Achieved My Hair Goal

Since last October, when I had my friend Gina cut my hair and put some highlights in the front, I have been trying to grow out my hair to where there is only natural Suna hair, and nothing with dye on it. I think I finally got there.

In person, the more gray parts in the front look pretty cool. I had no idea I had "natural highlights." One of my coworkers said I look younger this way. Looking at those eye wrinkles makes me doubt that, but hey, they are smile lines, so that's not all bad, right?

I hope this will be the last "this is my new hair" post for a while. I think I'll keep it natural, and just grow it a bit longer. No new photos of hair will be needed!

I look a little tired, and that's because I am a little tired. I worked a lot of extra hours last week, plus I have been rehearsing for our choir service (that is over, thankfully) and another rock and roll service, plus working on fixing up our kitchen, and that sort of thing. And I am trying to teach Beccano to drive a manual shift. That isn't so easy in my car. There's just a lot going on. None of it is bad,  though! There is so much good going on that I say thanks every day for the fact that things have turned around a bit!

We've been spending whatever relaxation time we have sitting on the "new" front porch and enjoying the garden. This year, the wildflower garden has the perennials in all their glory. We even had some bluebonnets!

We have two of these beds between the street and sidewalk. Right now they are mostly Indian paintbrush and black-eyed susans, but there are also some Mexican hats and horsemints. The one in the side yard has huge coriopsis (OK I can't spell it or find it in spell check)  and English daisies. When the flowers are all gone, we'll just mow it, and it will look grass-ish.

Lee has put in lots of pretty things this year, and I have weeded a lot. This was the front yard a couple of weeks ago:

That front tree is the redbud, and the brown things are all its seeds. We have pulled up MANY seedlings this year. If you want a native redbud, we can set you up with one.

Here are some of the front flowers. Those pansies are about shot and are going to be replaced with some summer annuals tomorrow, we hope. But, they were sure pretty all winter. The roses are doing great, too. You can see the two by the front door. Here's our teeny miniature rose, as of today:

Next to it are the lilies from two years ago that will bloom soon. We will have to divide them next fall.

What I am not sharing photos of is the back yard. We had the huge tree back there taken down, but it looks pretty bad still. I hope that once the kitchen stuff is done we can work on getting that area looking better again. There is NO grass where the tree used to shade everything, but we don't want to put any in until we know where we are going to put a shed and another patio. So, it looks pretty icky.

I guess I have gone on and on about the garden as long as I can. It was just a great, long spring here. That is so rare. We really took advantage of it!

I should have lots to report next week. I just hope I have time to report it. Wishing whoever reads this well. I do want to say that I am thinking of quite a few people with issues in their families. You know who you are.

Cute Things

Our Cardinal Nest
Originally uploaded by sunasak

I just want to show you a bunch of cute things this evening. First, here is a view looking up at the daddy of the cardinal pair that has built a nest in the tree right outside our house. He has been bringing in bugs very regularly since the babies hatched on the 4th (Beccano called to report this while Lee was playing in Point Venture). The mother helps, but mostly hangs out on the nest keeping them warm. It has been fun watching this nest, since it is both directly outside the guest room window (so you can see right in!) and directly above the gliding bench on the patio. We can watch from above and below. The nest is hilarious. it has hair from the dogs in it as well as big hunks of soda bottles that the dogs took outside and chewed up. Yes, a modern, plastic bird nest.

Moving on to more cuteness, Lee bought me a fountain today, for the back patio. We had liked its shape before, but thought it looked sorta cheesy with the fake flame on top of it. What silly people we were. That fake flame is just a substitute for the real flame that comes out of the tiki torch style burner that will burn citronella oil and keep some of the evil mosquitoes off us as we enjoy the trickling sound. Now we just have to get some citronella oil! I'm really happy with it. I have missed having a water feature since we got rid of the pond/mosquito breeding facility last year. And it's a cute fountain. Well, maybe it is more distinguished than cute, but I like it.


