Earth Day

I’m still up to my teeth in projects, but I managed to spend a couple of hours of my Earth Day in the garden, planting beans and cleaning out old beds and recycling a wooden pallet into a flowerbed. The sunflowers and zinnias are starting to come up, as are the cucumbers and onions, and most of the tomatoes look pretty good.

Our bees seem to be enjoying the warm weather — the backyard looked like O’Hare Airport this afternoon — and the chickens spent most of the afternoon clucking contentedly to themselves and munching on the cutworms I dug up and fed to them.

I’ll probably spend part of this evening doing the same thing I do every April 22nd: Re-reading my copy of 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth and assessing where I am, where I could improve, and where I’ve more or less maxed out my efforts.

Hope your day was good and you got a chance to play outside, wherever you are.

Emily

Planting Day!

Despite the ridiculous number of commitments and projects we had to deal with this weekend, I managed to scrape up a couple of hours to celebrate the most glorious holiday of the entire year: Planting Day.

Longtime readers of this blog know that while birthdays and anniversaries are generally ignored around here, and Thanksgiving and Christmas can be rescheduled as necessary to fit the demands of work and family, April 15 (or the first weekend thereafter) is sacred, because that’s our first opportunity to put the garden in the ground without serious risk of losing plants to a killing frost.

I was genuinely afraid we might have to delay Planting Day this year, because we had two major commitments yesterday — an all-day Route 66 festival here in Red Fork all morning and afternoon, followed by a Leon Russell concert in the evening — and we had to be in Oklahoma City this afternoon for an Oklahoma Route 66 Association board meeting, but somehow we managed to get back from OKC in time to plant tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, cucumbers, okra, onions, and four different kinds of herbs. The chickens helped by eating all the grubs I found while I was working. At least a dozen cutworms and June bug larvae met their demise at the beaks of our feisty buff Orpingtons.

Bonus: Our beehives smelled terrific this evening. As I’ve mentioned before, nothing in the world smells nicer than a healthy honeybee colony, and our hives are so fragrant that you can smell them halfway across the yard.

I wish my house smelled like bees. They’re lovely.

Emily

Still here.

I really, really hate neglecting this blog. Sadly, I don’t have a lot of other options at the moment. At some point when I catch my breath — probably after my kids finish taking their all-important End-of-Instruction tests in a couple of weeks — I’ll give a thorough update that will (hopefully) serve as sufficient excuse for my delinquency here. In the meantime, please know that I haven’t forgotten y’all, and please check back now and then, because I really do expect to have more time on my hands in the not-too-distant future, and I really will have stories and photos to share.

Summer will be here soon. Allegedly. I think. Maybe. I hope. I have a sneaking suspicion that when it finally arrives, I’m going to feel exactly like I did at the finish line of my first marathon, and for the same reasons. But I have a really, really good story for you, full of healing and hope and joy and excitement and adventure and creativity, tinged with a little trace of sadness, seasoned with a big helping of road karma, sprinkled liberally with hugs, and garnished with at least one classic Emily Priddy maneuver.

Stay tuned….

Emily

I love this man.

Every time I think I could not love Route 66 more than I already do, Angel Delgadillo proves me wrong. I love, love, love this ad:

http://route66news.com/2012/04/06/angel-runs-deep/#comment-129542

That is all.

Emily