Daily Archives: June 24, 2013

Celebrations

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This weekend was full of celebrations!  We spent most of Saturday sharing happy times and meals with family members who were passing all sorts of milestones in their lives.

We celebrated grade school, high school and college graduations, an anniversary, and scads and scads of birthdays  We participated in a bridal shower.  I met the newest baby in the family and his mother, and I spent some time this weekend working on a baby quilt for the first of three who are still on their way.

And, there was a wedding this weekend, too.

I have four siblings, so there are five of us in the oldest extant generation of my family plus four spouses.  Counting children and step-children, there are eighteen in the second generation with ten spouses.  That generation has TWENTY SEVEN kids and three spouses.  There is a fourth generation of three babies with two more imminent, and the third generation will increase by one in October.  We are peopling the world, so you can see we have a lot to celebrate.

Of all the celebrations, I’m proudest of those who have graduated from high school and college.  I know what it takes to get through college, and I want these kids to know how proud I am of them!  Congratulations, on a job well done!

Flower update

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The sage and oregano want to bloom.  I cut back one of the oregano plants (barely a tenth of what’s there)  and took the branches to exercise class, tied in bunches with rafia.  Bless them, they took every bunch and I need to cut more!  I thought I’d cut off all the blooms on the sage, but I must have missed a few.  I clip them off when I deadhead the lamb’s ears.

Day lilies and purple coneflower, and the shrub roses are blooming.  What few lilies I have left are almost ready to open.  Something out there eats lilies!  One end of the sidewalk garden at the front of the house is filled with volunteer coreopsis.  The ox-eye daisies have bloomed and died back.  It’s time to pull them out.

I have a big wire basket lined with coir and filled with potting soil that sits in a well in front of the dining room windows.  Last fall I cut some of our evergreen branches and covered the basket, and then added some red twigs that have a curly stem for contrast.  I was VERY surprised this spring when those twigs grew leaves!  I’ve kept them, just to see what will happen for the rest of the year, and added a few annuals to the basket.

We’ve had so much off and on again rain, that I have not been keeping up with the weeding.  And, there are a few plants that still need to be put into the beds.  We have the possibility of rain today, but it might be worth it to get out there and do some weeding while the garden is so wet.  That makes pulling weeds SO much easier!

Birds!

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I believe that I have seen some birds that I have never seen before!

In a grassy area not terribly far from a good-sized retention pond, we saw a bird that ran like a water bird or piper.  It had two distinctive dark bands at it’s throat.  I didn’t have binoculars with me to get a look at the beak, but DH says it’s not terribly long.  When I checked the bird books, it looks as though we may have seen a “killdeer.”  I’m uncertain about that spelling, but that’s what Wikipedia said.

Then, we were on our way to exercise on Friday, and drove between two very large marshy areas where we normally see egrets and herons.  At the edge of the water, in the reeds, we saw two large birds, which were facing us.  Their heads and chests were a rusty, tawny color, and they look more substantial than the blue herons.  When I searched the bird books, the closest bird I found was a juvenile common crane.  Since we couldn’t see their backs, we couldn’t tell if they might be sand hill cranes, but they had the right shape for some type of crane.   Of course, they were gone when we made the return trip, or very well camouflaged.

I don’t keep a life list, but it’s always fun to add new birds to the mental list of birds that I’ve seen.