I spent an hour or so outside this afternoon getting all of my newly acquired flowers planted in pots. It’s one of my favorite things. :D
Photo Post: Tulsa Zoo, February 21, 2009
I normally write about it when we go to the zoo, I’ve been pretty overwhelmed for the past several months and I would like to post here more, so I’m going back over things that I have happened recently.
I normally shoot the zoo exclusively with the 75-300mm lens, it’s kind of irresistible. I decided I would leave that lens on my film rebel this time around and shoot with something else. I took photos less and enjoyed the zoo more.
Every year in April I go flower shopping with my mom at Riddle Plant Farm. In years past my dad would go with us, and leave us there to peruse the aisles of flowers in the greenhouse while he had a foot long coney at Sonic, or went to wash the car. This year my brother went with us, for the first time that I can remember, though it’s possible we all went when we were kids.
This is my haul. Geranium, Sweet Alyssum, Osteospermum, Portaluca, Salvia, Zinnia and a few others that caught my fancy. I really loved some of the prearranged pots that they had this year. I want to arrange something myself along the same style so I bought flowers with similar colors and a scheme in mind. I’ll post again when I have them arranged in pots. I’m excited!
Shaun and I went for a bike ride today. It was my first time out on the town, which is a very different experience from country roads. Smoother, yes, but my childhood route only took me through one stop sign. The stop-starting and general jelly-like quality of my limbs made for quite a workout. We eventually made it to the bike trail and rode a very short part of it. I could tell that I wouldn’t be able to go for very much longer, and I was right. The ride home was uphill & we stopped near the bottom of it. Sitting down on the curb my legs gave out. I caught my breath and admired Shaun’s friendly mutton chops. We decided to walk the bikes home from there. I collapsed on the living room rug and Shaun brought me tea. He was completely unperturbed by the ride, which was rather rude of him.
I made Pecos Bill style veggie burgers and fries for dinner when I recovered and we sat on the floor and ate them, because it seemed like a day for having dinner on the floor.
We have a couple of pitiful azalea plants by our front porch. The first year we lived here, they didn’t even bloom. One of them always gets choked by grass that I can’t seem to keep out of it, but it blooms pretty well anyway (the middle of it is full of grass and blooms, I can hardly pull the grass out without harming the flowers). The other one is clear of such obstructions, but barely blooms at all. They hardly get any sun. They never get any bigger. They seem to do better every year, though, so I suppose it could have been the years of neglect in regards to weeding that they had when no one lived here. It would be an awesome spot to have giant azalea bushes if they did well. As it is, it looks pretty pathetic.
We also figured out the culprit for our bushes in the front uprooting themselves. I’ve been replanting them for about 6 months every time I find one lying on it’s side, and they have kept alive as long as I got them back in the ground. Something is chewing their roots off. I have given up. I want to move the ones that have never been uprooted somewhere else and plant something else there and see how that goes.
Well, it’s been a while. After slogging through NaNoWriMo I took a bit of a holiday break from the blog…
Some of you already know, and some may have caught on from following links to my flickr, that my dad was in the hospital from October 24 through December 14th, when he passed away. It’s been really difficult to write here knowing that I would feel the need to start with this… and so I haven’t. Day by day I have gone in to more detail on flickr, little things, mostly, as well as sharing a myriad of childhood photos, if you’re interested, the link to my flickr is in the sidebar. Christmas has been, understandably, more overwhelming than usual, though I have always been lucky enough to actually like my family, receive thoughtful and extremely appropriate gifts and enjoy a relatively stress-free holiday. I don’t expect it will ever be exactly the same, but we did fairly well given the circumstances, remembering good things and enjoying each others company.
I’m not going to linger now, I just wanted to give those who don’t follow me elsewhere an update and explain my absense. I hope you’ve all had a good holiday & have a happy 2009.
xoxo
I’m sitting here wrapped in a blanket wearing fingerless gloves on the eve of my NaNoWriMo 2008 triumph. I meant to keep this blog updated throughout the month, and if you are curious about noveling trials past, you can read them on my flickr, where, on days when I worked on my novel, I wrote a short paragraph and appended it to my 365 days self portrait for the day. The best way to view them is by checking out my nanowrimo tag on flickr.
Today? Today I wrote 4,117 words. They were a bit mushy and nonsensical in the middle, but I have not resorted to many of my usual NaNoWriMo word count buffers this month. I did not insert a sequence in which the main female character found herself wrapped up in a sex scene in a trashy romance novel. This is the first time that has not been featured, sometimes more than once, sometimes to the extent that it becomes a major plot point, in one of my NaNoWriMo novels. I am proud to say that there have been no thrusting man swords or velvety woman’s places in this novel. When I have felt that awful ache of writer’s block in my stomach I have not written a stream of consciousness adventure in to the surreal that had absolutely nothing to do with the main characters dilemma. I have not recounted my dreams of the night previous as if they were the dreams of my main character. What have I done? I have trudged through bad terrible really awful dialog which often ended with something like, “they both tittered at the hilarity of their awesome jokes.” BUT it was on topic. All of my sucking was pertinent.
Tomorrow? Four half hour writing sessions at approximately 1,000 words a pop. Can I fit a seance, betrayal and the attempted sleep walking suicide of my main character who will be saved by the man whom she has never even addressed on a first name basis but to whom she will end up with in a happily ever after scenario into 4,000 words? I can certainly try.
In addition to keeping thoroughly ahead on my NaNoWriMo word count, I have kept up with my daily photography projects, visited my dad in the hospital almost every week day, fully rearranged the living room furniture and finished most of my Christmas shopping.
46072 / 50000 words. 92% done!
