Flowers & strings and other things (Ha! I made an utterly useless rhyme!)

It's actually been a couple weeks since the flood. There was a lot of damage in Shelby County, but we certainly faired better than Nashville in the human suffering category. My heart and prayers go out to all the residents of Davidson County.

We were worried about damage to our AC units. Fortunately, both units avoided getting any circuitry wet, and survived the flood with flying colors. Woohoo!!

There's my lovely lady as she poses with her Mother's Day bouquet. I think she liked it. You look at that face and tell me. I know if Frances Reese sees this picture she'll probably pick up her Zimmer frame (that's fancy English speak for a walker.) and whack me upside the shin for not sending her a bouquet of purple flowers.

I wanted to try out the Sports setting on the new camera. None of my previous digital cameras would have been fast enough to catch that Yo-Yo in mid-flight. The gentleman in the picture is my son, Yo-Yo Joe. The boy collects Yo-Yo's like Imelda Marcos collects shoes. Unfortunately, this boy also likes to take things apart and try to figure out their mechanics. That means he really has the world's largest collection of nonworking Yo-Yo's with a few operational ones thrown in. Of course, the ones that no longer work are the ones people spent $10 and $15 dollars on, while the one above is a Duncan that only cost a couple of bucks. Go figure!

Looking at the picture above, you might be asking yourself, "Self! Why is that crazy man purposely growing grass in a flower box!?!" Self would answer, "I don't know. Why don't you ask him?"

It's not grass. Joseph and I were inspired by Aunt Marcia and Uncle Jim (Those are the two people we go to visit when we want to get away from the world!) to plant garlic. We visited them last summer. They had fresh garlic from their own garden available for salads everyday. Joseph could not get enough of the stuff. In fact, he still just pops a clove of fresh garlic in his mouth any chance he gets. (He won't have to worry about attracting vampires. Girls might be a challenge though.) Aunt Marcia sent Joseph a few different varieties of Garlic from her 2008/2009 garden. We ate a clove or two from each head, and planted the rest. What you see above is the current state of those cloves of garlic we planted. We also planted some garlic bought from the grocery store. Between those and what Aunt Marcia gave Joseph we planted 26 cloves. Last count, we had about 20 plants. All the garlic Aunt Marcia sent is looking very healthy (as can be seen above). The grocery store garlic is having the difficulties. I could be the growth inhibitor put on them to prevent sprouting in the store...Or, it could be that Boots thinks that corner of the garlic bed is a frigging litter box. Oh well! 20 of 26 is still quite the success for a first time effort. Joseph and I are already looking forward to expanding next year's crop. I don't think we'll quite try the 600 cloves Aunt Marcia and Uncle Jim planted though. Who knows, though...

More garlic planting pictures at: Garlic Adventure 2009-2010