Choice Morsels

It's Azalea season here in the Deep South! Today's garden photos are of a side by side pair of Azaleas in my back yard: First, this nice shot of end of day sun lighting up some of the flowers on this dark pink Azalea: Second, the light pink Azalea next to it: Azaleas bloom in sort of a wave either working bottom to top or, like this one, from one side to the other. I took this shot, because you can see a fullness of blossoms in the front toward far side, but the side facing my camera is still full of buds.  Nor do they necessarily bloom all at the same time. I have two bushes in front and one is fully in bloom and the adjacent one is still mostly covered with buds. Though pretty, they require hedging maintenance; otherwise they grow into massively huge shrubs, 15 feet round!  There are dwarf types now---I'd recommend those, if you wish Azaleas.

 Yesterday, I had lunch with an Air Force Chaplain who was really good friends with my husband. The Chaplain was deployed at the time Dave died, but has since returned and reached out for a lunch chat. He's reassigning in a couple weeks elsewhere, but gave me the number for a different Chaplain Dave and I had known quite well in the past, but had lost touch with. So, I'm glad to be reconnected with that Chaplain & his wife once more! I spent 2 hours at the local T-Mobile office which is close by now here where I live, because I was having HUGE problems with Sprint billing because T-Mobile owns Sprint. Unfortunately, they allow them to operate separately. Some bug in the Sprint system was rejecting every avenue I tried. I find T-Mobile oh-so-much more friendly & helpful. We resolved the problem by paying Sprint off and switching me to T-Mobile. It didn't cost anything to do and I ended up in a plan nearly like the one I'd had with Sprint that was, in fact, about ...

   While I love our new floor, I didn't love how the installers put the trim back on the base-boards. They were here from 10 to 3 this last Saturday, the 4th day of what should of been a 2-day job, because their Dad, who was the carpet store manager, kept calling them to go do this and that all over the county. So they kept disappeared for hours at a time. On Saturday absolutely all the grouting was still left to do throughout the main body of the house, plus they needed to put all the wood trim back in place. But it was Saturday and they didn't want to stay till 5pm, so they rushed everything. Now, if they'd done an excellent job replacing the trim, I might been able to over-look the delay, but they did a horrible, horrible job with the trim . I found trim segments just resting in place without nails , trim jammed into place in such a way as to splinter both trim ends and the base board,  nails not hammered all the way in or tri...

I was expecting major rain today, but---nope. It was initially sunny this morning when I drove up to the YMCA for my bi-weekly interval training class, but is now gloomy gray, though still cool and pleasant enough to get some yard stuff done:   #1 was cutting down the decorative banana trees in the far back yard. They freeze and turn brown in winter, and cutting them causes a fresh tree to spiral up from the center of the stump. This helps control them a bit. Ignored, they can turn into 10 foot wide clumps. They're easy to saw through, being a water-logged type of pulp inside, but water is heavy. About 10, all different sizes, ranging from an 1 1/2 inches on a few babies to 8 inches on the one oldest. It's a work-out. # 2 was taking the hedge shears to a couple small pampas grass clumps also in back. #3 was a brief mow of some of the front lawn, mostly to collect mulch to spread over the hosta beds and front flower beds I recently edged.   G...