Scattered Thoughts . . .

Today was a landscaping day.   Mostly, I was focused on the lawn and especially the new putting green.  The new grass in the putting green is filling in nicely.  The grassy area in front of the putting green is coming along but there are still a few bare spots as you can see in the second photo, below.  Some new grass should be popping up out of the bare spots in the next few days.   Mowing a putting green is something new to me.  I started with my usual mulching mower in the hope of picking up most of the debris that has already fallen from the surrounding trees.  We have all sorts of seeds that have fallen from nearby oaks and elms (I think).  After sort of vacuuming up the putting green using my usual mower, I then went at it with a reel mower.  This reel mower cuts much closer and it worked very well.  The putting green is looking very nice. The rest of the lawn around the house is looking nice too.  I spent extra time...

Every year we expand and improve our landscaping and gardens and this Spring was no exception. Each year, things are a little bit different in our yard with different plants and slightly different gardens and we seem to add a little more each year as well.   I'm not at all into having little figures and figurines in our gardens and backyard, in general,  but we do have our frog, Dawn, perched on our front step to greet all visitors. This frog is named after Sheila's lifelong friend, Dawn. If you were fortunate enough to know Dawn, you'll understand why our frog is named Dawn... We added cedar planters and window boxes this year and hope to add more to more windows in the future... As always, our stone walls, stone paving, and timbers tend to expand and artistically spread as well. This stone walkway to our backyard and back door , lined by wildflowers and stones,  is one of my favorite features (and required a lot of back-breaking work for someone with ext...

I've had a few good days recently and managed to get a few things accomplished around the house but that never lasts long.  My health is often in a constant see-saw motion... sometimes a roller coaster motion... and lately, I've been struggling with a few days on the low end of these fun rides. During those few good days, I built a few new planters for our front deck and two new window boxes for the front of the house. I was on a roll and I was optimistic that some good health would continue so I could get more accomplished on the house. It was a nice thought but what the hell was I thinking?  My health was rather poor yesterday with weakness, dizziness, lightheadedness, and simply feeling rather poor. I even spent some time in the bathroom sick as a dog. It wasn't until later in the day that I realized that what was really bothering me the most was bone pain.  This bone pain is brutal. It is pain all through my body. Everything hurts but especially my long bones. T...

After turning over the ground in the front flowerbed... I had a good day of health yesterday and it was beautiful outside so we spent the day out in the yard doing our first day of landscaping for this year.  As I've written many times before, it is a rarity when my health cooperates with the weather... good health coinciding with good weather... so, after two weeks of pretty lousy health, it felt awesome to be doing something physical and being productive for a change! We cleaned up the flowerbeds... I turned the ground over... weeded out clumps of weeds... raked... weeded again... leveled... added wildflower seeds... lightly raked again to cover most of the seeds... while Sheila pulled weeds and rearranged plantings in another flowerbed.  One of the flowerbeds, weeded and seeded... I got the weedwhacker running and knocked down some of the longer grass where the mower can't access... I also got the lawnmower running and cut the lawn.  The yard is lookin...

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!

The light had changed outside so I went back out there with my camera in hand to see if I could compose a different sort of scene with the newest blooming flowers in our wildflower gardens.  Because of the change in light... direction, quality, softness... I had something different in mind this time around...  I again grabbed the camera which chooses its own settings...  randomly... at any given time... usually screwing up any notions I have of getting a good shot. Although, in hindsight, my newest camera might have been the best choice for this particular shot I wanted to stick with the color depth of the Kodak sensor on this malfunctioning camera.  Anyway... I had the camera...  I kept checking the settings to make sure they were the way I wanted them ensuring the camera wasn't changing them on me randomly... I had the lens I wanted... and I quickly captured a few frames.  Typically, I go for a contrasty scene with a lot of deep tonal qualities......

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.....