Choice Morsels

  Hello----I've been away from blogging for awhile, but I feel ready to at least blog about my garden and flowers. Things in life happen and daily life can be suddenly and radically altered. Mine was. Hubby died unexpectedly in December.  On the up side, my schedule is entirely my own now. I have plenty of uninterrupted time to work on my flower beds and garden. Being spring, I've begun working from bed to bed, weeding out the borders around each. I'm still working on the front beds and today I cleaned up one of the two beds with an unruly Pampas Grass. I trimmed off it's grass skirt around the bottom. Tomorrow or the next day, the other bed with an unruly Pampas gets trimmed. I also have a luncheon with my old friends from yoga class tomorrow at a favorite local Mexican restaurant. Todays Garden Pics are a couple of nice of late day shots of my yellow Flag Iris in the glowing rays of the setting sun:

The First Day of Autumn was Sept 22---the Autumn Equinox. As dusk approaches, I see the sun's last rays slanting in low now, sweeping over the garden, touching flowers and plants with it's receding glow. Today's Garden Pics are shots of those late day rays highlighting things in my garden: An old Hydrangea blossom given a second chance at beauty: Glowing threads of Pampas Grass: Sun-kissed pink Vinca's:  

The Mama Kat prompt I'm doing today is to share about a time I was forced to leave my comfort zone. I grew up in rural Indiana and I was in 4-H from age 10 to about 11th grade. My parents became local Club leaders when I was around 12. That's probably how my Mom knew about the state-wide 4-H event being held on the Purdue campus in Lafayette, Indiana. I was around 15 then and it was an overnight trip. I went. By myself. On a bus with a gob of other kids from other area 4-H clubs. I was the only one from my club who went and the only person I vaguely knew was the County Extension Office 4-H rep who also went. This is the first time I went anywhere without my family. So we arrived on the huge Purdue University campus around lunchtime. As we got off the bus, a person was there with a fan of activity tickets for a variety of mini-workshops for us each to pick two of, then we stowed our gear in dorm rooms and went to lunch in a campus cafeteria. I've always been an introvert, bu...

      The Mama Kat prompt I chose today is to write a post using the word: final. For this one, I turned to my collection of writers prompts in Pinterest: "the last entry of an explorers journal" and thus this short  fiction was born: The Final Report by b.nickerson. Allen turned on the logbook and rapidly began tapping keys, composing his final report, quite certain he would not survive the night.      “ Of the seven of us, I alone am left,” he typed, then paused to reflect on events since they landed on this planet. Ethan had been the first to disappear. Right after they landed and were hacking their way through thick jungle. Ethan had been in the rear, but then suddenly he wasn't there at all---and they hadn't heard a sound.             They called for him and scanned around, but nothing. The Ship wasn't due back for four days to pick them up, so the Captain ordered they proceed. They had surve...

The Mama Kat prompt today is to share "the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." I can't remember where we were or where we were going, but I do remember we were in our station wagon on the interstate crossing a bridge over a river. It was a very long bridge, being this was the Mississippi River. I recall peering out the window, and we had a clear view of the turbulent river water below the bridge. It had just finished raining. The road was wet, the sky partially clearing and a bit of sunshine had come out. We could see thick mist clouds hanging above the water slightly below the bridge and coming out of one of those clouds was a rainbow that curved downward toward the water below, it's lower portion vanishing among the mists. It was awesome. All rainbows are amazing, but this one sticks in my memory as particularly pretty.  (Didn't have a camera on me as a kid 45 years ago, so this attached photo just represents the idea.) I don't know why ...

Our Mr. Coffee Maker died yesterday morning. So I made morning coffee by boiling water in a pan on the stove, then slowly pouring it into the drip cup. In the evening, Hubby and I went to Walmart to get a new one. I like the 5-cup models that have an auto-turn-off, so I don't have to worry about whether I turned the coffee off or not. We found one such model, another Mr. Coffee, which was much nicer then the previous model---but when we got it home I discovered it had a factory break in the tank, right behind the coffee pot, invisible in the shadows just under the part the holds the filter. I  didn't notice it till I tried pouring water in the tank only to have it splash out all over the counter. So back to Walmart for an exchange. The we checked the new one right there and it was perfect.  So, I had a normal coffee experience this morning. Today's Garden Pics are a interesting mushroom and my pretty peppermint colored 4 O'clocks: First, this Mushroom: ...

Today's chosen prompt is to share a memory from 12th grade and of all my years o f high school, 12th grade has some nice memory highlights. Probably one of my best memories of 12th grade is writing fanfiction  with my friend Cheryl. We became friends in 9th grade and I got her hooked on my interest in it. There was a masked-hero show called "The Green Hornet" in re-runs then and I fell in love with writing script-like fanfiction for that show. Cheryl liked the idea and started writing similar fanfiction for her favorite show, Mannix. We both even had an original character we added into the mix.  I remember many a study hall period, us sitting side-by-side, talking in hushed whispers about whatever we wrote the night before.  Having someone to share a common interest with was super cool. The other highlight of 12th grade was having a boy actually ask me to be his experiment partner for a Psych class project. I'd known him since 10th grade, but I was just ...