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Corners

I wanted to do a corners of my home post and was looking around for a corner you all haven’t seen ad nauseum already (is that redundant?). This corner is in our bedroom and I took about 800 billion pictures and this is the best I could come up with. I seriously need a new camera.

One would think having a fireplace in the bedroom would be all swoon worthy but honestly we’ve had a fire in it maybe three times in the six years we’ve lived here. It smokes which really ruins the ambiance. I would love to get an insert for it and just have fake logs in there. The gas is already piped in so I would think it would be pretty easy.

About a year ago Rick was looking in a fireplace store near his work to check out glass doors. He pointed to a very plain one and asked how much it was. $5000. For that much money it better come with it’s own personal woodsman to cut wood and stack it on our back deck.

I wish I had a better picture of the Paul de Longpre print above the little chair. I love that print. I saw it in a little shop in Grass Valley and my friend went back and bought it for me for my birthday a couple of years ago.

I should take the glass out of the frame – I think prints look better that way.

The print above the fireplace I bought at Cost Plus about 15 years ago for about $10 and spent $150 framing it. At a do it yourself place – I can’t imagine what a professional would have charged. I have no idea who the artist is but it’s an urn filled with flowers and I find myself trying to replicate the colors when I plant the pots out on the deck. All pale pinks, blues and yellows.

Well there you have it – one poorly lit corner of our home.

May Day

I wish I could remember about May Day before it actually arrived. I love the idea of sneaking out at dawn and leaving a little basket of May flowers on loved one’s doorknobs. But every year I wake up on May 1st and think "oh shoot…"

There is something, well, tall going on in my yard this Spring. Everything is growing hugely tall. The Foxgloves I planted two years ago finally bloomed this year and are over 7 feet tall. I thought they were supposed to be about 2 feet tall.

And the I don’t even know what is going on with the Rhododendrons. They are probably 25 feet tall. Excuse the ugly stucco siding. One of these days we’ll get around to painting the house some other color than the ugly tannish beige it currently is.

Our house it situated at the top of a long driveway and for some reason the original builder thought it made the most sense to put all the really ugly stuff – like the humongous heater/air conditioning unit, the meter boxes, the phone gear – on the wall that you see when you first come upon the driveway.

One of the first gardening things I did was to plant three mock orange plants on the other side of the walkway with the hopes they would get big enough and create a hedge that would hide the air conditioning unit at least from the driveway. It’s actually working quite well. They don’t bloom as much as I had hoped; our bedroom window is on that wall and I thought it would smell nice coming in through the open window.

This picture doesn’t do the Rhododendron justice – I should have made someone stand out there so you could get some perspective.

This weekend I vow to get out there and start doing some gardening. I’ve been totally neglectful this Spring. I need to replant all the pots on the deck and there is an alarming amount of black spot on my roses. Here I fought so hard to eke out a little sunshine for those roses and now I am going to have to defoliate half of them.

Edited to add: I meant to start off this post by thanking everyone for the get well wishes – I am definitely on the mend. Still moving a little slowly but I should be right as rain in no time.

Out of Africa

Okay maybe not exactly like the scene with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep but I did get my hair washed today. Let me tell you it makes a person feel about 1000 times better when they have clean hair. I feel like a new person.

Of course instead of having the blazing sun warming me and lions off in the distance I was laying on cold, hard granite with the neck of my sweatshirt getting increasingly soaked and a Dixie cup pressed up against my ear while the was cat rubbing up against Rick’s legs, wondering what the heck he was doing to me.

I bet 95% of the female readers know exactly what scene I am talking about.

Thank you Rick ~ you’re better looking than Robert Redford, anyway.

When I woke up this morning I was dreaming that I was taking pictures for a post – I was at an old French amusement park. The colors were all faded pinks, reds and turquoise with kind of a golden, sepia light. Old ferris wheels and ticket booths and popcorn carts. I kept thinking what fabulous pictures I was taking and I couldn’t wait to get them uploaded.

I’m hoping to get back to regular posting this week – can’t promise the pictures will be all that interesting but I’ll try.

Bed of roses

My goodness having surgery sure takes the starch out of you, doesn’t it? I feel like I’m in a perma-fog. All I want to do is sleep sleep sleep.

The surgery itself was rather uneventful ~ always a good thing, surgery-wise. I have a nifty Frankenstein like thing going on behind my ear and the right side of my face is a bit puffy. I forgot about this part – I can’t taste anything on the right hand side of my tongue. This happened with the other surgeries and it’s really odd. Everything is kind of metallic feeling on my tongue. It should go away in a couple of months though.

At least I have this pretty quilt to snuggle under while I convalesce. My sister made it and gave it to me for my birthday. The colors are so muted and pretty and it just makes me happy to look at it.

Here’s an unrumpled view of it:

I may never get out of bed.

Except I have planting to do – another sister gave me plants and I need to get them in the ground. I have just the perfect spot for them. I love bleeding hearts ~ they are so Victorian looking to me. I can picture stepping out of my conservatory into my little walled garden of roses, forget-me-nots and bleeding hearts.

For now it’s back to bed – I promise to be perkier very soon.

Be right back…

I’ll be offline for a few days – Having my bionic ear tuned up.

I was all set to do a post on the lovely quilt that my sister made for me but my camera batteries died. So something to look forward to later on in the week. It’s dreamy – I’ll tell you that.

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