Do the orange beards of irises look like uni to you too?

Years ago when I was living downtown in Toronto, I used to make up all sorts of reasons to visit The Room at the Bay. Sometimes I'd bide my time and browse other stores first - a warm up of sorts - while other times I'd head straight there. 

Reliably, as soon as I stepped off the escalator and glimpsed those gorgeous mannequins arranged on the far side of the floor -- pouf! -- a sense of euphoria would billow up from my feet like a cloud of smoke and expand to fill my chest. It would lift me up, clear off the ground, the better to haunt the racks of ready-to-wear, enveloped in a warm, dreamy cloud. Then I would paw helplessly at treasures I couldn't take home with me, all the while ignoring heart palpitations.

I get that giddy feeling over food too, but these days, I most frequently have it around the flowers I grow and the photos I take of them. They're intense, these dopamine explosions that happen when I cut an exquisite stem or capture something delicious on camera. So it was with these irises, with their flirty skirts and naughty beards. 

All of this picture-making feels so good, in fact, that I sometimes worry I'm losing myself in a beautiful but maladaptive dreamworld of my own making. I mean, to reassure you (and me), relatively speaking, I'm probably quite firmly tethered to the earth, even if it's only with a longish piece of twine and a rusty ground staple... I just worry a lot.

Gang, if any of you have somehow achieved a good balance between your sensuous and intellectual minds, please do let me know how you did it. For now, watch me give in and indulge the former: