Garden-y Things

Early this morning I went out to fill the birdbaths, decided to water everything and look what I found.  The best discovery was leaves on the shrub rose that I thought was dead.  This weekend I'll carefully take off the chicken wire, trim out the dead canes, weed out the violets around the base, and give it a little rose food for encouragement.

The poppy buds are standing tall in their green fuzziness.  I can't wait for them to open.  I need to go to the garden center for an acorn squash plant for the garden, maybe I'll find some more poppies to replant along the west side of the house.  Plants are on sale now, you know.

Two of the irises are blooming.  They're laying on the ground because the flowers are too heavy for the spindly stems but they're blooming.  Yay!


On my way to work yesterday I stopped to deliver the bag of peels to the chickens.  They loved me... well, they loved what I brought them.  They are such dumb creatures, not even smart enough to go in out of the rain, but they zeroed in on the few blueberries (under- or overripe) in the mix and gobbled them up right away.  Next on the list were the Brussels sprouts leaves and I'm sure that by the end of the day all that was left was the pineapple rind.  I like it when DS & DIL1 go away for a day or so and ask me to check for eggs.  I get to keep them then too.  (I'm easily amused.)  Maybe I can convince them to go away more often... except they're pretty exhausted.  They're new parents, you know, they have LC the wonder baby.  Or I could just sneak over there when they're sleeping.  Hee hee.

Mrs. Boss came to the dive shop yesterday to mow the lawn and do VIPs (annual visual inspections) on 12 of the shop rental tanks and a few customers' ones.  I got to take off the stickers, put on new ones, put on new o-rings, and screw in the valves.  Oh, and fill them too.  We worked together on the huge chore and got it done.  It's a lot of hauling of heavy steel tanks thither and yon, it's hot work too, at least for me who is an enthusiastic sweat-er, but I'd rather have hot, hard work to do than sit like a toad under a mushroom all day.  AND I got a couple inches of bib knitted once we were done.  Win-win.

June 6--Man Ray, Nancy Cunard.  The woman at the lunch counter had a dozen bangles on each arm.  Kay tried to look away but she was riveted.  It was the style to wear a stack, three or four, of mismatched bracelets but the woman had gone overboard.  She looked well-to-do, a little skinny perhaps, but her clothes sure didn't come from Woolworth's.  And her shoes.  Those were handmade Italian leather, Kay thought, once in a lifetime shoes for a lucky few.  The woman was sipping a cup of coffee.  When she picked up her cup the bangles slid toward her elbow--click, click, click.  When she set the cup back in the saucer they slid back--clack, clack, clack.  She developed a kind of rhythm.  Click, click, click, sip, clack, clack, clack, plink.  Kay forgot her own cup of coffee and egg salad sandwich.  She watched as if a rare tropical bird had landed in the grungy bus station diner.

The library branch was closed when I stopped last night after work so I want to zoom over there this morning and get my book... and maybe one on CDs too, since they don't seem to have it on audiobook.  They should put all the books, ALL THE BOOKS, on audiobooks so I can listen to them all on my iPod or Kindle.  Just saying.  23-skiddoo!
--Barbara