Whirling Dervish-ness

That's our house (upper left corner). Those, however, are not our cows.

It is crunch time in the garden. I have learned that it is a slim window of opportunity down here in Virginia, in terms of getting plants in. May can become hot and dry overnight and then summer is here and almost instantly you are overwrought and struggling to keep things alive. I've been so busy, I keep forgetting to take pictures. So, I thought I would put up some photos of our house and some cows taken during a dewy, foggy morning walk.

We have been planting and transplanting. The doggy patch is looking much better. It is a completely new space for us and it is a huge improvement over the baked clay/neurotic dog-digging ditches and dust that we put up with for years on end. I highly recommend replacing lawn with garden space. I am going to try my hand at homemade bird baths, a brick garden divider and more moss milkshakes - soon - to help age the garden space a bit. Not so plunkity-plunk and bare mulched spaces everywhere.

The down side of all this activity is that I have been having trouble with heart palpitations. Earlier in the week, I was hooked up to a heart monitor for 24 hours. It was a biggish, unattractive thing that I had to clip to my hip (dorky) and it looked like a very old beeper (doofy). I ducked into Urban Outfitters after my appointment for a quick look-see and immediately skulked out - painfully aware of how 1994 I must have looked to the kids (if they were even alive then?).

But the tests revealed that all is well and the cardiologist encouraged me to keep running. I have been getting back to it through the Couch to 5K training and just signed up for the Keswick 5K for Hospice of the Piedmont in June. I hope to also do the Women's Four Miler. And - I am loving the book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.

More focused and coherent posts to come, I promise.

This weekend: More transplanting, more seed sowing, some rest, reading and baked treats with our monster rhubarb harvest and local strawberries. Happy Mother's Day one and all!