Tucson Trip

February has been an incredibly busy month. I'm just realizing that it's almost over. This last week I realized that I'm going to have to find a better way of managing things, because I'm doing so much that I'm forgetting things. I forgot to pay a bill! That's a serious first for me. The company even said as much when they called. "You've had this card 18 years and never even been late on a payment . . ." , etc. On top of that I forgot a deadline to get a housing form in to one of my organizations. *sigh* Time to get some additional organization into my life I guess. Which is a little scary, when I think about it. I'm already like the world's least spontaneous person, and I'm talking about being more organized. *laughing* Seriously no hope for me.

This month I went to a meeting in Tucson, at a place called the Loew's Ventana Canyon Resort. Awesome place!! The resort is built in a canyon (obviously), but it was built without harming any of the several thousand saguaro cactus that populate that area. Plus it was built to blend into the canyon, so it's weirdly shaped and spread out, and totally awesome. My room was on the third floor, and yet I had a patio that you could step up out of and be on ground level. They also created a nice walking trail behind the Resort. The resort itself is somewhat vaguely shaped like a large "V", and the pool is inside the V and the walking path is partially inside and extends out of it and leads to an 80 foot waterfall. The waterfall is natural some times of the year and artificially maintained the rest of the time. The top of the waterfall can be seen in the first picture in this entry, with the saguaro all around it.

Along with the landscaping, I have to give the Resort staff some serious credit. Every single person I dealt with went out of their way to be friendly courteous and helpful. The food was great. the people were great, the little shops were great. cst was seriously happy.

Besides the purpose of the trip, I learned something about saguaro cacti while I was there. Those babies are old! They don't begin to get arms until they are between 50 and 75 YEARS old. So when you see arms, those are old cacti. There are two in front of the resort that may be close to 300 years old. I managed not to get pictures of those two, but did get quite a few saguaro pictures, like the hillside shown here. I kept meaning to go out front and take pictures, but something kept distracting me every time I thought about it.

Of course, it's February, so the area was very brown and mostly dormant. I'd love to see it when things are growing. Cacti don't go dormant, so that was fine. Plus I like the desert-type landscape or I wouldn't hike out there, but I'd still like to see it growing some day. One of the things that really struck me on the drive in from the airport was the yellow-green trees. Leafless of course, but the bark is a bright yellow green. This picture doesn't do them justice, but you can kind of see what I mean. I learned from walking the path at the resort that those are called Palo Verde. The walking path had small signs naming various plants, and a couple of larger signs explaining all about the saguaro and the building of the Resort.

There was a cactus wren in the area behind my patio that I watched for a while. It ran past when I was out there taking pictures. At first I thought it was a roadrunner, but it was too small for a roadrunner and not the right color. It was large for a wren though, being slightly smaller than a robin, but not small like the Carolina wrens I see around here. Plus it doesn't have the little up-turned tail I've come to associate with wrens, but a longer tail, which is why I first thought 'roadrunner'. I tried to get pictures of it, but like most birds, it wasn't holding still for it. This picture is looking out from my patio and the wren is sort of visible, blurring past, running on the ground to the right of center. I got other pictures that were slightly less blurry, but nothing really good. That wren and a little plain hummingbird were the only wildlife I saw on the trip, but then, I didn't spend a lot of time outside the hotel meeting room.

The meeting was good also. I'm a newly elected member of this particular group so I wasn't sure how it would be, but I'm going to enjoy being a part of this group. They are serious and enthusiastic about their involvement and the dialogues flowed evenly among all members. The group and the organization are well worth the effort to be a productive member.

At work things are moving smoothly also. *laughing* Well, of course there are politics going on there, but that's a given. I've gotten better at becoming part of the flow. I'm still extremely busy, but things are on track, (except a certain book with a colleague who continues to drag his feet on his part) and I've begun swimming smoothly rather than treading water with my nose barely free.

Hmmmm. I seem to be into water analogies this morning. Strange in a blog post filled with pictures of desert landscape. I took a lot of pictures of different types of cactus, but I really liked this "fuzzy" variety shown in this picture.

I guess that's about it. February flew by, but that's nothing new. The years rush past almost too fast to notice.

Later.

It's COLD!!!!!!!!!!

This has been one really hard week, weather-wise. I have to keep telling myself that this is Texas. It's too frigging cold!! This picture is my backyard this morning. The sun's finally out, so the snow should be mostly gone later today - I hope.

