Milestones

Some days milestones in our life become millstones dragging us down.


I celebrated my sixtieth birthday a couple of weeks ago which is a great milestone in my life.  I think it can now officially say that I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me.  I still get up every morning feeling that everything that happens after I wake up is a bonus.  I still can't sing in tune, dance to any known rhythm or cook like a gourmet.


My birthday has lifted a great weight off my shoulders because now I feel like I don't have the time necessary to learn to sing in tune, dance to a rhythm or cook like Julia Child before the big blackout.  Huge relief!


In other ways, being sixty has set a couple of millstones on my back.  I think I should be wiser, less impulsive and more dignified in my demeanor. I realized that it just isn't going to happen when I came across a great project to mark my birthday.


In a recent issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine I came across an article on making Prayer Flags.  The article is full of inspirational flags and I decided to mark my birthday with my own version of prayer flags...not so much that the prayers would go to God for her help but that they would remind me of things that are important to me.


There are traditionally ten flags in two sets of five colors.  My interpretation went something like this:

1. Blue = space.. >the final frontier> rocket ship > seek > imagine
2. White = air....wind > explosion > breathe
3. Red = fire..  burn > cleanse > discard
4. Green = water ..  flow > wave > sooth > dance
5. Yellow = earth.... dirt > grow > bloom

Starting  with the ideas above, a base of marbled fabric that I had experimented with many years ago and thread that matched the prayer flag colors, this is what I came up with:


(Oops! Blogger is telling me i have run out of space event hough I am at only 52% of usge..  check out my facebook wall for an image  )


Yes, I only did five, but I can see them from my living room window and every time I glance that way, I think of the concepts shown, smile and another millstone falls off my back.  Who cares if I am not wise, less impulsive or dignified when I am sixty.  After all, I still have a few more years left, and they may come in time...or not!

Mushroom Days

When the ground gets too wet to absorb any more moisture, mushrooms come up.

A least that's what the experts claim.

I grew up believing that mushrooms in the grass came from dog poop.

Around here the ground can get super saturated very quickly and the mushrooms come soon there after. 

Anyway, I proved to myself that the dog poop theory is somewhat wrong when these sweet little mushrooms appeared in a large flower pot outside.

Then I went on a mushroom hunt in the yard and did not find any other cute mushrooms but I did find this aged one.

Ewwwww!  That looks like some old guys butt.

On walks with the dogs I have found a lot that are scattered through various  yards.  They tend to be clumped together and contain more than one type.

I have not tried to eat any of them because, despite evidence to the contrary, I still believe that at least some of them come from dog poop.

Prove me wrong.

Have a great week!

Yard Work

Before the June drought, when my area got less than 1/3 of an inch of rain, I spent every day working on my front yard plantings. Not that I am a big gardener but I do enjoy getting my hands dirty once in a while. There is a large 'garden' in my front yard that had turned to weeds and grass over the past couple of years due to a mis-directed clean-up effort of mine that removed all of the pine needle mulch and replaced it with standard bark mulch.

I have now learned my lesson.... pine bark mulch only lets you see the weeds better while pine needle mulch really kills weeds. Besides, pine needle mulch is free when you have a few large pines trees in the yard providing the mulch.

My goal was to weed the front garden, divide the liriope (monkey grass) to fill in any holes plus plant some perennials and a couple of little bushes all topped off with about 800 pounds of rocks over landscape cloth to provide a path to my bird bath.

Some of what I planted did not make it through the lack of rain but most of what I planted seems to be working on gaining a foothold in the planting area.

Here's how overgrown the liriope had grown in the foundation planting area..

and here is what it looked like thinned out
The bird bath was in the backyard but was not getting much use due to the dogs so it is now in the front yard and has been getting quite a work out. I have had this for years and some day I will figure out how to keep the black stuff from coming back without poisioning the birds. The little circular disk is used to prevent mosquito breeding.
The little white flowers below are supposed to be daisies but they don't seem to like the heat. I hope they getting bigger is it would be nice to have some tall flowers in this area.

Here's a little planting near the front door. I didn't do much here except thin the shrimp plants. That big old rock came from a yard of a former home of mine that the movers moved, ever so carefully to this home. You should have seen all the protection that was provided for its transport!


I think I am done digging in the yard until it cools off again. Every few days I venture out early in the morning to pull more weeds and errant grasses. And,yes, I have been watering (even though it kills me to put drinking water on the yard) so I have lost only a little from the lack of rain. The biggest problem seems to be that the squirrels really like the little bushes and have been burying stuff under them. Also, Alex has been providing his own watering and that has caused a couple of losses.

All in all I'm pretty proud of the revamped front garden. Not a designer garden but definitely an improvement.


I wonder what I will do in the Fall to improve on the work from this Spring?