My Favorite Things

But I'm not Oprah, so you won't find a basket of these under your chair.


The first year I've had tomatoes that look like they (I hope!) will ripen!  I also love my portable fence section that I'm using for a trellis right now.  Those 5x3 sections have a lot of uses!

  

My rain barrel -- doubles as a redneck splash park for the kids.



I love, love, love my flower garden!  It's full of masses of brown-eyed Susans, lupine, and a bunch of other anonymous flowers.  I also love finding surprise visitors out there, like this bee and grasshopper.  Right after I took this picture, the bee tried to land on the flower the grasshopper was on, but he kicked at her, and she startled away.




I have a sparrows' nest right outside my window in the carport.  They've nested there for years, but this winter a windstorm cleared out all three nests.  One pair rebuilt and have raised a noisy family this summer.  I love the sound of the "pio pio pio" in the morning.




Who doesn't love frogs?  These fellows have been living on our kitchen counter all summer.



Cardamom is the spice of the gods, I'm sure.  Just the scent of it in my spice cabinet makes me feel wealthy.  It's delicious in chai, coffee, bread, rice, and anything else.

Many years ago I got rid of my beautiful matching dishes and collected mismatched, brightly colored ones instead.  I like variety.

This is my newly redone bedroom.  I painted over the old manufactured-home wallboard (the paint is the color of peach smoothie), replaced the thin plastic wood molding, ripped out the mauve shag carpet and painted the floor brown, then put in new curtain rods, curtains, and comforter.  I didn't put my niece there; she rolled herself into the photo.

Well, I guess it was good exercise...

After spending two weeks digging out a sprinkler pipe trench 20 feet long and 8 inches deep, I visited Home Depot to find sprinkler heads.  Did you know they make sprinkler heads that rotate and fan out to cover a huge area?  They're terrific.  All you do is screw them onto the existing sprinkler system (note: not the pipe that you spent two weeks digging a trench for) and they fan out to cover the entire area needed.  I don't know whether to regret the wasted two weeks of digging, or to rejoice that I found a short cut to the project.

Next on my list for the summer:

1. Buy a camera to record all the work I really am doing while I'm not washing dishes or clothes, bathing the children, cooking meals, vacuuming, mopping, or doing any of the other boring housework that's always here.
2. Rake aside all the big gravel chunks in my yard, digging up buried soldiers and dinosaurs in the process -- plastic ones, not real.  If I had real dinosaurs in my yard, I guess I couldn't put in a lawn.  Same for real soldiers, I imagine.
3. Pull every last weed.  Convince Brooklynn to help pull a weed or two each day.
4. Spread topsoil.  Respread topsoil after Derrick and his friend across the street turn it into a jump for their bikes.
5. Lay sod.  Any volunteers??
6. Edge driveway.
7. Spread gravel on driveway to replace the gravel that Brooklynn throws into the street during her tantrums.
8. Finish painting trim in bedroom (with trim paint this time, instead of the exterior paint accidentally used).
9. Paint trim throughout house.  It's about time to cover up all the plastic-covered cardboard that passes for "wood" in this house.
10. Mend the holes in my wall.
11. Lay a new kitchen floor.  It's difficult walking around with no floor to stand on...
12. Paint the kitchen cabinets a color that will look good on my dog.  (This week he is black with white accents.  Last summer he was black with green accents.  Black pretty much goes with everything.)
13. Rejoice if I get even half of what I plan done.