Friday at last!

Have you ever noticed that sometimes life just runs away from you? There you are plodding along and all of a sudden days have swept by and you can't really remember what you did. Oh, you haven't noticed that... Oh, it's never happened to you... Ok, maybe it's just me then. Apparently I can clip right along and lose days and days. Years ago, the first time I read that book that they made a movie with Sally Field where she had Multiple personalities (apparently I don't just lose days, I lose my memory for movie titles too) anyway, I decided that I had multiple personalities too. Not because I was necessarily losing days at the time, although I was drinking perhaps a bit more than was good for me, mainly because I'm paranoid and obsessive. Anyway, that went on for a while until I realized that if I did have multiple personalities the others were having a much better time than I was. They were probably better looking, more popular and were invited to better parties too. Rotten personalities. They never take me anywhere and then I have to do all the laundry. I bet they got invited to the White House during the Clinton years and got to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. I tell you what.

Ok, enough of that, that's why we never take you anywhere, sitting there and mumbling to yourself. You think we don't have anything better to do than listen to your complaints? There's a party at the lake this weekend, go pack our bags.

Ok, ok, make me do everything and then I have to sit around here and watch old Oprah reruns. Boy oh boy. Just you wait. They'll be sorry......

Sorry, stream of consciousness thing.

Ok, it has been a wild and crazy week. Mom is home and doing well. But she doesn't have much strength so I have been taking lunch to her and my sister has been doing the dinner shift. Plus all the stuff that she notices looking out the window at her garden. You know I thought your eyes were supposed to get worse when you got old. That woman can see a weed at 150 feet! Plus she can see that the tomato plants are wilting before they even do. Anyway, thanks to everyone who has been keeping her in their prayers.

Well, the plan this week is painting. Yes, I know, it is the Fourth weekend and everyone is going to the lake, which is why we're staying here and painting. Actually, we're just painting the living room unless Kathy goes nuts and decides she can't stand the dining room anymore, or she makes me pull up the run in the bedroom and refinish the floors. Anyway, she found a rug at Home depot online. Actually, she found it in the store but bought it online and saved about 50 or 60 bucks. Well, I was going to show you what the rug looked like but blogger won't let me post pictures today. Oh well, I have to move some furniture so we can have all our fun tomorrow. Have a good and safe and happy Fourth of July.

Wayne.

New blooms

Well, I have figured it out. All you have to do is put all the pictures on the blog and then write the stuff. That way you get at least something up for your time.

Well, mom is at home and exhausted. We took her out of the rehab center on Friday and it was a several hour ordeal. Actually getting her out was a couple of minutes but her talking to a friend of hers that she hasn't seen for a while that was taking care of one of the patients in the place and recognized her voice and then having to say goodbye to all the staff and patients that she got close to and then having to go out to lunch before we got her home because after all we would just have to go out later and having my sister and I and my daughter and five of my grandchildren to help load everything up and haul it off it takes a little time. Anyway, she is at home and resting and the home health people are supposed to show up today and do all the preliminary paperwork to get her back into that. Whew!

Ok, this weekend was the gay pride festival and parade in Memorial park and my only question is why do they let them park all over the place in the park? I have seen the police come and chase families away that were just unloading their cars by a picnic table and we had people parked up next to our fence for ten and twelve hours at a time. I hate to sound un-pc (actually, I don't, I'm fairly used to sounding un-pc) but I have to wonder if the parks department would have allowed parking on the grass for any less vocal group. Of course, it may just be sour grapes because my granddaughter Natasha spent Friday night and all day Saturday with us and one of my favorite things to do with her is take her to the park and play on the swings and you couldn't even get on the swings because there were tents set up all around them!

OK, enough complaining. Let's get to what's blooming.

This is one of my new favorites. It is an ice plant that has recently been introduced in Oklahoma. For years everyone apparently assumed that ice plant wouldn't survive here but lately there are all sorts of places that it is a perennial. To me the flower almost looks like a tiny strawflower.Not the best shot but I still love crepemyrtle. I'm especially impressed with this one because, believe it or not, the flowers are a great shade of dark red. Yes I know it looks pink, but it really is darker than this. I'm just not sure how to make the colors true with my camera. If anyone has any ideas I'll take 'em.

