a flipped Saturday

Something about this day is skewed in an odd direction.

I blame the weather.

My daughter, granddaughter and I did not go to the downtown market (rain, cold) and so, in fact the entire day passes and I do not see Snowdrop. Oh, I've traveled and missed seeing her then, but when in town, something or other usually puts me at her doorstep. But, today, the parents had plenty on their plate and so a playdate with grandma would have been difficult to fit in and not at all helpful.

Now, an entire day without a scheduled event this year has been so rare that you would think I'd revel in the free time that came with it.

But I come back to the weather (rain, cold).

I don't know if others have had this experience, but once I reached real adulthood (meaning -- turned 50), the last fibers of procrastination (which festered and grew exponantionally during my adolescence and early adulthood) disappeared. Boom! Gone! If it's distasteful, I want to cross it off my list asap. The dreadfulness of something hanging over me became as dreadful as a boozy hangover -- neither was worth the indulgent behavior that lead up to it.

All this to say that by 7:30 a.m., I was up washing the bathroom floor. Some 2.5 hours later, the farmhouse sparkled.

Tomorrow, as the sun comes back for a prolonged visit in the upper Midwest, I will have this chore behind me.

Breakfast -- well, again, it feels oddly flipped. Not only is it too cold for the porch, but Ed has convinced me that with the addition of a patio door, we should slant the table at a slight angle to the wall. He sometimes has clever decorating ideas and so I am willing to give this one a try (even though we don't yet have the much coveted and talked about patio door - it's being custom made to fit the rather high opening that we'll have once we take the window out).

If for years you've eaten around a table standing parallel to the wall, try positioning it at an angle. As Ed commented at breakfast -- it makes you feel a bit seasick, doesn't it?






Outside, the rain continues, in various gradations of strength. I do take a photo of a perennial and you may fault me for the repetition -- it's the blue false indigo -- but the flowers are now richer and fuller and so I cannot resist it.






Less open is the lupine -- but I will post a photo of it as well, because the survival rate of my lupines is at around 50%. I never know if the following morning, a rabbit/deer/groundhog will have discovered this sweet, delicate morsel and have feasted on it for a midnight snack. So, love it now, in its infant stage, because tomorrow it may be gone.






I should have devoted the rest of the day to my Great Writing Project, but I am waiting for a famous author person (Ed's favorite description of someone who regularly publishes) to get back to me about some moving and shifting of the text that we both think would be a good idea and so for now, I am off my writing schedule.

Out of the million and one things I could choose to do on a rainy and cold Saturday afternoon, I surprise myself (and Ed, who chooses not to accompany me) by deciding to go outside to weed our vegetable patch of the ever emergent bindweed. (We must stay on top of it, or else!)

Perhaps it's not everyone's idea of a pleasant time, but our vegetable patch is a special place of calm and quiet. The cheepers never go that far and so Oreo poses no threat. As the rain gently falls, I dig and pull and dig and pull. It is immensely satisfying to cleanse this field of hearty tomatoes and emergent peas and beans! (The melons are doing just fine too!)

It surely is an outlier of a day. But this is, of course, why it is quite special.