The Aftermath and Other Fun Things

We’ve been home for two full days. We are still getting caught up, which will take a while. The yard. Oy. Rick mowed the grass the day before we left. It grew about two feet while we were gone. Wait, did I say grass? There is some grass out there, I’ll grant, but mostly it’s weeds and crabgrass. Anyway, they grew with merry abandon. Evidently we had lots of alternating rain and warm weather. That’s the kind of weed growth we can’t keep up with even when we are home, let alone being gone for a month.

I spent yesterday working on a photo album about the trip. I uploaded all the pictures to Shutterfly, then sorted through them to choose photos for the album and decided where to place them on the pages, then wrote captions and text pages, and finished by embellishing it with stickers where appropriate. I haven’t ordered it yet. Wanted to step away from it for a day or two, then look it over again for any necessary changes. It’s like editing your book. You need time away to give yourself perspective.

I worked on it for about 15 hours. That kind of thing becomes addictive to me. I just can’t stop. I don’t consider it a waste of time. I know I needed to take care of the photos right away, or I would ignore them for a year and have no idea of what to do with them. That’s how I operate. Besides, how much would a professional charge to do work like that? Twenty dollars an hour?

So. The pictures are done. I still need to organize all the keepsakes from the cruise, which will necessitate another album, this one real rather than digital. I need to do that right away too, because you know that album I was going to put together about my honeymoon?

Yeah, it’s not done yet. Trust me. I have  to do this stuff right away.

In the meantime, there’s been laundry and grocery shopping, and my own version of yard work, which entails cleaning up the native garden and reassuring my few potted plants that I really don’t hate them. So this morning I cleared out dropped branches, pulled some weeds and stray crabgrass, then took a hatchet to my poor, sad, nearly-completely-dead Madeira bush. I think our dry winter and a few frost-filled nights were just too much for it. Last year it was six feet tall, five feet wide, and covered with leaves and blossoms. This year it’s a skeleton of dry branches. I cut away everything but the trunk, which is still alive. Only time will tell if it survives or not.

I also fertilized and watered the blueberries and lemon tree. One of the blueberry bushes is  fading, so I also pruned it back to a few inches in height. That’s the only place there were any leaves growing.

I am not a good gardener. All I can say is that I have good intentions.

Speaking of pictures, I owe you some. Here you go.

Rick and I are standing on the staircase in Thomas Andrews’ house. See the stained glass windows at the top? I never knew those were there. I would have put them in the book, believe me.

Westminster Bridge and Stonehenge. Stonehenge was beyond description.

This is on the cruise. The lovely lady with me, is Rikke, from Denmark. We’ve been Facebook friends for a couple of years and it was so much fun to meet her at last.

One more: I’m clowning around with Claire, a lady with a lovely and generous Irish soul. I’m so glad I took her up on her offer to show Rick and I around Belfast. She and her husband Denis are great people.

There’s lots more to share, of course. I’ll have to parse them out in small doses. This was simply an amazing trip.