The joy in small things…

My second year started with a bang – or a whiz’pop’whoops’zing!-bang. I started the year with a rotation that is new (and “improved,” as they keep telling me) but being in the first set to “try it out” means that the other resident and myself are the ones discovering which things weren’t quite 100% right. (missing vacation days that have since been found and finding out a mere hour before the start of call that I am the one on call (!) have made for memorable experiences.)

My time at home has been a balance between doing nothing (sleeping, napping and sitting around in the shade) and being very busy.  The yard has had to fend for itself (as it wasn’t high on my priorities this summer) and I think it took on the challenge with gusto. 

(figure 1: a lily that bloomed by itself. ) (note: I used to peel the unopened blooms like they were bananas, despite my mom’s urging to leave.them.alone.  I’m sorry mom. You can come over and enjoy them now.)

(figure 2: a better picture of what is actually going on out there. The pansy there in the front? the one growing in the grass? It was chopped down to nothing when my brother mowed the lawn last month. Now it’s back, without any help from me.    The primrose has grand plans to take over the whole flowerbed – it doesn’t know that the coneflower is getting ready to put on a show too.)

4/5ths of the neighbors I have now are the same people who have lived on this end of the block for the last 20 years. The guys have plows on their trucks and are happy to accept cases of beer in exchange for making sure I can get in and out of my driveway in the winter.  This known, I shouldn’t have been surprised to come home after a night on call to find that my lawn had been mowed. (only problem being that I have no idea who did it – beer for everyone!)

Izabelle has tasted the world on the other side of the screen and would like everyone to know that it’s horribly unfair that I am allowed outside while she is not.

(figure 3: Izabelle, mid-miaow.)

There has been spinning.

Thanks to a great morning with friends, I now know how to ply yarn.

And! I know what I had to do with my wheel to fix it, so I can ply yarn on my own.

(it’s easier to see in my flckr account – the left hand section of the cross piece was screwed into the clear piece too far down; now it’s even and spins evenly both directions, which means I can ply.)

It’s the little things that will make this year do-able.

Simple, little things.