Parts One and Two

Inspirational song: MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

My self-appointed job in the game group is the designated birthday cake baker. I gave myself this exclusive role because I have the strictest dietary need, and I didn't want to pass on the responsibility of making safe cakes to anyone else. Sometime last year, I made a cheesecake with GF brownie crust and a compote made with cherries from our tree. (I wrote about it then, and called it "Schwartzwalderkirchkasetorte.") Our college roommate, who has been a rockstar member of this game group for years, specifically asked me to make this cake again when his birthday rolled around. 

Well, that was supposed to be a few weeks ago. Stuff kept happening, and the game kept getting pushed out. In the group text, we promised that the cake would still get made, and it became someone's suggestion that for every week we get delayed, we would add a layer to the cake. So far, I've promised the original three layers, plus chocolate mousse, whipped cream, and a layer to be determined. The choices are between toasted pecans, chocolate shavings, and sprinkles. At this point, I'm kind of considering all of them, and making a monstrosity that is taller than the length of my hands.

Something happened to my oven a few weeks ago, and it stopped heating up all the way, and it takes an hour to get even vaguely close to regular baking temperature. I'd been using my toaster oven for most stuff while we waited to see whether we repair or replace. That wasn't an option for a cheesecake, so I packed up everything I needed and took it all over to the kids house to make the first two layers. It ended up taking up a solid five hours. I partially baked the brownie crust, and had to wait for it to cool before putting the cheesecake batter on it, and after it baked an hour, I waited for it to gently cool in the oven. Then I had to pull it out of the water bath, to learn I still have the worst luck (soggy bottom yet again). By the time I finally got to go home, the all-day rain had turned really cold, and it was just unpleasant getting my stuff to and from the car. 

Now the first two layers of the cake are in the fridge, I'm in warm jammies, and I'm about to go save the photos of Valerie discovering brownie batter, so I can post them here. I hope I can get all the other layers done in time for tomorrow's game. Photos of the Abomination Cake to come later.

Going Faster

Inspirational song: Lookin' Out My Back Door (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Memorial Day around these parts means the Bolder Boulder. I've never run in it, nor any other 10k race in my adult life, but a few times I have walked all around it, waiting for the Mr to run it. This time, I didn't even have to get up early and drop him off. He got himself there, assumably by going to a park and ride and taking the shuttle in. I stayed home and looked at the pictures he sent along the way. Sometime during the middle of the day, he messaged that he was limping back to the car and would be home soon. Apparently taking three years off and not training was a hard way to run a 10k. He's been a bit sore ever since. I don't blame him. I'd be laid out for a week if I tried at this point in my life.

My son-in-law came over this afternoon to help us work on characters for a game he is running. It's a game format none of us has played before (and I don't remember what it's called). The scenario will be time travel back to Roman Gaul, and I have decided to play a real person this time, specifically my own grandfather, circa 1976. It will be interesting to play a pragmatic Oklahoma dentist whisked back 1700 years to what would eventually become Lake Geneva. I'll do my best to be true to the source material.

Val came over with her daddy, and showed off her rapidly developing intellect and charm all evening. What was a chance proto-sentence yesterday was a pattern of subject-verb combinations today. She is so smart and we are all so impressed. She was playing in the front yard with Pa-pa-pa for a while, and she kept coming up and watching us through the glass. At one point she was staring through, touching her tongue to the window. I tried to capture that with the camera, and I wasn't fast enough. I got a series of peekaboo moments, when son-in-law said he had been working on facial expressions with her, naming them and showing her what they look like. He called out to her, "Valerie, can you scowl?" This time I clicked the camera at the exact right moment.

Grumpdate

Inspirational song: Reunited (Peaches and Herb)

The last week has been so hard. All the kids were sick, so we couldn't babysit at all. We had to wait until they were healthy again and we were sure we didn't catch the you-know-what from them. I did a couple of grocery store runs for them, but dropping off food, cough medicine, and TP didn't mean toddler cuddles. I had to keep my distance.

