lilies and hollyhocks


...too much work, days off sporadic, Monday and Tuesday to go, then, at last, I have Wednesday and Thursday off; my birthday is Friday, June 27; I'll be 65.

My garden areas are looking good. I've already had some home grown broccoli; the tomatoes will be very late this year, planting postponed many times due to rain. Many lilies are budding up this year and I planted a bunch more a week or so ago, several, maybe nine, called "Latvia" bright green with maroon markings within the flower, but others, too. Echinaceas have begun to bloom, regular purple-pink ones, a white here and there, a new orange-cast one called "Summer Sky", bought at Lowe's, not cheap. A new stretch of garden, just off the back deck is a mish-mash of annuals, cabbage, broccoli, roses, Lysimanchia punctata--Yellow Loosestrife--gladioli, daylilies, etc.



white trumpet lily with yellow throat

Summer's Here!

Homage a van Gogh, maybe


An odious exhaustion on this Saturday, the first of two days off from Lowe's. In the morning I pulled weeds from around the broccoli and cabbage and irises and lillies in the side garden. Oppressive early with humidity, my glasses sweated up so the work became tacile and inutitive rather than wholly visual. It got very warm. Into the house I had lunch--a salami sandwich--and dozed off. My next intelligence: it was thundering. A stormette, out of nowhere, up from Missouri, an orange-red dot spread over the weather map at Moline. It lasted 20-30 minutes, a monsoonal, gullywasher rain, and left. The sun came out. Oppresive heat returned.

Good plans, to plant the rest of my tomatoes, to plant lillies and gladioli I order from on line, well, that didn't get done. And I didn't make the most of an indoors day by going down to my studio and painting, either. Tomorrow, instead. The logic, the bone-weariness of work will have gone somewhat and armed with new energy, I'll plant and clean, and tidy up, wash dishes, do laundry like crazy. A slim sense of lonliness to day, not bad. I usually push that out with busy work, but today no tact to do that. Still smoking, I smoked and made a gallon of ice tea and played on the computer; photoed plants and puddles, and storms, and posted them to Flickr.

Beautiful here--just at that juncture when spring turns to jungle, a long string of tempid days, pleasant, breezes, spring buds giving way to full blown summer, like the tropics...I imagine.





Hostas, blue and yellow

I ordered a couple of books today from Amazon about how to build a sundial..for me, for Matthew, if it's too mathematically complicated, then just for Matthew. I've always wanted a wall sundial and not sure how to go about doing that...maybe as an emblellishment to a mosaic or a painting, an outdoors art work?

I wrote to Lauren tonight asking her advice for buying a Nikon digital camera, nothing too outrageously expensive, but something to expand that intetest; I really enjoy documenting life with the cameras.

Some deep pledge (inwardly) to stop smoking, Chantix useless, I need to ween myself...and to paint! A great space, all the supplies I need, and nothing gets done. If only for myself, I should paint!