A Summer Sunday

Every morning after I wake up I realize that I get to have coffee. And on weekends I realize I get to have it while sitting on the couch, relaxing. It’s such a small delight but it is one that makes me very happy.

For the moment the house is quiet as Forest and Chris are on the porch working on a leaky faucet. There’s a rosy wolf snail crawling on the siding on the porch and someone is chainsawing across the pond. Last night’s thunderstorms are gone and we’ve got a warm and sunny morning gracing our day. Today I’m hoping for no rain so that I can do some garden chores that I didn’t get to yesterday. It’s time to get another last summer crop sown, something I wanted to do about two weeks ago but I just hadn’t gotten to it. The blackberries are done and I need to prune the dead vines off the fence so it will look a bit cleaner and let the new vines grow for next season’s crop.

My birthday was last week—37! Didn’t I just turn 30?—and I got a couple of garden related items from Chris’ mom: a butterfly tent for raising caterpillars and Gaia’s Garden, a book about permaculture. I did see a monarch the other day, something I hadn’t seen for awhile, so maybe they will be migrating back through here soon. The milkweed became its own ecosystem this year when the oleander aphid population swelled, and the milkweed bug population blossomed, and then the ladybugs came in with their are cute alligator-like larvae all over the plants, in addition to juvenile green lynx spiders. I also noticed something different than I was used to and I figured out that it might have been a syrphid fly larvae. I’m sure there were/are other critters that I haven’t seen yet but it has been such a fun experience seeing what all have made the milkweed home this summer. I need to start looking more carefully for monarch eggs so I can begin raising them.

Over Christmas I received some money and Amazon giftcards from family and mostly squirreled away the money until I could figure out what to buy. I used some of the cash to beef up my summer clothing wardrobe a few months ago but I finally put some other birthday money into the pot and decided to buy a full sized digital piano. I played piano through my growing up years on a smaller sized keyboard and have always wanted an actual piano. A piano is not in the cards at the moment but a decent beginner keyboard was so I found one with good reviews on Amazon and it arrived last week. I still have all of my sheet music from those formative years and while I am very rusty I can manage to play some of the very basic tunes. I’m having to remember where to place my fingers and how to read some of the notes (thank you younger self for writing in the notes!) and now I need to Google some of the other accompanying symbols and language to get up to speed. I’m hoping with some practice I can be decent enough to teach Forest a little and maybe he will want to learn himself in a few years. We’ll see!

If you don’t visit the site much and read in a feed reader or via email, could you pop over to the blog and check it out? I actually updated to a WordPress theme instead of keeping the coded HTML that I’ve used for years. It took some banging around with dealing with the CSS but I finally got it to look decent, but if you are viewing it on a phone, tablet, or just another computer, can you take a peek and make sure it looks alright to you too? It had been awhile since I did any banner changes and I also streamlined a bit more on the side bar. I have a few more favorite posts I want to add to the side but other than that I think it is how it is going to look for good while.

Happy Sunday friends!