mistressofmuses

On Tuesday, in part for late Mother's day and in part for early birthday, we wanted to take my mom to the Denver Botanic Gardens. We planned ahead for a day when she would be back from her New Mexico trip, and that she and Taylor could both take the day off from work.

Unfortunately, this wound up being the *one* day that was forecast to be chilly and rainy all day. (We've had rain basically every day for a bit now, but most days it's only for a little while. Tuesday was going to be overcast and drizzly basically the whole time!)

Mom still wanted to go for it, and was glad for the cooler temperatures, rather than walking around on a hot day. (And I was glad for that, especially for Taylor; last year we went and they wound up overheated and miserable, and had to head back to the car early.) Even so, I was a little apprehensive, because I loathe being cold, and I was afraid the cold rain would make it hard to appreciate anything about the day.

I was pleasantly surprised! It wound up being lovely. It did get uncomfortably cold a couple of times, but for the most part it was nice enough with a jacket. The initial drizzle let up within maybe half an hour, and minus another quick rain shower, it was just cloudy. While I prefer sun, the clouds did mean I didn't get sunburn. It was also nice for pictures - easier to get fairly accurate colors without direct sunlight.

And I took way too many pictures, lol. Even when I was trying to narrow it down very significantly, I think I kept... 70? So this will be split into several posts! Sometimes I try to split the posts into "themes" or something, but this time I think I'll just go for chronological through the gardens.

Hope you like pictures of ~water droplets on flowers~ lol.


One of the most dramatic in terms of water droplets!


Kind of an odd one, but I loved the way the water had collected on the seedpod inside this poppy.


This rose is so perfectly classic it looks fake. :)

Fourteen more pictures:

We waited at the entrance for a bit while we figured out our plan for the day.


There are some wonderfully tall yucca. There was also a very loud sparrow! I'm guessing they have nests within the yucca, which is probably the safest imaginable place.


Water droplets on poppy leaves.

In some of the gardens at the front:


I do like the way the water droplets look like little glass beads.



Then the "perennial walk" and a plaza:


Delightfully goth irises.


A ladybug pupa on a rose.


So ruffly!


Very classic rose!


A hummingbird, perched up high.

On the other side of the plaza is The Ellipse, the gardens around the Chihuly sculpture and in front of one of their admin buildings.


The columbines were having an absolute banner year this year! I don't know that I've ever seen quite so many doing so well.


Nice irises.


I like the burnt orange color.


And some lovely lupines!


And some two-toned ones! Plus the admin building (a beautiful converted house) in the background.

(Today was mom's actual birthday! I did stop by to see her briefly after work. I gifted her Overgrowth and the last six months of short stories from Seanan McGuire's patreon. I'm planning on getting some garden plants for her once I have a chance!)

Dad's surgery went well yesterday, though he said it hurt quite a lot. (Which... aaaaaaa, eye surgery, yes, that sounds horribly painful.)

Today he had a follow up appointment, and while everything is still very sore, it sounds like everything looks good. It'll be a few weeks to heal up, and then six months or so of checkups, but so far so good.

He's glad to have binocular vision again, ha.

On Saturday, everyone returned from their respective "trips." I have lots to catch up on.

Alex went to a model show in Kansas last week, so I brought the dogs and stayed with my mom and sibling for a few days, Wednesday through Saturday, since I didn't have access to a vehicle at home, plus didn't want the dogs to be alone for 9+ hours while I worked.

Berry Mad got to stay home alone, though we of course made sure she had a full pond and she got the last of the most recent batch of crickets.


She's so cute! Standing up all tall.

I was very worried about the extended time with the dogs in the house with Jaspurr, the new cat. Not so much because I expected anything to go badly, but just knowing that if something did go wrong, it could go extremely wrong.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened! Really... nothing much at all happened.

