Jasmine cont.

Thanks to a bad windstorm yesterday the jasmine got to spend the night in our room. Being a night blooming flower it bloomed and released a whole candle store's worth of fragrance. What a fun plant!

Pink Jasmine

I picked up some Red Yucca and Pink Jasmine at Home Depot on Sunday night. So far the Red Yucca is not much to look at but the Jasmine is gorgeous and smells heavenly. I hope I can keep it alive through the blazing Las Vegas summer!

Kalanchoe

Just wanted to give a shout out to the Kalanchoe. It's a popular flowering succulent that does well in arid climates.  I got this one at the grocery store for eight bucks and it has been flowering for well over two weeks, I've only had to water it once, and it is doing fine without a lot of sunlight. When it gets warmer outside I will pot it and put it out there and continue to enjoy it!

Sunday

Well, we've decided to hold off on shopping for a new dryer, at least until after our trip. Instead we've been focusing on the garden and the basement this weekend. The basement has managed to flood every time it's rained and it is really starting to take a toll on the walls down there (not to mention the...fragrance.) Yesterday Ross worked on the storage room while I worked on the garden and, while I'd much rather work on the yard today, I promised to help with the basement too. I haven't got much of a plan yet except that I'm going to use lots of Lysol.

It's been kind of a chilly weekend and last night the weatherman announced a frost warning for our area. Grrrr. I waited so long to plant my peppers so that I wouldn't have to worry about frost! So I brought in my potted flowers, but there was nothing I could really do for the veggies. I checked on them this morning and they look fine. :S Hopefully that really was the last frost of the season. I mean, it's May 17th for heaven's sake!

Yesterday we got the fencing for our veggie garden. It's naval high so it ought to keep even the hugest bunny rabbits out, lol. I was lazy and didn't actually measure the garden before buying the mesh and ended up discovering I was about 8 feet short after I had tied it to the posts. So I had to take it all down and start over, using the existing fence as the back (duh, why didn't I do that the first time?) and problem solved.

I haven't painted at all this weekend - there is just too much to get done before our trip! (When I start painting I have a really hard time stopping and nothing else gets done.) But hopefully I will find some time Tuesday or Wednesday to finish the tulip painting so I can start something new when we get home.

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."

-Hebrews 13:5

Friday

Amazing. The sun has been gone for hours, and it is still so warm that I'm sitting here in my shorts with the windows up and the ceiling fan going. I love it!

This is great gardening weather. I transplanted my remaining impatiens and lavender plants into larger containers, pulled some weeds, and fed my irises and peonies. I'm really pulling for the peonies and irises this year because last year they were absolutely sad to look at. The peonies were patchy and small, not even the ants were interested, and only one of the irises actually got around to blooming. Tomorrow I want to rake (again), pull more weeds, bundle up sticks to take out on trash day, and do some prep work for the veggie garden. I'm putting off mowing until the last possible moment because we have a clover problem and I heard letting the grass grow tall early in the season helps keep clover under control.

We also made it out to the Half Priced Books today. Books are not, strictly speaking, a necessity in these tough economic times. But when they are used and discounted I always manage to leave the store with one or two. This time I got Seeking the Face of God by Gary L. Thomas (author of two of my favorite books on marriage, Sacred Marriage and Sacred Influence) and Black Mountain Breakdown by Lee Smith (one of the best Southern writers around.)

Right now Ross is on his way back from the city where he was networking with other video game developers. It's been a pretty good week in the job search and we are feeling hopeful. He had a phone interview today with a San Francisco based company and has an on-site interview with a local company next week. Praying hard!

Tomorrow is supposed to be another deliciously warm day. We're going to try to swing by the Stangers' for a visit before Mark's mother, Donna, has to go back to Iowa and then it's on to church in the evening for the second week of Celebration of Hope.

Finally, if you haven't already seen it over on iblogo, here is a little video for your viewing pleasure:

Pictures from the Garden

Good Friday

It's a sunny but chilly Good Friday here. I was reading Buechner this morning and thought I would share this passage on Good Friday (same as the note I posted on fb);

"God so loved the world," John writes, "that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." That is to say that God so loved the world that he gave his only son even to this obscene horror; so loved the world that in some ultimately indescribable way and at some ultimately immeasurable cost he gave the world himself. Out of this terrible death, John says, came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live it is to stand with one foot already in eternity. To participate in the sacrificial life and death of Jesus Christ is to life already in his kingdom. This is the essence of the Christian message, the heart of the Good News, and it is why the cross has become the chief Christian symbol. A cross of all things -- a guillotine, a gallows --- but the cross at the same time as the crossroads of eternity and time, as the place where such a mighty heart was broken that the healing power of God himself could flow through it into a sick and broken world. It was for this reason that of all the possible words they could have used to describe the day of his death, the word they settled on was "good." Good Friday.

In gardening news - all of my pepper plants are growing strong, but the lavender and impatiens have been slowly declining ever since they first sprouted. I only have about six impatiens left and about 30(out of about 50)lavender. The morning glory are outgrowing the little Cetaphil jar they started in so I'm going to try to transplant them to the much roomier yogurt carton later today ;P The outdoor plants are doing great! My first daffodil bloomed today. (Sorry the picture is so bad, I was rushing because I wasn't wearing any shoes and it's cold out!)

