Friday bullets, May 22, 2020

I guess I'll jump right in.

• I spent the day finally finishing planting the vegetable gardens. This year we're trying tomatoes, cucumbers, ground cherries, cabbage, okra, sugar snap peas, a whole bunch of greens, beets, kohlrabi, fennel, dill, hot and sweet peppers, eggplant, shiso, basil (Thai and sweet), green beans, beans for drying, watermelon, pie pumpkins, Chinese long beans, celery, green onions, leeks, yellow onions, luffa squash, and zucchini. Now we just sit and wait.
• The greens I planted a month or so ago and doing quite well. See?

We've been enjoying radishes and radish greens in our salads already, and the other greens are almost ready to start being used.

• Look what arrived today.

It was a surprise gift from another adoptive mom, and I cannot wait to read it. I've already read the introduction. It's actually a collection of papers on the topic, so each chapter (paper) has it's own bibliography. Am I the only who gets excited over multiple bibliographies in a book?

• G. has now made bread all by herself twice. She has really figured it out and is doing a great job.
• I've been cutting lots of animals out of felt. They are printed on and designed to be used on a felt board. I picked them up at free rummage sale that a local church hosts twice a year. They looked as though they would be something that I could use as an activity for R., so picked them up. Imagine my surprise to realize that the set I grabbed retailed for over $40! I guess someone really didn't want to spend the time cutting them out. It is an odd collection of animals, even the set that is supposed to be "rain forest". There are animals in that collection that are most decidedly not from a rain forest, for instance... an armadillo? I don't think so. But even more disturbing to me was that on the large sheet of felt you had random jungle-ish animals, but then there were also several people. It really felt as though it was saying, here are all these interesting animals to look at, and oh, here are some brown skinned people to look at, too. Yuck. Homeschoolers, we can do much, much better than this. (And yes, it was a company who markets directly to homeschoolers.) I will not be cutting out the people. We'll stick with the animals.
• This business of the sun setting much, much later is making it difficult to get dinner on the table even close to a reasonable time.
• Java's injury is completely healed. You can barely tell where it was.

Bet you can't even see where it was, huh? I can, but I'm also the one who took out the stitches.

• This time last year we had just arrived in Amsterdam and found our houseboat. It was such a fun trip and I am so glad we got to take it. But looking back, it helps me to see the significant difference between now and then with R. This time last year, we were holding on by the skin of our teeth and M. and B. really made the trip possible because of the effort they put into managing R. We had no idea that things were going to get much, much worse over the summer and into the fall. I am so very thankful to be on this end of things.
• All of this also explains why last year's garden was such a complete bust. First, I was gone during the prime planting weeks, and then when we returned we were pretty consumed with survival, not gardening.
• D. has his first set of hours for working at the library when it reopens next month. Well, starts the process of reopening. Either way, do you know what this means? New books!!! 
• It also means that we can get the next seasons of the shows that people have become rather enamored of... The Great British Baking Show and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• We have a robin's next right under our mailbox with four newly hatched baby robins in it. It's great having such a great view of the baby birds, but we try to limit our trips to the mailbox because it (understandably) distresses the mama robin so much.
• M., who has a break between class and externship, is working to get the hot tub pond working so we can do some landscaping and make it look nice.
• I thought I should look at my calendar today just to be sure I wasn't missing anything. It had been at least a week since I looked at it last. Nope, not missing anything. The entire second half of May was totally empty.
• On that same note, I just realized yesterday, when everyone happened to be talking about it, that Memorial Day is this coming Monday. Had it been left up to me, I would have completely missed it.

And with that, I'm going to call it a night. I'm pooped.