Swimming Upstream

The nine rams are still in their places next to the horse in the field at Cottage Garden nursery, but this catfish seems to have escaped and found itself out of its element, swimming along on top of the entrance arbor. It's quite silly, but somehow seems to fit there....

We had a guest for dinner last night...an old friend who used to backpack with us. We stayed up late (for us) talking about epic trips and parties, sometimes combined. There was, for instance, the night we sat around a campfire somewhere up in the high Sierra passing the bottle of Jack Daniels...I don't really remember how I got to my sleeping bag, but I most certainly DO remember hiking out the following morning....not my finest hour, but at least I didn't fall asleep with my hair in the fire, as one woman did, or on a picnic table hidden from the parking lot as one of the guys did, causing his ride home to assume that he had already left. We took pity on him and took him home, despite the fact that he was a notorious non-stop talker and it was a five hour drive back to the Bay Area. At least we didn't have to make much effort. Those were the good old days....

The 'hot tub garden' is still basically a hole in the dirt, but the vision for it is taking shape in the form of a growing batch of plants lined up on the ground awaiting the delivery of the fig tree next week. We went back to the garden center in Petaluma this morning to get more plants like the ones we bought last week before they run out. Our color scheme is becoming green and white based on the two Mexican mock orange shrubs with white blossoms which survived the cull and look quite nice now that they have been freed from the bamboo. We bought an oak leaf hydrangea with a white flower which OilMan just planted in the pot that was choked with  dead bamboo.*Planting it was a lot easier than getting all those ancient bamboo roots out of the pot, but I'm glad we were able to save the pot because I like it. An added bonus is that the design on the pot is revealed.

We had just finished that when Tim came up with the kids to go to the waterpark at Spring Lake. When they come back wet, dirty and tired and head for the showers, we will head for the barbecue for dinner for the troops....corn on the cob, potatoes and green beans from our garden and hamburgers. Dana is bringing a cherry cobbler. 

All in all...a perfect summer day. 
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