Today we were cleared to babysit again. Saints be praised! In the time apart, that little girl's vocabulary has tripled, at minimum. And her capacity for complex abstract thought has ballooned. She understands play in a way she couldn't a handful of weeks ago. She uses her imagination to create scenarios in the world around her in a way that shows she understands that it is separate from her. I love cognitive leaps. And we are getting the beginnings of sentence construction. For the last couple weeks she has been able to make short possessive phrases, like Daddy's keys or Grandma's car. Today she said "Doggies bark bark." Her pronunciation was a little less clear, but we understood it, and recognized there was a subject and verb. Also, not for nothing, she pointed at a photo of me and the Mr from around 2000-2001, and said, "Grandma Pa-pa-pa." This is only the second time I've heard her attempt to say my name. So excited.

I tried to sneak bananas into her diet, curled up in a Nutella crepe with whipped cream. No dice. She shook the bananas out and nibbled on the crepes. And then she got interested in the stack of gardening trays I had piled up near the spot where she was eating. She practiced making silly faces at me, and of course stopped when the camera came out. I did make her laugh at me, so fair trade. She did a whole lot of that today.

Maintenance

Inspirational song: Will It Go Round In Circles (Billy Preston)

Two week's worth of gardening and hauling was squeezed out of me today. I haven't seen my regular massage therapist in months, instead getting a few visits with an alternate, equally talented but very different therapist. Today I caught up with my regular guy. He knows just how to bully my shoulders into behaving properly, and after 90 minutes with him, my feet work as directed too. 

I was afraid of ruining all his hard work by sitting back down on the ground to rip out more weedy turf when I got home. Instead, I pulled over a (heavy) chair and worked from a place I knew I could stand up from when the time came. I never actually scooted the chair left or right, so it didn't seem like I did that much, but I was thorough, so a yard-wide section is nicely clean, ready for mulch. Whenever that happens, obviously. I don't know how this is going to work if I'm the only one doing it. I hope Mr Juggle-16-Projects-At-Once swings back around to help some.

Things are starting to fill in up front. The perennials are taking off, and the pots are still looking strong. I went looking for a replacement for one coleus that didn't thrive in a hanging basket. I wanted a verbena. The only ones I found at the Lowe's across from my massage were either a giant basket of multiple colors, or a mostly dead mix on clearance (and still 25 bucks!) I'll wait until after the holiday, and hope that I can get a parking place at the best nursery in town. It will be a gaggle all weekend, and I don't want to fight that. The struggling coleus gets three days to prove it wants to be there.

 

Plant People

Inspirational song: In the Evening (Led Zeppelin)

Roughly 20 years ago, I received a schefflera plant and a beautiful cranberry red ceramic pot as a wedding anniversary gift. They both have been with me in every place I have lived ever since. In all that time, the plant has grown leggy, spindly, and awkward. Turns out, had I known, I should have been pruning it all along. Considering it now reaches out a full arms-length from the pot, on those hard, tree trunk like branches, there is no time like the present to start pruning. Naturally, the first place I went was to YouTube to see how to propagate what I cut. I've been watching some Swedish guy for an hour now, and he knows everything about these plants. Following his directions, I have now snipped four cuttings and put them in water. If they survive, I may end up trimming off the entire rest of the viable plant, pulling out the old root mass, and starting over fresh in new potting soil.

Today was the day we moved the ficus tree outside for the season. It's another plant that has been with us since the dawn of time (it was a wedding gift). It takes up a ton of real estate in the living room, and I always look forward to its outdoor season. We have pruned it back a few times, but they are such melodramatic, fragile trees, I don't like to do that often. I wonder whether this same Swedish guy has thoughts about them.

