Time to End My Spring To-Do List

It is definitely summer now where I live.  It's been in the 90s for days, we've taken the kids to the pool repeatedly, and we've even had some lovely thunderstorms.  And, of course, Memorial Day has come and gone.  So it's high time I wrap up my spring to-do list and get busy on a summer one!

(All photos are my own.)

~ Finish re-reading The Lord of the Rings  Fail.  I did finish The Two Towers, though, and now I'm into Return of the King, so I'm confident I'll finish it soon.

~ Finish the first draft of my Beauty and the Beast retelling  Fail.  Oh my goodness, friends!  This first draft is 60,000 words and still growing.  That's half again as long as the final draft of Cloaked.  Whaaaaat?  I did not realize this was going to be so much bigger.  But I am absolutely loving the ride.  It has been a genuine pleasure to get to know these characters.  I can't wait to share them with you!  

Meanwhile, I do have this little teaser graphic I whipped up recently, if you'd like a little peek into the terrain where it takes place and the actors I would cast if I was making this as a movie instead of writing it as a book:

~ Finish leading the Sense and Sensibility read-along on my book blog  Check!  I had the loveliest time, and I hope participants did too :-)

~ Read 3 books about/by someone who is not white  Check!  I read six:

• Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev
• Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
• Hard-Boiled by Peggy Thompson and Saeko Usukawa
• Tall in the Saddle by Peggy Thompson and Saeko Usukawa
• The Poker Bride by Christopher Corbett
• Asian Americans in the Old West by Gail Sakurai

~ Read 3 books for my latest Classics Club list  Check!  I read five:

• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
• Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery (review to come)

~ Read 9 books off my TBR shelves Check!  I read (are you ready for this?) SIXTEEN!  They were:

• Laura Ingalls Wilder Country by William Anderson
• Dearest Josephine by Caroline George
• The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
• The Winter King by Christine Cohen
• Hard-Boiled by Peggy Thompson and Saeko Usukawa
• The Canary Trainer by Nicholas Meyer
• Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
• Tall in the Saddle by Peggy Thompson and Saeko Usukawa
• A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
• Yesterday or Long Ago by Jenni Sauer
• Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim
• The Last Fire-Eater by Charity Bishop
• The Lady and the Lionheart by Joanne Bischoff
• The Poker Bride by Christopher Corbett
• Land of Hills and Valleys by Elisabeth Grace Foley
• Kilmeny of the Orchard by L. M. Montgomery

~ Watch 6 movies off my TBW shelves  Check!  I watched:

• The Buccaneer (1958)
• The Moonstone (1996)
• Little Women (1949)
• Rhapsody in Blue (1945)
• Man in the Middle (1964)
• The West (1996)

~ Watch WandaVision  Fail.  I will probably watch this with my best friend in the future.  Right now, I'm more excited about Loki's show, though.

~ Go see Black Widow (I HOPE!!!)  FAIL.  But this is not my fault -- they shoved the release date back again.  Sigh.

~ Take an afternoon river cruise on a tall ship Fail.  Again, not my fault -- they didn't start up their cruises as soon as they said they would.  We're hoping to try this over the summer, though.

~ Visit Colonial Williamsburg  Check!  We went there for my birthday :-)  My mom was visiting at the time, so she got to go along too!  It was the perfect time to visit, as allll the flowers were in full bloom.

~ Finish the baby blanket I'm crocheting for a relative who's expecting  Check!  I don't think I ever got a picture of it, but I sent it to them a couple weeks before the baby arrived, so yay!

~ Bake a pie for Pi Day (3/14)  Check!  I made this Keto Snickers pie and it was magnificent :-9

~ Hang a hammock in the backyard  Check!  I'm not a big fan of hammocks (they mess with my back), but my kids love it :-D  They've been asking for a hammock for a couple years now, so we gave them one for Easter and rigged it up when it got warm enough.  They use it pretty much daily.

Well, there you have it.  Five fails this spring, but nine checks, so all in all, I'm satisfied :-)  How about you?  Did you accomplish this spring that you were hoping to do?

