wrapping up the week

Today we leave for Dallas. We found an alternate route that keeps us off the interstate almost the whole way and it only takes 3 minutes longer...5 hours and 15 minutes in all. I thought it would take 6 minimum. We are going to attend and celebrate our great-nephew's Bar Mitzvah. I can't believe that kid is 13 already, especially since we went to his father's Bar Mitzvah. 

While we're in Dallas I hope to be able to drop in on the gallery there that has some of our work, Kittrell/Riffkind, especially since we got a check in the mail from them this week. They sold the Wren Box.

I finally got a start on the new flower bed I've been wanting to put in towards the back of the Big Backyard but in front of the one where the poppies and banana trees are. Eventually I'll connect it with the long bed on the side. Anyway, I got the perimeter stones moved back there and put in place. And put the plants still in their pots inside the perimeter. Now I'm slowly digging up the grass, something I'm less than enthusiastic about. It will all have to wait now til we get back.

My sister and I went to another estate sale today but it was, like the last half dozen or more lately, just a bunch of junk, although I did buy one item at this one and one at the one before, both purchases setting me back $2 each. One was this little cluster of vases which I've had filled with pansies this week but forgot to take a picture when they were fresh 

and the other, a glass chimney for a lamp. I bought an antique lamp a year or so ago at one of these sales and decided it used to have a chimney that helped keep the top globe in place so I've been on the lookout for one. This sale was out in the middle of nowhere and it confused Siri as she was telling us we had reached our destination when there wasn't a house to be seen in any direction. You never know what you are going to come across driving on these county and small town back roads and so on our way back we passed this field full of plastic car bumpers. 

I suppose you could say they have a bumper crop! (OK, I stole that joke from my sister.)

So some of you might remember when I choked last summer (and all the other grisly details)? Well, I had my annual physical Tuesday and I mentioned to her about the whole spastic throat thing and the whole choking thing and the having to be heimliched three times thing and before I was through talking she was ordering an x-ray, which they did then, and now I have to go back Monday for a modified upper GI and a barium swallow on an empty stomach and my appointment isn't until almost noon and then I have to go see an ENT doctor. So, I've kept my promise and been to the doctor about it.

I meant to take a picture of the baptismal bowl slumped in the mold that our friend Gene was making here last week but I forgot (you can see a picture of the fused blank here) but this is what the finished bowl looks like.

Well, I guess I ought to get these last minute things taken care of so we can get on the road.