It's Spring Again...

...and birds on the wing again
start to sing again
that old melody.

Anyone recognize that song?

I had dinner on Friday evening with my good friend, Venessa. She's American, from San Fransisco and occasionally (usually) has the same sort of "Oh my God. Look where we are! And we live here!" view of Amsterdam that I walk around with most of the time.

So as we were walking to my bike on Friday evening, we stopped on a bridge and talked about how beautiful it was. It was a dark, crisp-but-not-really-cold evening. The next bridge down had lights on its arches that reflected in the water, so it looked like rings. There were more people out walking on the streets than there have been recently because it's been sort of raw. There were people in boats in the canals. It was that "standing in a postcard" feeling. And I said, "Thank goodness that spring is finally here."

I've said that before and then it gets cold again, but I think we're getting out of the uncomfortably cold weather and into the early spring weather. I hope. I've always said that spring in Manhattan is one of the most beautiful things you can ever experience and spring in Amsterdam is the same. Even spring in Brooklyn was pretty great. I guess it's a spring thing.

Fred and I were out on Saturday doing some running around and we took some pictures. There are some nice trees with little pink flowers along the canal near our apartment. It's still a little early for a lot of the flowering trees. You have to be quick on the draw with the camera. They leave before you know it.

This is a tulip tree, which I used to see a lot in Texas and in NYC. A friend of mine from Texas used to say, "A lot of people call those mimosa trees, but they are not mimosa trees. You know what a mimosa tree is. That's not it." He's right. He usually is right. Don't they only bloom every other year or something?

How many pictures of canal houses against a beautiful blue sky can Fred take before I say Stop? Well, we haven't gotten there yet. Here's another. It almost feels exotic when I look at it here.

And Fred also takes a lot of pictures of canals. We have tons of them, but he takes them with different settings. I'm not a huge fan of being in the water (certainly not this water), as I've said before, but I like living near it and having it around. It never gets old.

Things are happening. I'm working on several writing projects. Lots of movement in positive directions. I'm also working on a knitting project that I've been pretty obsessed with. It'll be done in a day or two, bu I've run out of yarn. I thought I had enough, plus a bit extra, but I was mistaken. I'll have to figure something out now. Oh well. I've already fiddled with the design a bit. I'll do more fiddling.