We’ve had quite a bit of rain here in NW Louisiana for several weeks now. This means our lawns are lushly green. This afternoon, three of my neighbors mowed their lawns and the scent was marvelous.
It mingles with the scent of my star jasmine which is nearing the end of it’s yearly blooming. It will be replaced by the scent of my asian lilies soon — the buds are large now.
After that, sometime in July, the gardenia will start blooming.
My small front porch garden is doing well. This is where the star jasmine reigns supreme, but I also enjoy the blooms of the impatiens, the begonias, the hostas, and far too infrequently, the gerbera daisies. I just don’t have much luck with those.
For Mother’s Day, I was sent a small azalea, which I’m going to try in this small garden. I hope it works… it’s mostly a shade garden and it has some drainage problems which I’ve worked on correcting over the years.
This garden is also where I put my rocks. I love rocks. All the rocks in my front porch garden carry a special memory for me. Some are from my step-mother’s collection, some are from the home in Arizona where my granddaughter was born, some are from Alaska, one is from the clinic where my father is receiving radiation for his lung cancer… some are from my back yard.
Wherever I visit, I’m likely to ’steal’ a rock.
The entire blogosphere has been on pins and needles waiting breathlessly for my safe return, I’m sure. Well, worry no more! My knees survived the 13 hour trip there and the 13 hour trip back. My son-in-law did have to prop me up for a few steps when I tried to stand after the last leg of the return trip.
Everyone should be proud of my son-in-law (and my daughter) for not getting upset with either me or my 22 month old granddaughter when it was time to get back in the car after each fill-up and potty stop. We both whined, but I wasn’t physically able to kick and scream like I really wanted to.
In fact, my granddaughter was pretty much an angel. This is in part due to the backseat video player. I’m up on a lot of kid stuff I didn’t know about before. We found Nemo twice and I know all about Elmo’s World. The best video was Leap Frog’s Letter Factory
. It’s funny, colorful, and I enjoyed it as much as my granddaughter did. We had a fantastic time watching it and saying the sounds together.
The DVD has a 5-star rating on Amazon with over 500 reviews. That’s astounding. I can see why. It was actually a nice refresher course in basic phonics for me. Consider how many years it’s probably been since I was taught phonics. Just consider it, don’t dwell on it. That number is rather depressing.
It was, as always, the best Christmas ever. I can’t wait ’til next year.
It’s windy enough that I expect we’ll be without power shortly, though it shouldn’t last too long. A lot of the crews from this area are in Texas or south Louisiana where problems are much worse, so I won’t complain.
The forecast is projecting 50 mph winds later this evening and tonight. Flooding is never a problem here as the house sits on a hill, but a tornado would be horrible. We are surrounding by trees. Tall ones. Oak and pine.
I’m not really worried about anything other than having to clean up the yard, and that’s not much.
Take a look at the two images at Weather Nerd. Talk about a well-developed storm.
In Irish, the day is Lá ’le Pádraig or Lá Fhéile Pádraig, according to Wikipedia. No pronunciation guide given. Since today is part of Holy Week, I’m actually 2 days late with this post. For me, that’s like being a week early.
I hope these Asian lilies come back up as promised when I bought them last year from Lowe’s. They were called Mona Lisa, looking very similar to stargazers, but smelling 10x as good.
