Under a Blue Moon

Rose Diary

A couple of years ago I decided I was NOT going to let my shady piece of property dictate how I wanted to garden. Under the guise of it being safer in case of a brush fire (which we actually did have come within 1/2 a mile of our house after we first moved in) I had the trees around the deck cut down.

My real motive was to be able to eke out a little bit of sunlight for a rose bed. And when I say little I mean I have room for about seven rose plants. The rest of the place is done up in azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons. I always wanted to keep a garden journal. My idea was to document the roses I planted, when they were planted, how they behaved and have a picture or two. Of course in my ideal world I would render amazingly lifelike colored pencil drawings of them but in reality I take the occasional snapshot.

I created a template for each rose and bought a sweet, little scrap book. I slipped a little posy under the protective plastic cover (which I leave on because it IS a garden journal after all. Could get dirty out there).

Of course I have only about a dozen roses, all told, in the garden – there is one along the fence that I absolutely forget about until Rick tells me it’s blooming and what do you know – there it is, bless its little neglected heart; and there are few more along the front of the house that I have a conflicted relationship with. They aren’t exactly the shade of pink I would pick but they bloom like mad so I tolerate them. Since I don’t have a lot of roses I have a lot of empty pages in my little rose diary.

Someday it will be bulging with pages and photos and jotted down notes on how a particular rose fares in a certain setting. I want to be able to snuggle up next to the fireplace on a cold winter night, flipping through the pages and dreaming about warm, rose scented Summer days.

The rose bed in the background of the first picture isn’t actually mine. It’s my Mother’s. If she had kept such a journal it would be rather brief since she only has two types of roses in her garden. Her very favorite ~ Iceberg and the incredibly scented climbing Sombreuil. In her memory I have an Iceberg in my own garden and if I had a place for a rose to climb I definitely would plant a Sombruil. It is undeniably the best smelling rose in the world, in my estimation. A single bloom will scent an entire room. Iceberg has to be the most prolific rose – in our Northern California climate it will bloom from April through December.

I can almost smell the roses now.

Lavender dreams

I had an epiphany yesterday, on my way to the clinic. I had to get up at the crack of dawn (see previous post on my sleeping habits) in order to make a 7:15 appointment for a CAT scan (believe me when I say it’s nothing – just an old ear issue flaring up). Driving down the dark road I began fantasizing about the test. Wouldn’t it be great, I was thinking, if it turned out to be a brain tumor or something, so I could legitimately get off of work for a while. I am thinking this, in all SERIOUSNESS. Happy little far away gaze in my eye as I picture my calm, stress-less life away from work, just a little medical inconvenience to deal with.

How sucky does your job have to be that a tumor would be a great alternative? And why on earth does one stay with such a job? How does it come to THIS. This was my epiphany – the answer has so far eluded me, I am sad to report. Well I do know money has a great deal to do with it. Fear of the unknown. I guess what hasn’t come to me is how to change things just yet.

I do know what my dream job is, however.

I would own a beautiful linen store, stocked with both new and antique linens from France, Italy, Germany, England and other, as yet unknown to me, places. I would travel four times a year on grand buying sprees. The walls in my little shop would be lined with antique armoires, filled with stack after stack of luscious tablecloths, bed linens, handkerchiefs. The shop would be gently scented with fresh lavender and the music playing in the background would be soothing.

And it would be right next door to my other store, the stationary shop.

So how does one get from Point A (brain tumor fantasies) to Point B (dream job)? Does anyone have a dream job? Or like me, the dream of a dream job? I would love to hear how you did it or how you plan on doing it.

Mag love

Rick had surgery on his hand on Friday and by Saturday was sufficiently housebound to agree to let me get him out of the house. This means that I actually get to drive which sorely tests his patience but at this point he was willing to accept me driving slower and less aggressively than he would. It’s like driving Miss Daisy, let me tell you. All the instructions and eyerolling coming from the right.

Anyway ~ off we went. I thought a visit to the bookstore was in order. I could live in a bookstore. I feel very at home in both libraries and bookstores. I thought maybe some magazines would distract him. As it turned out I found a few and he found nothing of interest.

The pictures in this post are from the British magazine Homes & Antiques. I bought it for the cover picture alone. I’m not sure what it is about British magazine that I like so much. Most of the wares depicted aren’t available to me but I do I get plenty of ideas.

I love the chair pads on these chairs. I have six dining room chairs that are in serious need of something. They have the world’s easiest cushions to recover. You just unscrew them, pop them off, staple a bit of fabric over the old fabric and you are done. Only we can’t agree on a fabric choice. These chair pads look more labor intensive but less permanent. Maybe one of us could pick out the new pad fabric and the other the cover fabric. Two looks and we are both happy.

