with many thanks to tthe internets

Thank you ALL who joined my Photographing Your Knits webinar for the live webcast from Interweave last Wednesday. * I applaud you! (Sorry about the overuse of um for the first three minutes, then I got rolling. At least I'm not one of those artificially perky speakers, right?)

I was so jazzed up after the virtual live presentationended, I had to go to the beach to get my ya-yas out with Zoe for an hour of hooky-playing.  I love knitting but it doesn't offer the level of ya-ya reduction required at the time.

humungous, 3 foot tall lilac bouquet  courtesy of the internets

 Friday morning, I set down to work started blog-reading, and there was Carole's peony.  It reminded me that my peony might be flowering, and the weird 24 hour tropical storm rain falling was going to knock off any blooms. I figured I'd better get out there and investigate.
Last fall Hurricane Sandy radically landscaped our backyard.  We kind of ignored it, dealing with replacing our roof. Good times!  I recalled a section of downed tree pinning the peony.  I thought maybe it was dead.  Not so! Friday morning I discovered it as healthy as it had ever been (which is not all that healthy, to be honest).  It is a late bloomer, so still budding.
But had I not been out there in the rain seeking an internet-inspired peony, I'd never have noticed a lushly bloomed old lilac tree in the back corner of the yard. Thanks to Sandy and her ugly older sister Irene the year before, this antique was torn mostly out of the ground, meeting a small apple tree in a combination bramble/deciduous tree canopy. For the past few years this tree had been my least productive lilac, with its best blooms  tantalizingly out of reach, high up over the neighbor's yard. Not anymore! Crazily blooming and so perfumed. Pruning my way through downed branches like a gardening Indiana Jones in the rain, I collected me three big bouquets. Thanks Carole!

 This here is on my front porch. We have a new thrift in town and I'm buying up teapots and other housewares for porch planting. Buck at a time.  I got my idea when visiting the charter school my sister teaches at in downtown Washington DC last fall. Check out their entry walkway: 
Keep in mind it was October, so the plants were on the way out for the season. When I called her confessing I had openly ripped her off, she said, no worries. She'd gotten the idea online, from Guerilla Gardening.

 I mean, seriously, where would we be without our internets??!!

 In knitting news, if you are still reading this-my Caliz shawl is 5 rows away from being done, and I need a wooly not-too-big-to-carry and not-too-attention requiring project to take with me to an adventure in Maine this weekend. Suggestions?
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*If you want to experience learning with me, sans the hands-on part, there'll be a link to purchase the webinar, recorded in all its 1 hr 45 minute glory, in about 10 days. If you already purchased and/or joined it, you should have a link to it already, in your email.