Sunflower

I'm so behind on posting on this blog.  Busy, busy.  But I'll come back to that.  First of all the pictures on this post are a daily progression.  For the fun of it, I took pictures of the opening sunflower every day.  So day 1 was the first picture in the last post, and then this first picture of this post is day 2, and the rest of the pictures progress through to day 8.  Kind of fun.

The bad news is though that the sunflowers never went to seed.  We had some miserably hot temperatures, including a week in the 100s.  No matter how much water I gave it, the flowers themselves drooped and drooped after these pictures were taken.   The plant is still alive, but none of the blooms lived long enough to go to seed.

The corn plants are doing well.  They're almost waist high on me now, and happily thriving, although I don't see anything resembling ears on them.

Let's see.  I was gone for a week to a convention, which went well.  I almost didn't go because my Mom's been very sick.  Luckily, she turned around and began the long road to recovery just as the convention was starting, so I went to it.  I managed to get in all the schmoozing I was planning on.  The election's not until September, so I'll know October 1st if the schmoozing was helpful.   Then I was home for a week.

This last week I was out in east Texas with my parents and sister and brother-in-law.  My Dad was scheduled to have a pacemaker placed on the same day that Mom was scheduled to be released from the hospital.   I figured my sister and her husband could use some help.  They've been handling the load of both my parent's illnesses since they live out by them.  The pacemaker placement and subsequent recovery has gone like a charm, but Mom's release didn't go smoothly.  She passed out the day after her release and ended up back in the hospital for two and a half more days while they adjusted her medications and ran a billion tests to rule out any other causes.  Looks like it ended up being a drug-related incident.  

Don't ask me why they would send her home with three new medications she hadn't ever taken before, but at least one of them didn't work for her.   Anyway, she's now back home again and doing well this time, gaining strength and adjusting to home life after a month and half in the hospital post aortic valve replacement.   Nothing like having both parents with heart-related issues.  But I'm delighted to say, both seem to be well on the road to recovery now.     

I did spend all week in east Texas, although I had originally planned to spend 3 days.  Luckily my pet sitter is awesome and adjusted her schedule to keep the cat kids covered.  My cat kids are not too happy about me being gone two full weeks so close together, but they seem to be forgiving me.  That'll last until I drag them to the vet to have their teeth cleaned at the end of the month.  No doubt they won't be quite so quick to forgive me for that. 


I'm fighting new car fever.  I want to buy a new car.  Doesn't help that I got the title to my current car in the mail.  Paid off!  Yay!  I'm ready for that new one now.

I refilled the bird feeders, but the birds haven't realized it yet.  The feeders were both completely empty when I got back yesterday, so the birds have been eating elsewhere.  Usually it takes them a day or so to find the full feeders again.  I haven't seen the little rat since before I left to go to the convention, so maybe he's found other food sources, or been found by the cats that roam the neighborhood.  

The last sunflower picture is foggy because it was so humid that day that when I walked out of my air-conditioned house I couldn't keep the camera lens from fogging over.  Oh, well.  You can sort of see it.    

That's it for today.  More later.