Let's see, last weekend was pretty if a little cool, but Monday night changed all that. We got a nice ice-storm Monday night into Tuesday morning. I gave it a shot - the driving in to work thing. I managed to get out of my neighborhood, but not to the highway. I hit a still slushy patch, it sprayed up on my windshield and froze. So I had little visibility as well as little traction. Yes, my defroster was on and functional, but the ice on my wipers themselves kept smearing ice across my field of vision. I gave it up. I just wasn't up for 28.5 miles of it, so I turned around and went home. I worked from home on Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday, I braved the still frozen conditions and made it to work and back both days, although Thursday afternoon going home I gave up on the highways and took back streets. The high temperature between Monday and Friday was 24 degrees (low of about 12), so nothing melted. Street and highway conditions only improved marginally, with passable ruts in heavy traffic areas, but the highways continued to have continuous wrecks, and disabled cars, abandoned cars and cars in ditches. Friday when I got up, Nature had added 5 inches of snow on top of the ice! So even Momma Nature isn't above adding insult to injury. I totally didn't expect it. Yes, the meteorologists were forecasting a 50% chance of a "dusting' of snow. And yes, I know they can't really forecast what it's going to do. But 5-7 inches in the metroplex is a significant difference from a 'dusting'. I drove in on the highways, and traction was actually the best I'd had all week, as long as you were careful and remembered there was ice under that snow. Friday afternoon the temperature approached freezing and roads started to melt. Lots of water, lots of slush and lots of ice still. I did the non-highway route most of the way. The bottom line? The fastest trip to or from work I made this week, not counting Monday which was a normal commute, was 1 hour and 15 minutes for that 28.5 miles. The worst was 1 hour 45 minutes. So not only does that add to my work day, but that 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours is extremely tense time spent - death grip on the steering wheel, watching all the other cars intently for slippage. I'm glad the week is over.

I'm equally glad I don't have to be anywhere this morning. All that water from melting snow and ice will have frozen solid again (temp of 21 overnight). This just doesn't seem like Texas to me this week. And they're forecasting more weather like this next Wednesday. That should about give it time to melt before we go again.

Another "interesting" weather-related development: It's been cold enough long enough for my pipes to freeze in my house! Nine and a half years I've been here and never had this happen before. My kitchen sink and my master bathroom shower froze. Both are opened back up now so hopefully there's no burst pipe damage. The shower I should have expected since it's on an outside wall, but since I use it every day, I didn't think about it. The kitchen sink is not on an outside wall so that one surprised me. The only other pipes I have on outside walls are the ones to the washer. I'll run that today after the temperature comes up over freezing and see how it does. The temperatue is supposed to get above freezing today.

Just so as to not have the entire blog be about the weather, things are going well at work and going not well at work. *laughing* Yes, those can both be true. I got all my lectures in on time and my colleague got me his half of the book, and I'm getting it whipped into shape to submit. Those are the good things. On the side of the bad things, we discovered incorrect units of measure on 1100+ test results that we released. So the lab gang spent two days correcting them, and I spent two days contacting 200+ doctors. Luckily the numeric results were fine and they matched the numeric reference ranges, so the units of measure correction was essentially clerical. A pain in the ass, but not affecting patient care. A worse issue was that a tech placed the incorrect fluid on a main analyzer, resulting in 60 incorrect test results that DID impact patient care. Those are still being followed up and require dealing with the doctors and with Risk Management. I'm not sure why errors of this nature tend to cluster. I can go long periods of time with no lab issues, then seem to have several at once. Something in the water?

It's gorgeously sunny out today, sparkling off all that snow. Yesterday afternoon was the first time all week the sun came out, which is why things finally started to melt. I have hopes that the melting will continue today, with all this sun. Oops, talking about the weather again.

I brought more lectures home to wok on over the weekend. These are resident CP lectures, so I should just be able to update them from previous lectures. Since I've been focusing on the book and those other lectures at work, I decided to bring these home and update them here. Shouldn't take too long, but it saves me the time doing them at work.

My poor garage is semi-flooded. I've really been trying to knock all the major ice off my car before pulling it into the garage, but each morning when I go out there's a mini-flood in the garage from melted ice from the car. I'll have to trash some of the cardboard boxes that are sitting in water right now. Everything that I care about not damaging is up off the floor, but some things are wet. Still, a semi-flooded garage is better than scraping ice and snow off a car as it defrosts in the morning.

