A New Post.

I admit I've been a neglectful blogger. I just haven't had a lot to write about. However, I have taken some pictures, some from a while ago, so here goes a long, "picture-ful" post.

I had taken some flower pictures last week to show what's thriving.

Although this constant rain has been a pain in the neck and interfered with sunshine for most of the summer, my urns are doing very well. I try to fertilize every week or week and a half.

I took this picture for Joanne (Cup on the Bus) to show her my obedient plants and see if she thinks that is what she has in her garden. They are definitely August bloomers.

This clematis was given to me 11 years ago. It has bloomed once before. (I am a patient gardener). This year it is putting on its best show ever.

Quite obviously I have not managed to rip out all of my black eyed Susan. This picture is actually trying to show you one of my favourite fillers: Russian sage. Again, this year it is doing remarkably well and the purple plus the height create a lovely background for so many flowers. You can see my giant hydrangea behind it.

Onward to the vegetable garden, which you would think, would be thriving beautifully with all this rain. Not so much. This is a collection of about 4 or 5 cucumber plants. In previous years, the vines would have been roaming across half the garden. I am at least harvesting some cucumbers here and there.

May I now introduce to you the world's saddest patch of tomatoes. This well and truly breaks my heart. They developed blight very early in the season and there was no coming back. I even bought expensive copper-something-or-other powder that I mixed with water and sprayed on the leaves. It didn't matter. By now in other years, my tomatoes have been so huge that I've had to pound wooden stakes in along with the tomato cages so they didn't keep falling over from their own weight. Next year I will have to plant them elsewhere because I think the blight can stay in the soil. No, I do not put the dead leaves in my compost.

These guys are my only hope for toasted tomato sandwiches. Sniff. It reminds me of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree bending over with the weight of  one ornament.

Here is what husband has been busy with . Our shed now has a red metal roof like the rest of the structures on our property. He's been working away, strapping over the old shingles, and cutting the metal and putting it up. This morning he was finishing the ridge. Do you see him up there? I asked him if his running shoes had "sticky" enough soles. He makes me nervous. He built the shed himself about 16 years ago.

There he is!

This, to move onto a totally different subject, is the back of my daughter's head. She had just quickly put it back into a braid and I took a picture of it on my phone so she could see how incredible her hair looked. All those variations of colour are totally natural. Lucky duck. I'd have to shell out about a hundred dollars to get highlights like that!

Yup, so that didn't work. Sorry those are sideways. I am also too lazy to go back and try to turn them before uploading them again. Tomorrow is husband's birthday. He'll be a big 53 years old. Today I will bake a cake, a really good decadent chocolate cake, layered, for his birthday. That is what I do. To me, a homemade cake means 'I care' and 'you are important enough that I will make the effort to bake you a cake'. I remember being shocked and little disapproving when I first started going out with my husband and on birthdays in their family, they just got a purchased cake, and not even anything terribly special. Funny, the things that matter to one person, but not another.

Finally, I need to ask, are any of you getting weird comments on your blogs that are just pieced together comments written by other people and seem to be coming from an Asian source? What have you been doing with them? I delete them sometimes and other times click on spam, although truth be told, I have no idea what happens when you mark something as spam. I'm concerned it is some sort of virus infiltrating my computer and doing terrible things. Anyone know anything??

Hope you are all enjoying your second week of August. It is lovely and hot here (for the moment).