Crazy Silly Dream

As my family can well attest to, I am the world's craziest dreamer! I could write best-selling fiction novels and script award-winning movies and television shows with some of the dreams I have! They are always so vivid and unbelievable.

I was telling my Mom and Sister about one wacky dream I had last night, and Mom said "Girl, you could write a book just on your dreams alone!" so I thought I'd blog about it instead. And before I get started, no, I did not eat chocolate before bed last night! (Chocolate can make me have some super extravagant dreams, for sure!)

Anyway, last night I dreamed I had a big booth in an antique mall, and in my booth I had this old Victorian wicker baby carriage for sale. It was white and very ornate and I'd had it for sale for a long time with no takers. I was only asking $125 for it, and that was a steal! Well, I was working in my booth, straightening things up and dusting, and this old man came up to me. He was from Transylvania or Romania or something because he had that kind of "Count Dracula from Sesame Street" kind of accent. He was a dealer in the mall too, but he really creeped me out.

He came up to me and said "I av somsing very impor-tant to show you. Come vith me." and he led me over to my antique baby carriage. He said "Look here." and pointed one of his gnarly old fingers at this little glass dome in the middle of the handle to the baby carriage. I assumed the dome housed the mechanism to steer the baby carriage left or right, but he told me that sometimes, that little glass dome housed something "very special."

He asked me if he could take it apart and see if what he suspected was true. I told him sure, no problem, and then I went about my business while he carefully took the dome off the baby carriage. Awhile later, he came to me and tapped me on the shoulder and very dramatically said, "Behold! It is true and I av found it!" He handed me this beautiful solid gold pin with a big stone of some sort in the center, encircled with gorgeous pearls. I was totally shocked! The gold was brilliantly polished and the stone was shining so brightly, as if it had never seen the light of day. It was totally untarnished. He told me it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars! I was so excited and despite his creepiness, I just hugged him and thanked him over and over.

Wierd, huh? I sure have some doozy dreams! Then, the rest of my dream carried on with ghosts and children that could see ghosts, and me and the children chasing the ghosts up and down a staircase in an old Victorian house.

Me and hubby are going to a big antique auction tomorrow, so you can bet if they have any ornate baby carriages for sale, I'm going to be bidding on them for sure!

Assembly Required

The last weekend of May was a busy one at our house. While out exploring one Saturday, hubby and I stopped at an Ace Hardware in Bellevue and bought four adirondack chairs for our yard. I've always wanted a set, and they just happened to be on sale. The only hitch in the giddy-up was, the chairs came in a box and the box was stamped "Assembly Required." Oh boy!

We opened one of the boxes on the display and got the instructions out to see how hard it would be to put one together. The salesperson assured us it wasn't hard at all if you were organized about how you laid it all out and as long as you just took things step-by-step. Hubby seemed up for the project, so we bought four "chairs" and about nine cans of red spray paint and headed off for home.

We couldn't have picked a worse weekend for an outdoor project! We were in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave with temperatures in the 90's and it was miserable, but as soon as we got up Sunday morning, we found ourselves out in the backyard tackling the first chair. Sid set up a big piece of plywood on top of two sawhorses for our table and we laid out all the pieces of wood and bags of hardware. First step was to paint all the boards. After they were dry, we got out those handy-dandy instructions and started with chair number one.

About an hour later, we had the first chair together and boy was it ever beautiful! Exactly what I had always wanted and absolutely perfect! One down and three more to go! Poor hubby spent the entire day painting, waiting for paint to dry, and then assembling and later that evening, we had four perfect chairs around our fire pit.

While we were building chairs in the backyard, another "Assembly Required" project was happening on our front porch. It seems that two sets of red finches decided to build nests in each of our ferns and they must have been busy all day because that evening when I went to water the ferns, there were two perfectly formed nests that hadn't been there the evening before.

Now, a few weeks later, we've been enjoying our beautiful new chairs and the finches have filled their nests. One nest has five newly hatched baby birds in it, and the other has two tiny blue eggs. All of us are reaping the benefits of a job well done!

How does your garden grow?

My boss has the most beautiful yard and garden! He and his wife are out working in it for hours at a time, and you can sure tell by how gorgeous it all looks. It's like entering a different world when you walk through the gate and venture down the stone paths. Everywhere you look there's something different to marvel.

Gorgeous flowers, lushly thick green grass, ivy, statues and ornaments, birdhouses, yard art hanging here and there along the fences and from iron posts, even a rusty old bicycle parked amongst it all, with a flower-filled basket hanging from the handlebars.

They have a beautiful stone pond with water gurgling and trickling a musical tune and raised beds out back filled with all their vegetables. Cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, beans, potatoes. Everything you can imagine! He has bamboo poles that he harvested and dried in the rafters of his barn and he positions them into teepee's and grows beans and sweet peas up them. He has rocks and carefully-placed stumps with pots of flowers here and there, and boxes he made that hang along the gate and fences filled with bright colored masses.

The yard is filled with trees and flowering bushes and shrubs and every kind of flower imaginable. Lilacs, irises, petunias, peonies, tulips, azaleas, lavender, poppies, daisies, clematis, wisteria. Purple, red, white, yellow, pink and blue. All the colors of the rainbow everywhere you look.

