Gladiolas

One of my all time favorite flowers. Certainly they are easy to grow, showy, most times colorful. What more could a person want in a summer flowering bulb?

The only picture I have of my great grandmother has her holding a big armful of glads, a flower she was well known for growing. Even in her elderly years she always grew them.

I love all the colors of glads one can find in a catalog, but my all time favorites, because they always do so well for me are these white ones.

Fruits of the Spirit Garden

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Against such things there is no law." Galatians 5:22-23

Welcome to my little "fruit of the spirit" garden. It used to be my "front door" garden. But I had some bricks laying around that were an odd size and I didn't know what to do with them. For years I've been wanting some stones with words or some similar decorative item for my front door garden. So, I thought, why not use those bricks and once I decided that, the idea popped into my head to paint the fruits of the spirit on them. Well, it turns out, I'm one brick short, I think I'm missing gentleness, but eventually I'll find a similar brick and put that in there too. These are not the best pictures of this little garden, but you get the idea of it.

I must say, when the dogs come trying to "help" me when I'm weeding and mash a prized plant in the process, it's real hard to remember gentleness and self-control even when they're written on bricks in front of me. I've never had as much trouble gardening with a dog as I've had with this yellow dog. Flash the Wonder Dog learned to stay out of the flower beds. Good old Buddy learned to just lay down behind me wherever I was working. Sometimes I tripped over him, but he wasn't a problem while I was working. Lady-BUG is convinced she should be between me and whatever I'm doing, whether it's weeding, or trimming grass or planting.

Caught this picture of an Easter lily just before it opened. When they're not forced for Easter, but just allowed to grow in the garden, Easter lilies bloom in July, just after my other lilies do. I have several around the yard, and they were all salvaged from the after Easter dumping of the lilies from church over the past couple years. This one is from two years ago and this is the first time it's bloomed. Well worth the wait.

Tomorrow: Gladiolas

Summer "Vacation"

Ok folks, here's the answer to that dreaded question I mentioned awhile back. "What did you do on your summer vacation?" Well, I don't get vacations. So sometimes I take a day and call it my vacation. Sunday was IT. I arranged my schedule weeks in advance so as to have nothing going on this past Sunday so that I could go with my mom and my aunt to a family reunion. And, wonder of wonders, we got my son and one of my daughters to go along with.

We set off on Sunday morning with coolers in the trunk, mom driving, aunt in the front seat, me and DS in the back. Drove 100 miles or more down the interstate and met DD at a gas station and then she climbed in the back seat with us. What a load!!! Mom said the car handled a little funny. I said that was not surprising with over a quarter of a ton of weight crammed in the back seat! We drove on down the road a bit to the little town where the reunion is held.

When I say little town, I mean truly little, like say 500 folks, but bigger than the town where I live. This town is big enough it still has a grocery store and a hardware store and a school. We got to the town hall where the reunion is held and I said, "I've just got to take a picture of this for my less rural friends."

For those of you who aren't familiar with farming, that's a combine without the header (the part that cuts the grain) sitting beside the hall. I couldn't resist taking this close-up with the reflection of myself (enlarge the picture and look closely at the center) in the window glass.

Once all the relatives arrived, the street was very quiet and nobody ran me over while I stood in the middle of Main Street taking pictures.

Looking west on Main. Yes, that is a guy on a Harley cruising down the street.

Looking East on Main.



And then there was the cute little beauty shop. Now I'm used to small town beauty shops being tucked away in little old buildings or remodeled garages or some obscure little corner of town, but I must say, I don't think I've ever seen one quite as cute as this.

The Catholic church caught my eye because one of my inumerable hobbies is photographing old country churches.

And the repair shop down the street grabbed my sons attention because well, tractors and other things with big engines always grab his attention.

Oh, and I did take a few obligatory photos of relatives, but honestly, people pictures just don't interest me much. I mainly took the pictures of relatives to send them to my long lost brother. I intend to label each person in the picture and write a long and rambling misive about the reunion that will bore him totally to tears. But the joke is really on him, because by his continiued absence from anything family, he's missed out on knowing some truly wonderful people.

Anyhow, that was my vacation day for this summer. If I'm lucky, I may find a mini-vacation in August, but I'm not holding my breath!

