Day !

We really wanted to go on a vacation this summer.  If we don't get off sooner rather than later, we usually don't get to go at all.  I was a little worried when we didn't leave as we originally planned, but it worked out okay.  My teacher husband got his contract signed for a school in the fall and that is just fine to delay for.  We got some of his pictures hung in his room and some of his school stuff out of the garage and up to the school!  He is looking forward to having just one subject to prepare for instead of five.  It may be a blessing in disguise that he was downsized out along with others due to funding issues at the private school he was at, though it made him sad.  But that's a ways off...for now we are on the road!
We are headed to New York to see one of our daughters.  It's been a year since we last set eyes on her and her family, way too long!  We have over 1700 miles to go before we get there, so there's time for some adventures along the way.

We paused at a rest stop in Oklahoma near Erick.  A man who worked there told us about a local photographer and showed us a book by him; we were admiring the pictures he'd taken that decorated that rest stop.  So I'm giving a shout-out to him: http://themasterslightajourney.com/ .  It's a website to buy his book that we looked at, but one of his photographs is featured on the cover.  He likes reflection photography and does some really good work.  Some of his photographs are also featured at http://www.classicoilfieldphotography.com/1/cb86#/gallery/western-photography/ : look for pictures by Sam Hagen.  I always enjoy finding others who see the world the way I do.  

A Day's Work

We have a corner of the yard that never grew grass well, so years ago we decided to put in a container garden with a fountain.  It takes maintenance over time and some years I've been better at keeping it up and other years, not so much.  I always put plants there, mind you, but I don't always work on the upkeep.  We originally laid down so-called weed cloth which has bio-degraded itself into scraps.  The grass has merrily grown on top of it, which at least makes it easy to pull, but is frustrating.  We had laid down a good bed of wood chips originally - not the bark kind from the store, but some from a tree lot where people take the trees they cut down and the city chips them into mulch.  And it's free!  This was very important when we set this up.  Not the prettiest of mulch, but free is good!  Over time, this kind of mulch turns into soil, hence the grass.  My dad one year, being very helpful, got rid of the ugly stuff in our corner garden, which was the remains of our wood chips.  This left pretty much just the scrappy weed cloth.  Now what?  So, we invested in store-bought bark mulch, much better looking than our wood chips and not overly expensive, no bigger than the area is.
I've been planning on working on that garden and had gotten all the needed materials: bags of mulch and a new fountain pump, but hadn't gotten around to actually doing it.  The weatherman was making dire forecasts of "These are the last cool mornings we are going to have for a while" and "Chance of severe storms" (Ha), so I decided I'd better get busy.  My little project ended up lasting all day......and the plants were already potted (the work of other days).  It takes an amazing amount of time to unload a fountain of all its goodies and clean it out and change out the pump and put it back together (making sure it works before you load it back up!).  I had to wash off all the rocks because they were covered in mulch silt and we have a LOT of rocks on that tiny little fountain.

Then came the laying of the new bark mulch, which involved moving all the plants previously potted and placed, removing mulch silt where necessary and then decoratively distributing said bark mulch.  I added some stepping stones to hopefully keep mulch from being redistributed to the yard and re-placed all the potted plants and rocks and other things I have except for the garden critters (decorative animals and such I've collected over time) because I pooped out.  Still, it was a good day's work.