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Saturday was the 10th annual URI East Farm Spring Festival. This began
as opening their acres of flowering crabapple trees to the public to view
them flowering. (Many people don't realize that the University of Rhode
Island began in the 1880s as a land grant college, just like many of the
big ag & tech schools in the west and midwest.) Gardening instruction
and plant sales and more and more has been added to this weekend... |
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| This is the third year in a row that Jeremy's restaurant (well, he doesn't
own it, but he is the general manager) has been serving up hot dogs and
hamburgers at the plant show. That's chef Jeremy with the backwards baseball
cap. |
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| And here is a view of some of the dozens and dozens of specimen crabapple
trees. (I must have dozens and dozens of photographs of these trees but
every year I can't help but take more photographs.) |
| That afternoon Jill baked three apple pies (one of which you see pictured
on the right). Nancy's sister Clara and niece Melissa (who is sister Karen's
daughter) came for a Mother's Day weekend visit. Saturday night Nancy and
I went over to her mother's house for dinner, joining Nancy's sister Janet
and her husband Tom (plus, of course, Clara and Melissa). Jill sent one
of her pies with us for desert. |
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(The second pie went with Jill and Chris to the gathering of their friends
for an evening of Dungeons and Dragons. The third was for domestic Mother's
Day dinner on Sunday.)
And we all got together for a Mother's Day lunch at
Champlin's Seafood
Restaurant in Galilee. (Yes, regular readers will note that Champlin's is our family
favorite for seafood.) |
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That's Nancy and her mother in this photo..
And the photo below is an after lunch scene with us all just hanging out
and talking -- Melissa seated with Nancy and Nancy's mother, Jill standing
(with Chris almost hidden behind her, Nancy's sisters Clara and Janet (with
her husband Tom), and Jeremy in the lower right corner (and niece Alison
was not in the picture). |
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| And I just had to turn around to snap the picture below.
When you eat at Champlin's you can see some of the fishing boats that caught your meal a few
hours earlier. That first boat has a paraphrase of part of the
Declaration of
Independence (white letters on a black background just above the cabin windshield):
"When Government Abuses and Usurpations Occur, it is the Right and Duty of the People
to Throw Off Such Government" (It is a paraphrase of
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations,
pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.') Below the windshield there is a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: "One
man with courage is a majority." He is quite in line with Rhode Island
tradition; as I have mentioned at various times here, Rhode Island was
the first of the thirteen colonies to declare its independence and also
the first to take up arms against the king. |
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| After lunch people headed off in various directions, but Jeremy and Nancy
and I stayed around. Jeremy treated us to ice cream cones at the little
ice cream shop downstairs from Champlin's. We sat on the sea wall and ate
our ice cream and then walked the few hundred feet to Salty Brine Beach
and walked along the beach as far as Roger Wheeler Beach (just a bit over
half a mile or so) |
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| Nancy and Jeremy having a stone skipping contest, which got Jeremy to reminiscing
about many childhood hours spent skipping stones on the Chenango River
just before it flows into the Susquehanna River in Binghamton, New York.
(Jeremy was 10 when we moved to Rhode Island.) |
Continuing on the dining in and dining out theme, that night I made lasagna
for dinner and we followed that with Jill's apple pie.
Tuesday was Jill's birthday... as you can see from the cake that Nancy
made, this was her 29th birthday.
Yes, time does fly!
Following our family birthday tradition, we went to the
Mews Tavern to celebrate... |
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And here we are at the Mews... Katie, Jeremy, Chris on the left side and
Jill and Nancy on the right. Yes, they have those signs at all of their
tables. The GOT BEER sign is metal, similar to a automobile license plate
-- hanging behind it is another sign that you can flip over that says NEED
BEER to alert the wait staff to your dreadful plight.
And before dawn on Wednesday Jeremy drove Jill and Chris up to Logan Airport
in Boston so they could catch a flight to Florida where Chris is taking
Jill to Disneyworld for her birthday. |