I spent nearly all day rearranging the corner where the ficus had been all winter. I was scooping up the bushel of leaves it dropped that were hard to reach, and deep cleaning things that had been inaccessible all that time, like baseboards and the south end of the picture window. With all the hard work outside we have been doing, we kind of let tidying up inside slide, so I did a fair piece of that too. I stopped often to stand at the front window and admire my collection of flowers. It's a lovely feeling to do that. It's like being hugged by color. I wore myself out moving furniture and plants that are taller than I am, but at the very end of the day I managed to go out and do a light watering of all the pots. The Korean lilac is in bloom, and between it and all the alyssum I've tucked in everywhere, it smells wonderful out there. 

Okay, Mr Swedish Plant Guy, what about Sansevieria? Am I treating those right?

Bubblegum

Inspirational song: Sugar, Sugar (The Archies)

You know I am not sponsored. Never have been. Nobody pays me to write this stuff. So hopefully you know it's unlikely that I will contrive a way to discuss a specific product unless it actually feels relevant to my life. To that end, I am embarking on an extended experiment to see whether a particular branded product lives up to its hype, and I plan on periodically providing updates on that experiment in this space. Do with that what you will. No expectations here for you to spend money on the same thing I bought.

In all those gardening videos I have been gorging on lately, one annual plant keeps coming up: Proven Winners Supertunia Vista Bubblegum. Yes, the people are very specific when they show themselves growing it. At first I ignored the specificity. But either Proven Winners does a hell of a sponsorship campaign, or this might do what these people claim it will. What they claim is that it will get large. I mean large. Like one plant in a landscape spreading to three feet wide. Taking over hanging baskets large. Are they for real?

I had an extra coconut liner and an extra wire hanging pot. They weren't the same size, but I don't care. If it really starts to take off, I can buy a bigger coco liner and just slide it under the other one, and add a little more potting soil. I went to Home Depot, the one garden center I hadn't been to already today (don't ask--you know the answer). I wanted to find Supertunia Vista Jazzberry. It's a new color for this year, that is more of a purply-pink. Did not find. I got the one everyone talks about in those videos, the Bubblegum. Classic pink. I knew the wire basket I was using was 16 inches, although my liner was 14. I may end up regretting this, but I bought three of them to put in the basket. (Maybe if I come across a Jazzberry, I can buy a single one and run a concurrent experiment for size.) I don't have a spot to hang this, so eventually I'll figure out a pedestal for it. It's planted and watered in now, so all I can do is wait and watch. More later.

Dark Days

Inspirational song: Nobody Told Me (John Lennon)

I don't know about all y'all, but I had to spend a lot of time away from the news today. As yesterday. I couldn't keep wrenching myself around with TV or Twitter. I needed frequent extended breaks, and lots of gardening videos. I spent a lot of time running around outside, and I dyed my hair (same ginger, just more vivid when fresh). It is too much for me to process how broken our souls are in this country, and how no one is able to/willing to do what it takes to fix us. I don't have solutions, just pain. So instead, I grow things. I grow plants. I grow cats and dogs. I grow kids and grandkids. And I feed them all. These are the only things I know how to do anymore.

After a half day of work on the Park, we went in search of replacement valves for the sprinkler system, and between two large hardware (and more) stores, we found none. Naturally I picked up a few more plants, because they were within reach, but I got far fewer than I wanted. I managed not to buy a blue hydrangea to keep in a pot on the porch, but only because all the ones I saw were so big, costing like 40 dollars. That is a lot to spend on a gamble of whether I can keep one alive in a pot.

I had three new hanging baskets in my cart at Lowe's, the black metal kind with coconut liners. Mr S-P swore he could find our old ones, and put them back, only taking fresh liners. When we got home, he looked all over, and eventually found them. Two the same size as the liners, two much larger. So we will go back to the store for one more that matches. With S-hook extenders, they hang lower, so we need to move out the ones on either end, so we don't bash the mail man in the head when he comes by. By the time I got one hanging pot transferred from plastic to coconut, it was dark. Too dark for a really good picture, but just light enough to see what's going on.

