Monday, May 28, 2012

Welcome beautiful Elise!

Please join me in welcoming the newest member of my family.

Meet Elise

I am fostering this sweet thing, but She will be with me for the next several years. Perhaps by then I may persuade her owner to allow my to officially adopt her. We have already had some great bonding time, and I feel like she has been part of my family forever. I need to majorly work out to keep up with her, but that is a challenge I am so willing to accept! I am waiting for an appt with the doctor to get her all tuned up, but that's all that's left to do!

Welcome Baby!

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Fake it 'til you make it, baby!

Guess what I do now? Gardening...sort of. I decided I am tired of living in a place that looks like white trash rednecks live here. (no offense if you are a redneck) SO. I cleaned up the front walk and the front flower bed, planted some flowers and herbs, and weed whacked the portion of the yard closest to the house. (The rest of the yard needs to be mowed, but that will wait until my landlord comes home from Israel.

And then...(btw, did you know that weed whacking is absolutely addicting? Yeah, it is.) I decided to weed whacked the back yard. The fenced in portion. And while I was weed whacking my little heart out, I discovered the quaint little garden plots. 2 of them. 5x10, with a little brick walkway between! (I also discovered Roger, aka Satan, a snake of some sort. Threw him out of the garden, twice. Wearing gloves, of course. YUCK! If he comes back again, Roger is going to lose his head.) Being the ambitious person that I am, I chose to dig out the plots. Yup, by hand. With weeds higher than my waist. A total of 100 square feet. Hard clay, huge grass bunches, moss, rocks, nasty weeds, and don't forget the snake...

Now it's so pretty! (well, as pretty as it can be, which isn't REALLY pretty, but better than it was.) The yard is down to stubble, the garden is down to pure dirt, and I have turned the dirt to get it ready to plant some veggies. Just tomatoes and peas, nothing more. Maybe some strawberries.

All the flowers in the front garden are pretty! There is some sort of yellow ones, some sort of petunia (I think) purplish in color, Iris, Calalilly, and a couple types of green plants. No idea what they are. But they look good! And I have some parsley, thyme, mint and lavender. I will be putting in some rosemary too.

Now for the disclaimer: I have never had a green thumb. If anything it is a black thumb, which is why I am good at weed whacking (it's really just killing things. :-D ) I hope these plants are still alive in a couple of weeks. This is how much of a gardener I am NOT: I do not have any of the necessary tools for gardening. I am borrowing a rake and shovel from a friend (thanks Abby!), and I don't even own a watering can (yet) or a working outdoor faucet for that matter. This means that I take a bucket filled in my bathtub and a small cup and water all the plants by hand. Makes me feel domestic.

BUT...I am getting tan from spending so much time outside! And trust me, that is hard for me to do. Mainly my freckles just grow together.  Which isn't a bad thing.

Ok, I think that is about it. The sun is shining and I keep thinking up things to do outside! (The list of things I want to do to my house is getting longer and longer, but that's another post for another day.) I am off to play in the dirt some more!!!!

BUT: