Birds! and Garden!

I managed to get up this morning with enough spare time to get my new hummingbird feeder filled and hung in the backyard. It is my hope to be able to attract a pair to our backyard, but we'll see.

Our other bird feeder, hung last weekend, has been immensely popular with the various types of little brown birds that live around the place, as well as our blue jay. He is a little bit too large for the feeder, and you can always tell when he's been there because the feeder swings back and forth wildly. Usually, he can be found on the ground below, picking up what he's spilled. This feeder hangs outside our dining room window, and the chairs around the table provide a perfect viewing point for Mama Cat and Baby Cat to watch the comings and goings around the seeds.

The garden is coming along not too badly. We have had a couple of plants that have expired already, and will need to be replaced, but most everything else is growing exponentially. I need to start keeping track of what we plant successfully and what we don't, so that we can build on that success in future years. Our herbs are already taking over, and we badly need to cut some of it down before we're overrun with thyme. Anybody got any good tips about drying herbs at home?

What a lovely day...

I love days like today.

We slept in, watching old game shows on the TV in our bedroom before finally getting up about 10.

WH made waffles for breakfast.

We watched the Blue Jays game in HD before tackling a little bit of housework.

WH cleaned the bathroom, I cleaned the fridge, we got laundry going.

I made an apple crumble and WH made vanilla ice cream.

We went our for a lovely dinner.

We talked about upcoming vacation. We talked about our future. We laughed a lot today.

We're going to watch a movie before we eat our dessert.

I love days like today.

Some Friday Randoms

My husband and I have recently discovered ice cream sandwiches made with mint chocolate chip ice cream in them. Awesome. Simply awesome.

We have absolutely nothing on our plate this evening or tomorrow except doing a little house cleaning and working in the yard and garden. We're bbq-ing lamb chops tonight with a little mint aioli (made with our own mint from our new herb garden).

There is very little in this world better than good high school theatre. WH and I went to see the work of one of our friend's students last night in a production of a play called Picnic. It was really very, very well done. The sets and costumes were breath-taking, and the actors did fine work with challenging roles. Whenever I see good theatre, I get the itch to find an acting outlet again. Sigh.

We are 23 days from California.

Have a wonderful weekend, y'all!

Who's Up and Who's Down

I haven't done this for a while, so today, when the sun is shining and the birds are finding our new feeder (yay!!), seemed like a good idea to touch base, once again, with who's up and who's down in the world of sports.

Who's Up? :)

1. The Detroit Red Wings

2. The NBA: Gearing up for the beginning of an absolutely dream of an NBA finals between the Los Angeles Lakers (and Kobe Bryant) and the Boston Celtics (and Kevin Garnett). I'm not much of a basketball fan, but this matchup has even me excited. Two great teams with great history and great leading players - who could ask for anything more? Here's hoping they live up to all the hype.

3. The MLB Draft: Or perhaps not the draft itself, but rather a touching and fitting tribute just before the draft itself begins. Each major league team will draft one surviving player from the Negro Leagues this afternoon in advance of the "real" draft, as a tribute to the many excellent ball players who never got a chance in the major leagues because of the colour of their skin. The part of me that believes that Josh Gibson was probably the greatest baseball player of all time gets all teary-eyed at the thought of it.

Neutral Ground:
I can't decide where to put the the US Open: I saw an article announcing that Tiger Woods (#1) and Phil Mickelson (#2) and Adam Scott (#3) will play together for the first two rounds of the US Open at Torrey Pines this year. While this is entirely an exciting announcement, and will, I'm sure, produce lots of intrigue and story lines and excitement, I just hope that TV stations find some time to cover other players as well, while they're following these three around the course like greyhounds after a rabbit.

Who's Down? :(

1. Hockey Night in Canada: Canadians are very attached to their hockey (duh), and more specifically, to their hockey traditions. In that spirit, I would like to say: "What the hell?"

2. The Seattle Mariners: I know I have Seattle-based bloggy friends out there... what the heck is going on over there? It's not good folks; it's not good at all.

3. I'm struggling to come up with a third one this week, so the New York Yankees, just because I can.

There are no words...

This is for my baseball-loving friend, Towanda:

Quick Post

The quotation came from an episode of Blackadder, in case you wondered!

Just a quick post today to say that by the time I came home from work yesterday, WH had finished (!) spreading the top soil. I was completely gobsmacked at how much work he got done in a single day, and more than a little grateful to have had it all done when I wasn't there!! Now we spread grass seed and then water like crazy!

I have five meetings today.

Guh.

In which Chorus Identifies Irony

("It's like goldy and silvery, only made of iron." Two points to anybody who can identify where the quotation comes from, and who isn't a member of my family.)

WH and I were talking yesterday about how two or three days of dirt liftin' will do great things for toning one's muscles, but also about how much easier the task would have been had we had a Bobcat (the machine, not the kitteh) to help. Isn't funny how people will pay for gym memberships in order to get fit, but will pay extra money in order to limit the physical demands of work itself?

Humans are funny.

On a 100% unrelated note, as a lover of old game shows, I would just like to say that Regis Philbin can't hold a candle to Allen Ludden, and the new format of Password on CBS is a poor substitute for the original, which included the creepy voice-over whispering the password to the audience: "The password is ... turtle."