2016 Container Garden

It has rained nearly every day for over a month.  We've had a few moments of actual sunshine lately, though, so I seized the opportunity to take some photos of this year's container flower garden on my deck.  Here it is!

Also, down to the left we have my two bigger pots that used to have my lavender plants in them.  I got those in the ground at last (we'll see if they manage to grow or not), so now we have blueberry bushes in these pots, since those didn't do well in our clay-y ground.  So left-to-right here, we have blueberry bush, blueberry bush, a few lilies-of-the-valley left over from when I divided the patch of those out front, and some magenta petunias that Tootie chose at the store.

Moving on up, we've got these two lovely double-layered pots.  I planted purslane in the top of both of them, and then it never came up, and it never came up, and I gave up on it and bought some pretty purple lantanas for the tops... and when I planted those, I discovered the purslane is coming up at last.  So left that plenty of room in both pots.  I planted marigold seeds in the bottom of the left pot, and bachelor buttons in the right one, but the buttons never came up, so I put in some petunias that Sarah (yellow) and Sam (purple) chose instead.

My three biggest pots are a delight this year.

The ones on the left and right have yellow pansies and purple johnny-jump-ups that are from last year!!!  They stayed alive over the winter and started blooming in March again.  They're huge and bushy and great.  I stuck some pale-ish blue lobelia in those pots too because they each had an empty spot where something last year died.

The center pot is all new stuff.  I stuck a "bandana" lantana in the very back, flanked by a yellow dahlia on the right and a "starsisters" dahlia on the left that had a gorgeous two-color bloom on it when I bought it, which promptly snapped off in the car on the way home -- but it has lots of buds, so I'm hopeful.  Anyway, directly in front of the lantana are 4 celosia, one of which has already died off.  I tried them a few years ago and was disappointed by them, but my dad grew them really well in his container garden, so I thought I'd try them again.  We'll see what happens.  Then in front of those is a yellow "sunsatia" with delicate flowers I love.  Flanking that are two "Aloha Kona" calibrachoas, which should get drape-y and awesome like the ones I've had previous years.

Finally, to the right of that trio is another double-decker pot with a purple lantana and some tiny purslane shoots on top, and more marigolds coming up in the bottom.  The yellow pot in the foreground has another lantana (I got a little nutty with those this year -- usually I just have one or two, but now I have five).

And the three on the stand belong to Sam, Sarah, and Tootie, arranged according to their age, with Sam's on top, full of bachelor buttons we planted as seeds.  Sarah's middle pot mostly has these succulents called portulaca that seem to have reseeded themselves from last year.  She planted a few marigolds in with them, though, because Sam and Tootie were getting to plant seeds.  The bottom one is Tootie's, with different bachelor buttons from seeds.

Now I'll share a few close-ups just because I love taking pictures of flowers :-)  Here are the johnny-jump-ups:

The lobelia:

The sunsatia:

The calibrachoa:

The dahlia (and yes, I totally chose these because of the Alan Ladd movie The Blue Dahlia):

The "bandanna" lantana:

And here are a few of the johnny-jump-ups and some roses from the bush by my front door, which I stuck together in a jug to decorate our table when we had some company over for supper last week:

I don't know much of anything about arranging flowers, but a bunch of fresh blooms stuffed in a little jug almost always turn out pretty, I think.  We were celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday, so I wanted to dress the table up a bit.

Guest Post in Which I Count My Blessings

Just a quick note to let you know that I've got a guest post up on Counting Your Blessings One by One today.  It's part of a continuing guest post series she's got going on :-)

And, because otherwise this is an exceedingly short post, here's what our azalea bush looks like right now:

Gardening 2015

I haven't posted anything about my gardening efforts all spring :-(  So I'm making up for it today with a whole slew of photos showing how things have gone in June and into July.

First, this is what our raised-bed vegetable garden looked like in early June:

Tiny pepper plants along one side, garlic in the center, and peas along the edges.

It doesn't look like that anymore because the peas are all done and pulled out, and so is the garlic.  The pepper plants are much taller, and have cages to support them.  And along the other side opposite the peppers we have 4 cherry tomato plants.  Right now I have 8 empty squares, which is silly -- I'm hoping to find some lemon basil plants or something to put in the middle.