My Weekend Projects

Here's pictures of a couple of my weekend projects. I have other projects I did and I'll get those posted eventually. Here's the yummy edible projects though. The "present" cake was for my aunt's 71st birthday which we celebrated today at a family reunion. The cake was chocolate with raspberry cream filling and chocolate satin frosting. Yummy! And it got RAVE reviews with the relatives including one gal who said she'd drive the 150 miles between us to get one of my cakes. I just had a blast doing this cake. Started the fondant ribbon days in advance and learned that one should build a ribbon from the bottom up, not the center out like one would with real ribbon. Live and learn. Probably would have helped if I'd read some instructions. Oh, and the cake wasn't near as lopsided as it looks in the picture. It's the way the picture is taken and the curve of the plate that makes it look that way.

The other cake is for a friend's wife's birthday. It was carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I haven't gotten any reviews on that yet. I wasn't especially happy with the way it turned out, but I'm guessing they thought it was cute. I did find out that although I love cream cheese frosting it's kind of a pain to work with as far as icing goes. I believe I'll use a different recipe next time. Don't know if all the writing in the picture is visible, but it says "It's all downhill from here."

Flower Power

Nothing makes me smile like flowers. I went out with the camera this morning and had lots of smiles.

Cosmos, lily, daylily,yellow rose, and yarrow with glass totem.

Six a.m.

Six a.m. is just a magical time of day for me. I love getting up and being out and about early. I've always been that way and life just does not go quite a smoothly for me if I sleep in. Watching the sunrise is a special event every time I get to do it. When I was in jr. high and high school, my brother and I got to watch the sunrise nearly every morning because we'd be out at the end of the driveway waiting for the school bus, rain or shine. If we weren't at the end of the driveway, the bus driver didn't even bother to stop, so we saw a lot of sunrises in those six years.

Then I grew up and began gardening and wouldn't you know it, I find six in the morning the best time of day to water and weed and dig and all those things. The only drawback is that I work three evenings a week. Being up and out in the garden by six and not getting home until after 10:30 make for a long day, so I tend to sleep till seven or eight and wake up groggy and disgruntled and don't get a damn thing done. So, last week I started having my dear husband get me up when he leaves for work at 5:30.

It has been so worth it. The past week, the mosquitos have been dreadful, but I put on long sleeves and watered and weeded regardless. And I've seen some marvelous sunrises, seen the birds divebombing and teasing my poor dogs, heard the traffic out on the highway three miles away in the still morning air and just generally enjoyed the mornings. For the most part I haven't even missed the extra sleep. And if I do get tired, I take a nap around noon. You wanna know something? There's not a thing that goes on at mid-day that's important enough to stay awake for.

How did you spend the 4th?

If I've been asked this question once, I've been asked a hundred times this week. It makes me feel like a kid back in grade school on the first day back from summer vacation with the teacher demanding a two page essay on "What I did on my vacation". Other kids always wrote about where they'd traveled and who they'd seen and made it all sound so exciting. I could never figure out how to make the fact that I spent my summer feeding hogs for dad or pulling weeds and watering grandma's garden exciting. But, to me it was all fun. And I still find those sort of home-body things fun (althought I LOVE to travel too) And my answer is the same today as the few short sentences of that dreaded essay. "Not much. Stayed home. Didn't do anything."

Truth is, I very much enjoyed having a Friday off of work without having to go anywhere. The last Friday I had off was for my daughter's graduation and that involved traveling and buying high priced gasoline. Before that I don't remember the last time I had a Friday off. I work every weekend. Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night.

It's not really honest to say I didn't work though. I had an order for a baptism cake, so I baked that in the morning while it was cool, and decorated it in the evening so it would be ready first thing Saturday morning. Love doing cakes. I just wish people would sometimes order cakes in the winter time when I want to have my oven going.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I made another glass totem too. Not sure how I could forget that since the darn thing is sitting in the middle of the kitchen. I was working on fixing one of the kitchen drawers and figured as long as I had the glue out, I might as well put together another totem. So I did, and now I don't know what the heck to do with it.

Peonies

Is there anything as gorgeous as a peony in full bloom. With our odd weather this year, these beauties bloomed right up till the end of June.