Spring it taking her sweet time this year, but how sweet it is! Every day when I look out the window my view becomes a little more obstructed. Gone is the bare starkness of rows of leafless trees. Now the trees are wearing fuzzy buds that light up when the rising sun shines through them. Soon our back yard will be enclosed in the green cocoon of summer. It happens every year but I still marvel at the process.

Every blooming thing has its own special season. The cherries are on the wane now (I'm sure you're glad for that!) but the forsythia and daffodils are still going strong. The crabapples and azaleas will be next although I have seen a few azaleas blooming. The lilacs will be right on their heels. 

So in honor of Spring's other predominant color, yellow, and the fact that the forsythia and daffodils will soon be gone, I dedicate this blog post to YELLOW.

While Rick was gone I indulged myself in a few old movies that I love to watch. One of them was French Kiss with Kevin Kline and Meg Ryan. I was spurred on to watch it by blogger friend Steve's recent visit to Paris. He showed photos of the La Tour Eiffel, or the Eiffel Tower, which made me think of the movie. 

Part of the movie takes place in Paris and Meg Ryan's character, Kate, wants so badly to see the Eiffel Tower. It's there in a lot of scenes but every time she turns to catch sight of it, either the lights are turned out on it for the night at the very moment she turns around or something blocks her view. She does finally see it on the train out of Paris headed to Nice but both Rick and I have taken the train out of Paris to the South and you don't get a view of the tower like she did. Nor is the tower able to seen from many of the places she was. Ah, the poetic license of the film industry! 

But that doesn't take away from the charm of this film. Not at all. The main premise is Kate is afraid to fly and doesn't accompany her fiancé to Paris as they had planned. While in Paris without her, he meets a gorgeous French woman and breaks off their engagement. Kate overcomes her fear of flying to get Charlie (Timothy Hutton) back and flies to Paris. She meets Kevin Kline on the plane and circumstances continue to throw them together. I won't tell you the whole plot but that's the gist of it.

I love Meg Ryan with her little girl innocence against Kevin Kline's worldliness. Kevin obviously speaks French very well and does so with a great French accent that is not over the top. He even has the French "phfff" down. The French have this habit of blowing air out through pursed lips which makes their cheeks puff out, making a sound like "phfff" only more drawn out than that. It's hard to describe but they do it all the time. It's the same kind of gesture like shrugging your shoulders and holding up your hands, or saying eh. Both he and Meg also say oui like a French person would, where it comes more from the back of the mouth with your mouth more closed than open, kind of like if you were trying to say the work quack. Again, hard to describe but they both nailed the pronunciation.

The whole soundtrack is wonderful with plenty of old French classics. If you sit through the closing credits you can even hear Kevin Kline sing "La Mer" en français. I love that song. 

Gorgeous scenery from both Paris and Nice and places in-between the two cities is worth watching this movie for alone, but the comedy is just as good with a little romance thrown in.

If you've never seen it I highly recommend it. If you have seen it, then watch it again!

Photo: Paris's little sister, Lyon, was not be outdone by their big sister so they erected their own small version of the Eiffel Tower which stands next to the Basilique Notre-Dame on top of Fourvière hill. Kind of funny! It used to have an elevator and a restaurant but now it's just used as a television tower. Photo taken on vacation in Lyon in 2010.

Yikes. Give me time by myself, alone with my thoughts, add in a couple of glasses of wine and beware. 

I've been pondering lots of things lately. It would seem I am surrounded by people re-inventing themselves. My neighbors joined Weight Watchers and lost a lot of weight and started working out at the gym. I checked out what was okay for WW and I tried some of things that were okay to eat.  Hmm. Okay to eat maybe for people who don't have any taste buds or who don't care what kind of stuff they put into their bodies. No fats whatsoever are allowed. Not even fats that are actually good for your body.  Somehow I don't think it is "healthy." Some of the breads taste like cardboard. Why bother for a few less fat calories? I guess I don't get it. Okay. I do, but I don't. Rick and I did the South Beach Diet things years ago and although it worked for me, I love food too much to get too bogged down in the what-to-eat vs the what-not-to-eats. Another friend drinks only whey shakes during the day. Yes, she's lost weight (and was not overweight at all to begin with) but really? I would love to lose three pounds. Maybe four, but life is too short to limit oneself to such extreme measures at my age. Moderation is the key. And accepting yourself for who you are, and accepting your body for what it is at any age is a good thing. Our society today places too much emphasis on what we look like.