My cats don't appreciate snow either. Here's Addy checking it out. Neither of them has ever stepped into snow, although Addy walked out on it this week when it was just solid ice out there.

Guess that's it for now.

Time and Procrastination

Geez! Time simply gets away from me too quickly. I think I've blogged about the nature of time before, but I'm continuously amazed by how fast it goes by . . . and how subjective it can be for such an objective measure. The length of time passing doesn't really change, so how can it speed by so fast when I need more of it, and drag by when I'm waiting for something? It's not time itself that changes, but my perception of it. Hmmmmmm. But that's not all. I could do my best to perceive it going by slowly and still have it rush by when I'm stretched to get things done.

*laughing* This is all stemming from the fact that I have six lectures due at the end of the month and I'm not making as much progress as I would like to be making on them. Because I haven't been able to make decent progress on them at work, I've been working on them at home in the evenings and brought them home with me to work on this weekend. So what am I doing? Procrastinating and writing a blog post!

This morning I've been having internal arguments with myself. "I need to get to work on the lectures" vs "I need some downtime to myself since it's the weekend". And of course since I need to be working on lectures, I've come up with half a dozen projects that I should spend some time on ... THIS weekend. Like going and getting some potting material and pots, going through my collection of old computer games and seeing if any of them still work on my current computers and getting rid of ones that don't, re-arranging my bookshelves and moving books I'll never read again to a pile to give away, cleaning out my cabinet where I throw all my bills, etc. etc. All of these things can be done at other times, but my procrastination tendencies make them all very attractive prospects right now. I only know one person who's better at procrastination than I am, but only by a little. Amazing.

It's cold today. Gorgeously sunny but too cold. It's been below freezing every night since Wednesday night and that trend is supposed to continue for this next week. That means the aloe vera are once again garage residents and I'm leaving lights on in there since it's an extended time in the dark. The cats are curled up in their favorite places. For Addy that's on my lap, where she is right now, but when I'm not sitting down she's been in this spot in the picture above. Zoe is in the red chair, except when I had this cabinet in the picture below open earlier. She loves open cabinets with places she can occupy.

Anyway, as long as it stays dry and I can stay inside, the cold is okay. Last time I blogged it was fairly warm and gorgeous, and the day afterward it snowed! Pretty because it didn't accumulate much or stay long, but the next morning the bridges were iced and the commute was horrific. My usual 30 minute commute took me 2 hours. One entire hour of those two I spent just sitting still on the highway waiting for them to clear a wreck and get traffic moving again. It was NOT pretty. Traffic is this area becomes like that every time we have snow or ice, simply because we have it so rarely. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad we have it so rarely and am not wishing to see it more often. I'll take horrific commutes a couple days a year and nice weather and commutes as the rule.

My shopping personality is voting for the shopping trip, even if it is just to get pots and potting soil. She figures (probably correctly) that if she gets me out into a store we'll come home with more than just pots. And she reminds me that we currently have no on-line orders pending. We haven't spent any noticeable money in a couple weeks. I was hoping she wouldn't be noticing that, but no such luck. My shopping genes are twitching. "Stimulate the economy!" she tells me. "Pay some bills down!" I reply. *laughing and shaking head* My internal arguments are too damn personality-differentiated.

*sigh* I suppose I've procrastinated enough today. Time to be a responsible adult . . . or at least I'll give it a shot. Later.

Nice Saturday

I couldn't decide on a picture for the blog today, since this is just a random blog, so you're stuck with a picture of my Duel of Dragons sculpture.

It's a gorgeous day outside, beautifully sunny although too cool for this Texas girl. I think it's supposed to only get to 60-ish, and then a cold front comes in sometime tomorrow. Still, days like this make me generally happy with the world. I love the bright sunshine and crystal clear blue sky. Even though everything is brown or bare and dormant, the sun never fails to lift my spirits. If it's sunny, I'm happy. Plus it makes me want to do odd chores around the house.

Today my odd chores are including things like, going through all my books and pulling out any I won't re-read. I'll give them to charity. I'm also doing random straightening of shelves and counters, putting things away, throwing things away. It's like a weird nesting instinct, to putter around the house and clean up and make the house just right. It hits me occasionally.

