Chit chat and garden questions and happy surprises

Lord, I meant to follow up my last middle aged purge of a post with something light a lot sooner than this.

Oops.

I have been busy, busy, busy, with kids and life and just lots of stuff.

We're still doing that volleyball thing, it's getting pretty exciting. Got invited to Hermosa Beach to compete in the High Performance tournament. It's a big deal for our midwestern girls. We are bound to get an education, and some serious beach envy. Before that we have to compete in Cincinnati and Des Moines, so you can see how excited we must be about California. Woo hoo!

In the life department, we finally finished the most tedious refinance in history of refinancing with the bank that you already have your mortgage with. My husband and I are beginning to think that the vast majority of the workforce is incompetent, indifferent, ignorant or just hateful. Nobody can seem to get anything right. My favorite part of the 186 page refi document was the one where they made us write our phone numbers and emails two pages before they listed our phone numbers and emails and asked us to check which one was our preferred communication method. They didn't allow for none as an answer. We started the process in October and closed at the end of June.  But it is done now, finally, finally.

Also, we got the house painted, which I was supposed to have scheduled this Spring, and I'm trying to tell myself that at least I got it done, before the wood fell off the house, but man, did they trample the shit out of my flowers and shrubberies. I apologize to the flowerbeds every time I go outside.

In other news, my sad little garden became a monster that will not be contained. I have one tomato plant taking up a third of the bed, and it's as tall as me. I've never grown anything like it, and I'm both proud and scared. It really, really liked my raised bed, compost enriched soil I guess.



Also, something sprouted from a seed in the compost, and it might be a pumpkin or a squash, I don't know, but I let it go and it has almost lapped the entire garden, strangling everything it can get it's tendrils on. Again, I'm both proud and afraid.



And then these - anybody know what the heck they are? According to my research, either a deadly poisonous weed, nightshade, except the flower color isn't white, or a nutritous edible green or a decorative lantern plant. I pulled all but two of them, but I'm curious to know what they are and how they got there. I need to learn to pull anything I didn't plant on purpose, it would make life much easier.



In other very exciting news, as husband and I sat outside on the patio last week as the sun was setting, he asked what that huge bird was in the half-dead oak tree, causing all the ruckus with the little birds. I ran for my glasses, camera and binoculars, because I like to cover my bases.
It was this guy:

A great horned owl, likely a young one, and he changed branches three times due to heckling before he flew right overhead, with angry birds in hot pursuit. It was a magical nature moment for both of us.

I've been trying to work, nursing a stiff and sore neck and wrangling ridiculous sleep disruption and just awful, awful dreams. For example, the one where my dog ran off and by the time I got to him some crazy guy beat my tucker to a bloody dead pulp with a stick so I attacked him and gouged his eyes out. And then I woke up.

Or this morning's ridiculous dream where the furniture was haunted and kept falling over on me and the piano kept playing itself and suddenly there was a children's choir singing Beatles songs in my living room. 

Every morning lately I awake from these stupid, stupid dreams. I could go on, but writing them out only makes them seem even sillier. My brain is insane.

So now, you are all caught up. I'll leave you with something pretty to look at, scenes from my fun but steamy hot day at the North Avenue beach with the volleyball team last week:

 

xo