The Garden

The garden's starting to come up. That's J's job much more than mine, I don't do much more than harvest things occasionally.

The tomato and pepper plants are looking well, this despite the couple of hailstorms we had shortly after they were planted. A few of the potato plants are starting to peek up above the ground, though none are as large yet as the volunteers we got from last year.

J's trying a new spot for the melons this year, right next to where we have the tomatoes. Maybe we'll get more than one melon off of them this year. It's a good spot for tomatoes. The first year we were here we had a volunteer tomato come up there, got lots of tomatoes off of it. We would have gotten more, but the season was more than half over before our next door neighbor mentioned to us that it was a yellow tomato plant. I kept waiting for them to turn red, but they never did, then rotted. OK, so I'm not much of a gardener.

The strawberry plants are blossoming (as well as putting out runners). This is their second year, so we should get more of them than we did last year. Of course, we'll probably still have the problem of something coming in the middle of the night and eating them just as they turn ripe. Rabbits, or raccoons, or something. Maybe even deer. The rhubarb was good, it had leaves as big as elephant's ears (Indian, not African). Of course, we pied it at the beginning of the month, and replacement leaves haven't come up yet.

Starting to see some of the corn come up. Of course, corn is a grass, and many of the weeds are also grasses, so it's hard to tell sometimes. Hopefully we can keep the deer and raccoons out of it, so that we can have the corn first.

Insurance Hassle

Back in March, N jumped off the couch and sprained his foot.  His usual response to something as simple as stubbing his toe is to crawl around crying, saying he can't walk, so it took me a while to figure out that he might have really hurt himself.  It was too late to go to the doctor, so we took him into the emergency room.  He was fine in a couple days, just barely limping when he went back to school.  After a bit, we forgot about it.

But today, we got something from the insurance company, one of those forms they send you when they're trying to figure somebody else to charge for the bill.  Last time this sort of thing happened was when J broke his finger several years back playing basketball.  He needed surgery for it.  For two, maybe three years afterwards we got those forms every couple of months.  I don't know why they kept sending them; the information didn't change any of the times we sent it in.  After a while, every time we got one, J called them, gave the information, and made them promise never to send us one again.  After a year or so, it finally worked.

Where's that trampoline

We went up to my sister's place for Easter.  This was the day after the storm I mentioned recently, which went right through their area.   They hadn't noticed any damage, but as we went out spreading the candy-filled eggs for the Easter egg hunt, my sister started wondering what the pieces of pipes and springs we were finding were.  She eventually figured out they were pieces of the next-door neighbor's trampoline. Everyone was just thankful that none of the pieces went through a window or something.  A six-foot long piece of pipe could really have done some damage.

Tornado Warning

The other week we had a couple of friends over for a snack time. While we were relaxing, and watching a movie, the sirens outside started going off. A tornado warning, of course. So our friends got to see our messy basement. Back before I had kids, my first reaction on hearing the sirens was to turn on the TV to see where the storm actually was, but now we just take the kids down to the basement and wait, and see what news we can get on the radio, or the computer if one of us remembered to grab it.

While we were in the basement waiting, my friend pulled out her cell phone, and proceeded to call a bunch of her family and friends to make sure they knew about the tornado warning. You know, doing something like that would never occur to me. For one thing, I wouldn't want them to come out of the safety of the basement to answer the phones. But then again, maybe her family really needed it. After all, I heard her tell at least three people, "No, it's a tornado warning. That means someone has actually seen a tornado."

Most of the storm went quite a bit north of us, though we did get a bit of rain and a small bit of hail. I probably should have called my sister to make sure her family was all right after the storm was over. (They were fine.)

Library fun

We've had a couple of library books that we couldn't find anywhere. One was mine, and one was N's. I knew the last place I had seen mine was on my dresser, but that was a few weeks ago. And I had no idea where the last place I had seen N's book. I spent several weeks looking everywhere those books could possibly be, again and again. Then I started looking in all the places the books couldn't possibly be. Unfortunately, there are a lot more of those. But they were still nowhere to be found.

Finally, after all the times going into the library, and having the librarians keep on reminding us that those books were still out, I did something. Out of curiosity more than anything else, I looked on the shelves where my book would be. I found the book there, and took it up to be scanned. Sure enough, it wasn't just a copy of the book; it was the same one I had taken out. So then I went to the kids section of the library, found N's book, and guess what? It was the same book. I should have had them check on it a month ago.

Now if I could only find my library card.