Catching Up

I have a lot I could be talking about here, but my desire to do things "in order" always makes me fall behind, whether that be in watching TV shows (which I've pretty much stopped altogether), in my gardening, and in my picture posting and journal writing.

Speaking of my gardening, it's moving along.  I put five broccoli plants into the ground, although one appears to be dead.  None of my peppers sprouted, and none of my cauliflowers did either.  I will have to buy seedlings at the nursery if I want those.  But I do have lettuce growing, and potatoes, and about 12 tomato plants that will be transplanted into the garden later this month.  I also have four or five more crops that are scheduled to be planted over the coming weeks.

The blackberry "bush" (it's really not bushy at all) looks good.  The strawberry patch has been pretty much wiped out, though, by weeds, digging, mowing, and nobody caring for it.  My rosebushes look better than ever, after I pruned them for the first time this winter.  The azaleas are right in the middle of blooming and are beautiful.  I got a bunch of pink tulips come up unexpectedly.  And the hydrangeas are looking great -- I hope to actually have all three bloom this year.

So there, I caught up on journaling about my garden, but I still have not talked about the kids in school, the funny things Holly has been saying, what books I'm reading, the music I'm listening to, or the pets.  And there's also the little matter of this:

Yeah... I'll tell you all about that.  :)  Soon!

Emily

This is Emily, the new member of the cat family. She's a lot of fun. :)

I have been working hard updating the photo albums on Zebranest, so check them out here: http://www.zebranest.net/photos. Lots of stuff up from the beginning of the year up to the end of May. Also, I'm looking to sail past my goal of 15 books read this year, since I'm already working on the 13th -- woohoo! You can see my reading list here. The older girls are supposed to be reading plenty this summer instead of rotting in front of the computer or Wii... you can check out their progress on their blog, Chickpeas.

New Decade

Couple of changes for the new decade. I'm going to be moving my public posts over here to Blogger -- the new address is thebigenoughumbrella.blogspot.com -- and they will in turn feed over to my website. I'll keep friends-only posts at LiveJournal.

Here in Baltimore 2010 came in cold and has stayed cold. I love my heating system (radiators), but the house is so drafty that many areas just won't warm up. Over the weekend I put plastic up over one of the windows in the family room and it made quite a difference. I need to go to Home Depot or something to get more plastic for some of the other windows. I put towels down in front of the doors to try to stop the drafts coming under them, but a certain cat tends to pee on them. (Allie, our elderly lady cat.)

If you're friends with me on Facebook you may have seen this already, but here are me and the girls on Christmas Day:



Moving right along to goals for this year:

• Don't gain any weight. It worked last year!
• Read at least one book each month. I have no shortage of books waiting to be read. Follow the progress on my website, once I get the page set up.
  
• Make headway on the biggest house project -- the torn up upstairs room. Once it was going to be a kitchen and dining room, but now my plan is to make it a master bedroom and master bath. Or at the very least, to make it a livable room of any kind. This hasn't been worked on in over three years.
  
• Continue paring down my stuff (junk). It's a long road for me since I have packrat tendencies. So far in the three days of this year I got rid of two bags of clothing and a bag of toys. Gotta keep at it.
• With the kids, laugh and hug more, and yell less. Not sure how to quantify or track this one, but it's a goal nonetheless.