Random Saturday Stuff and Yardwork

Thank you all for loving my old dog. Sydney is back home and decidedly dizzy/disoriented. She keeps bumping into things like she's got a snoot full ...but this is not as funny as it sounds. (In fact, it's not funny at all. Go figure. Also on the Not Funny list, she is having some intestinal distress due to the disorientation --I guess it's a lot like vertigo. Anyway, send some positive vibes for my living room carpet. Ick.) The vet thinks we'll see this resolve within two weeks. If not, there's something else wrong. If so... well, every day is a blessing with my old friend.

I'm feeling very hopeful, though, so I decided to finally proclaim my faith in extreme silliness. Behold, the image of the Noodly Master as it appears on my van.

It doesn't look quite straight to me but it's just hard to GET spaghetti straight.

And now, more than you ever wanted to know about our lawn.

Today, I mowed the lawn like a normal person.

Well, I know that not many normal people like to mow the lawn as much as I do but that's not what I mean, I meant that I mowed it in running shoes. It's only the second time I've mowed it since my surgery in March and the first time I wore the dreaded walking boot thing and was crippled for a week. But today I got to use my shoes and things went fine, except I forgot to use sunscreen and I'm a little sunburned.

So, I love to mow the lawn but I hate to use the Weed Eater thingy. No, that's not exactly true. The thing is that I can't seem to use the weed eater thing. Look what happens when I try to use it --and I mean, try HARD.


It's really frustrating. I seem to be missing some Weed Whacking gene and I really hate that *I* can't do it but my husband can do it perfectly. Only he doesn't LIKE to do it. Which is why our curbs all look like this:

I think the Weed Eater might be sexist. It's just like when we used to have this lawn mower that only Coop could start. That just made me crazy! We have an cordless electric mower now. Actually, in the spirit of conservation, we share it with our neighbors. I think this is very cool because honestly, does it ever strike you as excessive that we all live in these houses side by side and we all have the same tools and lawn mowers, etc.? I guess I'm odd in that way, too. (Next I'll be wanting to start a commune.)

More plant news:

You know how the Yarn Harlot has that squirrel that steals her fleece when she puts it outside to dry? (Well, she DID have--read this for how she got revenge.) Well, I have a Squirrel Thief, too. Only, since I don't spin, there is no fleece to steal.

See this?

This is a tiny Mango Tree, grown from the seed of a mango by yours truly. I have managed to grow three of these little things. The first one, I did the research and took the hard husk off of the seed and grew it tenderly in a pot of growing material in a Ziploc bag. When it sprouted, I put it in a tiny pot and when it was a little bigger than the one in that picture, I transplanted it into a bigger pot. The next morning, my husband was leaving for work and I brought it out onto the porch. I told him how I'd grown it from a mango seed which is sort of like a big Lima bean once you take the husk off and how proud I was of it. He realized that he'd forgotten something inside and I followed him back in and left the plant on the deck railing. I went back out to move it back into the safety of the screened-in porch not five minutes later.

It was gone.

Seriously. The pot and dirt were still there but some thieving little squirrel had apparently been eavesdropping on our conversation and come down and taken the tender seedling and the Lima bean seed for his breakfast.

I did not respond well.

In fact, I plotted and plotted and I grew another one and I wouldn't even show it to the world until it became THIS.

My husband has been known to whisper warnings to the squirrel when I tell this story and today, when I showed him that we had another little mango sapling, he whispered, "SHHHH! Better not let the squirrel know!"

Maybe I need one of those food dome contraptions.

Oh, and here's one last magical thing that happened today:
You might have to click on it to see it. Isn't it really beautiful and delicate in a, um, buggy kind of way?