A Butterfly Event

Last weekend was rainy, wet and fun.
After a quick 12 miler Saturday, I stopped at the Greenspot to find a little farmers market set up in the parking lot.
I chatted with a local honey supplier there, some friendly bee advocates who told me about the butterflies at the Discovery Gardens. I purchased a jar of wildflower raw honey with honeycomb. Yum!

Here are some photos of the butterflies at the Discovery Garden. It's a great place for toddlers, and many of them were there. I was easily transformed to carefree, younger, butterfly-watching, days. I totally got into the fun and even got a temporary monarch butterfly tattoo applied to my face. No pictures. :) It was fun.
The butterflies dance and fly to their own rhythm. They were so colorful, with flirty wings. So pretty and free to look at.
I couldn't get a photo of them fluttering through the air. The darn critters move too fast for action photos.

Cheers, it's 9/9/09!!!

Aside from 9 being my favorite number, today is a genuinely rare day! Maybe not as lucky a day as 7/7/2007 but 9 can hold its own.

Most of us will not get to experience another single digit date in our lifetime. The next one won't roll around until 1/1/2101.

As the final numeral, the number nine holds special rank. It is associated with forgiveness, compassion and success on the positive side as well as arrogance and self-righteousness on the negative, according to numerologists.

Multiplying by nine reveals a mirror symmetry among numbers. Any grade-school student could tell you, for example, that the sum of the two-digits resulting from nine multiplied by any other single-digit number will equal nine. So 9×3=27, and 2+7=9.

Multiply nine by any two, three or four-digit number and the sums of those will also break down to nine. For example: 9×62 = 558; 5+5+8=18; 1+8=9.

Sept. 9 also happens to be the 252nd day of the year (2 + 5 +2.

The Chinese pulled out all the stops to celebrate their lucky number eight during last year’s Summer Olympics, ringing the games in at 8 p.m. on 08/08/08. What many might not realize is that nine comes in second on their list of auspicious digits and is associated with long life, due to how similar its pronunciation is to the local word for long-lasting (eight sounds like wealth).

Nine is also strongly associated with the Chinese dragon, a symbol of magic and power. There are nine forms of the dragon, it is described in terms of nine attributes, and it has nine children.

The number 9 is revered in Hinduism and considered a complete, perfected and divine number because it represents the end of a cycle in the decimal system, which originated from the Indian subcontinent as early as 3000 BC.

Cowtown 2009

It only took about 6 months but I finally received the Cowtown race completion certificate.
Then I pirated this photo off the race results website. I'm getting way too good at ripping off race photos.

Marathon day felt like the coldest day in Cowtown history.