Mum's the word

Now the attack ants have mums to hide under.

Over the weekend, I decided that our front garden bed needed a little bit of love. Our pansies, though beautiful (and delicious, according to the woodchucks) had more than gone by, so it was certainly time to spruce the place up.

I got a gift certificate to Home Depot for my birthday, so I headed over there to see what they had flowers. They seemed to have every size mum you could imagine, and I picked out four in little pots and then two six packs of yellow and orange. I took these photos in the evening after I planted them, and it's funny how bright the yellow ones seem! Exactly what I was going for. Little balls of sunshine. I need that as it seems like we're already heading towards Daylight Saving again. (Is it dark when anyone else gets up, or is it just us since we get up so darned early?)





Here's a few close ups to get you ready for your fall planting:

Yellow, orange and pink tones all in one. Love it.

This one feels sophisticated to me.

Love this color.

These look so fuzzy and pink!

Little balls of sunshine.

This ain't no disco

Target is starting to put some of their summer goodies on sale -- I spotted this lovely, shiny orb and grabbed it since it was half off. $6 worth of joy. I hope the woodchucks don't haul out their leisure suits and start doing their best Saturday Night Fever routines.

This ain't no country club either.

Tips from a Tagger, or Fun with Spraypaint





I'll have a large pepperoni and garlic, please.


Here's a fun DIY Friday riddle for you: What do you get when you combine decorative  objects with blue spraypaint? Answer: Pretty things! We had this star when we lived in Ipswich and our color palette was red/gold/green.  Our house is now blues/grays/whites, which is interesting to me as those are not colors that I tend to gravitate towards. But the house was like that when we bought it, and I really love it. Anyway, I felt that this star needed a bit of an update, so it was spraypaint to the rescue. 



This is smurfy!




I have a few recommendations for when you are spraypainting stuff.

1: Wait for a non-windy day.  There's a reason this is #1 on the list.

2: Make sure you have something you DO NOT CARE ABOUT to put your object on while you are spraypainting. Because that thing you are laying your object on will never be the same again. (Thus the pizza box.)

3: Spraypaint is pretty stinky for a decent amount of time, and I don't care if you buy the "less stinky" kind -- it all stinks. Make sure you have an outdoor area that is free and clear for airing out your object.

4: Try to get the paint even. If you hold the spraycan in one place for too long, the paint will pool up.  Keep the spraypaint moving!



Star of wonder, star of fumes, how lovely you look in our living room.

I had originally intended for this star to
hang outside, but we had an empty spot over the fireplace during the summer. So here it is, in all its Hipstamatic glory. All in all, I'm pretty happy with it. And since it is spraypainted, it could go outside at any point. 

So if you find yourself bored this weekend and searching for a great DIY project that's pretty cheap and makes you feel like a graffiti artist, I recommend hauling out the spraypaint! I felt accomplished and just a little bit naughty all at the same time.

Party animals



I love that little ear sticking out from under the hat.



The lack of posts here has not been intentional -- I have just been partying up a storm for the fifth anniversary of my 29th birthday. On Saturday, I went to the beach with friends and it was just the perfect day. It was warm but breezy. The water was chilly but refreshing. We got a good parking spot. That never happens. We ended up staying at the beach for about eight hours and then went to Portsmouth for dinner. Such a fun day!

On Sunday, we spent time with my favorite in-laws, and later had dinner with my parents. On Monday, I went to lunch with a friend and had another friend over with her kids in the afternoon. And then on Tuesday, my actual birthday anniversary, my parents, two aunts and uncle came over for a BBQ. 



She is also very patient with me.


It really was a wonderful birthday. My husband spoiled me rotten, despite his tendencies to roll his eyes when I start to get excited for my birthday. He has become used to my birthday obsession over the years, though it's still pretty foreign to him. His birthday isn't long after Christmas, and every year seems to contend with terrible weather. It's hard not to love your birthday when it's in August and there's nothing else going on anyway.

As you can see, someone else totally got into the spirit of things. She practically begged to wear the party hat. Such a good girl. 

Celebrating from bed -- what a party animal.



Our lawn and Meatloaf



Not quite the dark side of the moon. (Also not a Meatloaf song.)



What an imaginative title for a blog post -- our lawn and Meatloaf! And yet oddly, those have been the two highlights of our week.
Since this is a blog that is supposed to be about our home and all that goes with it, I'll lead off with a look at what used to be our lawn. It looks more like Shredded Wheat. If you step on it, you leave this really weird footprint that I imagine is similar to what astronauts leave when they walk on the moon. I have been thrilled at the amount of rain that we've gotten this week -- my rain barrel was empty and our plants have just been so dry. I told Josh I thought I saw a hint of clover somewhere in all this mess. He informed me that we don't want clover, we want grass.  I told him that I wanted green, not brown.