I've gotten through the first week of the new year at work, and damn, I have a lot to do. Periodically I get a mild panic-attack feeling, of not being able to get it all done. Then I have to take a deep breath and calmly consider how things are going. I did finish one manuscript this week, so we'll make the deadline on that. And I finished one out of 7 lectures that are due by February 1st, and started the second. And there's good news in that next Monday the installation is scheduled for the first new amino acid analyzer. The second one will be installed a week later. Then validations will proceed as quickly as possible. The bad news is that I have a manuscript that's now past it's deadline. That's the bad news about having a co-author. Even though I met the deadline with my half, he didn't, so our manuscript is now late. I'm going to have to nag him this next week and hope for the best. Another one of the million and a half reasons I'd rather do things myself than trust other people to get them done.

Over-functioning, over-functioning. That's what the lab administrative director calls it. I should delegate and hold people responsible. Only if they're not responsible, it becomes my problem when things don't get done. This is my toughest dilemma as a boss. If I do it myself, I know that it will get done, and get done right. If I delegate it, I then have to make sure the delegee performs, because ultimately it's still my problem, with me getting the blame if it's not done. The dilemma? How do you make someone perform? I've tried so many tacks: what can I do to help you? what can I do to make sure you have time to get this done? daily emails asking for progress on the issue. And still it's not done, and comes home to roost on my desk.

I will say, I've developed a new personality to deal with some of the people in my lab. The trick seems to be not just to do my job, but to do it loudly and ostentatiously so that everyone is aware of every aspect of what I do. It seems that all some folks understand is that the person who they see making the most noise = the person getting the most done. I took a long time to learn this basic 'truth'. When I just quietly go about my job, some people really think that I'm not doing anything! Thus all my hassles back in September. So my new personality goes by the name of "Diva" and she's an in-your-face, look-what-I've-accomplished-now personality. She gets along well with my other alter egos, and is invaluable in dealing with people. They really seem to think that I'm doing a whole lot of work that I wasn't doing before. Sadly, I am doing more work, but most of it is in sustaining Diva's personality. Yes, it's true. I'm working hard to show people that I'm working rather than just doing my job like I used to.

*shakes head* Here I am complaining about work again. Considering all that, it's amazing that I still like my job, isn't it? Weirdly, I'm no more fond of certain people, and less fond of a few, but I still love my job. And even more weirdly, Diva is fun. She's so outspoken and so 'blow-your-own-horn'. I didn't even realize I had that type of personality in me. Maybe I should change my name to Sybil, huh? That's four personalities now. Me, ET (evil twin), cst (chibi-shopping triplet) and Diva. *laughing* Probably normal people deal with things as a whole person rather than splitting themselves into different egos to deal with different aspects of their lives. Sounds boring.

At any rate, guess I'll go back to puttering around the house and see what I can actually manage to accomplish.

2011 is here!

Hmmmmmm. I wonder if I should make some New Year's resolutions? *laughing* I BRIEFLY considered one while I was out shopping this morning. Yes, cst went shopping. "cst" in case you're interested is "chibi shopping triplet", or small shopping triplet (chibi = slightly derogatory Japanese term for a short person or kid). I have an evil twin, and a shopping triplet. cst is who I blame for all my shopping.

cst loves Christmas time. She can shop non-stop, and with even less feelings of guilt than usual. It doesn't even matter that she's shopping for other people . . . just as long as she can shop. She went out this morning. She didn't get much, caulk, hair gel, but she got to shop so she was a little happy. Driving home I was bemoaning the fact that I hadn't found the pajamas I like and wanted to buy, and was soothing myself by thinking that I didn't really NEED them, when all of a sudden I thought: maybe I should only buy things that I actually really need. *laughing* I could almost hear cst wailing in horror. I decided NOT to make that a New Year's resolution.

The rest of today I've been straightening up the house, putting up 2011 calendars, putting away Christmas stuff . . . just your basic New Year's things. I also sorted out my family Christmas pictures and decided to insert a couple below in this blog.

I'm not sure why I'm blogging again so soon, other than I had forgotten that I enjoy doing it. I've been so busy that I've been ignoring it, but last night it was nice to just talk about all that stuff in the blog. I forgot that it's sometimes nice to just talk to yourself, which is what blogging feels like to me. So maybe I'll try to do it a bit more frequently in the future.

