This One's for Judie

Hi!
:-)

Little Things that can Make Me Happy

1. Airplane contrails.

2. Remembering something that's eluded me for hours or days.

3. Seeing my sweetie.

4. Watching baseball (an in-person game makes me a teeny bit happier, but I'm okay with watching on TV).

5. Knitting when it's going well.

6. Knitting even when it's not going to well.

7. Making a dinner that doesn't suck.

8. Seeing clean countertops.

9. Knowing I'm caught up on work with nothing hanging over my head.

10. Seeing our little apples getting slowly bigger every day!

Sock Summit 2011!

Easy registration this year, got all the classes I was interested in, the system didn't crash. And just like 2009, I'm sure that even if I didn't get into any classes at all, I'd still have a blast.

07/28/2011 11:00 AM
Swing by Your Heels

07/28/2011 1:30 PM
A bag of tricks for stretch and strength

07/29/2011 9:00 AM
It's Hip to be Square - Bosnian Toes

07/30/2011 1:30 PM
Textured Colorwork Socks - Chrissy Gardiner

07/30/2011 7:00 PM
This Is Your Brain on Knitting - Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

07/31/2011 1:30 PM
Knit a Mini Turkish Sock - Lynn Hershberger

Bin Laden is Dead

On the one hand, time to celebrate.

On the other hand, I'm afraid of the retaliation. I was already leery of traveling on 9/11/11 (we have to be in San Diego that weekend and the following week), now I'm really going to be concerned.

But good news, nonetheless.

Uh Oh... The Downside of Gardening

Peach leaf curl! Aaaauuuggghhhh!!!

ChickenKnittle told us that's what the problem is with our peach tree, so today I dutifully removed all of the affected leaves and put them in zip-locks, then threw them in the garbage can, far away from where the trees are.

Unfortunately, our neighbor, the one behind us, the one with nectarines, the one with nectarines that we deliberately planted our peach tree next to... her tree is full of this stuff. I didn't see one leaf that wasn't affected, and it looked to be pretty far along in its progress - all the leaves were curled in on themselves, and they were all pale. It looked pretty gruesome.

Don't know if our tree can be saved if it's in such close proximity to such a diseased one. We may need to do a mid-spring transplant to another location farther away from the nectarine.

Bummer.

The Greening of the Back 40

Yes, I know it's been a while, so here are pictures of the Back 40, taken today. Lots of things are bursting out, and DH finished putting up the supports for 2 of the 3 rows of grapes.

Looking down one row of grapes

The view of the Back 40 from the back of the Back 40

The view of the Back 40 from the lemon tree corner

The blood orange bush has a ton of blossoms this year

Three of the 7 grape vines have baby grapes!

The apples are still going strong

Unfortunately, some of the leaves on the peach tree are doing this weird bubbling thing, so I'll have to take a sample to Johnson Garden Center to see if they can diagnose it (or see if ChickenKnittle knows what's wrong - if anything).

We also bought one more grape vine today. We currently have two rows of three vines each, plus one guy off to the side near the cherries, all by himself. We used to have one more row with three more, but two of the three went kaput in the first year or two, so now the one that survived is all by himself. We found another vine today, though, so we'll plant him in one of the previous holes and then put up supports for both of them. I think it looks really neat now, almost like we're serious about growing grapes!

Oh, and the trees!

Cherry tree bursting from the top!


Apple tree, bursting from the side!

While we were gone, everything exploded!