"We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog..."

Did you miss me? ;)

With any luck at all, work will now get back to normal - no more intensive (and intense) traveling and something resembling a more normal schedule and workload. (8-hour days and 5-day weeks would be lovely!) To celebrate what I fervently hope is my last business trip for a very long time, I'm taking off the whole rest of the month. I'll probably spend a lot of it getting caught up on things like laundry and maybe even doing some baking, partly to mark the return to normalcy; I will definitely be making my annual pilgrimage to the local nursery for annuals.

Last year's "stop-gap" pansies faked me out; all but 2 of them not only survived the winter but thrived. I haven't the heart to rip them out when they're so bushy, bright and flourishing, so I'll probably only get a couple of impatiens plants to replace the pansies that didn't make it. (Unless someone would like to suggest another colorful gap-filler that's compatible w/ pansies?) The apartment complex behind us finally took out the enormous, 4-story-tall tulip tree that was so rotted it had become a major hazard. It'll be interesting to see how the additional sun affects how the dogwoods and other trees do this year. All those crocuses I planted last fall bloomed and faded while I was on the road, but the Chief got pictures for me. The new daffs seem to be doing well so far; I think it's still too early for the allium to make their appearance.

The ground has settled very unevenly in the wake of last year's plumbing excavation, so it looks like we'll soon be buying a lot of dirt and filling in all the uneven places. Much of the grass seed didn't come up, so that'll have to be taken care of, too; neither one of us much likes seeing all that bare orange clay. Ugh!

Enough procrastinating; time to start unpacking...