Jaspurr did stay upstairs basically the whole time, but he also didn't seem distressed about it. He did not hide or get anxious. He just didn't want to be around the dogs, though it seemed like he sort of enjoyed watching them. That was a relief, because that was basically my ideal scenario: cat with his own safe zone to stay in without needing to be confined, with no evident stress for anyone.


This was basically the whole three days: Bella in motion, Cy oblivious, Jaspurr judging from the railing of the upper floor.

Bella noticed the cat a few times, but was more jealous that mom would go upstairs with treats for him and to play with him than upset/interested in reaching him. Cy also noticed him a few times, and he had a meltdown about it every time, because he couldn't figure out how to get upstairs (as we had the bottom of the stairs blocked off.) Cy loves cats, ever since he got to "help raise" some orphaned kittens our friends were bottle feeding. Cy has some of the strongest paternal instincts I've ever seen in any animal, and he loved those kittens.

Cy did realize that sometimes he could specifically see Jaspurr in the hallway mirror, which reflects more of that upper floor than is visible from the living room, so he would just stand there and stare at the mirror and cry about it.

More pictures of the dogs:

Saintly Sister Belladonna, true martyr.

The dogs and I slept downstairs in the basement, so that we could shut the door on the dogs and give Jaspurr his house back overnight.


Cy was pretty happy about the basement sleeping arrangements, since the couch was wide enough for him to sleep on it with me.


Bella was a little less enthusiastic about the basement, because you can hear everything else going on in the house so loudly. I'm not sure if she knew it was people walking around upstairs, or if she thought the ceiling was haunted, haha. She'd walk around trying to figure out the source of the sounds.


Bella in the living room with the rainbow banana.


Dogs on couch.

Some pictures Taylor sent me while I was at work:


Couch dogs.


The saddest beast the world has ever seen.


Cy, helpfully assisting with opening the bathroom door.


Cy watching the oven dog TV.

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Alex's drive out to Kansas on Thursday was fine, but unpleasantly windy.

The hotel he stayed in was quite nice for a relatively inexpensive hotel. Dated, but clean and everything worked. (Which was better than we can say for the one we stayed at in South Dakota, damn.)

The Breyer Midwest model show was on Friday.

Alex did pretty well!


18 placings out of 50 models is pretty good. 6 NAN cards and one sectional champion! (Sectional champion also came with a prize model, "Sorry Not Sorry," which was a special run from BreyerFest last year. However, Alex already had this model, so he sold it to his table-mate, since she wanted one.)

BreyerWest/now BreyerMidwest has, for the last several years, had an event-exclusive model. These are only available to people who attend the event themselves: you cannot have someone else pick it up for you. This year was a glossy version of the portrait model Marc of Charm!


He's so shiny!

This is one of my favorites of Breyer's recent sculpts (sculpted by Jennifer Scott, an artist who lives fairly local to me, and who by utter coincidence is a mutual acquaintance of a DW friend of mine!) The regular Marc of Charm model is part of the general Breyer line, and we have wanted to see him in gloss ever since he was released. (Breyer sometimes does special gloss runs of other regular run models, but while others of his release year were, Marc of Charm was never never included in those events. We were SO EXCITED that he was the event model this year.)

The drive back from Kansas to Colorado on Saturday was also apparently very windy and unpleasant, but uneventful. Alex is super wiped out and unfortunately hurting pretty badly, but it was a good not-quite-weekend.

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It was nice to have a couple days that I got to hang out with Taylor and my mom, and while I started off being very stressed and anxious about the dogs and the cat, it all went just fine.

Had a good birthday! :)


Here is Berry Mad lurking in her pool.

The weather was nice enough to be outside, so we went to the neighborhood park to let the dogs go for a walk. Cy was surprisingly enthusiastic and made it all the way around half of the park without even seeming tired!

This is still false spring. We may be looking at some terrible weather again by the end of the week, and almost certainly next week. Enjoying it while it lasts, though! The trees have buds! Not leafing out yet, but... soon!

