This & That

They Are Early

They are early and they are blooming. We don't usually have lilacs this early.

Standing here taking these photos there was the most incredible smell.

This Makes Me Happy

We had some rain. We rarely have rain, so rainy days really make me happy.

Starts

My walking buddy couldn't go with me yesterday morning, so I decided to take that early morning time to do some weeding in the flower beds as well as plant some iris starts my SIL had brought me from her yard in Utah. These are supposed to be blue-ish and kind of ruffled.

If you remember, a few years ago LS Boy planted some yellow starts from a friend down the street. They are doing so well, I'm going to have to refine them a little so they don't take over my flower bed. That same friend gave me the rhubarb plant start I have in my garden now. It thrives on neglect.  I think it's interesting how sharing things makes them multiply and grow in all kinds of different spots.

On the garden front, DH and I are disagreeing on how to downsize our garden now that we don't have so many children at home that we need to feed, freeze and can for. I'd like to set the whole thing up in raised boxes. He thinks if it ain't broke, don't fix it and wants to stick with our old under-the-plastic system, but dividing the area into thirds so we only use 1/3 of the space per year. That means that by the time we reach year 3, I'll have a weed mess from things coming up through the cut plastic from previous years, since he is not here in the fall to pull up plants and hoses. I'm not going to win, so I should probably just resign myself to a messy garden, but I'd really like a nice, tidy, smaller patch with several boxes that I could manage.

Cautionary Tale #3

Never plant long-needled pine trees in your yard. Especially if you live in a place that gets a fair amount of wind.

Because guarenteed you'll be sweeping the dang things up every other minute.....and your rain gutters will be full of them all the time and then will overflow and drip water into your daughter's closet.

Believe me.

A Bit of Q & A

My friend, Julie, from Florida asked a couple of questions about us cutting and decorating the tree. I figure others may be curious...

She wanted to know about the Reindeer Ambush. The Reindeer Ambush is described in this post. You have to get a little ways through the post to find it. It's a tradition that's evolved over the years and comes from having 5 boys in the house. 5 boys who grew up hunting with their dad and interpret reindeer made out of wooden clothespins as potential big game.

She also asked about paying for the tree and such. We actually have to have a tree cutting permit to go in the hills to cut a tree. You can't just run around willy-nilly and cut anything you see. We go to the local Forest Service office and pay $10 to cut a tree that's taller than 10 feet. (It's $5 to cut a tree that's up to 10 feet.) This year is was ridiculously taller than 10 feet, but that doesn't matter as long as you pay your $10. That's a pretty good price for such a large tree, but we are providing the manpower and transportation to get it back to the house. There are also restricted areas where you can go. A lot of times it's in places where they are trying to thin trees to decrease the fire danger in the summer. 

 

Murphy's Law Is Alive And Well

Since we had some extra kids here for the holiday weekend, we decided it would be a good time to go cut a Christmas tree. Actually, this was my only goal for the weekend. I wanted to get the tree decorated while the college boys and DDIL#4 were here. The thought of decorating the tree with just The Girl made me a little sad. So we headed out, going in the opposite direction than we have done in previous years. It is closer to our house and we thought we'd be out and back in just a couple of hours. Um, no.

It was a beautiful day and we outfitted ourselves in the most stylish winter wear we could find.

We found a great tree, but realized that getting it down the hill and into the truck was a little problematic since it was in the middle of a patch of dead aspen trees. We had to push a couple of the dead trees down so we could drag the tree though.

The cutting began and then stopped because the chain came off the chainsaw. Luckily, we had the little tool we needed to tighten it back on.

The men huffed and puffed and, with the aid of gravity, managed to man-handle it into the back of the truck, where we had to tie it in.

The bed of the truck is 8 feet long. You can see that we had more tree sticking out the back of the truck than we had inside the bed of the truck. Without tying it in, it had a tendency to want to teeter-totter on the tailgate.This is where we stopped and had some tasty hamburgers for lunch.

What DH and I learned on this adventure, is that we have an inflated sense of how tall our living room ceiling actually is, because when we got it home, we had to cut another 6 feet off it to get it in the house. So the chain saw came out again. Finally we got it into the tree stand in the driveway and then hefted it into the house....no small feat, since LS Boy had a migraine and was moaning upstairs. We stood it up in the corner of the living room and started tweaking its position.....and the tree stand broke. Seriously??

I was beginning to doubt whether or not we were ever going to get this thing done. The tree stand had a spike in the center of it that went up into the trunk of the tree to hold it in place and that was what broke. We had to cut off another section of trunk to insert another tree stand. (We have several saved from years past....luckily.) DH thought he could spread a tarp under the tree trunk and saw it off in the living room, since no one was very anxious to drag it outside and then back in again. So the chainsaw came out in the middle of my living room. We got the new tree stand attached, but the house smelled like chain saw exhaust for the rest of the day, even after opening the doors and windows for an hour.

Still with me?

We got going on the decorating. While DH and the kids strung the lights, I started un-boxing the ornaments. And wouldn't you know that the first one I grabbed was PB's tiny shoes ornament? Every year I buy a few ornaments that go with events that happened during the year. The year PB was born I found a miniature ornament...a pair of teeny, tiny shoes. Since he was only 3 1/2 pounds at birth, I thought they'd be perfect. I guess I should have figured they'd make me a little weepy with him gone this year.

In the end, we got the job done, even if we finished at 10:30 that night. It was much more festive having several to help, and we needed some boys here to set up the annual reindeer ambush. I'm not sure The Girl could have done it right.

 Whatever we had to do was all worth it to get this shot of The Girl wearing PB's "Mad Bomber" hat out in the hills.

 

The Birch Tree

I've talked before about how the Red Maple tree in my front yard is my favorite. That hasn't changed, but I went outside the other morning to get the newspaper, and the sun was just coming up through the trees and put what looked like a big spotlight on this birch tree.

I like this birch tree a lot, too.

It sits just outside where I do my scrapbooking and such and when the light is just right in the fall, it casts this golden glow into that room.

It's one of the prettiest things about fall at my house.

Now what I want to know is why summer drags on endlessly, and falls just rushes by?

How I Know

The grandgirls and their parents have been visiting other relatives for a bit. They'll be back here next week for a few days before they have to go back to the Back East. I can always tell, though, that I've had little visitors.

And no, the donut isn't real. It's plastic food from The Girl's old Fisher Price kitchen.

And furniture from The Girl's old playhouse. Who knew it would come in so handy again?

Summer Around the House

If I have to endure the summer, I guess I can give a few shots of some summery-ness.

The front doors sporting their summer wreath finery.

  The impatiens by the front door. They're still alive, which is a good thing.

New Hollyhocks this year. I planted a start last year and this year it has really come along. The plant is taller than I am now and has these peachy double blooms. My mom tells stories about making dolls from hollyhocks that bloomed in her yard.

Blooming

If there's one thing in my yard that I baby, it's my hybrid roses. I (or one of my slave children) fertilize them regularly, give them doses of iron and deadhead them rigorously. For all our work, we are rewarded with beautiful blooms like these. I just think they're so pretty and, like a lot of the flowers around my house, I buy them by smell rather than by color or size.

The deep coral ones in the front have the strongest smell of any in the yard. Those I will cut and put in a little vase right by my bed and they will perfume the whole room.