This year I went to Colorado for Christmas. I dragged my friend along who's back from Grenada. We spent the 13 hour drive catching up on stuff so it was nice. I was hoping for some snow since she hasn't seen much snow in her life (Texas girl), but the snow stayed in the western half of the state. We weren't far enough west. I was both happy and sad about that. Sad because it would have been nice to have some snow, but happy because I've driven up there and back in some really horrible ice-and-snow road conditions at this time of year. I was happy not to have to do it this year. We spent Christmas morning at my sister's place and Christmas afternoon with my nephew and his wife and daughters in Denver. It was so much fun. The girls are 2 1/2 years and 7 months old, and we had a blast with them. This picture is their dad playing 'horsey' with the two of them at once.

We stayed in Colorado for 5 days then came back to Texas. The week between Christmas and New Year's, I met my parents over at my brother's house for a Christmas get together with them all. My brother's kids, including his son, son's wife and their new baby were there. So there was a house full of family including my newest grand-niece who is just 2 months old. Basically, over the Holidays I got to see most of my extended family, which was really nice. This nephew and his family live in Virginia so I was really delighted to catch up with them while they were here visiting my brother. The picture is of my Mom and baby Libby.

Interestingly, just before the Holidays my parents got on Skype so we spent some time video calling on Christmas Day. That makes you feel not quite so far away since half the family is in Colorado. I should be long past being amazed that my 80+ year old Dad keeps up with the current (and often the newest) electronics and gadgets. Usually he's ahead of me on stuff.

I need to remember to pull my aloe vera into the garage this evening. I've managed not to freeze the ones that survived from last year so far, and it's supposed to drop below freezing tonight. I've been dragging them into and out of the garage this year as we do our usual cycles of below freezing, then 80, then below freezing, then 75, etc, etc. There was ice on my birdbath this morning although my thermometer was reading 37 F. The aloe vera should be all right from that, but it's supposed to drop to near 20 tonight.

I guess that's all for now.

Later!

Last gasp for 2010

Yup. No matter how much I try to pretend it's not true, another year has passed. 2010 is over! And here I am again, blogging on New Year's Eve. Even though I haven't blogged since September.

The back half of this year has been tough . . . since September. Maybe I shouldn't be introspective this year. Maa. If not on New Year's Eve, when, ne?

*sigh* Where to begin . . .

I was re-reading my last New Year's Eve blog, in which I was talking about the meeting with my boss to discuss my goals for the year. Well, that meeting did not go well. In fact it went so not-well it was like a personal attack on me, and that was so 180 degrees from all my previous goal meetings that I was . . . I guess 'shocked' would best describe my feelings after that meeting. But I also knew my boss was under serious stress herself, so I blew off the meeting as just her stress. After the meeting she didn't initially act any differently toward me, but things got more and more tense between us.

At any rate, she was unhappy enough that she has since left. She took a new position out east and left in September. That was great with me except for one thing. Before she left she did her damnedest to destroy my career. Yup. That also came almost totally out of the blue. There was tension, but I never expected she'd tell the department chair that I was not promote-able and send a letter recommending that I couldn't do my job and should look for another one elsewhere. To say that I was dumb-founded would be putting it mildly. And of course, this is the year I should be up for promotion to full Professor.

Luckily, it doesn't look like she's done me any harm in the long run, but it's been a tough Fall. My ex-boss antagonized enough people in the department before she left that people were willing to believe that she was not correct in her assessment of me. Plus, I have a lot of support in the department from other people I work with, who know my work ethic and my work in general. I have support from all over the US from colleagues at other universities and hospitals who I work with. So the department is putting me up for promotion, on the recommendations of the Chair and other professors in the department. The hardest part of the whole nonsense, once I got past the sense of betrayal, is that my new boss doesn't know me and only has the letter from my previous boss to go by. So I've had to spend a lot of extra energy proving myself to the new boss. I'm glad the year is over. Now we'll see if the University Promotion and Tenure Committee will accept everything even without a recommendation by the person who was my immediate boss.

Okay, enough of that! That's the old year. The new year is about to start, things are back on track and moving forward.

I got elected to the board of directors of my national organization this Fall, so good things have happened too. It's a three year term and should be fun, although a lot of work. I was also asked to chair the editorial board of a new blog that another of my national organizations is starting. Let's see, what else . . . I just returned a manuscript to my coauthor for a special edition of Biochimica Biophysica Acta, and I have a book manuscript that should be ready to go in within the next two weeks.

For a couple of months this Fall I was bringing work home every evening and weekend because a chemistry instructor in the med tech program quit and I picked up and finished teaching that class. I didn't have time to prepare for it at work, so I broke one of my cardinal rules . . that work stays at work. It couldn't be helped. I'm pretty well caught up now, so I shouldn't have to do that too often any more.

