I came home this afternoon to find my yellow hibiscus had bloomed. Alice and I are spending about 4 hours a day at mom's apartment going through her papers and cleaning out her refrigerator. Believe it or not, after two 4 hour days we have only gone through 4 drawers of paperwork. It's going so slowly because at the same time we're cleaning out, we're also hunting for certain things, so you can't just take a drawer and dump it. You have to look at each piece of paper to see if you need to keep it. We'll make it though, slowly but surely.

As you may already be aware from reading Alice's Xanga site (and mom's too), our mother died Wednesday evening of an apparent heart attack. Alice was there with her and she's pretty sure that mom didn't feel anything past the first 15 seconds or so, which I'm so thankful for. You know, she was adamant that she did NOT EVER want to go to a nursing home. And that's what she feared the most would happen if she had to go to the hospital . . . that she wouldn't be allowed to go back home to Superbia; that they'd make her go to a nursing home after the hospital. She said many times that she wanted to die AT Superbia. And I'm glad for her sake that she didn't have to go to a nursing home. The funeral is tomorrow and these are the flowers that Alice and I picked out for her casket. It isn't exactly like the one they had pictured in the book, because we made a few changes to it. It was supposed to have gladiolus in it, but mom had left specific instructions that she wanted NO gladiolus in her arrangement. We also added the Star Gazer lilies instead of daisies. We're pleased with how it turned out.

There have been a couple new arrivals in my yard in the last couple days. The two little yellow flowers above are Creme Brulee. They are the very first of them to bloom.  I have been anxiously waiting all spring to see if these lovlies would come back and bloom this year. They were tauted as perennials but some of them did not come back. So I guess I'll have to get some more and plug those into the blanks spots left by the ones that haven't come back.

The above blue and white  flowers are called Love In The Mist. Alice assures me that now that I have sewn their seeds and they've come up that I'll always have plenty of them throughout the yard...and that's OK with me.

Gill had said something about trying Gaura in a pot and I really thought that was a good idea. I love the way they sway in the wind, and wind is something we hardly ever have a shortage of here in Oklahoma. I tried them in the pots so that I could set the pots outside my computer room window.

My first lily of the season has bloomed and I couldn't be happier about that. I have early bloomer, mid bloomer and late bloomers, so I should be graced with plenty of lilies for the rest of this season.  A new flower for my yard this season is the poppy.  I threw seeds everywhere around the yard last fall and they this week they have appeared.  Then those white looking ones (they are actually a pale pink) are primroses, which I introduced into my back yard last week. Alice says I may someday regret that decision. We'll see.

Here's one of my latest "Digital Nuts" submissions. Seven new photos are posted each Wednesdays and we have a week to work on them. Sadly, I was done with all of them by Thursday evening. But I guess that's OK, because I have to pack and get ready for a trip to San Antonio to visit my son and his wife and their kids.  Also my yard keeps me hopping just dead heading and pulling weeds .

I guess I must have a one track mind . . . I can't seem to keep up two hobbies at the same time. I haven't been blogging every day like I used to because I've gotten into "Digital Nuts" now. Digital Nuts is a group of people who enjoy editing and enhancing digital photos. The photo above is of my new tiny water fountain. At first the spout at the top was forcing the water spout too high and it was getting blown out of the fountain by our Oklahoma winds, causing me to fill up the fountain 4 or 5 times a day . . . WAY too often. But there's a little clamp that you can use to restrict the flow of water and now that I've done that the water level doesn't go down nearly as fast.

Gill, Alice and I had our May outing today and decided to go to Will Rogers Park. The roses were beautiful but what caught our eyes were this momma duck and her 6 ducklings. I must have taken at least a dozen movies of them and I like this one the best. We followed them for about 20 minutes.

I thought you all might also enjoy seeing a few of the roses.

When you read hear when these pictures were taken you'll know how far behind I am running. They were all taken over a week ago when Alice, Gill and I went to the Oklahoma City Arts Festival and ended the outing by walking through the beautiful Myriad Gardens.

I love peonies and couldn't resist running over to a bush that I saw blooming to get a shot. I was excited to see that a bumble bee was inside and busy harvesting pollen. He took no notice of me. The picture on the right above is of a lovely water feature with pink roses blooming around it. See the little bridge on the other side of the water?

Then we came upon this turtle covered branch. It was so crowded that a couple of the turtles sunning were piled up two deep. The picture on the right is a close up of another of the thousands of roses in the gardens.

I was pretty grateful when I got up this morning and checked my garden. You see we had hail last night along with really strong winds. I was pleasantly surprised to find all my plants and flowers were still in tact . . . all but the hostas. They sustained lots of little tears in the leaves from the hail, but I think they'll pull through OK. I was especially surprised to find the Iris and the peonies still standing and in great shape.