Blooming Blossoms

While raving about how our flowers are doing this year to Dave he requested pictures. Here you go Love.
A woman in the ward gave us these two tone Irises. I love them! A sneaky white one made it's way into this batch as well.

Dave bought these Narcissus last year. They are gorgeous. This group is under our red bud tree. Which had some blooms on it this year. I didn't get any pictures of it. Bummer. I appropriated the red bud starts from an abandoned farm house our first year here. They have tripled in height in three years.
Dave sent this rose bush to me during his last deployment. They have taken off.

Again these Irises were a gift from a coworker two years ago. Thanks Bo! It's hard to tell from this picture but we've got five colors in this patch. White, pink, two tone purple, lavender and yellow. The yellow ones are still thinking about emerging. I guess they don't want to steal the show.

We will miss all our flowers when we move. It has been one of the perks of living in Tennessee.

We are growing

Baby started crawling last week!

Just in time for the new floor too.

Here are the pumpkins at 5 days and again at 9 days. I can't believe how fast they have taken off. We are going to start some more today and hopefully get them all in the ground soon.



Today I removed the little box the queen bee came in. She gets to eat her way out courtesy of a marshmallow I installed. If only it were like every time we moved. Welcome to the neighborhood! Now eat your way through the door.

The pictures are of the honey comb they built this past week. Too bad I had to remove it. It was in some valuable honey real estate.

And all these guys are still kicking around. I haven't killed any yet! All in due time.

There's so much life going on around here. It's great.

Hit the ground running

Baby and I are back from the lovely Alaska and enjoying a beautiful Tennessee Spring. Details of the trip will come in a later post with pictures when I get them all. For now I will placate you with a picture of the babe and one of my sisters in Alaska. I have so much to tell of the last week that it needs to be recorded before it's lost to the crevices of my memory forever.

The flight from Anchorage was the duration of Wednesday night. Here I need to shout to the world that we have The Best Baby Ever. She traveled like a champ. Better even. A silent champ that seems to do better on 6 hour flights than one hour Sacrament Meetings. What's up with that? Again I will detail that part of the trip later. I'm just pointing out that I did not sleep the night of said Wednesday. The next few days are kind of a whirl wind but here it goes.

• Thursday morning land in Nashville.
• House AC gets running as we are twenty minutes from the driveway. (Cutting it a little close guys. Especially since it was supposed to be done two weeks before.)
• Deal with AC guy for the first 30 minutes home.
• Come to terms with the destruction caused by the dog.
• Hop down to Rural King to get chicken supplies. (A little random I realize. But I needed to get there before all the good ones were gone.)
• Set up chicken brooder.
• Attend Missionary Correlation Meeting at 8 pm. Still haven't slept at this point. Pretty sure most of my comments were slurred.
• Baby still on Alaska time zone had a rough night. Which translates into we both had a rough night.
  
  


• Friday Morning hopped down to Rural King again and purchased ten Rhode Island Red chicks. We now have a wonderful chorus of chirps coming from the laundry room.
• Took the mutt for a swim. It was a glorious 85 degrees.
• Set three packets of pumpkin seeds on their happy little road of plenty.
• Prepared the living room for a life changing paint job.
• Finally showered. But still haven't unpacked as of the writing of this. How sad.
  

• Saturday slept in. Thank you Baby Dearest.
• Dropped baby off at a reputable day care and painted our ceiling with primer. We have a white ceiling! This is the first time our ceiling has been white since I moved in. Dave started the awful task of removing the popcorn ceiling (insert here malicious popcorn invented by the Devil himself) before I moved to Tennessee. Instead of aging sheet rock we have a gleaming white ceiling. It is a marvel to behold.
• Aired the fumes out while the dog and I completed a run to the dump. I have this fear that the truck will fail to start while I'm inside that odorously foul place. Who puts the dump inside a warehouse?
• Continued to air out the paint fumes while baby and I attended the Rivers and Spires Festival downtown with some great friends. Hopefully I can get some pictures of that to share soon.

Sunday. The typical Sunday. Everything but restful yet full of Sunday things, meetings, visits, lessons, the whole works.

