There seems to be a lot of activity in the back yard flower beds to report on. This is one of the Native Lilies that Alice gave me for my yard. Three of them all bloomed today in 3 different locations in the yard.  

The thumbnails above are of more bloomin things in my yard today. They are: two different shots of Sparkling Orange, Home Run Roses with Stella deOra DayLily, Coral Bells and a very dark orange cosmos that Alice and I are wanting to save seeds from.  That last shot is not really about anything blooming, but rather the “pad” that I made for the Utility guys when they come to do maintenance in or on the three ugly utility “thingies” planted just to the left of the pad. The ugly “thingies” were supposed to be IN my yard, but I had them build my fence so that the utilities were just barely outside my fence.  I didn’t want to have to look at them all the time, and besides, I didn’t want the utility workers to ever have occasion to be tromping around inside my flower gardens.

Today Alice and I drove a few miles north to meet with Gillian again. This time visiting her yard and her neighborhood. She is lucky enough to have this wonderful park within a block or so of her house. Alice and I are both hoping that the developer of our sub-division finally adds the gravel walking path beside the ravine that runs behind our houses. It would make for a much more interesting walk each morning rather than looking at everyone’s landscaping in the neighborhood….day after day.

I believe I have one of my day lilies mislabeled in my back yard.

This one is labeled “Last Red Star”, when it’s actually a Stella deOra. Duh . . . I wonder how that happened.

Well, I’m feeling kind of proud of myself today. Now that the garage sale is over and done with, I’ve been getting my garage neat and organized. This is a vise that was my dad’s and I finally got it mounted on my work bench. It entailed drilling holes in the work bench and then securing it tightly with bolts, nuts and locking washers.

When they built my fence they attached the hardware for the gate with wood screws. And what with all the wind blowing around here, the screws kept working their way out of the wood. Soooooo, today I drilled holes all the way through the gate wood and attached the hardware with more bolts, nuts and locking washers.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the right hardware in black so I had to use silver. But at least it functions correctly now. Yet more evidence that I am my father’s daughter. He was a maintenance man for a large corporation for years and he could and did fix anything and everything.  One time we were stopped at the last minute from going on vacation because something at the plant broke down and “froggy” (my dad) was the only one who knew how to fix it. And I believe that those engineering jeans also got passed along to my son, who is a mechanical engineer.

This is a picture of my dad. He died almost twenty five years ago. I sure do miss him.

It was a lovely day today but I’m also glad it’s over. You see I sang a solo in church this morning and I’m soooooo glad that’s over and done with. I’ve been kind of nervous for a couple weeks just thinking about it’s approaching time. I didn’t flub up so that’s a plus.

I spent the afternoon cleaning up my garage after the garage sale and doing some watering and weeding out in the yard.

I don’t know if you can see him very well, but this evening I almost stepped on this snake out in my back yard. It scared me half to death, but I believe he was even more afraid of me than I was of him. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of him, it just startled me something awful when I saw something move as my foot took a step. I ran into the house and chased him around the yard before I could get a picture of him.

No pictures, but the garage sale was a success. Not nearly as good as the one I had in Texas, but then I didn’t have nearly as much stuff to sell at this one. When I moved here I wasn’t sure how much room I’d have or what I’d be able to use, so I kept more stuff than I knew I had room for just to have some options. All the stuff in this garage sale was what didn’t get used in the new house.  The weather was perfect, but still it feels good to have it over with.

My very first day lily has bloomed. It’s a StellaDeOra Lily and it’s just the first of a bunch of day lilies.

And this is another picture of the pink lilies that I brought with me from my yard in Texas. Today I had 15 blooms on it.

This is a close up of the Mesmerizer iris that bloomed yesterday.

Alice and I worked all day at my garage sale, and the weather was just perfect. No rain and it didn’t get too hot either. We’ll finish up tomorrow and hopefully the rest of the “must sells” will sell.  I really don’t want to pack a bunch of stuff up again and store it. . . . so . . . the prices got slashed tonight when we closed the doors.

Oh look what greeted me this morning!!  It’s the lily that I brought with me from my house in Texas. Actually it made a winter-long stop-over in a large pot in Ardmore, OK with my good friend Linda while my house was being built in OKC. She thought she had accidentally killed it when the greenery died. She didn’t realize that was just what it does in the winter time. Anyway, after I moved into my house she and her husband Butch drove to OKC to bring me all the pots and stuff she was baby sitting for me.  I planted this next to the house between the breakfast room windows and the master bedroom windows.  It’s kind of nice to have something in my new yard from my old yard.

I know it’s not much . . . just one bachelor button, but we can only report what we see, and this was yesterday’s only new flower.

Well, there’s also the new pot of flowers on the patio table.  They’re million bells and they’ve been there a couple days, but I guess I forgot to blog about that.  (Not everything is earth shattering.)

By the way, we got almost two inches of rain last night. My “weather radio” kept on squawking all evening. I sure hope we don’t have more severe weather again tonight, because I would really like to sleep all through the night.

My neighbor has her granddaughter and one of her little friends at her house for a couple days. Tonight while I was out front dead-heading the tulips, the two young girls came over to my yard and said, “There’s a bird and a nest inside grandma’s mailbox”.  Pretty soon my neighbor motioned for me to come over to her brick mailbox and listen to see if I heard anything. We kind of . . . sort of . . . thought we could hear the peeping of baby birds when we opened up the mailbox . . . but there was no nest in sight, nor any birds in sight. We tried to convince the girls that they were just hearing the echo of the birds outside as they chirped. I went back to dead-heading and finally went into the house for the evening, busying myself for the next half hour documenting on the computer the plants I’ve put in the yard this week. DING DONG. Imagine my surprise when I opened the door and there was my neighbor and the two little girls, and one of them was holding a tiny TINY baby bird. It was smaller than the last joint of my little finger.  The girls had found the baby underneath the lid to the mailbox. It was wiggling and very much alive. There was the smallest of cracks between the metal and the mortar, which doesn’t look large enough to allow ANY bird to enter, but evidently that’s where the mamma bird gained entrance. The granddaughter looked up at her grandma and me and said, “See, I told you.”

I added a border of tiny perennial pink dianthus flowers around the border of the yellow rose bushes. I hope that the little pink blooms show up a little better later on as they become more abundant.

And here is a close up of one of the miniture rose buds.