Snafu

Some of you might be aware of a big snafu on Google/Blogger yesterday. I've heard of posts being removed as malware, and that's only the beginning. By my investigation, all Blogger blogs were blocked as unsafe sites. My friend Cheryl wrote to me in a near-panic since it happened just after she switched her email feed over to a new service. As it turns out, that had nothing to do with it...thank goodness...and everything appears to be set right again. At least I hope so. This is one of those times where I'm afraid my words may get out ahead of what actually happens. I don't know anything more than what I've said here, but let's just hope the whole thing is resolved. If not, you may not even be able to read this post. And so maybe it doesn't even matter that I'm writing it. It's okay...I'm used to that.

Moving on...there was no sewing yesterday. I got so involved with gardening and trip planning that I wore myself out for anything else. I started by repotting the tomatoes into their largest pots of the season.

The one on the left is a slicer. The rest are all sauce tomatoes. There is also a cherry tomato planted in one of the whiskey barrels closer to the house. I like having them close so I can go outside and snack on them at will. Mike was off getting his hair cut, and I ran out of potting soil after the first five were finished. I had five more to go, and so I managed to heft one more bag of potting soil up into the bin to finish off the job. Not bad for an old woman with a healing broken shoulder.

As I was walking to the greenhouse, I noticed the first flower has appeared on the newest "Edda" clematis. I'm hoping it will open all the way today.

Also, I was happy to see the first poppy has opened, but then sad to find its stem is broken. By the end of the day, it was still as red and vibrant as ever. Let's just not tell it that it has a broken stem. Imagine the heights to which it could soar if it doesn't know about its disability. Or maybe not.

Among my seedlings there are some hollyhocks. I want to plant them along the wall where the "Vera iris" have grown previously. I was getting ready to walk over and look at the spot when I stopped short, nearly having killed myself by walking through a spider's web. Phew! That was a close call.

When I was finished with the tomatoes, I took another shot of the cyclamen since yesterday's image was blurry. The bright sun has the colors washed out, but there they are.

I was kind of tired after hefting around bags of potting soil and tomato pots heavy with dirt. The rest of the day was spent finalizing plans for our trip this fall. I've shown you these routing maps before. Not all the stops show on the map, but you might be able to see the places we're going by looking at the list on the left side. Google maps will only allow me to put in nine stops per map, and so they overlap with the last stop and first stop on each page.

The trip will take about six weeks and we'll travel about 6,000 miles, excluding sight-seeing. I have reservations all along the way, and so I hope we won't have to reroute ourselves at any point. We'll be doing some sight-seeing at various spots I've pulled from my state folders, and we'll be riding ATV's in Ouray and Silverton, Colorado, and then again near Oracle, Arizona. The trip is still several months away, but we're ready to go now.

The kitties were outside most of the day. It was a lovely day, and Mike and I spent a good portion of it outside too. By day's end, we'd run the wheels off both kitties.

Smitty caught and devoured a vole, so it was a good day for him too. Sadie was on the hunt for squirrels and chipmunks, but she didn't catch anything. She just enjoyed an evening sunbath, although the sun had moved on when I took this picture.

I'm thinking I'll have some time for sewing today, but the garden is taking on a level of urgency right at the moment. We're expecting rain by Tuesday, and so I'm hoping we can get it all in and planted before that starts. Most everything is already sprouted, but I still have seeds for corn, green beans, and beets to sow directly into the ground. Now that I've learned of the paper towel method for sprouting seeds, I might give the green beans a head start by giving them 24 hours in the paper towels.

Okay so going back to the beginning of the post...let's just hope everything is working as it should, or I will have written all this for nothing. Fingers crossed as I hit "publish."

("365:114 Finger-crossed lovers." by mind on fire is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)