And last but not least, here is more cuteness. I had to share at least one photo of my little friend Miss T in her dress-up clothing. I took the picture with the phone, so it isn't great, but it captures her spirit. It's been fun watching this precocious little thing as she grows--her mom is one of the yarn shop workers/hanger-outers like me, and a very talented, vivacious person. The daughter has much of her spirit and spunk, with a tinge of "I know how cute I am" to top it off. What the picture shows is one very happy child, who has just received a large bag of dress-up clothing that she very much wanted. Some were rather big, and she was a tad disappointed, but this one dress was her favorite. She begged to have photos taken, so I agreed. This is just one of a number of very carefully chosen poses she engaged in to show what a versatile dress-up item this dress can be. It just did my heart good to see someone so happy. She literally jumped for joy when the yarn shop owner brought in her daughters' old dress up clothing. Little Miss T and her friends will have years of fun with these dresses!

Enough cuteness. Must read about Outlook 2007 some more.

Quick Mother's Day Sharing

New Bed Edging
Originally uploaded by sunasak

This is just a quick post to say how happy I am with the flower bed edging Lee has put in front of the house. It is so professional and level. My big contribution was to suggest we use two colors of pavers to make it blend with the house better. He did all the hard work. I am grateful on this Mother's Day to have Lee in my life. He got me two lovely rose-scented candles made by his niece, which was a wonderful gesture.

I am also grateful for little Beccano, who cleaned the whole house, including his room, as a gift. All the tangled mess of video game guitars and drums has been put away, even.

I am sure Tuba Boy thought of me before he left for work this morning. He has been much better with holidays lately.

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!

A Fine, Rejuvenating Weekend

Powerdery Disease?
Originally uploaded by ninehermits

We sure had a good weekend—other than Rose getting out of the back yard, not much went awry at all, which isn’t bad. And there were good parts to the dog getting out. First, we found her fairly easily not far down the street; and second when I went to walk her home (she hates being in the car), we came upon two little kids playing in their sprinkler. The little girl was about 5 and the little boy was about 2. Apparently he had not met many dogs. Rose lay down and wagged her tail at them. The sister told the brother to say hi to the dog, so the little boy went up to her and smiled maniacally. Rose smiled back. The whole time she visited, he had this giant grin pasted on his face. He wanted Rose to know he was a friend! Eventually, he did pat her, and was very thrilled with himself. That was fun for both the little boy and the naughty dog.

I had a nice time at the yarn shop Saturday morning, so things got off to a fine start. I got the good news that my friend will be working at the same university I work at starting in the fall, plus I had an interesting class where both students knew how to knit already, so I got them moving on something more fun. They were a mother-in-law/daughter-in-law pair, and those are always fun to have. I also had fun designing a lace scarf for the daughter-in-law to make. And our colleague who had knee surgery came in for a visit, so it was really a nice day of visiting.

Lee and I had most of the weekend to ourselves, since the kids’ dad was in town. In the afternoon Lee washed the cars (see the photo, which Lee took, and his own blog post on why that didn’t do much good—they were covered in oak pollen by Sunday morning), while I weeded the front flower beds, even the one I plan to completely dig up eventually. I still couldn’t stand looking at the weeds. After that, we spent a lot of time sitting on the back patio and enjoying the lovely weather and plants. I worked on my weird socks and Lee puttered around. It was really nice to have some time to ourselves and not be having to “do” something. We barbecued for dinner, and simply enjoyed each other’s company.

On Sunday we skipped church and just sat in the back yard. It would have been more fun without noisy neighbors, but you can’t have everything. Beccano was back home by the time we got back from a leisurely trip to the Home Depot and grocery store (more plants, yay). We had an early dinner (more grilling!) and then headed off to the annual birthday bash of my singing friend Austin. That went as well as could be expected, though perhaps I overly enjoyed the margarita machine, judging by my morning headache. Our group performed quite a few songs and it went over pretty well—I was proud of my singing, anyway, and Lee’s lead bass was good (not lead the metal, lead as in leading the way). My favorite part, though, was when just Lee, Jeff and I were in the performing room, with all that lovely equipment set up, and Lee and Jeff jammed on some guitar ramblings of Jeff’s. It was really pretty, and nice to see Jeff be “big”enough to “let” Lee play with him. I think, perhaps, he got the realization that Lee is not the “amateur” that he probably thought he was.

In one weird coincidence of the evening, I was chatting with two guys when I realized the first one wasn’t someone who looked just like the father of a kid in the tuba section, but WAS the father of the kid in the tuba section (the one I watched all the football games with the year before he was really in the band). Then it turned out he was the brother of a musician I had known a long time via Jeff. Neener neener. I always thought that this kid’s dad looked familiar—no wonder—I had seen him at these events before. And he’d seemed different from the other band parents. Well, duh. He’s a suburban misfit like myself.