The only thing better than ice cream in the summer is hibiscus. We have several hardys planted and usually get a tropical or two and pot them up. The flowers are amazing and even though they confuse the heck out of the hummingbirds and butterflies the little darlings continue to try.And for those of you that think the magnolia is the most beautiful flower in the world I've got this one from mom's yard. Her tree is about twenty five years old and is almost past the struggling for acid stage.

Well, that's about all for today. Hopefully I'll get a few more posts in this week since mom's home. Take care of yourselves.

Wayne

A fix for your Maddox withdrawal

For all of you who can't go more than a few days without pix of Maddox (or am I the only one?) We went over to their house the other day for dinner and caught him out in the pool.
And of course after a hard day playing, a guys gotta eat!
And trust me, after this kid eats he's gotta have a bath.
And as always, there's always time to clown around in the tub.

Think about the joy of a child today. We tend to get so caught up in the stuff that we forget to laugh. Remember, God has a sense of humor. Just contemplate the giraffe or duckbill platypus!

Wayne

What's in bloom.

Well, blogging has apparently become a two day event. Yesterday I got the pictures put on and it took so long that I had to wait until today to write the crazy thing. Well, I guess that is better than most of last week when the website wouldn't let me on! Anyway, here's what's in bloom around my yard.

Slightly blurry (slightly? What're you talking about? It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting! Slightly blurry, yeah, someone might buy that....{Shut up, I'm blogging here!}) Where was I? Oh yeah, slightly blurry and really confused, this is my pink weigelia. Usually it blooms in late April, this year it bloomed in March and now I'm getting sporadic little blooms here and there. Hummers love these shrubs.

This is a caladium in a hanging basket. Kathy and I bought a box of about 50 caladium bulbs at Sam's and I thought that these were the only ones coming up, but I have found a few coming up in the four-o'clocks. I guess I was just getting impatient. I was getting a little miffed at Sam's I'll admit. But apparently all is well. And yes I know that this isn't a bloom, but if you've ever seen caladium flowers you understand why they're grown for the foliage.

This is just one of our stands of liatris. The cool thing about liatris is that they are a beautiful shade of purple (they also come in pinks and whites) and that they are one of the few (maybe the only) spike type flower that opens from the top down instead of the bottom up. Just a little liatris trivia, try that for your next bar bet. The uncool thing about liatris is that, yes, this is only one of our stands of liatris. We bought a box of bulbs (yes from Sam's) about four years ago and every year since I have thinned liatris. In case anyone wants any, this fall I'll be thinning them again and if you don't take them I'll be throwing about fifty bulbs away!

This is one of those weird plants that I don't really adore because it isn't all that cool of a plant. It's scarlet runner bean, an annual vine, that I planted about three years ago and I just keep putting it in the same place because it isn't any trouble. I save seeds from it every year and just sow in the Spring.

Another case of the plants not reading the books. Check any of the manuals and they will all tell you that you have to dig up your dahlia tubers if you don't live in a frost free zone. When we lived in central Florida when I was a child my mother dug up her dahlias to lovingly store them in dry peat moss till all the nasty frosts were over. Which is where I learned to hate digging up dahlia tubers. So a few years ago when we went to Sam's and bought dahlia bulbs I figured I would just let them die and buy new the next year. The next year we went to buy more dahlia bulbs and planted them, and then the year's before came up. Since then we have been having about 40 to 50% of the previous years dahlia production. This year we have about 12 Plants coming up. I figure in about 3 years we'll have to buy some more. Something besides light pink please!

Kathy is enamored of giant head sunflowers. If you will look at the picture close, you'll see this is a species sunflower. This is what happens when you are too lazy to the flowers off before they start dropping seed. I always figure if God wants to plant it, I'll enjoy it. Kathy disagrees when God plants Johnson grass. She says this year I'm pulling sunflowers so she can plant the giants next year. And some sunflower trivia: sunflowers are members of the Asteraceae family which means that the flower is not really a flower. It is actually thousands of tiny flowers, some circular, some ray type.

We went down to farmer's market the other day and found these great Persian shields and begonias and they immediately went into the cement planter by the front steps. The shield has since been trimmed back a little bit and is bushing out some. I'll post some more pics when it gets a little fuller.

