Some storms have such beautiful eyes

For the sake of clinging to optimism, I thought I would take a moment to post a few photos of a few nice things from the past few days:

We finally framed and hung art in our kitchen. Laurie and I have a tremendous amount of art to be framed. We're planning on buying thrift store frames in the right size for most of it, especially now that we're nearly finished painting the interior of our house, but this particular poster was a very odd size. We had to special order the frame and the glass (which ended up saving us almost $200 than if we'd just gone to the framing store.)
This is a print of an etching of the Sutro Baths in San Francisco. The baths were built in the late 1800s by Adolf Sutro, former SF mayor. It was horribly damaged in the 1906 Earthquake, fell into ruins, eventually burned down and became a municipal park. You can go there today and climb around the ruins of the old baths. In fact, I try to make it there every time I go to San Francisco. There are trails, cliffs, rocks, pools formed by the remaining foundation, all right on the beach. If we were in that picture, on the other side of the wall on the left would be the Pacific Ocean (I'm not an architect, but it occurs to me that that may have something to do with why the structure didn't hold up well to natural disasters. You'll remember Harry Belafonte's song about the building.)
Also, the color scheme of the poster worked very well with our kitchen.















In other news, Spring is creeping in. In fact, most of the past week it has seemed like Spring in Chico, but people who live in Chico for a few years learn that it's not time to pack up the Winter clothes until around May.
On my walks in the park I've happened upon some glorious almond blossoms. Also, the bees are back. We've already shaping up to have a good bee year, which means a good almond year.