Sorry to Make Anybody Worry.....

I'm terribly sorry I worried anybody..... Things have been ok here, just busy. Soccer 3 nights a week, gardening tasks all the time..... Work, all the time. Hanging out, outside, with the neighbours when it's nice out.....

I've got a whole lot of pictures to share, though!!! *grin*

First, one I just couldn't resist taking..... Scott and Tay were sitting on the couch one evening, watching a Nascar race Scott had recorded..... The dogs told me it was time to go outside to go potty, but when I came out of the computer room, this was what I found:

The two of them, sprawled out on the couch, side by side, fast asleep..... As soon as I got this pic, I sent Tay to bed, and woke Scott up.... He also wound up heading to bed. The race was recorded, so he finished watching it the next day. But this picture was just too precious to pass up.


Next, some pictures of my lilac bush in full bloom...... I really wish lilacs lasted longer than they do. I love burying my nose in the blossoms and just breathing in deeply. But, that is only possible for about 1 week of the year.




Next, some pictures of the smoky skies around my house last week...... We've had a few fires burning in areas close to our area, and the smoke is nasty thick some days. It's hard to show the actual color with these pictures, but it was a deep, muddy tan. Very, very gross.



These were taken from the end of my street, looking toward the refinery that my street is named after. This is facing south.



But, the last one here is taken looking back up the street toward my house, and the blue skies off in the North. Just to try to give some idea of the difference in color between North and South.

Next, I wanted to show some pictures of the blooming flower beds in my front yard!!! The first is there around the birch tree, the alyssum is actually blooming!!!! And LOTS of it!

Here you get some idea of the color, if you click on the pic. The alyssum was 1 pack of seed for white flowers and 1 pack of seed for purple flowers. I mixed them together in an old baby-food jar, then just sprinkled them as evenly as I could. I'm rather pleased with the result. And they do smell sweet!


Here's a pic of the flower-bed along the front of the house...... From a bit of a distance so you can see how much actual green sprouted up. Unfortunately I sprinkled much more seed through the middle than I did on either end. So, both ends are a bit bare as compared to the center of the bed.

A bit of a close-up of some of the flax I sprinkled out...... It came up very well, and a few of them are blooming so far.

Here's a picture of one of the pretty blue flax blooms.


Now, I don't know WHAT these buds will be when they bloom, but I hope you can see the deep red of the bud on the right, and the deep blue of the bud on the left. There are lots more buds, but most of them are red.


Now, just to give you some idea of the thickness of what will be mostly poppies...... *grin* As I said, I sprinkled far more through the middle than I thought I had. These are mostly poppies, with some flax in the back, as well as a fair sprinkling of that flower I just showed above.

That's it for pictures......

Veggie garden-wise, things are kinda wierd this year. The lettuce and spinach over at the FIL's house didn't come up very well, first planting. We replanted lettuce a couple of weeks back, and it's finally coming up. Then the spinach came up the second time around, and bolted almost immediately. The same has happened with what spinach I planted in the back of my house..... few plants, but they bolted immediately. I've got NO Swiss chard growing back there, and my beets are kinda few & far between. As with last year, though.... My turnips have taken off. My potatoes are doing extraordinarily well, as well.... And I do have some lettuce back there to harvest, but not as much as I'd like. My carrot seed came up, as did the onion seed I planted just for experiment. But I doubt either carrot or onion will get big enough to actually do much with. I need to go thin, even so. My cabbage and broccoli plants are doing well, however. I look forward to some broccoli here soon. Also, 1 of my tomato plants (received from a friend, when none of mine "took") has flowers, and 2 of the other 3 are bearing buds, but not quite flowered yet. My single zucchini plant (from the second planting!) is slow-growing this year, but I got a bush-scallop plant that looks like it may over-take the zucchini, at the speed with which it's growing. (I planted the bush-scallop seed as a third planting in that barrel, trying to get SOMETHING to grow!) My rhubarb is in major need of harvesting, but it's just so danged hot outside that I really don't feel like it. My sunset runner beans are doing the same thing they did last year, growing so slowly that I doubt I'm going to get any beans off them again this year either. I don't think I'll try growing them over here next year again, if they don't do SOMETHING this year. And the few corn seeds I interspersed between the bean plants sprouted, but then have languished in the heat. They're only a few inches tall. However, the corn plants over at the FIL's house are tall enough to start bearing ears..... We'll see if we actually get anything from them this year. I'm willing to try corn again next year, that's for sure. But with a different kind of bean if those sunset runner beans don't produce adequately.