Some robins:

A pair of robins in a crabapple tree.


Another robin!

We have robins around basically all year, but start seeing more as spring approaches. They're cheerful looking and sounding, and I like seeing them.

Then we dropped Cy at home, since he does not like being in the car for long, and does definitely get tired more easily. After that, we went back out to Pelican Pond to walk around there for a bit.

We didn't actually make it very far around, because Bella didn't seem to feel very well. Probably a quarter mile or so before turning around, so a half mile ish. I think she was just tired, and she was fine after we got home and she took a power nap, haha.

The water was pretty low. Lots of different ducks and other water birds, plus many turtles!


A turtle on the shore, and crows playing in the air!

Some more turts:

Turtles on a free-floating log! And seagulls on the island.


The turtle on shore. Definitely watching me very closely, but didn't dart away the way they usually do.

Later in the afternoon we went over to my mom and Taylor's. My mom made me a peach pie. <3

(For gifts, I got books, haha. Of course! I tried to limit myself to asking for things that I knew were going to be on my TBR list, but that I just didn't own yet, so I'm trying very hard not to add to the enormous list!

I got Installment Immortality, which will jump the line to be my next read after the current one is done. I also got The Left Hand of Darkness, since it was not included in the UKLG ebooks, and is one I know I want to read; The Count of Monte Cristo because I did not ever have to read it for school, and Taylor says it is very, very good, but oh man, 1300 pages; Bury Your Gays, because of course; and House of Leaves because it seems to be such a unique reading experience, and has a lot of impact on like, meta storytelling type stuff, even if people are divided on how much they like the work itself, and I love weird architectural horror.)


And we got to see and play with Jaspurr. He's so cute and sweet!

Still dealing with the remnants of the cold, but I think I lucked out on missing the worst of it. I've had coworkers sick for weeks, out for days at a time. I'm mildly miserable, and so extremely tired of blowing my nose, but still functional... I tried to do without any meds for the last day two days, but I don't think I'm quite there yet. Back to the day/nyquil.

On Saturday we opted out of the group hike, since my mom wasn't sure her foot would be able to handle it. She felt okay to walk, just on easier terrain.

We picked two attractions along the Arizona Boardwalk. The first one was Butterfly Wonderland.

I'm very familiar with the Butterfly Pavilion here in Colorado, having interned there for a year. This place was similar, but also had some definite differences.

The biggest difference was that the Butterfly Pavilion is specifically an invertebrate zoo. They have sections devoted to non-butterfly insects and arachnids, plus the water section devoted to invertebrates of the ocean. There are a couple fish in the ocean section (something my internship supervisor was very opposed to, lol, but she was overruled because kids love to see Nemo and Dory, lol), and there's a dove that lives in the conservatory (having been "donated" years and years ago, so he gets to live his life out there) but for the most part there are no vertebrates.

Butterfly Wonderland bills itself as "A Rainforest Experience," so they do have vertebrates of various types as well.

But time for the butterflies!


I was very taken with how shiny the blue on this guy was! He looks like a holographic sticker.


When you match your meal.

( Nine more below the cut: )

And now for the not butterflies!


There's a koi pond in the butterfly conservatory!

( Seven more below the cut: )

After this, we sat outside by the carousel for a while to let Taylor have a break. Fortunately they started feeling better, and we were able to head to the aquarium after a little bit.

My grandmother passed away last night.


(At her 90th birthday in 2018.)

She was 96. She would have turned 97 in less than a month. (Her birthday was January 21, 1928.)

She died overnight, peacefully, in her sleep, at home, which is really the best any of us can hope for.

She caught covid a couple weeks ago, they're almost certain at one of her dialysis appointments. She was hospitalized for a while last week, as she'd begun to have trouble breathing. She couldn't take Paxlovid because of her kidneys, but they did give her a different antiviral course, though it didn't seem to help much. Fortunately, she returned home on Monday, though she was still fairly weak, and had to use her wheelchair for transport rather than her walker as usual.

