Spring Has Sprung 2!

 

Lately we've been having foggy, misty mornings which turn into warm, sunny days.  I don't know if it's our proximity to the lake or our elevation, or just extra humidity but it makes for some hazardous driving and difficulty waking up. This weekend we're expecting July high temperatures and high humidity and just yesterday we were all feeling a bit chilly. It makes it hard to know how to dress one day to the next!  Oh well, at least it's never boring.  The flowers seem pretty happy with it so far, and I do love to see them blooming away.

When I see the mist it reminds me of being at my sister-in-law's house in the Adirondaks.  She ha a brook running through her land and in the early mornings in the summer you can follow how the brook runs through the forest by the mist which rises from it above the trees.  Nature is an amazing thing  There is something quieting about the fresh smell of moist pine trees in the early morning and sitting outside sipping a cup of hot tea that I feel nowhere else. I look forward to our yearly trip there, and she is a gracious hostess.  In the meantime I find things at home to quiet my mind and enjoy in nature.

The Azaleas are beautiful this year. I bought them perhaps 25 years ago at a supermarket in 4" pots.

I love these little petunia like flowers and get some every year in hanging baskets. The bees seem to really enjoy them, sometimes we get hummingbirds at them as well.

More Azaleas and a wind chime I hung this year on a broken but still useful hook on the inside corner of the deck.

A basket of mixed color petunia like flowers. It's so hard to choose just one color! So I like to get them all mixed together in one basket. 

I think the lighting in this picture of an Azalea is quite dramatic considering I took it with my phone. Soon the petals will fall off the flowers and it will just be green. Still nice, but not as showy as it is now.

Mother's Day and Outside Pictures

 

Mother's Day was nice, spent quietly with my husband and both my girls and my eldest's boyfriend. the guys did some yard work and my oldest helped me with a couple things inside, then we watched a ballgame on TV and ordered burgers for dinner. I love spending time with my girls!

I only got one bloom on the lilac this year,  perhaps the colder weather had something to do with it.  It's still pretty, but not fragrant. That seems odd, but I guess nature does what it does!

 For Mother's Day I get flowers and also a lawn ornament or wind chime. I love putting them around the edge of the patio. The first one and bottom one are wind spinners, the top one like a pinwheel and the bottom one, which is the newest, spins each level separately in the wind. I love how the top looks like an angel.  The middle one was a solar light, but it hasn't lighted up in years. I like it anyway, it reminds me of a black and white photograph.

 

MAYDAY!MAYDAY!

 MAYDAY! MAYDAY!  This is not the best picture of me, but it is my current condition. On a recent Sunday late afternoon, after a very nice day spent outside hanging windchimes and planting seeds I tripped over a box I put down and then forgot about. On the way to the floor I caught my arm on the computer chair and wrenched my shoulder out of joint. We called my daughter to drive me to the emergency room and my husband stayed with Hillary. Eight hours, several doses of strong pain killers, one nerve bock, and four attempts later my shoulder was back together and we were on the way home. I still don't know if surgery is needed, but no bones appear to be broken. I expect lots of physical therapy to be in my future at the very least. It's always something!  

The background picture was taken about a week before the leaves started budding in earnest.

This picture was taken from the middle of the board walk at Lake George at Schooley's Mountain County Park, looking toward the falls.

This one is from the same spot facing the opposite direction where a couple streams feed the lake. I went with my sister in law about a week before I injured myself. We had a great time hiking and talking and ended with going for a lunch of omelets at a diner in a nearby town. It was sunny, but cold and windy that day so the coffee we had at the diner with our eggs hit the spot!

Primroses I planted many years ago that have thrived in spite of weeds covering them most of the time in the past. I love their sunny yellow color.

Some violets growing wild along the driveway. This is the first year we've had them.

Spring Has Sprung!