Besides, I have my own diet: the 3 Dog Diet. If you haven't heard of it before this, well you have now. Take a handful of anything. It can be junk food, good food, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Take the portion you just took for yourself and divide it between yourself and three eager dogs. There you have it — the 3 Dog Diet. Another version is order a hamburger (or any other alternative nasty fast food object) and eat all but the last three bites, thereby dividing it between three dogs' mouths. Voilà: instant diet!

My sister shared with me yesterday that she is contemplating, well, something major for changing her life up.

And me? Nothing as lofty as either of the aforementioned things.          

And therein lies the question: is there something wrong with me that I have no goals to set, no burning desire to do or be something? Am I just complacent? Or am I just lazy?  Or even worse, afraid? I don't know the answer to that. I only know that I don't feel a need at this time in my life to "fix things" and hopefully that is okay.  Somehow it seems other than okay to just sit back and enjoy life without having some lofty goal in sight. Is it okay to be at a place in life where you don't feel the need to improve or reinvent while everyone around you seems to be doing just that?

Maybe it's because I've challenged myself a lot throughout my life so far. Living in three different European countries, where at the time English was not widely spoken, was a pretty good challenge. Not only linguistically, but just day to day life.  Heck, even moving to New Jersey from Colorado was challenging in the fact that it was different. Culturally speaking, I might as well be living in a different country with the additional perk of still speaking the same language. Well, at least most of the time. But that's a subject for a different blog entry in the future. But you get my drift here.

I've led a full life filled with plenty of travel and challenges and right now I feel like I don't mind coasting along with the flow. Will I regret the coasting? Maybe, but I don't think so. I'm just not that kind of person. Getting to know the "real" you and being comfortable with that, to me, is what it's all about. I might be wrong in someone else's eyes, but for now, I think I'm who I am supposed to be. Am I perfect? No. But I think I can live with that.

But should I? Am I missing something?

Photo: Broken: A dejected chair on the porch of one of the old houses at Long Pond Ironworks.

The first day of spring has come and gone with nothing to show for it. Our ground is still covered in white from our 4-5 inch snowfall on Monday. It's melting, but slower than you would expect it to at this time of year. The thermometer is stuck in the 30's. When I look back on the blog entries from years past at this time it's almost surreal. Last year the forsythia was blooming! This year its buds are closed tight with not even a glimmer of yellow showing. I know, I checked it yesterday. I also know I promised no more white photos, but I couldn't help myself the other day with the late afternoon sun on the melting snow.

It's hard to motivate myself to go out with the camera to find anything of interest so I headed to the local garden shop yesterday since I had noticed that they were flying a big OPEN sign the other day. No flowers yet except for a few potted bulbs inside. And these colorful hummingbird feeders.

And this cheeky little guy who is much cuter than the pesky squirrels in my yard that have now chewed an even bigger hole in my best bird feeder. Other than that there was nothing to see or buy at the shop.

The weekend is supposed to be a bit warmer with temperatures in the 40's, but they are saying the wind chills are going to make it feel much colder. And, a little  more snow is expected on Monday. Alex keeps pulling out his snowman toy that was a Christmas present to play with and I think he might be jinxing us. I'm seriously thinking of putting it away until next year.

In other news, the last amaryllis is just about ready to bloom and it looks like it's going to burst forth with three flowers at the same time.

And on closer inspection, the huge amaryllis that still has one last flower blooming has another flower stalk poking out of the base of the bulb. Wow, I'm thrilled it has the oomph to send up yet another bud stalk!

So how's that for a mish-mash of stuff in one blog post!

I've visited this old abandoned house before on my blog. It's haunting. The windows gape openly or are boarded up. The wood siding is peeling away and faded to interesting variations of the color it once was.

They say that for people, the eyes are the windows to the soul. So if the windows on a house are its eyes, what do they say about the soul of this house? That once it used to be loved? That once a child might have played and slept in the room with the peeling ceiling? That it heard laughter reverberate from its walls?

Or was it always just an empty shell?

 Photos taken at Long Pond Ironworks, West Milford, New Jersey

 Linked in to Madge's Rurality Blog Hop