Adrienne knows me very well. She kept taking me to places where I could see gorgeous flowers in bloom, like these masses of wisteria.
Wisteria isn't in bloom yet in Tallahassee, even though we're not that far away from Gainesville.
The dogwood trees were spectacular.
I also saw daffodils.
And this bright pink flowering shrub.
And this little delicate flower, which must be some kind of a violet.
This week was spring break, and I had an amazing time visiting my friend Adrienne in Gainesville. She took me to so many wonderful places!
Our first stop was the nearby town of Micanopy, which is where they filmed the movie "Doc Hollywood."
It's tiny, but packed with historic buildings and beautiful trees.
We did some shopping.
And wandered around town.
Looking at all the details.
The docent at the historical museum told us we should visit the cemetery, so we walked around there for a while.
We saw the oldest part of the cemetery, with gravestones dating back to the 1800s.
It was creepy and beautiful and right out of a Southern Gothic novel. For David's birthday, I got him a vintage board game called "Bigfoot the Giant Snow Monster." I didn't know that it was a game he actually owned when he was a kid. Here, we try playing the game. I wasn't sure what it would be like -- one of the online reviews called it "the stupidest game ever made." But we loved it. Clearly, that reviewer did not share our interest in chasing people around and stomping on them.
This week David and I discovered a part of campus we had never noticed before: a little garden with a fountain at its center. I taught my Greek class here a few times.
The statues on the fountain are nymphs, which makes the whole place look like one of the ancient nymph shrines that I study, a nymphaion. Some of them were sacred gardens that could have looked a lot like this.
Tall pine trees overhead.
The ground is covered with the needles and seeds of the pines, and with the flowers that fall from the camellias.
Under the camellias, the flowers cover the ground.
There is even a black rock behind the nymph statues, which I would call a "rock-cut altar" if I found it at an archaeological site. People leave flowers on it. Maybe for the nymphs?
A few blocks away from us, an apartment building is advertising its vacancies with rainbow bunches of balloons. They are looking ahead to the summer, when all the students will be moving out. Right now we're in full-blown spring, though, and these rainbow colors are everywhere.
These are the brilliant, sun-drenched colors of spring in Florida. 
Can you believe David is 44?
For his birthday lunch, he asked for some of the things he normally doesn't eat (because they have gluten). So I made a spinach-cheddar quiche with my favorite gluten-free pie crust. I don't know why this recipe works; it feels really strange to put cottage cheese in a pie crust. But for some reason it's delicious.
I also tried making egg rolls again. This time, they tasted slightly more like real egg rolls.
And for dessert, we had berries. Served with love.
We are also having some construction done in our neighborhood.
This morning we woke up to find a crew digging a giant pit at the end of our driveway.
David had to maneuver the car very skillfully across our neighbors' driveways to get us to campus.
And now we still have a hole and a small hill of dirt at the end of the driveway.
The resident mockingbird -- who doesn't even like it when we walk out to the car -- is not happy at all about the construction.
On Valentine's Day we went to Maclay Gardens.
We sat on the benches in that little gazebo by the lake.
David wrote me a poem in Greek.
I wrote him a sonnet in English.
Then we walked around for a couple of hours in the gorgeous early spring landscape.
We saw luminous Spanish moss.
Carpets of camellias.
David took lots of flower pictures.
It was too early for azaleas or magnolias, but we saw spectacular flowering trees that we couldn't identify.
Like this one, which had little clusters of vivid pink flowers shaped like bells.
And this very fragrant tree.
And this pinky-lavender one.
We saw all kinds of life, including the very small.
And the very large.
And we left thinking about all the signs of spring flowers yet to come.
I love this photography project What Does Your Tea Time Look Like, which shows you cups of tea from around the world. This is what my tea time looks like, in case you're curious.
Green tea poured from a sunny yellow teapot into my favorite octopus cup. The handle is a tentacle!
It's been very foggy lately, and I keep posting pictures of it because I love the way it makes Tallahassee look like a magical underwater city.
I walked around Lake Ella this evening in the fog. The ducks were already curled up with their heads nestled into their back feathers and one leg tucked up under them, but they woke up and gave me hopeful looks as I passed by. 
I was almost alone in the park with the sleepy ducks and the turtles. One solitary grebe was paddling through the mist. Someone in one of the shelterhouses was playing sad, dreamy jazz on a saxophone; I'm not making this up. Fog must bring it out in people.
Then the white fog condensed into rain, and I headed for home.
