Yeah, I am about 2 (3?) months late. :)

However, flowers are pricier this year, and I haven’t been able to get to the retailers to pick up what I’d like, anyway.

I’ve always wanted to grow plants from seeds, but had limited success over the years. And yet greenhouses do it every day! ;) So this must be an achievable thing. Practice makes perfect, right?

So I will have pots full of late-blooming plants this year. I’m going to plant my seed-started plants separately so I can bring them inside this fall and enjoy their full life cycle after the world turns to brown-and-gray, rather than losing them “early” in October.

The seeds I planted today included:

Giant Violet Zinnias
Thunbergia (black-eyed susan vine)
Balsam (not the tree!)
Profusion zinnias
Mixed sunflowers
Four o’clocks
Sweet Basil
……. and, Italian Oregano

I also have a couple packets of nasturtiums that I’m going to plant up at my Mom’s house… as well as some multi-colored Columbines for her yard, too. :) We love fragrant butterfly- and bird-friendly flowers. And unlike my deck, she doesn’t have bird predators (cats) to eat our little feathery friends.

With the exception of the Four O’Clocks, which as I understand are quite fragrant (and might end up up at Mom’s as a result if they attract too many moths and flutterbies), I have tried to pick flowers this year which are not attractive to hummingbirds particularly. One of my cats is quite adept at catching the little things, and she likes to bring them in the house and eat them on my bed.

YUCK!!!

Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as nauseating as discovering a little bird leg and 50 teeny-tiny feathers in a little pile on your bedspread.

Hopefully through better flower choices this year, I’ll attract fewer hummers (because it is very upsetting to me to know they are getting murdered on my porch) and then all the cat will have to dine on is cicada bugs. Yes, cicadas. In my bed. Headless.

*barf*

Memorial Day Weekend in Door County, Wisconsin… just the sound of it brings enchanted, sunny, warm, leaf-doppled memories of years gone by. This is a splendid and perfect weekend. It is the doorway to happy, joyous summer.

For everyone else. Because I am flat on my back in bed, sicker than a freakin’ dog with a cold the size of Montana, doing my best to hack up a lung through my clogged and irritated little windpipe, watching the sun bathe the rich luxurious grass carpeting the ground in warm, golden light.

I have been in this bed since Monday. Monday!! It is now Saturday. >:(

Truly, I do not remember being this sick since winter ’03 when I had pneumonia … that was pretty grim. And the pneumonia was only outdone by July ’95 in Tomahawk, at summer camp. I should have been in the hospital for that one.

I’ve been so tired, in pain, and feeling awful that I haven’t even had the energy (or desire) to crack open the laptop and screw around online. It was so easier to just lay here with my eyes closed and not think. Or lay here with my eyes open and not think. Just all quiet. No effort. My body was working too hard just to breathe, to make it to the next minute.

Thanks to some Claritin I found that expired 3.5 years ago :) and a rediscovered vaporizer, I am crawling back to the land of the living. Please bear with me! I will be back in the saddle just as quickly as possible.

No worries, my friends… although I haven’t been writing this spring (sorry!), I have been out & about snapping pictures of everything, nearly every day this spring.

I did, however, draw the line at rainy days :) neither I, nor you, need to see pictures of gray-brown muddy blah.

New entries will be filed by their actual date, which means they won’t appear at the top of the page, and you might miss them. So, I will post a “Spring 2008 Journal” table of contents, which will stay at the top. As I add new articles, I will link to them in that post! Then you will be able to quickly see what’s new.

In the meantime, let’s play “count the white-crowned sparrows” :) — click on the pic to make it larger. They’re easier to count that way. :)

Watching new leaves pop from their buds on the birches and aspens was particularly gratuitous from the overlook above Nicolet Bay. From May 8th:

Look at that fresh, young, untouched and unspoiled green of those newly-fledged leaves! I was never aware of how many different shades of green there are, ’til the last couple weeks.

Sometime between 11:30 PM and 2:30 AM, summer arrived. A southerly wind brought crying killdeers, moistened the air, and the air warmed considerably. The moon is a hazy yellow, with an almost eerie foreshadowing look to it.

It smells different though. Crickets and bugs are twittering, like in a romance novel waxing of warm steamy nights…. not a whole lot of romance going on in my little microcosm ;) but it has that sound and smell to it. Almost a sweetness. I turned off the heat and cranked all my windows open. It’s the most perfect song and feeling to sleep by.

The leaves popped at the mall during that time too. Just, POP! on the little red maples. When I left, the branches were bare. When I came back, brand new bright green leaves were backlit by the mall lights.

HAPPY SUMMER!!!

3:11 AM — 57° F / winds W-5 / barometer 29.96-S

Nights like this bring life — and the relativity of it all — into focus.

… my old stomping grounds, Rowley’s Bay, at 12:30 A.M.