Okay, on to the container garden!  Here's how it was in very early June:

Those brown pots with double layers are full of marigolds grown from seeds I harvested from last year's plants.  The two matching middle pots have nasturtiums also grown from last year's harvested seeds, and they didn't all come up, so I bought some "lemon bell" calibrachoas to fill in the gaps.  The middle pot is entirely purslane, also from seeds I harvested last year.  The pots up on the three-level plant stand belong to my kids.  They have nasturtiums in the back, and then store-bought portulacas in the front.  That little painted pot in front of the plant stand just has more calibrachoas and petunias that came in a "planter ready" pot that I got 75% off at the plant store because it wasn't currently blooming.

Down the two little steps are my lavender plants.  I need to put these in the ground and meant to do it this spring, but then I was gone nearly 4 weeks in May, so it didn't happen :-(

Now for the close-ups!  Here's the lavender:

That store-bought "planter-ready" mix.  Unhappily, we have a groundhog in the neighborhood that likes to munch these calibrachoas sometimes.

Calibrachoas

Petunia

"Lemon Bell" calibrachoas in the bigger planters with the nasturtiums.

The photos above are all from early-to-mid June.  These are from late June, about 10 days ago.  Here are my kids' pots, which they painted themselves last year, and planted themselves this year:

Portalucas

Here's how things were looking 10 days ago.  This is basically how it still looks now, except that there are some marigolds opening now.

And here's my purslane!  I absolutely love this plant -- it's a succulent, so survives our hot summers well.  Also, it's totally edible!  Last year, I put some in salads and such.  Haven't done that this year yet, but I will soon!

That naughty groundhog ate all the nasturtiums in Tootie's pot, so I let her pick out a replacement at the local nursery, and she chose this bright vinca:

The blooms are so pretty as they unfurl!

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans!

My Summer To-Do List

Naomi Bennet posted a long summer to-do list on Wonderland Creek the other day, and inspired me to write a similar post.  I love lists, I make to-do lists allllllll the time, and I have a ton of things I want to do this summer, so why not share?

This summer, I want to:

~Start writing my next novel, another YA western

(It doesn't involve any Rangers, but I can't resist using this photo whenever I get a chance.)

~Go see Age of Ultron again

~Read 3 books about Robin Hood (because My Year With Robin Hood has stalled)

~Read at least 6 other books from my TBR shelves

~Read at least 3 other books from the library

(I will, of course, look exactly like this while reading all those books.)

~Have a squirt gun fight with my kids (Actually, just had one yesterday, but need to have another!)

~Have friends over for a sprinkler party (Been meaning to do this for two years now...)

~Clean out and organize my "crafting corner" (Which has turned into a Giant Pile O' Stuff.  Again.)

~Make a collage of inspirational writing quotes to hang above our computer desk

(And they will revolve around this quote, which I got
from Juicy Pens, Thirsty Paper by SARK.)

~Finish watching Agents of SHIELD (We got soooo behind because of being sick and being gone, etc.)

~Watch Cranford and Return to Cranford (I just got the first disc out of the library.)

~Try new popsicle recipes (My kids can't seem to eat enough popsicles.  Hmm.)

~Make lavender lemonade

(This is one of the main reasons I harvested and dried my lavender last year.)

~Dance in the rain (For obvious reasons.)

~Clean the pantry (Doesn't sound fun, but needs to be done.)

~Watch at least 6 movies from my TBW shelf (It's triple-stacked right now and very sad.)

~Figure out if the dragon story in my head is workable (I never write fantasy or magical realism.  But I want to write this sooooo much right now.)

(This is a statue in Varna, Bulgaria, and I didn't even know it existed until
about 2 minutes ago, but it needs to be on the front cover of my book, if I write it.)

~Get off the computer and play with my kids more (Which I'm going to do right now.)

What about you?  Got a list of things you want to do or accomplish this summer?  I hope to come back and revisit this in the fall to see how much of it I got finished.