The creeping myrtle that I pulled long ago from the bank behind my childhood home and transplanted here at our house is one of the first plants to flower right after the crocus appear.  It really is quite invasive and can be a challenge to keep it from taking over the landscape, but I planted it in the back corner which is fairly rocky and unusable without major effort and landscaping.  It reminds me of my growing up years, my mother aggressively pulling it out in the spring to keep it where she wanted it.  Sometimes in the summer I would take a blanket and my lunch and have a little picnic in the grass at the base of the bank between us and the neighbors on the hill behind us.  That bank also provided us with a place to sled in the winter and just run down in the summer.  The neighbor sometimes yelled at us to get off that hill, not sure if the top of it was her property or ours but it didn't stop us from playing there.  My brother Dan broke his arm running down that hill and tripping over a tree root. Good times--haha!  Poor Dan was the one who broke bones--arm, wrist, thumb--all while just being a kid and running around, riding his bike, and playing.  I guess out of four kids one of us had to be accident prone!

You know it's spring time when the forsythia blooms!  These also remind me of my childhood because we had a huge "fence" of forsythia between us and the side neighbor.  They are also invasive!  My mother, it seems, loved her invasive plants--ha!  It did make a really good privacy fence though.  We only have a few growing across the back of our yard, but of course they are spreading so.....

We had a few really warm, summer like days this week and one evening after dinner I spent a little time on the back deck and watched the moon rise through the trees. This picture doesn't do it justice, but it's funny how the moon rises before the sun is set.  It was pretty bright because it was nearly full on this day.  Soon the leaves will be out and I won't get to see it through the trees until the fall.

I don't remember how long ago I planted these hyacinths, but this one came up in spite of being covered by leaves and a pile of twigs my husband put there last fall.  I moved the sticks off of it when I saw it coming up through the leaves.  Soon we'll have to get busy with rakes to uncover everything.

My older daughter and I went to a paint and sip fundraiser for the pet adoption she went through for her new cat.  I was smiling, but the person who took the picture must have snapped this before that--probably I was saying something in the second before.  It's a fun memory now!  I followed the colors on the example picture and the instructor's direction, Anna made hers colored like two of her cats. 

The background of this picture is from our little Lake George at Schooley's Mountain Park nearby.

 

April Already!

Recently I visited a nearby park and walked to the start of the falls, where the little lake emptys out over what I assume is a dam.  It was lovely standing there watching the water and listening to it rushing away down over the rocks.

This is a view of the lake there. It is called Lake George, but is much smaller than the more famous Lake George, NY.

Another view of the lake, this one from just before the bridge over the falls.  You can see in the background the metal boardwalk across the lake and on the right a clubhouse with a lovely patio on the lake.  I plan to picnic there one day soon when my sister in law can join me (she's a teacher and has to wait for Spring break).

I can’t believe how quickly the months are flying by!  Here it is April already, and I could swear just last week it was Thanksgiving!  I know I keep writing about time passing fast, but boy it is true for me.  I guess I just get lost in the days and when I look up I’m turning another page on the calendar.  At least time isn’t hanging heavy on my hands.  This is a good thing. The first day of April is famous for being April Fool’s  Day, a day where people for some mysterious reason play pranks, tricks and jokes on each other; some harmless, some mean depending on who’s involved and what type of person they are.  I’ve seen everything from a single gal announcing she’s engaged on social media (when she’s not even got a boyfriend), to someone leaving the kitchen tap on the sprayer so that when someone turns it on to say, fill the teakettle, they get drenched, to giving someone cookies made with salt instead of sugar.  It’s supposed to be all in good fun.

               I’m not one to prank people, but I do remember one time when I was much younger and very silly that I played one on coworkers.  At the time, I worked in a donut shop baking the donuts.  On the opposite side of the kitchen was the finishing table where the donuts were filled, frosted, or coated before going into the display case for sale.  Under the table were 3 rolling bins, about the size of a bassinette, filled with powdered sugar, granulated sugar, and glaze.  They each held about 25 lbs. of ingredients, and my trick was to bury just under the surface of the sugar sheets of parchment paper so that when my coworkers tried to coat the donuts they would not be able to get enough sugar to do so.  As I remember, we all got a good laugh out of it.  That’s it, my whole April Fool’s Day story.  I never promised a hilarious story here, but I hope it gave you a chuckle.

               I do hope that April will feature some calmer weather than we’ve been having, but even with the extreme cold we had recently there are flowers emerging from their winter sleep and buds appearing on the trees in the warmth of the sun.  It is a good and hopeful sign of things to come.