Friday night was the BG Relay For Life at City Park in Bowling Green. Around 6:45pm, the Sky Team gathered at our campsite for a team photo. Had I realized that the team photo wouldn’t actually be posed, I might have taken a little more initiative to assist in posing people… but, especially as a first-year team member, and as I didn’t know the person heading up the photo, I didn’t feel it was my job to get the people in back to move up front where they could be seen.
This morning at work, I was getting my water bottle out of the break room freezer when I saw a table full of plants. Full. Of little baby plants. I wandered over to where half a dozen people were gathered around, and discovered that a woman from another department was giving away extra runners and sprouts from her garden. She had everything labeled, some with care instructions, and they all looked healthy, if a touch small.
I ended up with four pairs of plants: Snapdragons, Lavender, Morning Glory (Heavenly Blue), and Calamint. I looked them all up in the plant encyclopedia that Aaron got me, so I’ll know how not to kill them. Add those to the miniature daffodils that Sheryl got me for my birthday, and the plants I bought from Michigan Bulb with Scott ($20 off a $40 order, so we each got $20 of plants for $10—I got Lilies of the Valley, Delphiniums, and Coreopsis), and I’ve got a pretty decent showing of flowery goodness.
My plan is to plant the daffodils and the full-sun-to-partial-shade plants under the small tree in our front yard. The must-have-full-sun plants will go around the mailbox. The shady front of the house is reserved for the Lilies of the Valley, which will apparently grow most anywhere, in varying degrees of sunlight and surviving varying degrees of watering neglect. Now that’s my kind of plant.
I don’t have a good track record with outdoor plants, so I’ll keep you posted on how they do. Once I get them planted (hopefully this weekend), maybe I’ll take some pictures… although they won’t be much to look at yet.
Maybe I won’t kill all my plants this year. Maybe things will bloom and grow and things will be keen.
*crosses fingers*
P.S. – The rose I thought I’d killed by not covering it over the winter seems to be springing back. I wonder if it’ll bloom this year.
CLUTCH SET TO RELEASE THEIR SIXTH STUDIO ALBUM ?ROBOT HIVE / EXODUS? ON JUNE 21, 2005
Co-Headlining Sounds of the Underground Tour Beginning June 24
New York, NY — DRT recording artist Clutch are set to release their sixth studio album titled, Robot Hive / Exodus. The album was prodcued by J. Robbins (Jawbox, The Dismemberment Plan) and recorded at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, NY, and mixed at Water Music in Hoboken, NJ.
The follow-up to the acclaimed Blast Tyrant, Robot Hive / Exodus firmly implants Clutch as one of the most talented hard rock bands making music today. With wildly creative songs that feature amazing musicianship and thought-provoking lyrics, Robot Hive / Exodus solidifies Clutch?s hard rock legend status. The band will showcase their new material on the upcoming ?Sounds of the Underground? tour which they are co-headlining along with Lamb of God. The tour begins June 24th in Lowell, MA, and will cross the entire country through the first week of August.
Nothing new to report, really. Aaron’s on vacation this week and next, so I get to spend evening time with my Honey-Muffin. Yay!
I still haven’t quite recovered from my exhausting Sunday of corps rehearsal, though, and it doesn’t help that I keep staying up late so I can have more time with Aaron. 😛 Oh, so tired.
And I have so, so many things to do, big and small. Clean my desk. Redesign the LakeShoremen website. Work on my multimedia portfolio CD-R. Finish scrapbooking our honeymoon from two years ago (almost—next Tuesday will be two years). Practice my mellophone so I don’t disgrace myself in front of a battalion of returned Marines on Memorial Day.
What am I doing instead? Watching Aaron play Half Life, figuring out how to install eyelets / grommets, taking a shower, going to bed.
(As much as I want to have kids… part of me lives for these lazy evenings. In a couple few years, they’ll be a thing of the past.)
My Memaw knew a lot. She wasn’t particularly book-smart—I think she completed 8th grade—but she knew little, important things. How to keep my ballet recital costume from unravelling. How to french braid and how to do a french twist. How to make awesome fried chicken, and tuna croquettes, and dozens of other wonderful foods. How to grow an avocado plant from a pit. How to grow plants in general.
About plants: Memaw definitely had a green thumb. Not in that Jerry Baker sort of way, though; he knows all sorts of bizarre tips and tricks for keeping your plants and lawn green and healthy, like spraying it with a solution of dish soap and beer and ammonia and some other household chemicals. Memaw had the other kind of green thumb, the kind where she had only to stick a plant in soil (or in water first, to root it), then water it (from the bottom, always), and poof. Big, healthy plants. Or so I remember, anyway… I was still kind of young when Memaw’s plant collection was in its heyday.
(Funny, isn’t it, how we never seem to take pictures of everyday things, like our living room… but, years later, we find ourselves trying to remember details that we once thought we’d never forget. Like how many plants sat in our windowsill in Apartment A-13 when I was 7 years old.)
Anyway, I wish I’d been able to ask her about more of the little, important things. As I got older, and as she got older, I did write her letters and ask her about some of the little things. How to make tuna croquettes (which I still haven’t attempted). How many different jobs she held, and where she worked (which I wish I’d written down, but I was in the car on the way to BG). And my Mom gave me the recipe for meatballs that Memaw had gotten from the Italian girl that worked with her at Bix’s Restaurant.
How to grow plants, though… if she had a secret, I wish I could have learned it. I do well enough, and I certainly *have* enough, but sometimes I wonder. I think I managed to inherit some of that green thumb, but… you know.
Sometimes I miss her.
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Next Friday, I’ll be participating in the American Cancer Society Relay For Life in Bowling Green. If you’d care to sponsor me, you can donate online all next week, until the event. Donations are, of course, tax-deductible, and will forward the fight against cancer.
Someday, I hope someone else gets more time to ask their own Memaw the questions I didn’t.