My temps here in Erie, PA have been 75 to low 80's. One day hit 90 but it rained. I had rain each of the first 6 days or so. I have not been able to water as much as I would have liked though. It gets 8 min per zone at 5 AM and I do my best to hit it in the afternoon by hand or with an oscilating sprinkler. A water restriction makes me use my homemade inground Hunter PGP sprinkler system under the mask of darkness. I am really happy I chose to use a leaf compost from my township as a topdressing (after core areation and seeding). In the few spots where I missed with it the are fewer seedlings. I think that it is really helping to keep the moisture in the soil. With this being my first summer of educated lawncare, I am happy to be making progress. Thanks again to all of you out there.

Ann - Eye surgery is on my list of things to do someday (when I have some spare money laying around) so I envy you a bit. Won't it be nice to see clearly again! You should plan a visit to a garden when it's done to celebrate and enjoy how well you can see. We cleaned out some very thorny brush in the fencerow over the weekend. My neighbor's black locust sends up shoots from its roots and I hadn't cut those back for awhile. The thorns on those things are HUGE. We lost a couple hedge trees in the ice storm in '07 that are still sending up thorny shoots from the stumps as well. After the ice storm, we used a tractor to pull out the stumps from a couple other hedge trees and should've done that with all of them but there was just sooo much clean up to do at the time and it didn't get entirely finished. There were lots of other little scrub trees coming up that needed to be cut out and weeds of course. It sure looks a lot nicer now. Hope everyone had a good weekend. Bonnie - you can start on my garage now. : )

Cheerful tablescape! Lots of moving going on at your place! Our DS just left for university again last wknd and we are loving having the house to ourselves again. (Older DD already moved out a few years ago.) We turned his old bedroom into an office for me so when he was home for he summer, he had to be in the guest room! He didn't mind though as it is bigger than his old room. Have fun with your BR reno! DD

Tomorrow is THE EXTRA DAY off work. Hooray! It should be a nice day since nothing is planned and I'm booked every night after work this week. Gloria, actually the house is decently organized and 15 minutes from "company ready" (AS LONG AS WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT MY MOTHER COMING, LOL) but I'm always trying to pare down stuff that we're not using regularly. Saturday I Freecycle'd the old dog grooming table, which (since the dogs are gone) had become just an extra table in the back garage. The table went to a young lady in dog grooming school who couldn't afford one of her own. AND I got DH to agree to take our old, hard to assemble camping screen house on his next Katrina mission trip, and set it up and leave it there for the volunteers to use (his third clean-up and rebuilding trip is in October). Since I have noticed the cooler weather here, too, I've started the fall garden clean up and cut back some flowers that were looking faded (one big paper compost bag full). Everything I do now means less to do later when I have to wear a winter coat. MAURA--Actually I *did* read a book this weekend that I bought at a garage sale, then I passed it on to a neighbor. I also crocheted a little and scrapbooked some. I also started to stock up for winter on essentials and watching the ads. Saturday I bought 10 tubes of toothpaste on sale. I hope to have adequate supplies by October 1st so I don't have to push heavy shopping carts through slushy parking lots in the middle of a blizzard (not that THAT has ever happened! LOL). My son's high school football team has dinner together the night before their weekly game, so I'm also trying to plan on having only 2 days advance notice in case the coach decides to have 45 kids come for dinner at MY house this month. We still haven't figured out how he decides who is having dinners when/where? but he is not the kind to preplan. I figure if I get it all set in my mind, then I won't panic if the time comes that they're coming here. So that's my update!