Throwback Thursday: Ithaca, 1987

Who on earth are these kids?  That's me on the left playing the piano, my partner (now husband) Dan standing on the right, and our friend Andrew between us.  Even knowing full well who these people are, I still have to ask: who are these kids?  27 years ago, 3 years out of college, we finally had our first house--okay, rented--but with its own yard and off-street parking, the first place where we stayed for more than one year, the first yard I mowed since graduating from high school, and the first time we had an unfurnished rental so we hit a lot of garage sales during that first year.  Even though we both had full-time jobs by this point, new furniture was a foreign concept because we were paying off student loans and had virtually no money.  Yet when I spotted this old piano at a sale one Sunday, I had to have it; we borrowed a friend's pickup truck, enlisted a couple of other friends, and went back to get it.  $700 was a huge amount of money at the time but I loved playing piano, and since we didn't even have a television I needed something to occupy my time!

Cornell Plantations: gardens far above Cayuga's waters

Cayuga Lake, view from Stewart Park, Ithaca, NY

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, part of my recent travels included several days in Ithaca, NY to attend my 30th reunion at Cornell University.  Ithaca is a small city in upstate New York at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, and greeted us with early June weather at its very best with blue skies, low humidity, warm sunny days and cool nights.  While there, my husband Dan (also Class of 1984) and I toured the Cornell Plantations, the school's botanical gardens and among my favorite areas on the campus.   I wrote earlier this year about my brief stint as a gardener at the Cornell Plantations after graduation (see Throwback Thursday: summer of 1984), a job that helped change the direction of my career.

What a week!

Wedding cake

A wedding (not my own!) was the perfect way to end an exhausting 9 day stretch when I attended my 30th college reunion at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY; spent 3 days visiting my parents in Buffalo; spent another day in Buffalo after my flight was cancelled due to weather in the DC area (with the rescheduled flight the next evening delayed and nearly cancelled for the same reason); got home late and exhausted for exactly one night in my own bed; did a quick check to make sure no plants were in dire need of water, and then headed out of town again the next morning for a wedding in the hills of southern Pennsylvania.

Throwback Thursday: summer of 1984

This isn't my favorite photo of myself, but it shows some of the people I worked with in the summer of 1984, just after graduating from Cornell University.  That summer helped change the direction of my life when I worked as a seasonal gardener at the Cornell Plantations in Ithaca, New York.  I had gone along with my friend Jim Steuerlein, an ornamental horticulture major who was looking for a summer job and had heard they were hiring, and I was looking for work myself as I was about to graduate with a degree in Entomology and had no job lined up.  Almost on a lark I decided to apply, and I was hired.