Seven Year Itch

Inspirational song: Dreams Weaver (Gary Wright)

I want to go to bed early. Hopefully I will be able to sleep. I didn't at all last night, not until the sky started to get lighter, which I could see through the curtains. I couldn't shut my brain down last night. I stayed up way too late watching gardening videos on YouTube, and one lady in particular grabbed my attention. She gave an extended tour of her fancy acreage property, showing off plantings she had done, naming each cultivar without a cheat sheet. It was more than an hour of garden envy, and it was already past midnight when the algorithm offered me this video. Of course I watched it all. Soon after, I turned off the TV, but I couldn't turn off the envy. My brain was wide awake, and nothing could slow it down.

There has been an inkling of a thought, but I had suppressed it until last night. For hours, I lay in the dark, trying to pin my eyes closed, wondering what sort of property would convince me to sell here and move. I know my home is worth twice what I paid for it just seven years ago. I know my husband and kids have mused how nice it would be to move away from heavy concentrations of people, to land out in the country somewhere. So if we did that, where would we go? What state? How much land would be enough to get me to move? What climate? How far out in the sticks?

I came up with a few minimum needs. It would need to be at least five acres to make it worth it. It would need to be somewhere between zone 4 and, say, 8. It would need water, lots of water. More than we have available in Colorado. It would need to be compelling enough to draw the kids and grandkids along too. I'd have to have a chance of representative government that meets enough of my values like my side of Colorado does. That's all a lot to ask, so it's probably just a single night's sleepless fantasy. 

Addiction

Inspirational song: Black Balloon (Goo Goo Dolls)

I heard footsteps behind me. I looked over my shoulder. Across the lawn came the postal carrier. He found me just as he had several times over the last few weeks, sitting on the front walk, covered in potting soil, assembling yet another container arrangement. (Just using up the last few things from last week. No new purchases, except the bag of soil.) I pulled off one dirty glove to accept the handful of mail. I said to him, "You have discovered my addiction." He laughed and offered that he found gardens much more appealing than lawns. Aha! He's sympathetic! I told him the hardscaping plans ("over here you will have a flagstone and gravel path!") and actual decisions we made ("I was going to put a big rose bush there in the corner, but I knew you'd have to walk past it, and you'd hate us.") Now we need to make more forward progress on implementing those plans. He seemed to welcome them.

I couldn't do much manual labor today. My wrist was still too sore from yesterday. Eventually I was able to get around, but it was a long wait. I did the mixed container and planted a hosta in a clay pot for the porch. I went around and sprinkled rose food around all of the rose bushes (I don't think I realized how many we have!) and fertilized the snot out of the poor struggling lemon tree. It's a classic cat lie to claim to have never been fed in ever, but this potted lemon would be telling the truth. I can't remember ever feeding it. No wonder it is struggling. 

I fed humans too. The kids are all dealing with round 2 of the rona, so I went to the grocery store for them. I was masked, of course, because we babysat a few days ago. I have no idea whether we were actually exposed or got away in time. I suppose I could do a rapid test tomorrow, before I decide whether I'm safe to go to Rotary. So far we both feel fine. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Mis En Place

Inspirational song: Dead Flowers (The Rolling Stones)

The tender plants of Smith Park appear to have beaten the odds. It wasn't a hard enough freeze over the last two mornings to kill off anything we have found yet, and the heavy spring snow only broke one branch off of Zoe's lilac tree in the animal memorial garden out back. Everything else has survived. A few things were a little limp because they hadn't been watered efficiently before being stored inside or under blankets. They perked up once they had good water and sunshine. 

