Hello, Beautiful

I went out to nab the newspaper this morning and look who showed up, the first Stargazer Lily.  I was afraid that all of the pink ones hadn't survived the winter but here's one proving me wrong.  It's a lot littler than they were last summer but it's alive, that's what counts.  Next to it is a much bigger lily plant that I suspect is the same variety only white.  I can't wait until those buds open.  Dad's rose is making up for lost time, there're blooms all over the plant, and yesterday's rosebud is today's rose.  Funny how that happens.


In the back garden a few daisies have opened with many, many more to come, and the bee balm is blooming too.  I'm loving the planter of coleus.  I need to remember to plant that every year, it's just so bright, colorful, and cheerful.

We're invited to a picnic today and I'm in charge of bringing dessert.  It's rhubarb season and I have a bang-up recipe for a rhubarb "cake," well, it's a bit more like a lemon bar, you know, with a cookie crust and a moist custard-y top, it's deadly delicious.  But some of the attendees don't like rhubarb (can you imagine?) so I also whipped up a pan of brownies with a few white chocolate chips sprinkled in, although I suspect that there might be those that sample from both dishes.

At knitting last night Lyn handed me a little pink sweater she made for LC.  Lyn had crocheted a pink sweater for herself, got it done, and hated it, so she ripped it out and is using the yarn for other things, the first of which was a little crocheted sweater for the baby.  Isn't it cute?  Those are pearly snaps, so much easier to use than buttons.  Thanks, Lyn!  (Harmony Cafe closed for the holiday at 4 PM so MW who volunteers at the Wildlife Sanctuary got permission for us to use one of their meeting rooms until 7:45.  It worked out just fine, so we knitted in a room filled with fossils and geodes and carved ducks.  It was great.)

In the "are you kidding me???" department, I realized after baking yesterday that the house was getting warmer instead of cooler even though the air conditioner was running.  I put my hand down by a vent and it was blowing warm instead of cool.  I checked the thermostat to make sure someone hadn't accidentally turned on the Heat instead of the Cool but that was firmly on the Cool side.  Then I went out to check the outside a/c unit.  Being the keen observer I am, I immediately noticed the problem.  The big silver fan that looks like a propeller was lying cockeyed in the housing, detached from its place on the motor.  That was wrong, even I could tell that.  Naturally since it was July 4th no one answered the Fixit phone and no one called us back.  I just called the Fixit this morning, got the answering service, and the on-call tech will call me back.  Since we just had nearly $1000 worth of service on the thing I'm guessing that the tech didn't tighten it on enough or didn't use a lock nut.  Either way, I don't expect to have to pay for this, or I'm not going down without a fight.  Gah.

July 5--Mesopotamia, Head of a Man.  He stared up at Bonny from the bottom of the pit.  At first she thought it was a body and was about to call 9-1-1 but she made herself look closer.  It was carved ivory head, probably made a few centuries before the birth of Christ.  What it was doing in her garden in Wisconsin, she did not know.  Recalling her anthropology classes from her university days way back in the early 1970s and one summer spent on a dig in Illinois, she took lots of measurements and pictures before carefully levering it out of the hole she had planned to plant a witch hazel bush in.  She knew any scientist would want to examine the head "in situ" (where she had found it) but she was too eager to see it up close and she wanted to plant her bush before the roots dried out.  Horticulture before archaeology, that was her motto, at least for today.

Well, the Fixit man just called and said that the previous Fixit man wouldn't have had to remove the fan to do the work he did last month, so he'll be over in an hour and a half to see about fixing it because he can't guarantee that there'll be room in the schedule to fix it on Monday.  Of course if we join the "Comfort Club" it'd only be a $99 service fee today instead of $189.  When the last guy told us about it, it seemed expensive to join... it might seem less expensive later today.  I love modern life.
--Barbara