She and my aunt had a wonderful Christmas, at home. My mom spoke to her on Wednesday.

She was my last remaining grandparent, outliving my grandfather by 12 years.

I hadn't seen her since March of 2021, when we went to visit her in New Mexico. She'd gone into heart failure back home in Oregon in February of that year, and was told that she had end-stage renal disease, and that she would never return home. The family was told she'd be moved to hospice care, and to plan for our goodbyes.

My aunt, a nurse, said no to that, and checked her out of the hospital. They packed up the things she most needed from the house and flew her down to New Mexico to live with my aunt. They started dialysis and a strict renal diet, plus my aunt was there to help her with medications and other treatments she needed. We all anticipated that this would buy her an extra six months to a year, and judged that of course that would be worth it!

And instead we got almost an extra four years with her, thanks to my aunt's constant, excellent care of her.

We'd hoped to find a way to visit her sometime in the next year, and it's heartbreaking to me that we won't, and that I won't see her again. I'd spoken to her since that last visit, of course, but I wish I'd gotten to see her again.

I stayed home from work, hoping to go see my mom in case she needed some support, but she had to work in order to ensure her company's final payroll was taken care of, then she had a doctor's appointment in the later afternoon. She *just* texted me that she's home now - apparently the payroll took all the way up until her appointment. I'll try to go over there for a short while this evening.

I fell asleep and dreamed about running into my uncle and my grandmother in a store. In the dream, I knew she shouldn't be there, but then it turned out no one else could see that she was there. She wandered away and I followed her. I gave her a hug and said goodbye. (The dream got real weird and kind of unpleasant after that, but at least that part of it was fairly nice.)

I simultaneously feel more prepared for the holidays than usual and yet like I have way too much left to do.

Mom has surgery (outpatient) on Monday. They're excising the melanoma they just found. It's not a *pleasant* surgery, but it shouldn't be overly prone to any complications. I sort of expect she's not going to want to be on her feet much around the holiday, though. (I talked to a coworker today who has had several melanomas, and he sort of helped me feel less worried about the surgery itself. I knew it was minor, but still helped to hear from someone who has dealt with it.) There is, of course, always the serious worry of metastasizing, which is what we want to make sure DOESN'T happen. So risk not completely mitigated, but hopefully this will be it.

My grandmother has covid. We aren't sure how/where she got it, since almost the only thing she does is go to medical appointments. She recently had throat surgery (widening the lower portion of her esophagus, which had narrowed and was making it hard for her to swallow), and so was in the hospital for that, plus several pre- and post-operative appointments. She also has dialysis three times a week. She and my aunt do occasionally go out to lunch, which could be the culprit. She seems to be okay, she was mostly fatigued and just feeling "under the weather" when they gave her the test. But she'll be 97 in January, plus she *is* recovering from fairly recent surgery, she's a dialysis patient, she's had congestive heart failure... so she's not a *low risk* patient. She is fully vaccinated, so I'm extremely hopeful that it protects her well from any complications.

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It feels weird to be worried about both of the above, and then also be thinking about holiday stuff. I also know that it's not like I can just worry about them enough to change the outcome, it just doesn't work that way. But it makes it feel weird and petty to still be trying to gear up to celebrate things, or trying to figure out how to fit in all the things I still need to do.

My holiday hype (which was already a bit unexpected for me) has definitely died down a bit, mostly due to stuff like the above. Plus our truck needing a lot of sudden, expensive work. Plus our heat is still out and we haven't gotten a response from maintenance at all. I'm striving mightily to maintain some enthusiasm, but it's wearing on me a bit. (Though not as much as it's, say, wearing on my mom, I know.)