By mid-morning I was out preparing to finalize the porch setup. I hauled all the pots that were inside back out, moved everything that had been huddled by the brick into the sun, and emptied everything off the porch completely. I took a broom to cobwebs along the windows and brick. I sprayed the exterior window cleaner with the hose. I swept the porch, and then used the jet setting on my hose wand to get the last of the dirt out from the corners. And when it was all dry, I put it back together correctly. I lined the edges with all the herbs and flower pots. I rehung the hanging baskets. I set the bistro table in the shady corner where I intend to take my coffee as often as possible. And I laid a modestly-priced outdoor rug under it to tie it all together. It looks amazing, if I say so myself. I wanted to just stare at it, but I had other things to accomplish.

The Mr and I both tackled weeds in the turf this afternoon. We are making good progress on digging up everything in the way of laying the hardscaping to come soon. It will still take far longer than either of us wants to contemplate. But I'm starting to see where it's going, and I like it. I just wish it didn't involve being stuck down on the ground digging it all out by hand. My wrists hurt so badly now. There isn't enough diclofenac in the world for this.

All in the Family

Inspirational song: The Family Madrigal (Encanto)

The kid is making up for lost time. She was slow to tell us how many words she knew, but once she got going, she has made it obvious she was paying attention the whole time. Also, even having raised two highly intelligent young women of my own, I am astounded by how quickly this little person is picking up written language. Some letters she names, some she sounds out, but she is on her way to being a very young reader. I guess this means we have no chance to spell out words we don't want her to hear, like p-a-r-k or i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m.

I bought her a Mirabel doll while we were at Target yesterday, but we only pulled it out of the box when she came over today. I have to say, it is so cool to see her fully entering the doll age. And her focus to watch a movie is so different even from a few months ago. Before nap, she had to watch Encanto (which she asked for by name), and she was glued to it.

She slept like a log, once she did nap. We both did. I am not sharing the picture, because she'll be mad at me until college graduation for it, but she had that "just five more minutes" kind of sleepy face when I tried to wake her to go home. Such a goober.

Late Blast

Inspirational song: Ridin' the Storm Out (REO Speedwagon)

For all that I didn't want to believe the forecasters were right, sure enough they were. It is currently quite chilly outside, and there is heavy, wet snow killing lots of my pretty flowers. I went out once to shake off the trees and bushes, so they weren't bent to the ground, but I got too cold after working on the front yard to go do the back. It's probably going to be pretty bad, come Sunday when it warms back up. I have to hope my perennials recover enough to come back next year.

I delayed bringing in the potted plants, instead watching the change in the hourly forecast. When I could no longer deny it, I brought in what I could carry, and huddled the rest up against the house with a blanket over them. I might bring in more tomorrow, if necessary. It was sort of nice having my whole herb garden right there near the kitchen when I made dinner tonight. Maybe one of those grow light devices for herbs might he worthwhile after all.

We had very little oomph left in us this morning. When it was requested that we grandparent a bit, we picked up the baby and took her for a wander around Target and Lowe's. We didn't really need anything, so of course I spent like a hundred bucks at Target. That's always how it goes. She had so much fun tromping around in her boots, especially when there were puddles to splash in. She did accidentally sit her butt down in the wet side of the Lowe's garden center. Kind of to be expected. It started snowing while we were inside the store, and when we passed an emergency door with a window in the back of the store, we showed her. That little face lit up and she said SNOW! She's a Colorado baby through and through.

Remove It

Inspirational song: Papa Dukie & the Mud People (The Subdudes)

I murdered a sizeable swath of turf in my front yard. Premeditated and everything. I bought the extra strong vinegar from Murdoch's and mixed it with a little dish soap and salt, like the internet says to do. I sprayed it on all the weeds between the driveway and the paisley bed (first one in line), plus a little along the sidewalk. I was hoping that by doing this, they would pull up easier. Not so much. I sat on the ground for hours today, digging and tossing dead weeds and some grass (there the internet let me down--it said the grass would survive). I didn't get nearly as much pulled up as I had hoped. I think next I will try doing the digging with a shovel, and then picking out the roots by hand.