As for the whole "Food Independence Days Challenge", I've rather fallen off the band-wagon, I'm afraid.

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Let's see, what else is going on??? Soccer is going well. We've lot one game out of 12. The one game we lost, our team came in assuming automatically that they'd stomp the other team, and didn't bother to really "bring it" and therefore lost when it happened that the opposing team was better the second time around than they had been the first game we played against them. Oh well...... Our girls just weren't as ready as they should have been, and they were cocky, and stomping is what happens when you get too cocky and don't "bring your A-Game". But, 11-1 is a very good ratio of wins to losses, even so.

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Work has been..... Well.... Work, quite honestly. It's been tedious and frustrating for quite a while now. Really makes me wish I could even just take a job back out here at NP branch as a 10 hour casual page again. But we need the insurance that my current position supplies. Also, the air circulation system (which hasn't worked right in the 4 years I've been working at Noel Wien Lib.) pooped out completely about a month ago. It was a 30 year old system and the borough mayor was telling the maintenance guys that the proverbial duct tape and bubble gum was going to have to be sufficient. The maintenance guys stuck to their guns, though, and were able to talk the mayor into springing for some new parts, though not a completely new system. It's been reassembled with the new parts in place and when I left on Friday, the building was finally tolerable. I'm not kidding you when I say that as hot as it has been outside this past week, our temperatures IN the building were well into the 90's. (The outside temperatures hit up in the 90's and a couple of people reported even closer to 100 degrees at individual houses and work-places, in the shade. Including Scott's workplace, at 97 deg. F.) There are no openable windows in the library building, and only 4 exterior doors, if you include the garage door where the Bookmobile vehical and the courier vehical are stored. So, with all doors remaining shut, no windows to open...... It was a stuffy, insufferable 90+ degrees F. INSIDE the building. My coworkers and I were almost all dealing with feelings of heat-exaustion and light-headed-ness..... Then when you factor in that so many people in the building were adding body heat, and the ice-maker in the fridge/freezer just couldn't keep up with employee demand..... I wound up leaving early on Thursday. I just couldn't take another full day of that.

Friday, when I went back in for my usual short day, the air was back up and running, though it sounds like the AC will still be set considerably warmer than a great many of us would like it to be. I don't understand why the cold-blooded people get to set the limit on the AC in the summer. They can always put ON more clothes, but it gets pretty indecent if those of us who are too warm continue to peel off layers. *wink* Even the library director joked (when I commented how much I was looking forward to getting off work on Wednesday and going home to change into something "highly work inappropriate") that he was considering going home and just stripping altogether. *wry smile* Coming from our usually very proper & polite (though very good humored Southern Gentleman) library director, that was rather shockingly funny.

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My baby sis was back in town this weekend for her best friend's wedding. Apparently she brought divorce papers with her, but she never bothered to call and see about meeting up with Tay and I, or even asking Scott to serve the papers to her ex. (Her ex apparently moved back here after Kori dumped his dumb ass and moved to Spokane.) Scott was kinda hoping Kori'd ask him to serve the papers to Brandon. He thinks he'd be good at it. *wink* I was hoping Kori'd call and ask to meet up. I'd have liked to see how much Kiara has grown in the past year.

But, I'm not terribly suprised (sp?) that Kori didn't call. Apparently her newest loser-boyfriend didn't come through with the travel plans he'd promised to Kori, and left her hanging without fantastic rental car, and upscale hotel-room reservations. Therefore, Kori was going to have to stay with the best friend and fiancee, and no rental car. And Kori isn't about to call me when she doesn't have something to brag about or show off. Don't know why she feels the need to one-up me all the time, or feels like she's got to show off, but since she couldn't show off a fancy ride, or brag about a stay at Pike's Lodge, she didn't call at all..... *shrug* Whatever.

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I think that about covers it for now. I've got to get offline, as we're heading over to the inlaw's for supper at 3:30.

Sorry I've been such a lousy blogger friend. I'll try to do better.

Hope y'all have a Blessed Week!