• Monday. A package of bees showed up as I was pulling out of the drive way headed for yoga. It's awesome that we have a mailman that has handled bees, doesn't freak out at the mention of them with a can of Raid and delivers them to your door.
• Quickly sprayed the bees with water and left them in the laundry room too. Now I know you are expecting me to follow up with some disaster where the chickens eat the bees and all havoc has transcended my home into Pandora's box. But I'm happy to report that I came home an hour later to a content buzzing from the floor while the chicks were oblivious on top of the freezer. This is where they all stayed for many more hours. Unfortunately for the bees.
• Next baby went to her six month check up. She's 14lbs 9ozs of happy and laughs. She has the greatest laugh. Now that I have a camera I hope to get it on video for all of you to enjoy as well.
• Here is were I would love to say I went back to the disaster on the verge of exploding in my house. But, alas, Sully had to go the vet. On the way home he did a little exploding. In the car! He chose to puke in the car as we were pulling in the driveway at the house. Thanks dog.
• Hived the bees around 4pm. Oh how I wish I could report that had been uneventful. But I did something uber dumb. I left my hair in a pony tail. Doesn't seem like a big deal but, oh, the devil is in the details. I bent down to seal up the last of a long list of to-dos and eight of those girls got caught in my pony tail. Before extracting them all from my hair four of them got me. Three stings on the scalp and one on my jaw. My elephant man impression is super hot. This is the first time I have been stung by our own bees. Dave was stung once when he dropped a crowbar in a hive and then retrieved it with his bare arm. Hopefully we've learned our lesson. We have gear. We need to start using it instead of acting like, "I'm the bee whisperer, watch me fearlessly go into the lair of pain and suffering with just a loin cloth."

"The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance." John Ruskin

The flowers we have been enjoying in Tennessee are great. From our crocuses, irises, tulips and hostas it's nice to see so much color. Though we've labored hours on many plants the ones we've enjoyed the most preceded our arrival. These tiger lilies could have been planted here thirty years ago for all we know. For as thick as they grow, they very well could have been here that long running the length of our front yard and framing our mail box. Dave took these pictures and did a wonderful job.

He couldn't pass up the opportunity to exhibit his shiny hog. Which he took to the local race track last weekend for a little drag racing. He was delighted with his times and speeds. Legal speeds, in this instance, of 87 mph in 1/8 mi. Unfortunately, our camera was not in attendance or we would have some video to share. A similar outing may not occur for quite a while, since the motorcycle is currently lame with a flat tire; due to all it's burn out on said excursion.

Courageous little guys

Yesterday we had a burly storm pass through. I thought the house was going to blow over and there was water running inside a just painted wall. Yes! Inside the house. The wind ripped off some stripping over a window and rain came rushing in. There were even pictures taken of the streaming rivulets so Dave would know I wasn't exaggerating. The dog licked up all the water as it hit the floor. I guess he came in good for something.

That was yesterday. Today, it's gorgeous out. The crocuses must have decided it was safe to venture out after all the death and destruction. It's barely February and we have flowers! I figure they are the most courageous little guys or they're kamikaze's. Either way, it is great to see them this morning.
Tennessee has had the craziest weather lately. One day it's in the 70's the next it's -7 followed with ice storms. Maybe all the bulbs we have are just confused.

Only the yellows have opened. They did this last year too. I planted three colors and they all came up by color. First the yellows then the whites followed by the purples. I don't really mind their color selectiveness. It would be nice to see all the colors at the same time though. Does this happen to any of you? Or does anyone know why they do this?

Fruits of our Labors.

So, here is an update on the garden situation.
Gardening is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.  We are battling record high temperatures, drought, birds, legions of ants, groundhogs, birds, cats, and hardcore gardening ignorance.  And yet- we have actually managed to reap a little of what we have sown.



We have really lucked out on this stuff.  Cantaloupe loves Tennessee.











Everything we have eaten so far has been Delicious!  I half expected that everything would just die.  It was quite the pleasant surprise when stuff started growing!

Does anyone know any tricks to getting rid of night-time garden visitors- short of shooting them?  Not that I would mind, but I don't stay up that late.