And on the same trip we got some sweet potato vines. Notice how well-behaved the Marguerite (the light green) is. It is keeping to itself and giving the blacks plenty of room. I'll take another pic in a few weeks to show you how it has about choked the blacks out. It is an aggressive little sucker!

I know I've shown the flowers on the chaste tree before, but just one more reminder of why I love these things.

Well, for those of you that have been praying, mom is supposed to come home on Friday. She of course was ready last week and never mind that she couldn't stand up. Keep her health in prayer, please and if you have any extra prayers ask for me and my sister to have strength so we won't choke her.

Spend some time today thinking about the flowers that God gives us. Large or small, Smelling like perfume or a rotting corpse, they all have a place in God's world and he watches over every one, and if he'll watch over them, how much more of his attention will he give to us?

Wayne

Well, we had the meeting with the rehab center that mom has been in for a couple of weeks. The decision made was that unless something drastic happens she'll be getting out next Friday. She's happy, I'm kinda happy, my sister is worried. My sister has this idea that we need to stop her from doing gardening. Like that is ever going to happen. I would be happy if we could just get her to understand that an hour here and there is better than doing six hours at a time and not being able to move for three days! Thanks to all who have kept mom in your prayers.

As for my life, not much else has been happening. We just keep on keeping on. It would be nice if I could believe that the weathermen aren't lying to me again. They are claiming that there is a 60% chance of rain here in the metro this weekend. I figure that if we get anything it won't be enough to dampen the ground. I could be wrong, though. We could get enough to cause flash-flooding and none of it will be around long enough to soak in.

Jill and Maddox came over last night for dinner. As usual Maddox was about the most intelligent person I have ever seen. I swear that kid has a genius-plus IQ. Now if he'll ever start talking, he'll show everyone else too. There was a very significant cartoon in the paper the other day that illustrates just my point. One grandparent is saying to the other that their grandson is an artistic genius and the other grandparent says not to put too much pressure on the boy so the first says, "I'm not, I don't care what kind of genius he is." We tend to do it, don't we? Our kids, our grandkids, we want them to have things we didn't have and then sometimes we want them to be things we couldn't be. We all need to be careful (and me most of all) to let the little monsters be just what God made them, not what we think God should have made them. But then our judgment is so much better than His sometimes, isn't it?

Be good to a kid in your life today. And if you can't find one, be the kid yourself that God made you to be!

Wayne

Is it going to be kind?

Well, let's see if Blogger is going to be nice to me today?

Kathy and I went out to dinner last night, actually I planned to make my famous smoked sausage and green beans and after I told her she said she had been thinking about eating out, hmmm... I wonder if there is a connection? Anyway, we went to the new place in the Penn Square parking lot, what a great place to have a restaurant, in one of the most crowded and hardest to get to parking lots in town, The Elephant Bar. It has a bar, but isn't a bar. Problem with truth in advertising if you ask me. And since my entire life is Blogger fodder, I was already composing my headline as we were leaving the place. I turned to Kathy and asked her, "What is the problem if the best thing you can say about a restaurant is that, 'it's decor is fun and campy'?" The food was ok, nothing particularly wonderful. Kathy had a chicken Caesar salad and I had a hamburger and fries, I know, not our usual arrangement, but she wanted to eat light and I was too tired and bored to figure out anything more complicated. The main problem we had with the place is that it is LOUD. They were putting together a 25 top next to us, well actually it was an 18 top and then some more people came in and stood there for about 15 minutes (not an exaggeration) until they found some more chairs and then some more people came in so they had to get more chairs and tables. All this about three feet from us. Real conducive to relaxed dining. To be truthful though, even if they had not been running around right next to us, we still couldn't have carried on a normal conversation due to the noise level of the whole place. And then we shared a dessert, walnut brownie with ice cream and chocolate sauce and whipped cream and slivered almonds. It was ok, but Kathy and I could have made it better at home (but then we would have to clean up) and besides we put raisins in our brownies (trust me, it tastes better than it sounds). Service was not really even so-so. We ran out of water twice, not earthshattering, but irritating. And just to reiterate, parking was atrotious! I hate the Penn Square lot at the best of times (although I can't really think of any best of times, Maybe the time our daughter Alison had a dead battery in her car and I had to go out there at 10:30 to give her a jump start, at least there were places to park then). Well, needless to say (then why are you saying all this?) we probably won't go back there again. All in all, I preferred Cheeseburger In Paradise even if they didn't play much Buffett and you need to take an extra couple to split the chocolate nachos. Or maybe if you didn't eat any dinner you could eat the whole chocolate nacho yourself.... Can we spell gluttony?