I realized somewhat belatedly that oh shit I need to get holiday cards out. I completely spaced needing to do it, which has been my problem most of my life, I'm pretty sure. I got them all addressed and written last night, but couldn't find any stamps, and the post office was closed by the time I was off of work. I did get my dad's gift shipped tonight via the machine at the post office, but didn't want to send the letters with the ugly barcode postage instead of stamps. :(
Alex helped unearth some stamps, though they're plain flag stamps, which is barely better than the barcodes, haha. But oh well, I think that's what's going to have to happen in order to get them into the mail.
I'd meant to ask if anyone else wanted holiday cards this year... but again, utterly spaced it. Maybe next year I can be on top of it enough!

I need to get my mom and sibling's gifts wrapped, but I think I'm pretty well done with gift acquiring, which is nice. A lot of years I've been having to panic-shop in the couple of days right before. There was one gift for Taylor that I was afraid wasn't going to arrive, since it was just sitting with "label created" for almost two weeks, but it finally moved today! It's supposed to arrive on Saturday! (Which makes me feel better; Taylor didn't want much, but I felt bad having little to actually give.)

The biggest thing I have to still do is baking. This year should be better set up for that than some, since Xmas is on a Wednesday, which gives me two days off before it. I obviously don't want to start baking anything too soon, but I also can only do so much at a time. I'll probably try to make one thing Sunday night, and the other two things on Monday. Then I can go over to my mom and Taylor's on Monday night after my mom's surgery, and spend Christmas Eve over there. We can do whatever baking things they want to do then.

I'm planning on the usual yule log cookies, plus kolaches, and then this year I was going to attempt a copycat of the "cranberry bliss bars" that Starbucks sells. They're a white chocolate, cranberry, orange thing, and they're very good... so hoping I can make a credible knock-off. At mom's we'll probably do the molasses and butter cookies, which are my two favorites, ha.

My mom and Taylor have adopted a cat. <3 They picked her up on Friday.



She's 14, though she seems to be in very good health. She was picked up as a stray, but was microchipped. Checking the microchip, it turned out she'd been adopted as a kitten (or young cat; unsure) from the same rescue that had picked her up. Apparently, attempts to contact the original adopters and microchip contact information yielded no response.

She was given a pretty extensive dental procedure and wound up having several teeth extracted. She's otherwise very healthy! A bit underweight, though she'd gained about a half a pound while in the shelter, though lost some of that post-dental-surgery.


You can see the shaved patches on her legs where she got IVs for the surgery.

She doesn't have a name yet: my mom was leaning toward "Mocha", though my favorites off the brainstorming list were "Blackberry" and "Nebula."

I also put forward that she should get a creepy/magic-themed/ominous name, because her intake weight after being picked up by the rescue was 6.66 lbs. (Grimoire? Spellbound? Macabre?)

She is astoundingly sweet. She's already settled into the house like she's owned it all along. She's very content to lay in a lap for hours. She purrs like a little jet engine. She wanted pets from me and from Alex the instant we met her, and gives lots of headbutts. My mom and Taylor have both remarked on how gentle she is. She's very talkative, though her meow is a little rough, so she sounds grumpy even though she's not.

She does not like other cats, and has never been tested around dogs. We'll have to see whether my mom can still watch Cy and Bella occasionally for us... Bella has also never been tested around cats. (Cy loves cats.)

I'm so glad they have her. <3

Last Monday (June 3rd), we went to the Denver Botanic Gardens with my mom and Taylor. We got a bit of a late start, as Alex had a doctor appointment that went more than an hour longer than it was supposed to. But we still got there with plenty of time to make it around the whole of the gardens. It also wound up being overcast, which was nice as it made the near-90° temps easier to deal with for hours!

I took... a lot of pictures. Like, I think I need to split this into four separate posts a lot of pictures.

The real star of the gardens while we were there were the irises, which were juuuuust after their peak, but were still spectacular. This first post will be devoted to all the flowers that aren't irises, ha. The second post will be the irises, the third will be all the animals of various kinds we saw, and the fourth will be the current art installation at the gardens.


