To Live Again a Butterfly

The swallowtails have taken advantage of our dill.

Pretty

I ditched my friends and their invitation to pub trivia on Sunday to "work in my yard." Except it was true! Look.



We planted Salvia:



Some mystery plant that didn't have a tag on it and we forgot what it was by the time we got it home:



White Mealy Sage:



Verbena (which looked pretty much D-E-A-D with a capital D a few hours later. I watered it, so we'll see.)



Plumbago:



We planted some other things, too, but they don't have flowers yet. Pictures of leaves are pretty boring, so I didn't bother. A couple of things we planted earlier are looking lovely, however.

Lantana:



Bee Balm:



Other Lantana:



Poppies: (Just for decoration. No heroin manufacturing going on here. No, siree!)



And, Cosmos:



Still to come: photos of Ireland and the vegetable garden that ate Dallas.

Unruly Duckling: Where is She Now?

Wow. It's been about two months since I last posted. It seems like longer, actually.

I was busy having a teeny, weeny nervous breakdown and quitting my job. The good news is that I have found my true calling as a semi-housebound agoraphobe with a burgeoning fixation on clean base boards, as well as a penchant for hyperbole. (evidently)

When I quit my job, I was afraid that I would regret it and that I was just blaming my job for my unhappiness when I really had more serious issues I wasn't addressing. However, I feel 99% better since quitting, so I think it was the right decision. Objectively, there wasn't anything so horrible about that job that should have made me utterly miserable, and I wish I could figure it out, but I'm tired of thinking about it. So: moving on...

I am "working" for a child care agency providing babysitting and temporary day care staffing. I say "working" because they haven't had an assignment for me in almost 3 weeks. That's a little bit my fault because I discovered the hard way that the agency appreciates it when you actually return their call when they want to offer you work. Since I lost one assignment for not calling them back for five hours, I've been obsessively checking my voicemail to no avail.

However, I really did enjoy the one week they had me working at the day care of a fitness center. Did you know that 40% of children are now named "Colin"? (not based on a scientific sample)

In other news, I took a really awesome trip to Ireland with The Husband and 3 of our friends. I'll post some pictures pretty soon. Also, our vegetable garden is going coo-coo bananas. Do any of you want some home-grown green beans or some Swiss chard? I can totally hook you up. The tomatoes, however, will be all mine (and The Husband's).

Looking forward, I may take another stab at this whole gainful employment thing. I'm also taking some tiny little baby steps towards being a foster parent. The Husband thinks maybe we could get some of those polygamous sect kids to teach me how to sew and can vegetables and stuff. In the long term, I'm becoming more enamored with the idea of getting my Masters degree in Counseling. However, I missed the deadline for this fall semester, so I have many months to get distracted from that whole project.

By the way, I signed up for that Twitter thing that all the cool kids are talking about. I'm not sure I really get it, but feel free to Twit at me.

Just Call Me Farmer Duckling

The Husband and I spent most of the last two weekends putting in a new flower bed.

First we had to break ground.



Just digging up this perimeter resulted in two wheelbarrows full of grass and dirt.



It turns out that The Husband and I kind of suck at digging, so we brought in his mom for some expert help. With her assistance we cleared the bed in a few hours.



Yesterday, we got to do the easy part: plant stuff.



These plants have barely been surviving for the past couple of years in pots that were too small and enduring much neglect, just biding their time until they could put down real roots. The Husband bought several of these plants for me on my first birthday after we were married. He grew the Eve's Necklace from seed. The plan all along was to put these plants in the ground when we had a home of our own.

Random Photo Friday - Gardening Edition

It came as quite a surprise to me that I have an entire folder on my computer devoted to pictures of tomatoes from November 2005 - mostly courtesy of The Husband, I suspect. He has instilled in me an appreciation for botanical photography that was previously lacking.



We were 2/3 successful in 2005 in our tomato-growing efforts. Of two of our three bushes produced prodigiously, and yummily may I add. Sometimes I would stand in the yard, picking tomatoes right off the vine and popping them in my mouth because there's nothing better than a perfectly ripe tomato still warm from the sun.

The singular spicy green earthy scent of the tomato plants would transport me back twenty years to when my grandmother was still strong and blessed with the greenest thumb I've ever seen. Because of her efforts I've known the pleasure of eating tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, green beans, and even peanuts fresh from the garden.

Now that my grandmother is frail and forgetful, she can't grow her vegetables any more. My parents have moved into the small cottage next to the garden plot to watch after her, and they've cleared out the dead stalks and vines to plant a butterfly garden - a peaceful place to sit and be still rather than to stoop and bend and weed and harvest.

If my grandmother showed me the rewards of coaxing and cultivating nature, my parents were instrumental in teaching me the pleasures of watching and understanding. We spent most of the vacations of my childhood camping. (We were too poor to afford much of anything else.) We would walk in the woods talking about different kinds of birds and flowers and berries and paddle canoes finding alligators and trees felled by beavers.

Little by little, however, I've let myself spend way too many hours in front of the television and the computer screen. The longer I let it go on, the less energy or motivation I have to tear myself away. At this point I'm tempted to make a dramatic gesture to reacquaint myself with the outside world, like quitting my job and setting up a yurt on the steppes of Mongolia or something, but that'll have to wait until it stops being so damn hot outside.

Little Pink Happy Flowers

After wallowing in tragedy like I was yesterday, I thought I would share this.



Last week my geranium was pelted with icy-cold rain and flung into a dark, unheated garage for several days while the temperature hovered around freezing. Once I got around to rescuing it from its miserable emergency shelter, it already had a tiny pink bud on it. Now this neglected little twig has three flowers on it and more on the way. It's amazing how beautiful things manage to persist.

The Last Harvest

It was 75 degrees and muggy outside as I drove home from work tonight. A couple of hours later The Husband and I found ourselves wearing pajamas and rain coats, standing in a cold rain, picking the last few tomatoes and peppers, and chucking all our potted plants in the garage.

I knew it was coming, but it's so hard to believe winter is really here when there are ripe tomatoes on the vine.