Wealth and fame she's ignored.

I spent the morning watching Tom Hiddleston on YouTube with the kids and then sent them to the kitchen to make milkshakes while I moseyed out to the garden to turn on a soaker hose. That's when I realized the Mister was still at home.

"Oh. We're usually much more nutritional and hardworking."

I know he believed me.

Plus, my first very own personal gingerbread on the shed and garage. I've admired the sunbursts on other people's Victorian homes, and now I have some of my very own. I kept waiting for the perfect day to photograph my garden: overcast enough so that it wasn't a glarey blur, bright enough that the wildflowers were open. And then the day came! And my camera's batteries were dead. So, glarey it is, but pretty too, I hope.

( Onward... )

Here are some garden pics. Yay?! I've got my first couple of dahlia flowers! The weather here has been crazy warm, which for here means a sweatshirt may not be needed. "What is this strange moisture?" I asked the Mister. It turns out it is this thing called perspiration. What is up with that? My mom talked me into going to Agate Beach with her. Agate Beach is nice. You know those hot rock massages? The beach has patches of those rocks, and you just lay on them and voila, free massage. It was pretty sweet. Still, the weather has been wonderful for my garden.

( Lemme show you! )

The dahlia trip was wonderful. The drive up the coast is breath-taking and the weather was perfect. The Mister laughs when I squeak in fear as I negotiate Highway 101. In places it clings to the side of a crumbling cliff twenty stories above the ocean. It's OK that he laughs because I only do it to make him laugh, but all that immense blue space IS scary, and you can tell that the road only exists because some very smart people with a lot of money have taken it as a personal engineering challenge. Our last real kid-free vacation was 12 years ago, and though we lived far away at the time, it just happened to also be a free-wheeling road trip down the same coastline. At the time, we knew that life was going to be changing. We were starting a family. We were also dissatisfied with where we were. We had good jobs, good health, but were greedy enough to want something different. Our 1999 trip was a vacation, a survey of cheap Oregon motels, and a last hurrah, but it was also to scout out towns on the coast for a new start. I started out this trip with nothing more in mind than playing hooky and seeing some beautiful flowers, but once we were on the road it felt like closing a circle of sorts and it was good.

( Onward for vacation pics )

I took a chance on a tiny grower that offers all their varieties for $4 on the strength of one positive review. We'll see what happens. I exchanged chatty emails with the owner who (by his own report) is a retired rodeo bull rider who also breeds cats, horses and pit bull dogs. I hope he comes out of major back surgery alright. (Bull riding: bad for your back. Who knew? Actually, I did. He's not the first professional cowboy I've met with bad back.)

( because you can't possibly want to look at more )

I googled on the first sentence of my guest editorial for the local paper today. I got 373 results. Blogs and websites picked it up. I'm tickled that the piece is reaching much farther than our obscure local paper. It's also fun to see my name as byline.

Also, I went crazy and ordered some Dahlia tubers for next spring. I'm so excited!

( Wanna see? )

And I even took pictures. Plus my garden in August. I've failed to take pics at the beginning of Sept. and Oct. Ah well.

( Read more... )

I cut my finger whilst washing dishes this afternoon, so I'm cheering myself out of my pout by futzing around on the internet. This morning I went outside and found this:



( It's called Naughty Nineties )

My new acquisitions! It's the usual mix of Nightmare Before Christmas pins and Disney pins celebrating vicious amoral thieves living the the 17th century, with my sexay poster of the solar system interposed between them and the steel they love so much. No blood blisters this time.

( pics ahoy )