Spring has finally sprung!

I had such a lovely morning today. The uncomfortable muggy weather of the past few days broke last night to leave us with a beautiful fresh sunny spring day today. But first to share a couple of random tidbits from earlier in the month.

Firstly, I finally got my act together in applying to volunteer for Girl Scouts! Now just waiting to hear if they've found a troop for me to help with!

Then last weekend was one of the few that N has been home recently. We celebrated with sushi :)

So today N is away again, but I got to go to Patterson Park with my favourite little girl and her mummy, which was lovely in the sunshine. We were headed to Fort McHenry but were thwarted by some kind of crazy running people. But I reckon it was fate because we met a lovely fellow Englishwoman when asking if we could meet her dog (you can get away with that kind of behaviour when in the company of a two-year old apparently!), who lives nearby, and we're going to meet up again! Always exciting to meet people from home!

We looked at the pretty flowers:

Fed the ducks:

And played in the playground, before going for pizza. Awesome morning!

Cherry Blossom Festival, Washington DC

I was lucky enough to have a conference in Washington, DC the first week of April, which happened to tie in with the latter end of the famous cherry blossom festival. Before we get to the pretty pictures though, let me share a fuzzy picture of a living legend:

The great James Watson of Watson & Crick fame, as in discoverers of the structure of DNA! I can't even tell you how excited I was to be in the same room as this man, even if he was very very far away!

Which leads me to the other thing: the scale of this conference was like nothing I have ever seen before, just look at the size of one of the plenary lectures, and this room was full! Incredible!

Being not too fond of crowds I skipped the Rally for Medical Research on the Monday and instead went in search of these famous cherry blossoms, and boy, I was not disappointed! There were a lot of people there too, but at least I was free to move around! Now for pretty pictures:

One a penny, two a penny

Yes I know, Easter was weeks ago, I fail at blogging, but I have beautiful images of hot cross buns to share, that I know you don't want to miss out on.

I was alone on Easter weekend, N has been away a lot for work the past month or so; not to mention the fact that neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday are public holidays here! So it could have been a miserable one, but thankfully I was invited to a two-year old's Easter egg hunt, which made the weekend a whole lot more fun!

We went to a place called Cylburn Arboretum, where I'd never been before. It was really lovely, and had a very English country garden feel which was rather nice.

It was the first time the weather was really nice, although still a little too chilly for our posh picnic really. Still very enjoyable though!

And finally some daffodils!

I filled the Sunday by making hot cross buns from Paul Hollywood's "How To Bake". They came out awesome, but went stale incredibly quickly. The one's I froze right away are still awesome though!

I also indulged in some American Easter candy. Peanut butter for the win! Nom nom nom!