I Heart Spring!

Especially since Spring lasts only a couple of weeks here. We have to take advantage of it while we can because the heat will be unbearable soon.

Today, Scruffybutt helped me plant flowers in containers on the front porch:

She did good!

(I heart porches, too.)

Last December, I planted the tulips from this package:




And these are what just came up:




Kind of disappointing, but ...



When I put them all in a vase along with a couple of daffodils, it wasn't so bad.

How's the writing going? Well, I'm glad you asked. :) I was going to write the "arraignment" scene I'd planned since the beginning of the Work (ahem), so first I pulled out my fat Legal Research folder and found my notes and printouts about arraignments under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Then I realized that I had done that research before I had decided (thanks to Pooks' suggestion) to have my protagonist go on the run. Okay, no problem, I thought - I'll just add that crime to the murder charge. Back online I went only to discover that the term "fugitive from justice" only applies to interstate travel, whereas my guy runs intrastate. What's it called when you run from the law without crossing state lines? I tried searching all kinds of terms, to no avail. Something like that can really screw up a whole day. Fortunately, I do have a friend of a friend who's a criminal lawyer (yes, I know, another lawyer joke; sorry) but I wanted to get all of my "legal" scenes written first so that he could review everything at one time instead of bugging him every few days. Eh. For now, I'm just going with the murder rap.

In other news, west Texas blew in over the weekend. I hadn't seen an old-fashioned dust storm in years, and this was a beaut. The wind removed a huge metal awning for us on the balcony - well, almost - it was hanging by three very tired screws when Tomcat got up there to rescue it before it landed on the neighbor's car.

My first tulips are blooming, and the daffodils and other bulbs I planted are coming up. The next freeze can't be too far away!

Happy Monday everyone.

Flower Power

[Previously Posted on my Vox Blog Sep 8, 2006 at 5:07 PM]
[There were pictures with this post, but Blogger is being difficult today and won't upload them.]

Grace, the artist, and I went to Home Depot today so we could get some mums. Honestly, after losing so many plants over this brutal Texas summer, we were desperate to find something to plant now that it's cooled all the way down to the lower 90s! Maybe we were jumping the gun just a wee bit, but mums we hunted and mums we brought home. I'll put mine in pots on the front porch over the weekend and take pictures.

When I tried to walk by the bulbs, I started feeling lightheaded. The thing is, if bulbs are already on display in the garden department, then fall is officially on the way, which means cooler weather, and being able to go out-of-doors of an afternoon to the ... (and here I got so giddy I almost swooned) ... to the cutting garden! Visions of having a cutting garden, and arranging flowers for my new dining table made me weak in the knees.


100_0636.jpg (BTW, that's Grace, the artist, in the background.) I've never been much into gardening (a long story, that), but now my fantasy was showing me in gorgeous, riotous color that I could have all the bulbs I wanted along the side of the house. All I'd have to do was dig out and prepare a bed for bulbs, plant them, and in the spring there would be tons of flowers. Of course, when I say "dig out" I mean Tomcat will do that part for me (ahem - I wuv u, Schmoopie.)

In this euphoric state, I started choosing bulbs for my cutting garden - no, make that My Cutting Garden - that would go with the dining room decor. I got these:


100_0660.jpg That's 40 bulbs each of tulips, daffodils, and ranunculous, plus 12 of fresia. I hope that will be enough.
Do you remember a book called Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach? Somewhere in there, probably in one of her fall month entries, Sarah described her first experience with planting tulips, which was the same as mine, many years ago: she followed the instructions that came with the bulbs and planted them four inches apart (another method is to take a handful of bulbs and scatter them on the ground, planting them where they land). She waited all during autumn and winter, expecting to be rewarded with dramatic masses of gorgeous blooms. That didn't happen. What she got were a few spindly tulips here and there, sans drama.
Like me, Sarah thought the problem must be due to something she had done/not done correctly. I knew her pain. One fall day years later, she said, she came across a man planting bulbs in an area where she had seen tulips blooming their little heads off, so she stopped and asked him how he managed that. He told her to ignore the instructions that come with the bulbs and do this instead: dig a hole and plant five bulbs - one in the middle, the others surrounding it. Sarah said when she planted her tulips that way, she was never again disappointed!
That's how I'm going to do it this time, and if that doesn't work I'll probably give up (and Tomcat will be very annoyed about digging that flower bed.)

