More Asters!

[leene_chan]

A Purple Cloud., a photo by Leenechan on Flickr.

I love these so much that I can't stop photographing them! Here's a picture of "Bluebird" in full bloom. I learned recently that it's no longer referred to as a "New England Aster" but a "Smooth Aster." I'm not sure what the difference is.

This morning I saw what I presumed to be a rabbit nibbling at the base of one of the aster plants. It turned out to be a squirrel burying a stash of acorns for the winter! I had actually dug up one of those stashes yesterday when I was digging out the bed for "Aptos." I felt kind of bad about it. It's pretty funny because we don't have any oak trees on our property. I keep seeing squirrels running across the street to get the acorns from our neighbors' oak trees and coming back to bury them in our yard! I wonder if so many animals hide their stashes of winter food in our yard because we're one of the only households on the street that don't have dogs outside?

Watched two silent films last night which thankfully didn't have to be reconstructed with production stills like London After Midnight. The first was the classic horror movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was only 67 minutes long and grainy in spots, but I thought it was a pretty unique and disturbing film. Apparently, Conrad Veidt's character Cesare was Tim Burton's inspiration for Edward Scissorhands...

The second movie was Kiki, starring Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman. Comedic silent films usually miss the mark with me, but I thought this one was hilarious! I was especially interested because I'd already seen Ronald Colman in two "talkies," The Prisoner of Zenda and Lost Horizon. I was prepared to see him in heavy makeup, mugging and gesticulating wildly, but he was just the same as he was in the later films, just with no sound. I can see how a lot of movie-goers found him appealing in the silent film era. He was so dignified!