Lilac Bush

Tulips

Blurry Daffodil

Reflecting on the Loss of my Tulips

Yesterday my potted tulips were ruthlessly attacked and gnawed to death by some mystery fiend while Ross and I were out running errands. I haven't quite recovered from the shock yet. These weren't just any tulips, these were tulips I've had and nurtured since they were naked little bulbs last fall, so I was sort of, you know, invested.

This gardening thing has been more emotional than I expected! I had to cut back the weaker lavender shoots in my seed starter today and, seriously, I felt guilty about it! And when Ross and I were talking about flying to Raleigh to spend a week with his family I thought, I can't go, my plants need me!

I think this may just be latest manifestation of the old biological clock tick, tick, ticking away. My hormones are clamoring for a baby and, in the absence of one, are willing to accept leafy green substitutes. Weird. Oh well, it could be worse - at least I'm not collecting baby dolls or dressing my cats in tiny jumpers.

Overcast Monday

It's an overcast day, but the markets are up, my Forget-Me-Nots are sprouting, and I have a giant diet coke next to me, so I wouldn't call it a gloomy day.

Things are pretty much holding steady here. Still looking for work, still resisting the idea of moving. Last week we celebrated our wedding anniversary and Ross's 29th birthday.

Our first year of marriage! People often say that the first year of marriage is the hardest. It was a hard year, but not in any of the ways that I expected. It was the the constant stream of curve balls that made this year difficult, even heart breaking at times. The marriage, on the other hand, was the easy part; the steady, warm, securing part. We had our disagreements - we're both opinionated people - but for me, Ross is the antidote to tension, and the more I know him the more peaceful I feel. I hope that our second year of marriage will be less fraught with unexpected obstacles - but whatever is in store for us, as long as we have each other, I will consider us way ahead of the game.

The gardening is going well. The bell peppers, banana peppers and the hot peppers are sprouting, as well as those forget-me-nots that I mentioned above. I'm particularly happy about those guys because I had run out of seed starters and had to plant them in an old cetaphil jar in regular potting soil, and wasn't holding out a lot of hope. The lavender and impatiens that came up earlier and growing like gang busters and I'm a little worried that they are going to out grow their container before the weather is good enough to move them outdoors! We'll see!

What's Up.

Hi Everybody! Hope everyone had a good weekend!

We got our weekend off to a good start on Friday night when we drove to Elgin for Dad's birthday party. His birthday was actually a couple of weeks ago, but Noah and Lauren were in town to do a little camping, so it was a good time to get everyone together. The apartment was packed with family and noise. Mom's cat, Powder, circled continuously, greeting and re-greeting us all.


Here Ross and I are with our squirmy nephews, Owen, Joseph and Malachy. Ross and Malachy played together most of the evening. Ross amazes me with his ability to enter into Mally's make believe world and stay there for hours. I get exhausted just watching them together.
Saturday morning I went out to get the mail and discovered the scattered remains of a daffodil bulb. Or two or three, it was hard to tell. There are bunnies all over our neighborhood, but they aren't hungry looking like city bunnies. They look like so fat and contented that I hadn't expected them to go after my poor, helpless garden flowers!


And, of course, the next morning they had dug up more bulbs. So, for the first time in my life, I'm at enmity with bunnies. This morning I planted four replacement bulbs a little deeper in the ground. We'll see what happens!



Also this weekend, we finally got around to mixing up some smoothies. Ross is braver so he went first and let me sample his. Not too sweet and slightly gritty, but good and really refreshing. Now I've started making my own and I'm loving them.


Next weekend Ross and I travel to North Carolina for his sister's wedding. In preparation Sunday we went to Borics and got Ross a quick hair cut and then we went to the mall to look for a dress in my new size for me to wear.

I've never gone dress shopping with my husband before and it was distracting, but fun. Distracting because I wasn't sure if he'd become impatient with it all, which he didn't, and fun because I got a glimpse of what these things look like through his eyes. I learned that he is not a fan of flower prints, and he is a fan of high heeled boots.

I ended up with a gray knit dress and wine colored pumps (which I am probably going to return because I don't feel like staggering around his sister's wedding, making an idiot of myself in shoes I don't know how to walk in.)

All in all, it was a nice and relaxing weekend - and I'm glad because next weekend is probably going to be a little on the crazy side!

Gardenin'

Last week Mama bought me some flower bulbs at Costco. My yard has a few flowers here and there, left over from the previous owners, but needs a lot of help. So this morning, when I saw what a pretty day it was going to be, I decided today was the day to start planting those bulbs.

After raking three bags full of leaves off the lawn I got to work digging in the dirt. We have a raised planting area right in front of the house that has nothing but a Juniper, some prickly ground cover, and a whole lot of weeds, so it was the obvious place to start.

I pulled weeds and then dug a 7 foot trench along the front of the house. I planted the tulips there because they are supposed to get 12-16 inches tall. Next, I dug a semi circular trench along the front of the planter area and planted the daffodils there, because they are shorter. Finally, I retrieved my poor old lilac bush, which I bought at Jewel months ago and has been wasting away in the pot, and planted it in the middle ('tada' it announces, in its sad little voice.)

I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, so I'm hoping that when my little tulips and my little daffodils start popping their heads up next spring it will look pretty, and not random and weird.

I have a handful of bulbs left over, so I think I will plant some more tulips around the lilac bush and then plant the rest of the daffodils along the driveway.

Next on the list - prune those bushes!