Blooming time of year

I owe a big thank you to the previous owners of this house for planting flowering perennials that I can enjoy as I try to identify them.  I'd say they had a penchant for pink though, because the majority of blooming things so far have been pink.  Still, I love growing and blooming things, and so far I've got that in spades at this new house.  

Here's another picture of the swallowtail from last week.   He was so nicely cooperative.

Besides the pot of blooming pink azaleas out there, one of my rose bushes is blooming with the biggest pink blossoms I've ever seen on a rose.  These flowers are huge, probably larger than my outspread hand, and really gorgeous.  My rose bush in the front of the house is blooming deep red.  Those roses are gorgeous also, but not as huge as the pink roses in the back.  They're all long stem roses though.

I also have a plant that's blooming with big orange blossoms that I think is an amaryllis.  It's so great to see them all.  I can't wait to see what comes up next.  I also have a lot of mint growing out there, which I'm told I need to start thinning out because it will take over everything. 

I have two big trips coming up in the not too distant future.  One starts next Saturday and is back to back business trips - one in San Diego and the next in Savannah.  I'll be spending 5 days in San Diego then crossing the country to spend 3 days in Savannah.  It's a longer stretch than I like to be out on business trips, but it just worked out that way.

The second trip is at the end of May and it's a vacation trip to Japan.  My friend and I have been talking about doing it for 10 years, and suddenly realized that our timing might not ever again coincide as well as it does at the end of May.  So we're going.  It should be a blast.  

Luckily I have a good pet sitter who will watch the girls while I'm traveling.  Today I'm trying to plan wardrobe for the business trips.  It's so much easier packing for a vacation trip then planning and packing for business trips where I have to be professional. 

Actually, I might want to get used to an increased amount of travel.  I'm running for President-elect of the national organization I'm involved with, and if I win the election, I'd be President in 2015.  That year the organization would ask me to commit 30-40% of my time to them, mostly as travel, to represent the organization nationally and internationally.  That will be a LOT of travel.  The election's not until September, so I won't know until early October if I won or not.   So I'm not going to think about it until then.

I have a new Internet provider!  I finally got tired of fighting with the Internet connection provided by Time Warner.  It was so unstable, it dropped the connection randomly, including during transactions, and sometimes it wouldn't connect at all.  They came out the the house multiple times, and two different service reps told me the signal to my house was just barely good enough to carry the Internet connection, etc.  So when AT&T came to my door, I jumped at the chance to change.  So far I haven't regretted it.  Connection works every time and hasn't yet dropped anything I've been working on.  That makes me really happy.   I don't do well when I don't have an Internet connection.

Guess I'd better get back to wardrobe planning.  Later.