And now, back to our regular programming.

It’s been about two months since my last post. My overly long hiatus was in part accidental. For example, My Sweet Baboo developed a taste for reading his email more frequently than he used to. His time on the computer, which I welcome and encourage, takes away from my time on the computer. And of course, April and May are peak gardening times, as we move out of winter dormancy into the rebirth of spring. We’re both out in the yard, working through our separate lists of chores until we physically can’t do any more, or we run out of daylight. 

After a while, it got to be a sort of a game – how long could I stay out? Could I last until New York officially had a budget, for example? The budget was due on 4/1 by the way… and is still not done. Could I stay out until I had everything done in the garden? I think if I were done in the garden, I’d be pushing up daisies, instead of planting them. Could I enforce some kind of rule on who uses the computer when, so that MSB and I could happily co-exist in the techno-world? Ha! Neither of us is good at sticking to that type of schedule.  

In the end, I came back of my own accord, and without any new rules or constraints. What brought me back was simply that I missed writing, connecting, and venting. Before I go off on tangents (oil spills, politics, Helen Thomas, and the like) here’s the gist of what’s happened in my world in the past two months, in no particular order:

• We got a new kitten, Mookenzie Earl, who’s officially a boy and is now 10 weeks old. We discovered in a very scary way that our oldest cat Michael T suffers from congestive heart failure, which in cats is treated much like it is in humans – diuretics, blood thinners, heart medicine, and aspirin. He may not be with us a whole lot longer, but we’re going to make what time he has left as good as we can. 
• We visited our local Regional Market four times, seven local garden centers a total of 11 times, and made literally countless trips to Lowe’s and The Home Depot.  Fortunately, I'm getting 5% cash back on every purchase. 
• We removed and recycled five pine trees which were not expected to live when received, but eventually outgrew their area near the driveway, and replaced them with more manageable climbing vines.
• We moved two dogwoods from my garden in the front to MSB’s garden in the back after they too outgrew their original home.  
• We received seventeen plant shipments from our mail-order nurseries. With only two exceptions, everything we ordered lived to be planted – we each lost only one this year, which is really outstanding.  
• The gazebo is finished and landscaped (Michael T couldn’t be happier), the new fence is in, and the landscaping there will be done this weekend if all goes well.

Overall, we’re in really good shape for mid-June. We’re not sure whether we’ll still have anything blooming in August and September, since so much has come early, but we’ve done what we can to make a beautiful garden possible.

And now that we’ve got the gardens under control, I’ll be better able to keep the writing under control. The venting, well, that’s a story for another day.