Scattered Thoughts . . .

Although the weather is beautiful today for working outdoors, I am in 'recovery mode'. My spinal pain, at rest, is in the 7-8 range on the 10 point pain scale.  Yesterday, I dug and installed footings for the roof covering our grill/outdoor kitchen area. Then, I jacked up the adjoining playhouse to raise it four inches to match the roofline I need for this new roof over the grill/outdoor kitchen area. This work proved to be far too much for my spinal injuries.  Anything I do adds inflammation to my spinal injuries but I've been doing a lot of things lately which require a lot of bending over and that is never good for my spine. I don't think I slept more than a total of one hour last night! My spine was so inflamed that it was excruciating just lying in bed. I spent the night very carefully and very slowly tossing and turning trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. It didn't work. I simply could not sleep. So, today is a down day for my health.  As I s

It seems that most years we have difficulty finding wildflower seed so we end up a little bit behind schedule.  This year I didn't even bother wasting my time and energy by searching for seed locally and instead ordered it from Amazon the moment I realized it was that time of year.  I couldn't find any seed locally last year and I really wasted a lot of time so I eventually had to order it online from Amazon. It was such a painless, quick and easy way to purchase that I went right to Amazon this year. Now we have the seed... we just need to get out of the freezing nighttime temperatures so we can plant. In the meantime, we need to clean out the flowerbeds all around the house in preparation of this new short growing season. We could probably use some top soil and peat moss as well... I'll have to grab some of that the next time we are at Lowes or Home Depot. So far, however, we are on track for some nice wildflowers this season!

I wandered from the living room early yesterday morning to take a look at our wildflower gardens as Autumn settles in and Summer slips away. Oddly enough, even though most of our plant life is turning brown and drying up, we do have a handful of new blooms here and there. I noticed one of these new blooms with a narrow beam of sunlight illuminating it from above and behind. I am always searching for good light and this was exceptionally good light. This beam of sunlight was lighting up only the yellow petals and green stem. I crouched down low in the perfect spot about 10 feet from this single flower. I set my exposure... I focused, inhaled and held my breath... I ever so gently pressed the shutter release being careful not to cause any camera shake... I exhaled slowly. After capturing a few extra frames, I noticed something change in the scene in my viewfinder...  A single bee entered the frame. Apparently, this bright yellow flower draped in sunlight caught his eye as well! I&#

We had a very late start to summer this year due to some snowfall in April and May. I couldn't plant anything until very late in May because the ground was still frozen. We even had some piles of snow and chunks of ice leftover through Memorial Day weekend which still needed to thaw. Needless to say, we by-passed spring altogether and summer has been late. This morning, while I was staining our front deck (a continuation of yesterday morning's little staining project... and a project which will continue into tomorrow morning), I noticed that we are finally beginning to get some flowers in our wildflower gardens around the house. We have three good-sized wildflower gardens and, oddly enough, the garden which is doing best this year is a garden which hardly had any growth in previous years. Maybe our other two gardens are a bit tired and need a year of rest. After cleaning up from my staining project, I decided to grab one of my cameras to attempt to capture a few shots..