Sunday, August 9, 2009

The New Girl


This gorgeous little creature is my niece Eva. She was born this afternoon to her brave and beautiful mama Cathy and her very proud papa Jon. She weighs 5 lbs 6 oz, is 18 inches tall, and has the pinkest, plumpest little rosebud of a mouth I have ever seen. She's going to have a great smile. She's sweet and snuggly and smells divine, and I can't wait to get to know her.

"And the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay."

Welcome to the world, baby girl!

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Welcome to the (tomato) Jungle

I am not a gardener. If you saw my yard, you would heartily agree with that statement, trust me. It's got a very, very long way to go, before it's pretty and pleasing. I need more money and more time to make it into my little corner of Eden, but I do like to dig in the dirt and watch stuff miraculously change from tiny little seedlings into ginormous sheets of tomato vines. Kind of like this...







Yep, this is the tomato jungle. The green beans were eaten before they could even get their first set of true leaves, and the strawberries won't be great until next year, but the tomatoes outdid themselves. I always forget how big they get when I'm planting, and I plant too many, too close, and I get this monstrosity. It got so bad that one of the tomato plants tried to escape over the fence into the neighbors yard, see...












but the fantastic thing about tomatoes is that I can mess them up, and I still get really yummy fruit. Really, really yummy fruit.





mmmm...tomatoes.

The cucumbers have been prodigious producers. I can't pickle 'em fast enough. And I have some serious Thai basil. Next year, I will have tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, and hopefully green beans, beets, strawberries and maybe a pumpkin or a watermelon, too. With some gorgeous flowers, benches for my outsided table, and no lawn. Oh, the daunting project of getting rid of the rest of the lawn both scares me and invigorates me.



"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing." Cicero