I know…two posts in two days! Outstanding!
Actually, this post was prompted by Erica.
Nearly full rain gauge
I emptied this gauge yesterday afternoon and the storms rolled in overnight.
Yep, that is total rainfall within the past 12 hours.
Seems like most of the garden survived the hailstorm and it has stopped raining…for now.
Woman, you have no idea what you’re in for.
Hello, blog. It’s been a long time since I’ve checked in with you, hasn’t it? I’ve been much too busy lately, but it hasn’t all been dreary work keeping me occupied. I’ve been having a lot fun, too. And it’s really more the fun stuff that is keeping me away.
I actually took 3 whole days off of work recently, and spent most of that time engaged in fun, fun, fun right here in my hometown. I spent a morning having breakfast with G and his mother at Manny’s [his idea; yeah, he wanted me to meet his mother, OK?]; a day with Adrienne; and another day going to the movies and having lunch with G. And the nights…well…let’s just leave that to the imagination. [Oh, yeah!!]
The weather has continued to be very springlike: cool and wet. We’re not used to having a real spring in Chicago, though, where we typically have lingering winter weather and launch into summer humidity and heat. So we wring our hands with worry about this strange phenomemon and try to make predictions about how the rest of the summer will turn out. Meanwhile, I’m very happy to not be heating OR cooling the house so far, and that I have an incredibly lush garden with no watering duty to fit into my busy social calendar.
Look at the evidence of this bounteous spring.
Zucchinis, cukes, and squash galore!
Loads of quickly ripening garlic
Peppers, tomatos, eggplant, and beans, with asparagus in the background!
Broccoli and the small amount of lettuce the birds left me this year
My beloved zepherine drouhin rose. Great scent, easy growing, and no thorns. Gotta love it!
I turned 42 last week. It was OK. My friends did special things for me like cooking me a lucious, dry-aged ribeye to perfection and giving me adorable gifts. G took me out and gave me a nice bottle of wine, too. I got a card from my ex-mother-in-law and my ex-husband. Interesting.
The next few days will be filled with prep work for the kitchen remodel, which is starting next Monday. I need to vacate the kitchen AND my bedroom, as the bedroom floor will be sanded and varnished, too. So, I get to live in the basement like a hermit. At least I have another bathroom with a shower, a cooktop, and the laundry sink for washing up down there. It will be like living in a poorly laid out open loft apartment. Except it’s more of an underground loft, if such a thing can exist.
I’m hoping this kitchen thing will be over in 6 weeks and then I can start cooking on a REAL stove for a change. [A decade-plus-old electric range with only 3 working burners and a wonky oven does NOT constitute a REAL stove, OK?] I will be enamored of my new kitchen and never want to leave it.
Maybe not. Well, at least I will appreciate it and all the labor and expense it will take to bring a 1950’s kitchen into the 21st century where people routinely use things like dishwashers to clean up after a meal.
And until then, I’ll just eat a lot of sandwiches.
Well, it’s been pretty crazy for me the past month. I’ve had a lot of work to do, and it wasn’t unusual for me to start off my days with 7 AM meetings and end my day at around 9 or 10 PM. All of this to orchestrate a big project that had a deadline of…today.
But the crazy project is now over. My body has declared it’s break time, too, by becoming achy and sniffly over the weekend. Once I confirmed that all was well this morning and completed my early call, I claimed the day as unplanned time off and went back to bed for a long sleep. I now have time for a brief sigh of relief before picking up all the other stuff that piled up at work in the meantime.
In the past few weeks, I spent so much time hunched over my laptop that I had to make a few emergency visits to the chiropractor just to unkink my neck and shoulders. So it should be understandable that I really didn’t feel like blogging much during the crazy times.
I did use Twitter quite a bit, though. Making mini-posts every day helped me stay a bit more sane and gave me a minor break. I also like the fact that I can tweet from my mobile phone, and took advantage of that ability a few times.
And one of my tweets was about…my first date. Yep, I went on a date a couple weeks ago. That one date led to another, and another, and actually I spent quite a bit of time with this person over Memorial Day weekend.
G and I definitely have a great physical attraction for each other and we’ve had a lot of fun together. It’s been wonderful to have someone find me so attractive and desireable and I’m glad to have an attentive lover in my life. He’s smart and sweet, too. But (and you know there had to be a but in there) he already wants us to be exclusive.
It’s not as if I’m out trolling for dates these days. In fact, it was just good timing that brought G and I together for our first date. I’m not ready to have a steady guy right now, which is why I really haven’t gotten worked up about a few other things that have my antenna aquiver, so to speak.
This is quite a change from my lonely nights just a month ago. Whether or not this situation with G works out, I think this bodes well for my dating future.
Windycitygal 