Twins offering their faces to the sun

Planted this clematis three years ago on one side of the archway leading to the front door of the house. For the past two years it's looked pathetic, but this year it just grew and grew and produced about twenty beautiful flowers the sizes of side plates.

These two grew side-by-side and I couldn't resist taking a pic. Twins, I guess. If you enlarge the photo, they look so vibrantly palpable, it's as if they can be touched. Incredible.

Took some pics of the house to put them up later on. To much time on my hands at the moment!

Scents and other simple pleasures

Every morning now I sit on the deck and drink my second cup of coffee after returning from the gym. I do this because this is the time in spring in Pennsylvania--most of the northern East coast really--when the Russian Olives and lilacs are in bloom and the breeze is heady with their thick sweetish scent. For having such small trumpet-shaped flowers, the Russian Olive--it's a shrub that grows wild here--sure packs a heck of a punch.

Just before dusk, I'm back in the garden--watering this time, because we hoed all the patchy parts of the lawn which the weeds claimed as theirs and spread some grass seed. It looks kind of ugly now but that'll change in a few weeks.

Sometimes, when I'm working in the garden covered in dust and sweat and sneezing because of the pollen, I stop full of amazement at myself. As a kid back in Ireland and an adolescent, I despised gardens and gardening, didn't give a shit about flowers and things. Now I'm out breaking my back to get it all beautiful and in shape just so we can sit out on the deck in the evenings, drink wine or sometimes beer, and listen to the finches, wrens woodpeckers and cardinals in chorus. We even put red flowers in the pots on the deck so we'll have humming birds stopping by in mid-summer to drink the nectar. Times sure change.

On an unrelated note, Debra Hamel of Book Blog has a new site called Twitterlit up and running. It gives the opening lines of published novels (mine is currently her first pick of the day, which pleases me very much) and if it tweaks people's interest to know what works they are, it then links to Amazon.com so you can investigate. Here's thelinkif you'd like to check it out when you get a mo'.

Marigolds and beer

Nothing like getting a bit of earth dirt on your hands in spring.

Yesterday was a warm, sunny day and I felt the need to do some outdoors work instead of sitting at my desk typing on the laptop. I like writing but sometimes get tired of it and just want to do some hard manual graft, the sort of graft that makes you feel like you've accomplished and achieved something of significance, the sort of graft that makes you feel good to be alive as you slake down a good, ice-cold beer afterwards--and I'm not talking about the weak mass-produced pee that passes for beer here in the US. No sir, I mean good beer, beer of the sort that that comes from Ireland, England, Germany, Belgium and American micro-breweries like Victory's Hop Devil here in Pennsylvania or Berkshire Brewing Company in Massachusetts. No matter how good a job I did working on a legal brief or how good I did in court of how well I think I wrote that paragraph or sentence in a novel, I've never been able to feel the depth of satisfaction I feel when I've mowed the lawn just so or mulched the flowerbeds so that the contrast between the ink-black mulch and bright green leaves makes an indelibly pleasing impression in my brain. I think I always feel this way because one can immediately see the fruits of one's labor, stand back and see the big picture--the sprawling velvety lawn, the lush flower beds.

So yesterday, I weed-whacked the untidy grass and weeds growing alongside the edges of the stone flowerbeds and underneath the picket fence. And after that was done, I got my trowel and dug deep into the musty soil, turned up the earth and popped fifty-five baby marigold plants into their new homes. I love the bright orange of marigold flowers and I love their lacy foliage.

Miss Brody thought carnations 'sensible' flowers. Well, I think marigolds are joyful flowers. In mid summer, after the lavish lily shows have come to an end, one can always count on the faithful marigold to maintain the sunny atmosphere...and they do, right up to the first frosts.

I can't wait for them to grow up and bloom.

Yoga 101-First inflate your ball

Yesterday was a magnificently sunny spring day in this part of Pennsylvania. As I outside on the deck drinking coffee and listening to a woodpecker drumming against the trunk of a nearby elm, the phone rang.


It was Lee of L&L.

"Hello, I need to ask Larry something," she said.
"He isn't here. What's up?"
"I've bought a yoga ball and I can't get it to inflate using my compressor. I've tried everything."
"I'll tell him to call."

Later, after doing some weeding in the garden we decided to fetch some black mulch to dress up the flower and shrubbery beds, so we decided to kill three birds with the one stone--get a tuna sandwich for lunch from our local WaWa (Indian for goose), buy a truck load of mulch from our local puppy mill that also doubles as a 'mulch dispensary' in Spring, and call in with L&L to see if we could sort out the Yoga ball problem.

To my amazement, Lee was still working on it, Lynne dressed in a caftan with her mane of long blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders, clearly exacerbated but still giving instructions. The ball was purple, large and flat as a pancake, the compressor straining like a jet engine as Lee held the hose with a valve inside the ball's opening.

"You're taking up yoga?" I said.
"Aha...hopefully." She nodded at what should be a ball.
Lynne was consulting the writing on the box. It was a Yoga novice's dream--mat, wooden thingie to help with body posture while performing the more complex contortions, and the aforementioned pancake-like, lurid ball.

"I can't believe they don't give instructions how to blow the ball up," Lynne said. "She looked at the black hand pump that had come with it. I've given up on this."

"I've got about twenty metal valves and tried any that will fit inside the ball's air hole and still that compressor won't fill it with air," said Lee.

Larry checked the compressor and hose. It was functioning properly.
"That's wierd," he said.

He took a valve he'd brought, stuck it inside the ball's opening, wiggled it about and then switched on the compressor. Stll the ball remained defiantly flat.
He tried another valve with the same result.

"Oh, wait a minute," he said. I think the white thing inside the air hole has to come out."

"I don't think so, Larry," said Lee.

Nevertheless, he took a knife and pried it out. It was long, sealed at the end, but its core was hollow which had allowed the valve attached to the compressor to be inserted without rupturing it.

"It's a plug," I said. "You've got to pump the air into the hole and then insert the plug to keep the air inside.

Sure enough the ball began to fill with air as soon as Larry inserted the valve and started the compressor.

We laughed at how such a simple thing could be so baffling.

"Come for drinks at five," said Lynne. "We'll sit on the veranda and watch the sun set."