Starting to feel a little overwhelmed. I have a shower for my daughter coming up May 6th and then the wedding 5 weeks later. My daughter who is away at college is suffering from an impacted tooth and is scheduled to have her wisdom teeth removed next Thursday. This will be where she is going to school which is 2 hours from here. I should be there with her but I can't get the day off at our little gift shop. Not enough people for coverage and it is a plant delivery day. My son is having some enemia issues and is 18. Now he needs an MRI on some lower abdominal swelling and then will have to see a GI doctor. My second son (have 5 kids) just got a job in Dallas, Texas and he and his wife will be moving there as soon as there house sells in South Carolina. The darn wet and cold weather isn't helping either. I have a plant swap I have to get done. The old "when it rains, it pours". I have enjoyed this swap immensely. Thank you Shirley for such a great time. Loved this idea and hope we do it again sometime. Margo

Update: everyone gone, party a huge success, music fabulous, birthday boy received enough wine to stock a package store. Exhausted, even with two helpers who served and cleaned up after, as I spent most of the day working in the back yard grooming flowers, refilling hummingbird feeder, weeding, etc.-----and then it RAINED! But we had drinks and hors d'oeuvres in our new lower level before dinner and I loved the way we could go in and out between the inside and the covered patio despite the rain. Final head count of 14, two went out of town unexpectedly so it was a nice manageable number. Everyone had a wonderful time and honoree was in his element. Plans made for a repeat get together with this group plus a few absent friends at in December, for our Choral Society's Christmas concert and supper afterwards here. These people travel more than an hour to visit us, so we do our best to make it a festive occasion when they do.

What band would you love to see in concert, even though you know it will never happen? I did see their final tour, but wish I'd had another chance to see Pink Floyd (best show ever!) Fleetwood Mac would be the other. What band would you love to see even though they broke up and will never get back together? Genesis What female artist would you love to see in concert? Reba What male artist would you love to see in concert? Billy Joel & Elton John (can't decide between the two) What musician would you have like to have seen perform but they are now deceased? Rosemary Clooney or Stevie Ray Vaughn What musician would you like to meet in person? Garth Brooks (he's been part of many extremely significant moments of my life) Put together a band...who would be your drummer, guitar player, piano player..etc. This is tough, I like Mary's band. Bonham or Geddy Lee on drums Stevie Ray Vaughn and Carlos Santana on guitars Billy Joel on Piano, and vocals I get kinda stuck after that

When an old dog who has chronic kidney disease insists he must go outdoors now, you must drop everything and take him out. If you don't, you'll find yourself mopping up the floor. There's none of that "wait a minute and I'll take you out". Nope, he is a little dictator (unwittingly, perhaps) now---one sharp bark and I drop everything and take him out because I know the consequences if I do not react quickly enough. Kim, No lady bugs around? Sometimes you can attract them to your garden (if they are in the general area) by making wheast. Or, even just by spraying a sugar-water mix on your plants. Here's some recipes for these: Recipes To Help Attract Beneficial Insects This morning I did a quick walk-thru of my garden to see how it has been doing without me and I did see some ladybugs (real American ladybugs, lol, not the Asian ones) hard at work on some of the watermelon plants. Sometimes in extreme July/August heat, the ladybugs seem to lie low---and who can blame them? I always wonder if they are up in some shadier spots just trying to survive the heat without subjecting themselves to full sun and full heat. Jennifer, It is great that Stella knows how to have a good time, but unfortunate that she chooses to have that good time in the garden. I've been leaving my garden gate open every day so the chickens can go in there now if they wish. Now that they can go into it, they no longer want to. I guess they've been excluded for so long that they've forgotten that good times can be found in the garden. Or, now that's there's no low-hanging tomatoes or melons for them to enjoy, maybe they just aren't motivated to go in there and eat grasshoppers and such. I'm glad you don't have a stress fracture because I know the time you'd need to stay off of it would drive you crazy. Still, take care and let it heal. The older I get, the more prone I am to catch the flu. I hardly ever got it in my 30s and 40s and, when I did, recovered quickly. These last 5-7 years, I seem like I get it every year and the recovery is harder every year. All my life I've heard that peoples' immune systems weaken as they age, and I see that now in my own life---at the age of only 59. By the time I'm 70, I'll have to hibernate at home during cold and flu season because I won't have any immune system left at all. On the other hand, an immune system is a funny thing. Last year, nationwide, a lot of young people in their 20s, 30s and early 40s died after they went sepsis during a case of the flu. When you go into sepsis like that, it normally is caused by your immune system over-reacting to an infection, which in these cases was the flu. What is it about the flu last year that caused young peoples' immune systems to overreact and throw them into sepsis shock? This sort of thing puzzles me. Obviously we want to have healthy immune systems but maybe not such robust immune systems that they overreact and kill you. It is such a conundrum. My garden is dry and pitiful looking, as the drought continues and no more rain has fallen here. It is what it is. August in a drought year is a tough month as it is, and the rain we got a while back was nice, but not drought-busting type rainfall. The rain made plenty of weeds sprout though. I see lots of morning glory, bindweed and foxtail grass to deal with---that will be next week as long as I don't encounter any snakes in there between now and then. Eileen, I bet it was the flu. I'm just basing that on the fact that there's low levels of flu cases being reporting across the country in August. My BIL in PA had it two weeks before I did. I did an uncommonly high amount of flu research while sick---trying to figure out if there was anything more I could learn about it that I didn't already know. One thing I learned is that it is not uncommon for the cough to persist for up to 4 weeks after you've otherwise recovered from the flu. I didn't know that, but I do remember that last year, the cough did persist for an uncommonly long time. Just take care of yourself and get your energy back. Last week I tried to do too much too soon and promptly relapsed, so this week I've been trying to take it easier on purpose so I don't do that again. Larry, I'm glad you're finally going to be able to go and get that PET scan. I hope all the news is good after it all is done. I love the deer but they sure can be destructive. What I've noticed is that when I plant stuff on purpose for them---like one of those fall and winter deer plot mixes, they ignore it. If I plant stuff for us, well, that's what they want to eat. It drives me crazy. Have y'all been watching the weather? Are some of you still getting rain? I've been out to lunch, weather-wise, not watching very carefully, while sick. Now I'm starting to pay attention again, and am not happy to realize we're back to being hot and dry, hot and dry, hot and dry. We had a couple of cool mornings earlier in the week and they sure were nice but I didn't even feel like sitting outdoors and enjoying them because of all that smoke in the air. It doesn't seem as smokey today, but then tomorrow is supposed to be really windy. I hope the wind blows away any lingering smoke, and not that it blows more smoke down to us, which I guess always is possible. Hurricane Lane has been a surprise. The last time I paid any attention to it was probably early last week and it was way out there in the Pacific as a topical depression, not expected to come within hundreds of miles of Hawaii, and not expected to do much of anything. So, fast forward a week or more, and I click on Dr. Masters Wunderground Blog maybe on Tuesday night and discover it is a Cat 4 headed towards Hawaii. By the next morning it was a Cat 5, but it now is weakening as it encounters wind shear and is back to a Cat 4 again. Still, they are going to get tons of rain if nothing else. I suppose that rain is usually good, but not when it comes in feet instead of inches. I hope everyone there stays safe and above the flood waters and out of any potential mudslides. I would joke and say why can't we ever get a hurricane here to bust our droughts, but you know, we got the remains of Hurricane Erin once, and also of Hermine, and the flooding was awful, so I won't even go there.... Have a good day everyone. Dawn