Gardening Isn't For Sissies

That's what Grace, the artist/gardener told me yesterday. My aching back agreed. But you know what? I had so much fun!

First, going to Home Depot's garden department with a gal pal instead of the hubster is a much different experience. Grace and I spent a leisurely hour and a half wandering around looking at EVERYTHING, choosing this, choosing that, changing our minds, putting things back, choosing something else, grouping things together to see how they look, finally deciding on something but checking all 47 specimens to get the best one ... I tell you, it was heaven. Someone said that men, being hunters, want to go in for a specific item, kill it with their credit card, and leave. Women, being gatherers, want to take their time and look at everything first.

Then we had brunch. (Men don't do brunch. They grab a bite to eat.)

Then we got to play in the dirt. The weather was great, for a change, and we had the morning shade to work in. We repotted some snapdragons that had somehow survived a year of neglect, then put in six holly bushes. She showed me how to fill each hole with water, let it sink in, then put the plant inside and fill the hole again, this time letting the force of the water loosen the roots. By the time I had one hole dug, she had done the other five because she is awesome.

We filled the two planter boxes with white petunias and a lovely little trailing ivy. I'm already thinking of what to put there in the "fall." (We don't actually have four seasons here, only two - hot and cold.)

We put the mulch down - did you know that you're not supposed to put the mulch against the trunk of the bush because it might rot? And did you know that hardwood mulch is the best because it won't float away during a heavy rain?

When finished, we tidied everything up, and stood back to admire it all. We were sweaty and had dirt under our fingernails. Note to self: I will have to get some big-girl gloves. Grace said the gloves I had on were for ladies who go out to the cutting garden of a morning. Sissies.

Gonna Go Play in the Dirt

Gah! I watched the three-hour Survivor finale last night. Cirie couldn't win, which was obvious right away since she couldn't get that dang fire to burn high enough in the first thirty minutes. But did I quit watching there? No! I stayed with it, I survived. All the way to seeing Danielle win immunity (!) and make it to the final two. Then the other deserving member, Terry, was booted off. Why did I watch this? It wasn't like there was nothing else on! Oh well, at least Terry and Cirie got new cars. And at least Danielle didn't win.

Meanwhile, I was missing the finales of West Wing, Desperate Housewives, and Grey's Anatomy. Tomcat taped those for us, so don't tell me what happened!

Then I got an email from Grace, the artist, which said "OMG! Did you see Grey's Anatomy?" No. I was watching Shane being a jerk at Tribal Council.

So today I'm gonna go play in the dirt. Grace, the gardener, is going to help me pick out some plants for the front flower beds at Maxwell House. Tomcat and I prepared the beds on Saturday. I don't think we did it right, even though I had emailed and called Grace for days for instructions on compost-to-soil ratios and stuff like that. When we were finished, I called her to ask whether to put the mulch down then, or wait 'til after we put the plants in (wait.)

Then when I told her that I bought too much soil and had lots of bags left over, she said, "How can you get too much --" but then she didn't finish the sentence. She sounded a tad, um, exasperated. See, this is why I don't think we did it right.

I'm taking up gardening in my 50s (a late bloomer.) Tomcat and I spent most of Sunday in recovery. Well, Tomcat did get out and mow the front and back yards yesterday. He said this whole weekend - schlepping dirt around in a wheelbarrow and digging and mixing compost into flower beds and mowing and trimming - was conduct unbecoming an Episcopalian.

We're going to be moving over to Maxwell House in a couple of weeks. Can we survive? Wait - don't tell me!