The roses were just getting started, but they were already looking beautiful. And many smelled amazing, of course!

( Six more flower pics below this cut: )


Stealing a joke from my sibling: These flowers said #transrights!

There were lots of cacti blooming (and more were, I'm sure, absolutely beautiful a few days after our visit.)


The most spectacular of the cacti!

(I wish I'd gotten more pictures from this garden - there were more cacti blooming just as amazingly. Unfortunately that particular garden was from late in the day, and my phone battery was dying. I had to get a lot choosier with what I took pictures of!)

( Six more cactus pictures: )

The whole day was really nice. It was fun to spend the day together, and it was a really nice time to be outside. I'm so glad for the warm weather, and even in the upper 80s I didn't have too tough a time. (Taylor did a bit, but we took frequent breaks in the shade for them.) I was still pretty sore from the model show on the 1st, but surprisingly didn't have too much trouble with that, even.

More pictures to come!

Saturday was the second (and main) day of the holiday trip. We had the morning and early afternoon to ourselves, though we didn't do much. I guess the hotel is well-known for having a water park, but we... never made it there, ha. I don't currently own a swimsuit, and half of the pools were outside. While they were heated, it was still far enough below freezing that swimming outside didn't sound great, alleged hot tub or not. Sorry to have missed out on like, the resort's Thing, but oh well.

We had a fairly lazy morning. We got coffee from the cafe downstairs, and I bought a quiche from there for breakfast. It seemed like the most financially responsible choice. The resort is pretty big on its restaurants, but uh... on the pricey side. Probably very good! But a bottle of water from room service was $4.50, which shows the general pricing of everything, haha. Apparently the Italian restaurant had a brunch buffet, but I was afraid to even ask how much it was.

The quiche was tasty, and minus a minor annoyance where apparently the entire hotel's key cards were wiped because they were surprise! switching to a new system, which caught the staff off-guard too, it was a mellow few hours. I was very tired, because I did not sleep well, though didn't want to nap and miss the stuff we were supposed to do. Taylor read a bit of Mort by Terry Pratchett out loud, and that was most of the morning.

There were two activities for the afternoon: a beer tasting at a brewery in town, or a paint-and-sip event in the hotel. All three of us chose the paint and sip, because I don't care for enough beer to make a tasting very fun, and painting sounded like a better time.


I did An Art!

The way the "paint and sip" thing works is that in addition to the boozy beverage, there's an artist who sort of guides you, Bob Ross-style, through the steps to paint your version of the example picture. She led us through what colors to mix, some of the techniques for how to do the different parts, plus some help if anyone was very dissatisfied with their results.

( Nine more pictures below the cut - painting + dinner: )

Sunday morning, the three of us split a very tasty chocolate-raspberry croissant from the cafe bakery. Should have taken a picture of it, because it was also a very attractive pastry.

After checkout, we met up at the Stanley Marketplace for brunch at the Denver Biscuit Company. The Stanley Marketplace is a pretty cool place. It's sort of an indoor mall, but it's in an old manufacturing building, and is a pretty great example of repurposing a cool old building into something new, rather than tearing it down. I've only been there once before, and that was with my driver friend for the Van Gogh exhibit we went to before she moved.

The restaurant doesn't take reservations, so our party of 14 or so (as we kept losing people, lol) had to wait a while for enough seating to open up for us, and we wound up being very glad we'd eaten something beforehand. Mom, Taylor, and I all got basic biscuits and gravy, which seemed like a safe bet for a biscuit place. It was delicious, but SO MUCH FOOD.

It was a very fun weekend, and I'm appreciative that A) Taylor and my mom's company does this sort of thing for them each year, and B) that they brought me along. :) It was a fun time, if way bougie-er than anything I ever do otherwise. I had a great time, but I was also glad to get home and take a nap, haha.