shopping spree and misc. pics

Two days and 8” of rain, sometimes heavy, and wind has littered the yard once again with branches large and small and leaves of all kinds and driven the fire ants up and onto high ground, meaning into my flower beds.

In case you can't tell, they've built up 
around the base of the recovering gardenia.

The poppies are listing heavily and some are laying flat but they are going by anyway.

What I thought were maybe flower buds appearing on the sweet peas don't seem to be after all. I'm beginning the think they just aren't going to bloom. Of all those two packets of zinnia seeds I planted that sprouted in the trays, only a handful have survived and aren't really growing even after being put in the ground.

I'm finally feeling back to normal today after three days of a sour stomach, low energy, and sleepiness. I blame two nights in a row of those sweet rich desserts my daughter gave me. In retrospect, instead of us splitting two for two nights, we should have split one for four nights. I did get all three of my tables cleared off yesterday, something that occurs only infrequently so take a quick look because they won't stay this way long.

We headed into Shopping Mecca today to do what we planned for last Friday...liquor warehouse, sheets, and jewelry store, already too hot for a meal sitting outside. The liquor warehouse was the easiest, the sheets took us three stores but we did find some 100% cotton, 800 thread count, sateen sheets. Colors were limited to white, gray, burgundy, and dark blue so we got the burgundy and the dark blue and that's the most I have ever spent for sheets in my life.

Last stop was the jewelry store to see about the diamond stud. He looked through a loupe and then used some other sort of detecting device to determine, yep it's real and 44 points, just under half a carat, did I want the same color, and yes they can match it. Triple digits, high triple digits. Gulp. We looked at new pairs there in the store. They ranged from over two thousand for little ones to over 6 thousand for bigger than mine. Well, alrighty then, triple digits started looking pretty good. It should be ready in a couple of weeks. Happy birthday to me and thank you President Biden.

I have some photos that have piled up that didn't really fit in other posts so I'm putting them here.

Five abandoned eggs. The four little ones are from the wren nest in the garage, abandoned when I put the big blue tarp up to help protect the tropicals during the deep freeze. The one bigger one was left in the nest of the barn swallows after the other two hatched and fledged.

Fire ants weren't the only thing looking for higher ground.

Cinco de Mayo rose with baby katydid