For most of the day there were patchy clouds. Didn't stop me from getting a sunburn, not one bit. I wore a sunscreen shirt, but my jeans were kind of rough-cut highwaters. My ankles were exposed, and now they are toasty red. Oops. The weather will be totally different all weekend, but somewhat less conducive to sitting on the ground digging weeds.

We called knock it off mid-afternoon and went to run errands. After picking up meds at the pharmacy and a quick run through Sonic (happy hour cherry limeades, yo) we ran by some salvage yards. The Restore Warehouse had some paver bricks I was eyeing seriously, but they wanted 50 cents apiece for them. That didn't seem like a great deal. What are they going for at Lowe's right about now? Should I go back for them, for the walkway up front? We looked at the big Boulder salvage center, and they had no brick or stone at all. We did get stuff to finally hook up our rain collection barrels. If this year is as bad as it looks, we are going to need every drop of water we can catch.

Big Crash

Inspirational song: The No-No Song (Hoyt Axton)

That big crash I've known was coming arrived today. The timing was perfect, actually. Three members of our gaming group are sick, one was planning a kid birthday party, one was literally and figuratively drained from donating blood, and I was completely out of energy from doing way too much. This was the perfect time to give everyone a week off to recover. I don't know what anyone else did (except the birthday party), but me, I slept off and on for six hours in my chair, unwilling to get up even to refill a water glass for most of that time. Every muscle was sore, and I had no choice but to rest them.

I've been watching the weather forecast, along with every other gardener in the Front Range. We've gone from rain and maybe dipping just under 40 degrees this weekend to oh-crap-heavy-wet-snow-on-my-tomatoes! I'm going to have to find a place inside for all my flowerpots and herbs, and create plastic-covered cages for all tender plants in the ground. It will be raining for two days, turning to snow overnight between them, well below freezing two nights in a row. This is a challenge none of us expected. I'll be closely monitoring the prediction models as Friday approaches. Maybe it will change for the better, rather than trending towards the worst as it has been.

Big Day

Inspirational song: Get Together (The Youngbloods)

Holy moly, where did this gigantic day come from? It was supposed to just be all about the baby and nothing else. That didn't stay true long. Last night I registered for a real estate CE class, one that was a rather intensive refresher on how appraisals are calculated, and what the market trends are on that score. It was supposed to run from 9 to 1, but by about 12:20, my brain was full. I couldn't focus for the conclusion and Q&A section. There was a lot of valuable information, though, and I'm going to appreciate the spreadsheet formulas the instructor will email to us.

I practically ran out of there at the end, and raced home to pick up grandpa. We had a birthday lunch to attend. We got to the restaurant, and a big girl in a booster seat (not high chair anymore) was happily dipping tortilla chips into salsa. She seems so suddenly grown up. Two years old today, and every day of those two years has been a joy for all of us. We didn't do presents today. We are saving that for when her toddler friends are over tomorrow. I think she doesn't mind.

We did lunch with the family, because we had a surprise dinner with friends. Our best good friend from the air force (which is really saying something, as we knew a lot of cool people), was in Colorado Springs for a conference with his wife. I hadn't seen him in probably 11 years, and had never met the wife in person. Mr S-P has seen them several times in that period, but I wasn't on those trips. It was fantastic to pick back up without missing a beat. Yeah, as always, the guys talked shop non-stop, but I was fine listening for most of it. Near the end I got to chat enthusiastically about real estate with him, so for once it was my area of expertise.

We were over by the Broadmoor for dinner. My brother had gone to school just blocks from the restaurant. I sent him a photo and asked whether he used to go to this English pub, and he laughed and said yes, all the time. It was a fabulous place. Spendy but worth it. Unfortunately halfway through our dinner, a piano player/singer started up, and was so loud we could barely continue our conversation. After dinner, we moved to the hotel lobby, which was more conducive to catching up.

The restaurant was the Golden Bee. There has been such a lovely bee theme to my life over the last month. I don't know why, but I'm rolling with it.

