Coming Soon--A Flower Bed with Flowers

One of the reasons for starting a blog was so I could show off my flower bed that came with our new house last year. When we first moved in, it was more of a weed bed with a couple of rose bushes. Eventually I weeded it and planted some wildflower seeds.

By early summer, one rose bush was budding and a few wild flowers were coming up. But it wasn't really enough to make it look like a flower bed. So last fall, I purchased some daffodil and hyacinth bulbs and planted them.

I have read that bulbs come up pretty easy if you plant them at the right time and the right way. (Pointy side goes up.) This appears to be true. My daffodils are well above ground now as are the hyacinths. My concern now is that we started getting more freezing weather over the past week and I hope all my little bulbs survive this cold snap.

The roses are also starting to form new leaves. So at this point, everything is alive. We'll see if I can keep it that way this season.

Sunrise, Sunset

No, this is not about the song from Fiddler on the Roof.

When I was growing up, the big picture window in our house faced West. I saw more gorgeous sunsets then I will ever be able to count. Recently it occurred to me that I haven't seen very many gorgeous sunrises, even when we had windows facing East. The reason I missed all of them is because we had blinds on those windows and I usually didn't open them until very late in the morning.

Our house that we live in now has a big window that faces South, but we have a nice view of the East. Right now it doesn't have blinds on it. During the winter, when we all have to get up early for school, work, etc, it is still dark. But this affords me the opportunity to watch a gorgeous sunrise. Of course, the sun rises every morning, but if it is too rainy or foggy, the sky just gets lighter. It only counts as a gorgeous sunrise if the sky turns pink.

Over the past month, I have found myself putting off things I need to do just so I can sit and watch the sky turn pink. And I realize how many of these I have missed out on.

I would like to get some sort of window covering in the living room, but I definitely do not want blinds. I'm thinking some sort of drapes. I want some privacy but I also want to let in enough early morning light so I can tell when the sky is pink.

If All Else Fails, Try Punching Some Buttons

About nine months ago, I purchased a high efficiency washer and dryer set. Although laundry is still a major chore (Quandary about laundry here), the new appliances made it a lot easier and faster. There was only one thing that bugged me about them: at the end of each cycle, I would hear a very loud alarm letting me know the machine had stopped. The dryer let out one long, drawn-out noise, and the washer let out three sets of three equally loud noises.

Most of the time I didn't mind them too much because then I knew it was time to continue the laundry process. One load to fold, one load to put in the dryer, and one load to put in the washer. However, when people were downstairs near the machines watching TV or playing on the X-box, those alarms were especially annoying.

Now, for the record, I did look in each manual to figure out how to turn those hideous things off, but there were no directions pertaining to this. So we suffered.

Recently, I decided to mess with the "Options" control button to see if I could get rid of the noise. In just a couple button pushes, the "cycle signal" light turned off. The dryer stopped without making a racket. Later, I figured out how to do the same thing to the washer. Yippee! Now I can do laundry when company is around without interrupting our X-box games with a shrill alarm!

Of course, while cleaning upstairs I will still need my "cycle signals." But it's nice to know that I can choose to silence them if necessary.

And it only took me nine months, one week, two days, and 30 seconds to figure it out.