I'd have to say that despite a rough Fall, 2010 has been a good year for me. I've done a lot, learned a lot, survived a lot. I'm going as strong as ever and have a lot of new things coming up. Yesterday two new instruments arrived in the lab, so after the New Year we'll be validating and evaluating. These are the instruments I mentioned in last year's New Year's Eve blog that I needed to convince the powers that be that we needed. It took me a year, but we got them. Also, the positions that I was blogging about needing to be created are now created and filled. So despite everything, it's been a good year. If the promotion doesn't go through, it'll go through next year.

My family is doing well this year too, with two new additions, both grand-nieces. Coraline was born in May to my nephew and his wife, and in October Libby made her entrance to my other nephew and his wife. They're beautiful and we're all blessed. I spent Christmas in Colorado and got to see Julia and Coraline, then came home to Texas and Libby was here from Virginia. Of course they were with their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Yup, I'd say the family is growing. And I did more family-oriented stuff than is usual for me, but the Holidays are good times to remember how important family is.

All the stuff that happened this past Fall has kind of over-shadowed the year for me, but it really has been a good year. The Utah trip with Monica was outstanding. We saw some really incredible things, like a fog rainbow that was more of a multi-colored fog halo, and the condors at Zion which are shown in the picture to the right, and the Shiprock formation looking like an actual ship floating because of low lying fog, and a really awesome sunset in northern New Mexico which is in the picture from earlier in the blog, etc, etc. The weather was absolutely perfect, we were there during a full moon so the moon was gorgeous every night and the stars are beyond beautiful when you can see them without city light interference. The hikes were wonderful, the shopping was fun . . . it was just a really great trip.

Another plus is that I got to go to Grenada twice this year. I went back in October and we played some more.

So all in all I'd have to say I don't have much to complain about . . . *laughing* even though I spent the first half of this blog doing just that. Oh well. I'll blame it on the New Year's Eve introspection / retrospection. And I think I'll stop now.

Have a great New Year!!!

Yard Work

Yup. I've been doing yard work. Labor Day I worked at it for five hours. Amazing, huh? Remember those yaupons at either end of my house in the front, the ones that were uprooted by the February snow? All of a sudden I got tired of always trying to trim them reaching up over my head to do it (yes, they're back to hitting the roof . . . or were). I got my hand saw and started sawing off branches. Now they're both about chest high on me. Of course, the vast majority of the growth was above that, so it now looks like I have nice bare sticks coming up out of the ground at both ends of the house. Maa. As fast as they grow, they should fill back in fairly quickly. Plus they'll be easy to trim now as long as I keep up with it and don't let them get tall again. It did take me five hours though, to cut all the limbs off and them cut them up into trash-able sizes. I was going to take m electric shears/trimmers/whatever they're called to the rest of my shrubs, but after 5 hours, I was over it. I figured I'd do them the next day.

Of course, it rained continuously the next two days. And then I went back to work. So I got back to the shrubs this morning. I went out, mowed the lawn, weed-whacked and then took the trimmer to the shrubbery. Dekita! I'm done trimming and cleaning it up now for the year, except for I notice the rosebush needs trimming up. I was back out there working for about 3 hours this morning, so I think I've done my quota of yard work for the week now. Everything's neat and tidy . . . and I'm tired!

It's in the low 90s today and overcast, so the work wasn't horrifically unpleasant. I'm just not usually a physical labor type, except for weekly lawn mowing, so it tires me out when I do more than usual. I feel it most in my hands though, and in my right wrist. It's swollen again, but not as bad as it was when I cut up shrubbery in February, so I guess it's slowly getting better.

I did call the plumbers back for the leaking faucet in the back yard and they fixed it. It feels like everything is neat and functional now. I still think the little peach may not survive, but I'm pulling for it. We'll see. I think the two days of heavy rain may have actually helped a little, but it's hard to tell at this point. The Bermuda in my back yard continues to spread and thrive and the St. Augustine continues to struggle and die. I really like how the yard looks right after I mow it though. You can't tell how much of the back is weeds! :D Plus Zoe can't eat the black seed heads on the weeds and come in and throw them up. Sadly, that's one of the primary reasons I keep my lawn mowed short.

Anyway, I'm gonna chill now. I know I still need to do a post about vacation, but it'll have to wait until I have more energy. Here's a picture of Addy chilling in my newly-mowed lawn.