Spring Weekend

Spring in the Woodland Garden
Originally uploaded by sunasak

I know I wrote Saturday, but here's more on this past weekend. The photo shows how the woodland garden in our back yard is looking these days. It's a nice time of year there. It always makes me happy when the false indigo is blooming (the pink flowers that look a bit like wisteria). I am enjoying the begonias, and quite impressed that the one in the gnome pot grew back from last year. We now have three returnees! The gnome is sitting under some of the grapevine we got rid of when Dad was here. The little purple flowers are Mexican petunias, another native, and it is a great ground cover. Much of our "grass" area has this stuff, too. It and the inland sea oats have naturalized really well, and I have to remove them from some places. The red begonia just adds a perky look to the old watering can that rusted out (yay drainage!).

The other photo is the "house turd" that was created when huge volume of oak pollen and flowers was washed out of the trees in last week's big rainstorm. The gutter spewed this worm of blossoms. Really, it is incredible the amount of bloomage the oaks produce. All the cars are very, very green this time of year, and the window screens look awful. The good news is the stuff composts really well, but when it first falls, there is an inch or two of it on all surfaces in our back yard!

So, enough of "spring in the back yard." One nice thing we did this weekend was go view spring at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, where I hadn't gone in a long time. We went for a plant sale, but there wasn't much left by the time we got there. Lee, Beccano and I enjoyed walking on the trails and taking pictures of things we'd like to grow some day. And we really enjoyed an exhibit of marvelous 3-D paintings by a Chinese-American artist. They were mostly of Texas wildflowers, and featured watercolors on cutouts that were bent and shaped to resemble the real thing. Just gorgeous.

Before that, we had lunch with Lee's best friend from high school, who was passing through town. He emails all the time, but I had never met him, and Lee hadn't seen him in quite some time. I haven't met many of Lee's friends, so that was a nice thing. I hope I didn't make a horrible impression. It's always a bit awkward being the "new partner," when someone knew the old one for decades. We ate at Artz, so I had a big plate of brisket to keep me busy.

I also had a fun time at church, where we sang spirituals with gusto. Afterwards a guy who was there for the first time came up and said he guessed he ought to introduce himself. It turns out he was the guy who had said good morning to me on the bus on Friday--he's been riding the same bus as me for a few weeks. Another"it's a small world" event! I guess it takes a decade living somewhere for this to take effect. I remember it happening the last few years I was in Illinois, too.

Back-tracking, Saturday was really nice. It was fun to do work alongside Lee in the yard, but a little scary when he climbed a crape myrtle to trim branches that kept hitting the house. Neither of us is good with heights. In the evening we had delicious pork chops and enjoyed listening to Tuba Boy and his friends playing Magic. I like it when they come to our house, so Beccano has some people to hang out with, too. Beccano and Lee were already entranced with Lee's new bass amp. They are trying to work on stuff together. That is fun.

I'd write more, but I must end the break I am taking. Later!