One Year

I meant to write this out last week, since that's the anniversary date...

One year ago, I quit a job that made me miserable.  I had chronic headaches, gained weight (a lot), went on anti-depressants, and felt generally broken-spirited.  Pity party aside, I was in a very bad place.
So I left that behind.  In the year since, I've learned more about myself, my relationships with those closest to me, and I've managed to accept things and move on more easily.

I've also realized that staying home all day sucks sometimes and is the best.thing.EVER on other days.
Some other things I've noticed:

• Baseboards suck.  Seriously.  All they do is sit there and collect dust and hair, then shout at me about it every time I look at the floor.
• Bras are the devil.  I wonder if I would've made a good feminist ninja hippy back in the days when bras got thrown into the fire.  I feel like throwing mine in a fire all the time.  I'm really going to miss the days of relaxing bra-free when I go back to the land of employment.
• Owning a house is wonderful.  I get to put in a garden, new trees, flowers, paint and repaint walls and ceilings and no one gets to give me shit about it.  The only opinions that matter are mine and the Mister's (and most of the time when I ask his thoughts, he says, "I don't care, it's up to you").
• My dogs make me happier than most humans.  Lily and Amber have been my constant daily companions for a year now.  When we took a short weekend trip recently, I had a really hard time leaving them.  I need to find a job that lets me bring my dogs to work....
• Reading is only a hobby.  I thought that when I had lots of free time, I would just dive into book after book that'd been piling up while I was busy with other stuff.  Strangely, and somewhat of a relief, I've discovered that even with unlimited time available, I read only occasionally.  I think I've only finished a dozen books in the past year.
• Whether due to stress, constant contact with the public, or the combination of the two wearing me down, I got sick a lot when I was working.  I don't think I've had a cold in the year since I quit.  One of the best perks of staying home is avoiding sick people all the time.
• Hallelujah for air conditioning!  A couple of weeks ago it was spitting snow.  Yes, in June.  It happens.  Earlier this week it was almost 100ºF.  The a/c was running all day and could barely keep it cool in here.  I'm SO happy we invested in a heat pump last year.  Woo!

I'm sure there's more stuff I've discovered that I love or hate in the past year, but those are the big ones.

Blog Pictures

It looks like Blogger updated the photo interface, so if you click on a picture in one of the posts, it'll enlarge it and give you a bit of photo-only slide options.  Pretty handy!

Let the greening begin!!

Spring has finally begun here--it did snow last weekend, after all--and stuff is growing like crazy!
I got my first CSA share delivery.  It's my first year of doing this and I'm hopeful it'll make me more versatile with veggies, since that's most of what I'll be getting weekly for 4 months.  I'm pretty excited to have the opportunity to do such a thing.  CSAs can be wonderful efforts at getting access to local, seasonal produce in whatever area someone lives.  This week's delivery included micro greens, radishes (for Papa), some green garlic? (have to research this more), spinach and other salad greens.  Notice all the green stuff in there?  I think the radishes were the only other-colored item and from what I was told, the greens attached to those radishes are actually more nutrient-rich than the veggie itself!

Aside from the CSA, my strawberry plants are even more local.  And boy are they flourishing this year!
If you don't remember what they looked like last year....

Directly after planting.

End of the summer.

And now look at the little buggers!

Happy plants

Dozens of these pretty flowers--soon to be tasty fresh strawberries!

Last year, by the end of summer, the plants on the left were the only ones that produced--and then only a few berries.  The plants on the right just spread everywhere and this year they're finally flowering.  I think we'll have a really good crop.  Yum!
We also planted a raspberry plant and an apricot tree.  Hopefully those will bear fruit next summer.  I *heart* fruit!

Inside the house is our rainforest.  At least, that's what I'm calling it.

There's droplets of water forming on the flowers and leaves of my calla lily plant as well as on the massive leaves of one of the other plants (I have no idea the name--the plant was a gift).

When we lived in the apartment, I almost killed all of my plants.  Well, I guess I didn't kill them, but the lack of sunlight did.  The big-leafed badass won't stop growing now.  Before we moved, it was down to one lonely, pitiful leaf.  So I named the plant Pathetic.

Now it grows leaves so large that the Mister's wanting to pull them off and fan me with them.  His words, not mine.

And it's sprouting individual new leaves from the roots, something I've never seen it do before.  The damn thing is going to take over the house!

*drip...

*drip....

It's a jungle in here

Itty bitty baby leaves waiting to grow up into monsters.

Now to the front of the house....
I decided this year that I wanted to plant a small flower garden.  Of course, this meant doing so in the most difficult way possible.
I wanted local-native plants.  I wanted some bee-friendly flowers.  And I didn't want it to look like anyone else's flower garden.
The first two goals weren't so hard.  One of the local nurseries had an amazing selection of flowering plants to choose from.  I got columbine, which I call honeysuckle because you can suck the sweet nectar out of the petals, I got a couple varieties of shooting stars, some "different" foxglove that grows flowers in the opposite direction of other foxglove(?) and some fern-type stuff that the Mister liked, for ground covering.
They all ended up being in the purple family.  Yay!

Shooting stars

Columbine                            

Foxglove

The flowers were picked, but I had yet to decide how I wanted to edge it.  

There's so many options out there--and all of them, at least the ones available at home improvement stores, were boring to me.

So I hmm'd and grr'd and finally settled on what I wanted, a thin-variety stacked flagstone edging.  How hard could it be to come up with that?  Pretty difficult.

I finally got the number to a local place, thanks to a distant friend, that had lots of stone for me to look at.  I could buy it by the ton.  I bought 120 lbs.  In big chunks.

Which I then got to break apart into the pieces you see below.

I'm thrilled with how it turned out!

Now the flowers just need to establish and bounce back.

The completed garden

Corner.

Look at that pretty slate!

This month we celebrate a couple milestones.
Smudge came to grace our couch with her matching presence 2 years ago this month.  We got the couch, then we got a cat to match it.  And somehow lay precariously on the back without falling off.  And let Lily chew on her head sometimes.

"what!?"

About a month after Smudge joined the family, Lily arrived to wreak havoc.  We got her because she matches the floor.  And because she has got the softest face that needs to be kissed a few dozen times a day.

Lily was born this month.  She'll be 2 next week.  So hard to believe!

Who's a pretty girl?  Me!

Little Lily on her first day with us.

Amber, September 2010.  We bought a house with floors to match her.  :o)

Lastly, a little bit of celebration with Smudge & Lily.  I love watching them argue.