Weeding and updating

My pc is undergoing an agonizingly slow update so I’m doing this quick post from my husband’s blisteringly fast (note sarcasm) pc. I totally procrastinated on updating my Windows service pack and now I’m being punished by the IT gods. My pc decided to totally ignore this whole early daylight savings business and is an hour behind. There was no manually updating the time so here I am.

The weather held out as promised and we are having a gorgeous weekend. I didn’t get quite all the weeding done that I had hoped to but I did do the beds along the front of the house (and therefore with the most visual impact). I forgot that there are muscles used in gardening that you just don’t use in other activities and since my gardening of late has been more of the dreaming about it variety I pooped out really quickly.

I left the house on Wednesday afternoon and returned the following afternoon and I swear in the those short 24 hours the pear tree burst into bloom.

This tree suffered a huge tragedy about four years ago in a storm. Half the tree came down and we were sure we were going to lose the other half but it has made a pretty good recovery. Still a bit misshapen but all in all still a gorgeous tree.

I know there is some metaphor in there about being able to recover from even the biggest disaster but I’m too worn out from all that weeding and muckraking to fully formulate the thought. Instead I’ll just be happy that it is a gorgeous day, the sky is as blue as it possibly can be and I have about a third of the weeding done.

Well I better go check on my pc before it resets itself to 1973 or something like that. I hope everyone is enjoying this beautiful day.

Dreaming

(iStockphoto)

I am not really a morning person. I don’t sleep in too late but given my druthers my body would naturally get up around 8:00 or 9:00am. This morning I am up at 6:00 because the cat has decided it’s time for me to be up. She starts out by hopping up on the nightstand and batting off what ever is up there (heaven help us if there is a glass of water). Usually I can shoo her away from this activity without too much effort on my part or without even fully waking up. She then hops up on the headboard and paces back and forth, eventually slipping off onto our unsuspecting heads.

If that doesn’t work then she pulls out the big guns and walks over to the little upholstered chair in our room and starts sharpening her claws on it. That always works.

She interrupted a really interesting dream I was having. I dreamed that I was at a shelter of some type. I’m not entirely sure if it was a homeless shelter or a halfway house or what. At any rate it wasn’t occupied at the time except for several women who actually ran and funded the place. They were gathering for a meeting and each of them was carrying a shoebox that contained some kind of handcrafted item. I got closer and realized the women were bloggers that I really admired and I recognized them by the crafts they had in their shoe boxes. I had seen the very same crafts on their blogs. Then the cat started hurling stuff at me and I woke up.

So now that I am up I might as well get on with the real purpose of the day and that is eradicating the place of EVIL bunnies. They are taking over.

More bunniness

I don’t think it’s too early to start seriously decorating for Easter, do you? It’s less than a month away (okay technically a little over four weeks but PRACTICALLY less than a month away). I mean it’s not like October when I was dragging out holly and yuletide cheer. I don’t think I’m rushing it. Too much.

To me Easter decorating is more about the pastel colors then it is the rabbits although I have to say I’m starting to amass some really adorable ones.

This weekend I plan to throw open all the windows and blow the stink off the place (that expression never fails to crack me up…) and give the floors a good scrubbing, wash all the throw rugs and curtains then I’m going to Spring up the decorations.

Then I desperately need to turn my attention to the ~~flower~~ weed beds. I need to muck them out and sort out what is old, spent annuals and what is perennial and then fill in the blanks with lovely, new plants. Last year I planted Foxgloves which I think are the epitome of a cottagey garden and I have high hopes they will actually bloom this year.

I’ve noticed something about the nurseries in the Sacramento area – or maybe it’s actually the gardeners in the Sacramento area and the nurseries and just responding to the demand – they carry a lot of very hot, bright colors in their bedding plants. Bright oranges, reds, purples and golden yellows. I am more a pale pink, lavender, cream and light blue kind of gardener but I can rarely find those plants up here. So I hit up the nurseries and garden centers in the Bay Area and bring the plants up here.

One of my very favorite nurseries is the Half Moon Bay Nursery on highway 92. They carry the best assortment of annuals, perennials, shrubs, trees, roses, you name it. And a decent selection of pots, statues and fountains. I generally visit this place early in the Spring in order to get my garden inspiration.

Okay now I am getting ahead of myself and I need to find the flower beds under the weeds before I start buying anything. So Spring cleaning first, a little decorating, a little weeding and maybe next weekend I can start planting.

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