That’s right, I’m a poker champion, at least in Annapolis Royal and surrounding area. I was the last player standing at our friend André’s birthday Texas Hold ‘Em poker tournament. It was a ‘just for fun’ event, which is too bad in a way, because I would have liked to have been playing for real money (even money for a charity). It’s rare that I play poker, even rarer that I get good cards…and by good I mean ‘winning’, because even when I chose to play atrocious cards, they ended up being great (meaning better than anyone else’s)…and I just know that the next time money’s involved, I’ll tank.
André made a trophy for the winner, and it sits proudly on my office shelves.
In my last post (in May!) I mentioned that the garden would soon go mental. Did it ever. And I chose last week to get a handle on things. So I spent hours every day weeding, sacrificing some plants that had been choked out by the goutweed, laying thick black weed barrier over the worst of the goutweed patches, transplanting some smaller plants that were getting lost in the hosta madness, topdressing the soil with compost and manure, and adding a final layer of bark mulch. It was a lot of work. I lost about 4 pounds.
And now the goutweed is fighting back, but appears to be somewhat subdued. The hostas are still such a nightmare. Just when I think they can’t get any bigger, they explode. I keep telling myself I’ll divide and transplant in the Fall, but last Fall I kept telling myself I would divide and transplant in the Spring. So it goes.
One of our neighbours’ more woeful trees (there are 5 that line our fence, and they’re all pretty sad) is fully dead this year. Last year it still had a few hopeful leaves, but it’s done now. I still like it, and prefer looking at it to looking at the nearby power lines, but I know it’s only a matter of time before it gets toppled, either on purpose with a chainsaw wielded by the neighbours, or in a storm, where it will probably crash onto our fence. I hope it sticks around for a while, and so does this bird:
This hummingbird lives in or on the tree somewhere; s/he’s always perched on a branch near the top, watching me while I work in the garden. I’m very fond of it.
We got a new outdoor seating set. We were going to get a table and chairs for dining al fresco, but then we figured, why not dine outside the way we do inside? So we got lounge-y seating. We’re pros at balancing plates on our laps.
In house news, within the next 2 weeks work will start on our new roof. That will be big and disruptive, but we’re looking forward to it. And we’ve decided to shoehorn a powder room under our front stairs. We bought a one-of-a-kind carved, celadon coloured ceramic sink from Lucky Rabbit Pottery, so we’ll build a water closet around that. The project will likely start in September, fingers crossed.
And on a final note, and this is really for my mom (hi mom!), Dilmah tea now has an online store. I bought 6 boxes of 100 teabags and had it delivered to my door from the headquarters in Sri Lanka. The cost per teabag turns out to be exactly the same as when my mom would send me three boxes at a time from BC via Canada Post. So thanks mom, for always helping me with my tea fix, but you won’t have to go through the hassle anymore now that I’ve got direct access to the producers of the stuff. Yay!