I Hope

Inspirational song: Do You Believe In Magic (v. Shaun Cassidy)

As I sat on one of the iron chairs on the front porch, admiring the hanging basket I had just assembled, a thought occurred to me. I had a name for this feeling that I've been having since I got back out in the garden, and I was staring at the proof of it. It's hope. The flowers I keep buying and arranging are the physical manifestation of hope. It all comes from feeling better, and having a reason to believe that my trajectory from here is finally going to be towards increasing energy and ability. I am not about to declare myself magically cured of all my problems, but I sure do think I'm getting a handle on them again.

Once in a while, I've faced some super scary bills, either shocking ones that come out of left field, or planned ones that still hurt to think about, that suddenly are revealed to be paper tigers. I'm thinking specifically of medical bills that got worked out with insurance or written off by the clinic that sent them. Without getting too specific, we had a big car-related bill I expected to be agonizing, like between 800 and 1200 dollars rough. It turned out to be nothing. As in, we didn't owe a cent. I was in shock, in a good way. I was stressed over it for weeks, and I didn't know what to do with myself. Now, if those last two bills from the March surgery would just give me a hint whether I owe or not, I'd be able to plan again with my finances.

You will not be surprised to learn that having expected to spent around a thousand dollars, when we went by the plant nursery on the way home with money in our pockets left over, all self-control was off. Neither of us tried to guilt the other into putting plants back. We filled a cart--technically two of them. We grabbed a bunch of perennials from the outside garden, left that cart with the employee who tallied them and gave us a sheet to take to the cashier, and then we filled up another inside with annuals and a couple pieces of equipment. (For real, I had gone there for just a watering can so I had something to mix up Miracle-Gro in.) But I found so many colors of blooms that spoke to my soul and demanded to come home with me. I just can't find it in me to be upset. Instead I look in amazement at the evidence of my hope.

Yet Wave

Inspirational song: Get Closer (Seals and Croft)

That made it all worth it. An hour ago, as I was starting to plate up dinner, I heard the Mr call out to passers-by from the porch. He was telling them about our broom plant that they were admiring, while it is in glorious yellow full bloom. I went out to tell them that when the seeds are ready, they pop so loud you can hear them, and they are welcome to them. We ended up chatting with these folks for at least 20 minutes, and they were very complimentary about what we have accomplished so far. Not only were they understanding about the weeds in the turf yet to be removed, they told us they have a solution for bindweed! Apparently there is a mite that kills it and only it. We will be trading seeds and cuttings for mites. Sounds like a bargain to me.

After a couple years without them, Honor Flights have resumed in northern Colorado. This means the Mile of Smiles is back too. We went out first thing to the interstate, to join hundreds of other folks holding flags and banners, and waving at the buses of veterans and their escorts. They are currently on their whirlwind tour of Washington DC, where they visit the relevant war memorials. It's always fun to go out and give a hearty send-off, and we have been told the veterans on the buses like seeing us. We get lots of honks from general traffic on the interstate as well, while we are waiting for the main event to go by.

When we got home, we couldn't just go inside and make breakfast or anything. We immediately descended upon the yard, ripping up weeds and moving things around. Me, I planted the hosta I bought yesterday in the shady side of the big mound, and I dug up the other lavender that failed to transplant last year. The first rose I bought, the knockout, went there. Then I sort of weeded around it, and worked my way to the front of house bed, where I pruned a ton of the lavender there. I'm trying to cut back the woody growth heavily this year, and I will do it even more next spring, in the hopes of bringing the lavender just in front of the house back to soft green. If I fail, I will replace them next year.

I made more progress clearing out debris (leaves and spilled hardware, mostly) from the corner of the porch, and tidied up enough that it feels like it is really coming together. I intend to have a spot where I can enjoy beverages while I view my flowers, and maybe watch over a toddler while she plays with sidewalk chalk. I'm getting ever closer to my fantasy porch. Every time I needed a break from weeding and pruning, I sat there, and it felt just right.