COMPETITIVE GARDENING

Home from New York and really getting down to working in the yard. While we were gone Lynda really added value to the corner garden and it now looks really uptown.  She and John also moved some plants around on the backyard , some of them we just planted before we left, but we're getting too much sun.  Many things that can stand a lot of sun are still stressed in our yard because it gets like an oven back there    I spent three hours, or did it just seem like it, moving bricks and arranging them like a crazy quilt underneath the back porch.  I'm so tired you could put my picture in the dictionary under exhausted.  

How those pioneer women workedin the fields, came home and gave birth and then cooked dinner for seven people, from scratch, is totally beyond me.   We went out for dinner. 

I wrote this day before yesterday, but today we took a girl's trip to High Hand Nursery in Rocklin. I'd never been there before, and it's really a treat. This foursome is all working on our garden to make it absolutely wonderful for the home tour. It takes a village. And of course, we're all into making it the best garden in the neighborhood. Among other things, we are going to take the fountain out, which will leave us with several useful pots, one of them enormous, and a small brick pedestal in the back yard that should be taken out, but might not be. The following pictures are of various glass, ceramic, and real plants that might be used if we have to leave this giant pot where it is. Anna found a really neat plant and got her wings as well. So many plants, so little space to plant them. We discovered our neighbor had bought a really nice Japanese maple. She has her house on the tour, too. The competition increases.

Now, the other thing that's available at High Hand Nursery is that it's a great place to have lunch. The food is good enough, though not spectacular, but the ambiance is wonderful, and dessert is to die for. We had a coconut cake with hibiscus sauce and hibiscus flower, and a cream cheese brownie with ice cream and chocolate sauce. If you've enjoyed the competitive gardening story, you might like M.C. Beaton's book Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener.

LAST FULL DAY

Today is our last full day in NY, and we just wandered, shopped, and ate. Yes, I know, that's pretty much all we've done since we've been here. So, here are some pictures: Capitalist pig. This is a thing the union often brings to a disputed job site. There's also a huge rat at some job sites. Wanted to be sure we got our money's worth on our metro pass, so took the bus somewhere where we might ordinarily have walked. Looked at shoes, as always: These were on sale. Don't know how I passed them up. Had a nice lunch at a place called Hampton Chutney. Gotta go there again. Bought a cool sweater that can be worn a thousand ways at an Italian shop on Broadway. I probably won't remember how to do any of them. But they're really cute. Not unlike French scarf tying.

ONE MAN TWO GUV'NORS

We went to one of the funniest plays ever today. We had decided, based only on the fact that the lead actor James Corben, got a Tony, that we would try to get tickets for One Man, Two Guv'nors. Then, as we were standing in line for tickets, I saw that it was an English farce and I started to have my usual reservations about it, because sometimes I think they are really strained, and I often can't tell the players apart. Because of that, we decided to take the sort of crappy half price tickets they offered us. This was funny in itself, because the half price tix turned out to be box seats and were quite good.

And the play was so funny that I had tears running down my face. Partly because it blended asides of talking to the audience (like in a play) but then the audience really got into it and the exchange between the actor and the audience was hysterically funny. And then there was a part where they dragged two men onto the stage and did a really funny bit, which turned out to be a setup for later when they apparently dragged another audience member up on the stage, and who I "bought" as an embarrassed audience member for a good ten minutes until they doused her with a fire extinguisher, and only then did I realize she was an actress. And they had a four piece band that started out as real rubes and ended up sounding like the Beatles by the end.

That's mostly all we did today, though unfortunately we got caught in the rain and had to seek refuge in a bead store --poor me. We did take a little stop at Times Square where a bunch of people were waving at a camera so we joined them. There's a little white circle around us, but it's kind of hard to see. We fixed dinner at home tonight, and Martha has a group that is working on reading early notation tonight. They invited me to join, but I wisely declined, since Martha always sings my praises about how wonderful I am at things, and it's much better to allow that fantasy to stand than participate and make Martha look bad for her mistaken opinion. So we're in the basement doing some laundry. Not sure what we will try to do tomorrow, but it will be very low key because John is already in going home mode for Friday.