Results tagged “Melissa” from Alan's Skew

Today, on one of the coldest Mother's Day I can recall, Melissa ran in the Melrose Race for Women, which benefited the Melrose Alliance Against Violence.

In contrast with yesterday's torrential downpours and booming thunder, it was 39 degrees when we left the house at 6:45 AM. By race time at 9:00, it was still only in the mid-40s plus the wind began blowing pretty steadily, at about 35 MPH the local radio station reported. Melissa was psyched to have the cool weather in which to run, but honestly, it was awfully chilly for the crowd of non-runners, such as yours truly.

Melissa said it was a very supportive crowd of runners, with folks encouraging each other as they were running up the hills. She said at one point that a guy who lived on the race route had the Superman theme playing on a loop on a boom box. To the left is a photo I took just after she finished the race.

As you may recall, last year Melissa created a lovely Butterfly Garden in one of our front flower beds. Unfortunately, the New England winter took its toll and killed off centerpiece butterfly bush and toppled the stone tower. The creek bed Melissa had created was also washed away by our house's lack of gutters in the Fall as a torrent of water disintegrated the creek bed's shores leaving stones scattered throughout the flower bed. Just before Winter arrived, we had new gutters installed on the house and, with that under control and the weather turning to a stretch of more warm and sunny days than wet and gloomy ones, it seemed safe for Melissa to attempt a makeover of the Butterfly Garden.

Melissa has created a new creek bed, complete with edging to help maintain its integrity and lined with landscape cloth to stopped the nasty weeds from popping up through the stones. Here's the first photo:

And, as you can also see in this photo, she's also built a new stone sculpture as the focal point:

There's still some work to be done to finish out the end near the phlox, but I think she's off to a great start and I'm sure the results will be stunning!

To escape the 90+ degree temperatures and smothering humidity that have been smothering New England today, Melissa and I went to see the new movie, Julie & Julia. Bottomline: We thoroughly enjoyed it!

The movie tells two stories in parallel: the first of Julia Child's journey from bored diplomatic housewife to creator of the most popular cookbook of all time, and the second of Julie Powell, a frustrated wannabe writer who decides to cook her way through Child's cookbook over the course of a year and blog about the experience to overcome her writer's block.

Last week my friend Liesl was in town teaching a training course. She had a hectic schedule, but was able to find some time to come over for a tour of our house and then join us for dinner. We went to Feng Shui, my favorite Asian restaurant, then went for ice cream at Kimball Farms.

Of course it's been nine years since we've seen each other in person, so I couldn't let her leave without snapping a couple of photos to commemorate her visit.

Melissa took one of me and Liesl:

Here's one Liesl took of me and Melissa:

Melissa's been working the last few months on transforming our rather dull, front flower bed into a work of art. Here's a few photos of the work in progress:

This is what I'm buying Melissa for her birthday, as soon as it becomes available:

Check it out...this is a brilliant ad, one of the most creative I have seen in recent memory.

Despite the power being turned off, Melissa and I were able to have a nice breakfast at Cafe Madrid. While we were out, Santa stopped by to wish us a Merry Christmas. The owner of the restaurant snapped our photo and e-mailed it to us today.