It was another gorgeous spring day -- we've had more than our share of them this year. We took advantage of the day by driving down
to the Farmington Canal Linear State Park Trail. There doesn't seem to be a good free page describing the trail, but there is 
this page that talks about the history of the canal. Interesting. The trail was very nice, but busy. There was, however, still plenty
of parking. Near the middle of the trail, Lock 12 has been restored and there's a little museum people
can visit. There was a fellow in the museum playing a snare drum that
reminded me of nothing less than dog show -- an SNL skit. This site has a WAV file of the relevant bits of the Dog Show introduction: http://www.wavsource.com/tv/snl/dog_show.wav Apparently the site checks referring URLs to prevent 'deep linking', but if you copy and paste the URL it works OK.
My kids played at the stream instead, catching snails and trying to catch tadpoles. There was a party going on under a pavilion nearby and some of other kids had burst a balloon and lost the pieces into the creek. Charlie, using a stick, was able to rescue the pieces (and they're still in my pocket -- I guess I can throw them away now).
When we got home, we picked violets one last time -- we're reaching the end of the season, I fear. I noticed that our azalea is just about to open. We have two azaleas: one is red and opens first. Just about the time it finishes, the orange one opens up.