Well, maybe I can put some pics on today: Well, apparently not. I don't mind that it won't let me put pics on as much as that it tells me they're added and then there isn't anything there. Don't you just hate it when your computer lies to you? They think they're so smart. Sometimes when I have insomnia I'll come down and I can hear my computer and MP3 player whispering to each other. I just know they are plotting something. I'm pretty sure that if they can ever get the toaster to agree to their plans I'm sunk.

Well, I tried to fool blogger by using microsoft publisher to put the pics on and publish the blog. Ha ha, I'm the one that was fooled. After about 20 minutes trying to get everything put together just so, it still wouldn't let me put it on Blogger. This is the commentary I had on publisher. At least you can figure out what I have in the garden, and maybe soon I can put pics up.:

Ok, so apparently you have to do all these convoluted things to get things published to Blogger. I don’t know if this is going to work. Luckily Kathy got Microsoft Office through work so now I am trying to do this in Publisher Maybe it’ll work and maybe not. So the top left picture is some sweet potato vine that we finally got. Notice how well behaved the Marguarite is? I’ll take another picture in a few weeks. I’ll bet it won’t be half that nice then.

Top right is a close up of a butterfly on the chaste tree.

The center pics are of some Persian shield and begonias that we planted in the concrete planter. I love Persian shield. It is such a cool looking plant.

The bottom picture is of one of Kathy’s sunflowers. She wanted me to pull them all up because she planted the giants about three years ago and I always let them seed out for the birds. Well, the dumb birds don’t eat enough because we always have a great big crop of small flowered sunflowers. I still think they are pretty and they don’t droop over from the weight of the blossom either.

Take care of yourselves today. Wayne

I've Been Bad!

This is actually a post from yesterday. I wrote the whole thing out and it wouldn't let me add pictures and then Blogger wouldn't even let me on. I would apologize but this time it wasn't my fault! Blame it on Blogger.

My apologies to everyone. It has been way too long since I blogged on this thing. I would love to say that I have been hyper-busy, but mostly I have just been lazy and then time got away from me and then Blogger wouldn't let me on and then...... Oh well.

So to catch up. Dinner at Susan and Jim's was fantastic, yes that was last week, but I already apologized and all that. Jim cooked steaks and we had veggies and potatoes and a really delicious chocolate birthday cake. Well, Susan had to do something, it was Jim's birthday after all. The company was wonderful, the conversation stimulating (until we all started yawning about 9:00), and best of all, I was the youngest person there so I could rub their noses in it! The only bad part about it is that I apparently haven't had a camera long enough because I forgot to take it with me so I could capture the revelry for blogterity. I better change the subject, I'm apparently making up words again.

Latest on the mom front. The doctors never really figured out what was wrong with her, but her physical symptoms went away so they put her into a rehab center to gain back her strength before they would let her go home. So now she's fighting with the physical therapists and telling us that the doc wants her to go home in a day or two (I'm not going to be the one to tell her that we don't even have the evaluation meeting scheduled until next Thursday). The great part about it is that I get to hear about how awful the place is when I visit mom and then as I'm leaving I get to hear the nursing staff complain because she won't wait for them to help her go to the bathroom. Here's my question, if the nursing staff wants to help her go to the bathroom, why has the nutrition staff come down to her room twice to ask her why she hasn't gotten herself down to the dining room? Anyway, it has all been good because I have been christened the "good" child. I have kept her tomato plants alive and Kathy found the perfect robe (JC Penney Spring/Summer catalog, page 158, white, extra large {yes, that's too big, but that's the size she wanted}), and all the while my awful terrible sister has been keeping up her house and making sure her bills are paid and all the other unnecessary stuff and so is the "bad" child. Hey, I'll take what I can get!

Ok, to the plants. What is in bloom? And what's new: Well, apparently Blogger doesn't want to let me add any photos so I will have to show you what is in bloom in a later post.

Be good to yourselves, God bless,

Wayne