I do hope I get some pictures of the event—a nice standup bass playing woman did take some, including me and a silly friend wearing name tags with each other’s names on them. It’s always nice to see the musician friends at these events, and now that I am not in the social circle, really, it’s the only way I do.

Other than Tuba Boy declaring he wants to go to an expensive debate camp this summer, everything is good. Last year I was in a better position to help with that. The new lower-paying job will make these extras harder to come by. I hope he can save up and pay for some of it.

Fine Craftsmanship

New Flower Bed
Originally uploaded by sunasak

I want to praise Lee for his lovely flower bed, since he feels so bad about the gate project being off the mark. The flowers are red petunias, with happy onions, basil and Mr. Stripey the tomato in the center. So far, so good. In fact, so far all the plants for Spring are OK. But, we have not entered into the "bad weather" yet. It is still cool nights and barely warm days. Not even tomato weather.

Beccano had his first tutoring from our friend last night. It went really well, I think. He seemed truly pleased that he ended up understanding the problems. She has a neat mini-whiteboard that she can carry to work examples on. Smart. I hope we have him on a better path now. I am really glad he will get to go on the band trip this weekend, too. He is working very hard. Interestingly, we have watched television shows on what constitutes intelligence, and one on a savant over the past few days. It's a nice bridge for talking to him about how he is wired a bit differently from others and that causes academic angst, but still tests very high on most areas in an IQ test. I told him we are all perplexingly complex.

I hope Tuba Boy finds someone to sub for him at work so he can go on the band trip. No grade problems, just organizational ones. And he "forgot" to tell me I had to pay $54 each for him to take two AP tests, either. Ahem. Good thing his friend had that much cash on him (and scary that he was carrying it around school). Tuba Boy doesn't talk much, but hasn't mentioned the girlfriend I have not met in a while. He spent all last Sunday (when there was no OWL class at church due to the Christian Holiday) with another female friend, the li'l singer-songwriter with actual gigs. They seemed to have a great time in a friend-like way. It would be FINE if he dated her. They live close and I know her parents and their wonderfully pagan/organic values!

Tonight, as a reward for hard work, Lee and I are going on an actual DATE with some people we used to work with. It's one of those "free" comedy club ticket deals, where you win 20 of them and bring your friends, who do not know that there is a two-drink minimum and drinks are $10 each. Well, I actually DO know that, but it should be a fun evening anyway. I will be a lot more fun to be around than I was at winter holiday time, which was when I last saw those folks. Employment is good.

I am thinking good thoughts for a couple of friends' job interviews. Many fingers are crossed and much good energy is going out!!

Spring Spruce Up

New Flower Bed in Progress
Originally uploaded by sunasak

Things are nice this weekend, even though it's a bit chilly on this early Easter. I've been enjoying reading things my email and blog friends are writing about spring, and have been doing some nice spring things, myself.

One thing that has been done is mostly by Lee, who has made a really nice flower bed where there was once an incredibly overgrown Texas sage and some very horrid VINES that had grown up around it. He got some nice concrete blocks to build with, and let me talk him into getting two colors, hoping that will blend a bit with the bricks in the house (the ones that look gray actually also have some tan in them). He got the bricks all perfectly level and has put lovely dirt in the bed. Right now he is planting a mix of red petunias and some vegetables. Why? Well, it's the only sunny bed in the yard right now, so we are hoping a tomato will actually grow!! They certainly did not like the shade in the back yard last year. (Really, really hoping we can get some trees out in the back so we have enough sun to grow grass--soon as Lee gets a real job and we don't have to keep saving for unemployment times). Lee also doesn't want to plant the good plants in there until he is sure we are really rid of the vines. Once we are sure, we want a nice rose bush or two. I want roses.

I hope to share a picture of the finished bed in a day or two!

What else is going on? Not much. Nice to have a calm few days. We have been enjoying the DVD about the Who that Beccano got me for my birthday. If you like the Who, you may want to get Amazing Journey. I think it was once only available at Best Buy, but Beccano got it on Amazon.com. We love all the interviews and all the music, too. There are some really interesting musical insights (the Edge and Eddie Vedder both give some really good comments), and some poignant stuff about the members who have passed away.