulips, too! Well timed.

I so wish I could have tulips here, but that is just deer candy...

Yeah, I am exhausted. Otherhalf got a new mattress for us while I was gone. I am anxious to give it a try. He thinks it's better for HIM, so it will prob not be that great for me, but I'm so tired that anything will do. LOL

It sounds like a wonderful whirlwind RRed. Beautiful tulips!

rred, another memory for the 'memory book of our mind'. So glad you made it and so glad you're now back home...

That gas station - and the gas pumps - look like the old roadside stations from 80 years ago. Are those pumps really still working?

Jay, haha, no... that was in front of someone's house, too! LOL One of those mom and pop gas stations from the 50s, still sitting there along the little shortcut highway we used to visit my mom's cemetery.

I busted my bum today to buy and plant up planters here at the tree house today. I have some photos. Hang on...

On our way to the nursery, the skies were very moody. This is the comm college where I used to work... part of the campus, anyhow. My bldg was not here; it was downtown...

On our way home, there was an opening in the sky among the clouds. It was spectacular.

That is our woods, as viewed from the back road. I live right over there, in the left-hand side of that hill o' trees. lol

This is the first batch I brought home this morning. I couldn't resist the pansies today... I usually don't bother with them, but dang it, I needed them today.

Most of that stuff went here.

Then, we went back out for more. My policy is not to buy more than I can get done in a day. I try hard to stick to that. It works for me.

This year, russian sage and dusty miller in the back pots, bc deer.... we shall see if we have enough light for that sage now that so many trees are gone. I am seeing if they really leave the dusty miller alone, and if they seem to be ignoring it, maybe I'll get more to fill in those pots.

Then I did the front planters. Dragon wing begonias, some ivy geraniums, and snapdragons and a random pansy each. The lower ones are pansy bowls Wally World had for 9 bucks. And, those other geraniums I overwintered successfully, and they got a bit bedraggled, but I'm gonna prune them back one more time now that they're outside.

Ever wonder why these are called "May apples?" Because the flowers always bloom first of May and they look a lot like apple blossoms! When I was little, we called them "umbrella plants" too, bc they have those big umbrella leaves.

I potted up some pansies today, because they were half price on the Lowe’s clearance. We are really not frost free until Memorial Day around here, but the pansies will cope. The ‘guys” have been busy doing our once every five years exterior trim painting, replacing anything that it rotten with plastic, paintable wood. It’s always nice to come home to ‘done”.

I got 5 of these, bc pulmomaria does pretty well in my zen walkway around the house. The deer do indeed leave it alone.

That is a patch of just three I tried out two years ago. It's done really well! So, I say, more!

I got five of the Shrimps ones and three other ones that have darker leaves with brighter spots of white...

I have no idea if pansies are deer candy or not.... I have those metal orbs over the ones out front where the deer could get to them... The ones on the deck are safe. But we do get squirrels up there. I just cross my fingers.

I am stupidly happy the laser cat in space stickers arrived today for Duckling's birthday party. I found them on an artists' collective website, and the artist was in the UK. So yes, they were also stupidly expensive. Why, oh why, couldn't she like unicorns???

You such a devoted grandma NWDuck!😀

Wow RRed, you got yourself quite a few pretty planters! 🥰 Is the pulmonaria fragrant? My mom’s name is Pansy, so I always had them in the garden. Down here we plant them in the late fall/winter.

Fiss, it is so nice to come home and the work is done!😉

OMG you guys... I made a batch of cookies to take with us to St Louis, and I hit gold on the secret to chewy delicious choc chip cookies. https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/chewy-chocolate-chip-cookies/ Her secrets are adding corn starch to the batter, using more brown than white sugar, chilling the dough and making the cookies into towers (rather than balls or drops) on the sheet.

They turned out fantastic. Hyster/Cyster and I devoured them. But lol, I froze half the dough for when I returned, and I'm just baking that half of it up now. These are my dream cookie.

Well… I bought two pansy plants and just stuck them in the pots in one of my planters and this morning when I went out the deer had eaten them. I’m more than a little annoyed that the deer have decided that my kitchen steps are a Buffet.

NW the Duckling is my kinda gal…🥰

Oh them damn deers! That’s got to be frustrating! What don’t they eat Lia?

They are not dam deer, Alice…they are effing deer. I am presently eating my way through a freezer full of venison….the effing deer were decimating a friend’s yard…they called the bow Hunter…and they overflowed into my freezer.

How lucky for you… and bow hunted is the best…I grew up eating venison and so miss the special treat… but even back then it took a skilled butcher to be sure all the meat was cut properly..my fave was the smoke house prepared jerky…

Aw bitter/sweet fiss lol! I love venison. My step mom has them roaming up at the farm but she has nothing planted to encourage them. Maybe she gave up? They are beautiful animals i will admit. There are Key deer in the Keys, only on the islands that are miniature deer. Very courageous. My aunt has to get groceries upstairs all in one trip or close the trunk bc they are in it fast. I watched as one sniffed my daughters ear when she was a little girl, walking right up to her, it got so close, but she finally gasped could not stand still long enough and scared it away.