These Days | July

I’m sure one day things will calm down and life will be semi-normal, instead of days filled with unpacking, cleaning and getting my head on straight. If I said I didn’t feel overwhelmed in this month I’d be lying. It’s been one big overwhelming thing after another. And while most of it might seem rather innocuous, things begin to wear on you. To the point that watching episode after episode of season 1 of Alias makes things all better. Well. Mostly. Because you know that season 3 will come eventually and that was the crap season.

We’ve had two weekends of visitors, the first bringing Chris’ brother Neil and his girlfriend. They were the heroes that helped us unload our POD and help Chris get our burn pile down to a nearly non-existent size. Well, at least the pile in the backyard. The front yard is still one big pile of dead loblolly pine trees.

This last weekend my mom, brother and his wife, and their two kids came to visit. We got a lot of boxes unpacked and some cleaning done in the midst of chasing after a near 4 year old and near 1 year old. And laughing a lot! I’m liking the feedback we’ve been getting on our house—everyone likes it so far and we’ve been nominated to host Thanksgiving this year. With the exception of a few years, our normal Thanksgiving routine is camping of some sort. However, if folks want to come for Thanksgiving I think we can accommodate that! Plus, we can always camp in our backyard!

So, my days have been to get up, go to work, maybe come home at lunch if the house is navigable, come home in the evenings and unpack. To get ready for my family and for my visitors next weekend (three of my friends and a total of their four kids) I’ve moved all of the boxes I have no desire to open yet (shells, decorations, photo albums, and more) to our third bedroom along with other wall photographs and furniture we don’t know where to place. With that done the space seems more manageable.

The last thing my family helped in unpacking was my art studio. The furniture was arranged and some boxes were unpacked but I’ll have to spend some time this week putting things where I want. I was amazed at how much stock I had and what variety too. I am pretty sure I can entertain myself for hours! I do know that looking at my fabric stash I am itching to make a rag rug for the room.

As for the garden, I had hoped the apathy I felt about summer gardening in Florida would go away in Texas, but no, it has returned. Gardening in the summer is difficult. What works? Eggplant, okra, peppers, melons, sweet potatoes, sometimes squash/sometimes not, beans for awhile, and corn seems ok. I went the longest amount of time away from the garden, 1.5 weeks, before going again. We’d had rain nearly daily so I felt that at least that aspect was taken care of and I could just hope that the rest would handle itself. It mostly did, but the tomatoes are decrepit, the spaghetti squash completely bit the dust as did one melon bed and another melon bed looks quite unhappy. I will be very happy when we are able to get our garden set up here so I can just manage it from home.

Somewhere in all of this I will start writing here again. We finally got internet at the house so I will be able to do that. I miss taking photos too. I hardly took any this weekend and I am usually taking some of my niece and nephew any chance I can get.

So, that’s where I am at. How about you?

I’m at Sprout Dispatch today. Come say hi!