The Man. The Meat. The Loaf. The Legend.



Proceeding on to what was really the most exciting highlight of the week... Meatloaf! I got tickets for this concert months ago in order to surprise Josh for our anniversary.  He didn't even know there was a concert until two days before our anniversary when he heard an announcement on the radio, and then declared he was going home to buy tickets.  I then had to let the cat out of the bag a bit earlier than I had intended. But he was thrilled, and that was back in May.

Fast forward to the end of July, and we couldn't believe the day was finally here! Mr. Loaf did all the hits -- Paradise by the Dashboard Light, You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (It Must Have Been When You Were Kissing Me), I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That), and so on. He even managed to get the Time Warp in there and a clip from Rocky Horror Picture Show. And this was a concert that was fantastic for people watching. There's a colorful cast of characters that goes to a Meatloaf concert. 

Take these two for example.



Notice the Meatloaf sweatshirt.



Goldfinches



Male Goldfinch; Salisbury Industrial Park; J. Bouchard.



Anyone who knows my husband is well aware of his love for nature photography. Every weekend, he gets up at the crack of dawn and then spends as much time as possible outside, scouring parks, the river, the woods, industrial parks, and any place else that might have natural life. I usually stay in bed until a reasonable hour. 

He got into this hobby while we lived in Ipswich, and I remember very clearly the first day he went out to take photos. I was at work and received a phone call from him that he had started out on one trail and had ended up on the other side of town, was now exhausted and could I please pick him up? And since we only had one car, that meant that the car was parked in the place where he had started off from. And that meant that I had to ask a friend to drive me there, then I had to go find my husband on the other side of town to pick him up. I was not thrilled.







Female Goldfinch; Salisbury Industrial Park; J. Bouchard

 

Female Goldfinch; Salisbury Industrial Park; J. Bouchard



By the time I found him, I was steaming a bit -- but he had a look in his eye like he had just found the treasures of an ancient pyramid. He told me that he found frogs. He found snakes. He saw a deer and a turkey. He took as many photos of them all as he possibly could and was almost delirious with excitement. Some people go through life with no interest in anything at all, and my husband had just found his passion.



I was rooting around in the closet last night, and came upon an old photo album that had some of his first nature photos in them. He had used a pretty normal camera, and they were not the best photos. (At the time, they were treasures!) Now, three cameras later and several years of experience under his belt, he can take incredible photos of pretty ordinary things in extremely ordinary places.




He told me that this weekend he drove through the industrial park in Salisbury and saw some Goldfinches.  Big deal, right? It's old hat to him now. Then I started nosing around on his Flickr page and saw the photos that he had actually taken. You would have no idea that there were factories in the background somewhere. I am sure that hundreds of people drive by these little guys every day on their way to work, not noticing how sweet they are, or how the purple thistles play off their gold bellies. And I love their little beady eyes.


If you asked Josh, he would tell you that these are boring.  Boring mostly because he is at a point in his nature photography that he wants photos of Bald Eagles swooping into the river to catch a fish, or of a fox carrying a pup out of its den. But I am a big fan of these sweet little vignettes that have so much color and detail in one little moment. They feel like watercolor paintings to me. They feel like summer.





 



Male Goldfinch; Salisbury Industrial Park; J. Bouchard









 

Rose of Sharon

The one ROS that didn't get creamed by the October storm.

When we first saw our house, the Rose of Sharon shrubs in the backyard were in bloom. Josh and I both fell in love with them -- the colors were just amazing and the blossoms abundant. (And if we're going to be totally truthful, there were few truly impressive sights in the yard when we first moved into the house -- so anything we didn't have to totally excavate was especially incredible to us.) Then, we had the horrible storm in October that pretty much had its way with two out of three of the shrubs. We weren't sure if anything would come back, so we had been holding our collective breath since.

Now after much ado, I'm excited to announce that its Rose of Sharon (ROS) time again! 

We have two lavender bushes and one pink -- the pink is much prettier to take a close-up photo of, but the lavender is just gorgeous when you see all the blossoms together on the shrub.

Pink:

Pretty in pink.

More pink:

A rose-colored Rose of Sharon.

The colors that our two lavender bushes create is just gorgeous. The blossoms start out as a pinky-lavender, and as they fade and wilt, the colors turn to a beautiful blue-lavender.

I could stare at these colors all day.

More lavender:

Lots of blossoms and buds! Good signs.

And, finally... a game for your amusement.

Find the bee tukkus in this picture...