He has several different roses in pinks and yellow and red and everything grows so lushly and abundantly. What a wonderful haven for all the butterflies and bunnies too! God has blessed their hands with the magic touch because the whole yard just flourishes with beauty.

I hope someday I can have such a beautiful garden at my home to escape to. What a peaceful place they have created and how proud they are to share it with all of us!

Good Vibrations

Boy have we had some doozy storms so far this Spring. We had a big one whip through last night around 2:00 a.m. and it kept us up well into the early morning, as two more bouts came through one right after another.

Our poor dog Tubby is just scared to death of the storms. When the wind starts blowing and the thunder starts booming, you'd think it was the end of the world by the way he acts. Last night when the first crack of lightning shook the house, poor little Tubby jumped up in bed with us quicker than Jumpin' Jack Flash! He crawled in between the two of us and started shaking like a leaf. It felt like our bed had turned into one of those fancy vibrating beds the hotels have! We couldn't calm him down at all. His eyes were glued to the nearest window and every time he saw a flash light up the sky, he started shaking even more because he knew that boom was right behind it. Poor little guy.

He hates it even more when the weather person is on the screen and all those colored maps are tracking the storm. He watches that tv with his head bobbing up and down like he can understand what they are saying. You just wonder what all the thoughts are going through his head.

But since it's just now April and May is right around the corner, I imagine we'll have plenty more storms to come to liven up the household. I just hope poor Tubby can endure it without giving himself an ulcer.

Wish upon a firefly. . .

Last night when I took Tubby out for his evening walk around the yard, I spotted the first firefly of the season! I treat the first firefly sighting like you do when you wish upon the first star in the night sky. You make a wish real quick and then hope it comes true before the summer's end.

I looked all around the yard, but this one single firefly was the only one flitting around, blinking his bottom on and off in the dark. I've heard this is how fireflies call their mates, by blinking on and off in the dark, so I imagined him flying around calling "Fiona! Where are you? It's me, Freddie, your long lost love!"

I sat on the porch steps and waited for Tubs to do his business, and thought about fireflies and where they went during the colder months and how was it they knew when to come back? And what makes their rear ends light up like that? They are so fascinating and magical and when they cover the lawn and trees and bushes, they look like tiny, bright twinkle lights.

Summer must be coming early this year and I can't wait for Freddie to find Fiona and all the other fireflies to come out and dance in our yard!

A Country Drive

These are the things I saw on my drive to work this morning. . . One lone turkey Tom with his tail feathers fanned out, prancing in a field and calling for a mate. A squirrel running along a fence with a nut in his mouth. Kids waiting for the bus in the rain with their raincoats and umbrellas. Pink and white dogwood trees blooming everywhere. A beautiful green field with five deer eating their grassy breakfast. Three tiny black-and-white spotted calves standing in a pasture. A long fence row lined with tulips blooming in red, yellow, white and purple. A duck sitting on a fence in the rain! Had to do a double-take on that one! Two starlings taking a bath in a mud puddle on the side of the road. Purple red bud trees blooming, surrounded by green green green everywhere. What a beautiful way to start the day! Happy Spring!

Oh What a Night!

Last night was our first threatening Spring storm of the season, and boy was it a doozy! All day long the newscasters were preparing us for the worse, which was supposed to happen sometime in the evening. It's so nerve-wracking to have all the local stations on constant alert, interrupting your normal television programs for severe weather updates and watching the graphics on the map as they tracked the storm coming in from the west. Then as it gets closer and closer, they start putting up charts that show times of arrival and then it really gets scary. All along the way they're reporting damages in the first-hit counties and at the bottom of the screen you see the warnings as they post them for flash flooding or worse yet, tornadoes!

Hubby was stuck in Nashville working a hockey game, so it was just me and Tubs, riding out the storm together. Poor Tubby was a bundle of nerves and shaking like a leaf. The wind was blowing so hard and the rain was hitting the house sideways in sheets. We could hear the CLANG!BANG! of a loose sheet of tin on the roof of the barn across the road and our screen door kept thudding against the front porch. The lightning was intense and the thunderboomers shook the whole house.

I had our "tornado" bag all packed, just in case, and had Tubby's leash hooked on his collar. I had the candles and hurricane lamps set out around the house with a box of matches by each one. The power went off twice, but thankfully it came back on. When we have these scary storms you can't help but wonder if this will be the one that picks our house up and carries it away. Will this be the night one of our walnut trees comes crashing through the roof? Are my donkeys safe out there in the barn? I wonder if I can make it to the neighbor's storm shelter, or should I just pull all the blankets and pillows into the tub and ride it out? A million thoughts and worries go through your head.

And just like that, the worst of it has passed us by and the winds die down and the newscaster moves on to other counties and I breathe a sigh of relief that we were spared.

On my way to work this morning, I got to see the aftermath. Huge trees that I pass every day, snapped in two like twigs or completely uprooted. Big sheets of rusted tin from barn roofs laying by the side of the road. A neighbor's grill laying in the middle of the yard where it was blown off their back patio. The creeks and rivers were all filled to the top and whooshing over the banks, and driveways along the way were all washed out with gravel across the roads and tree limbs scattered here and there.

Thankfully, our house was still standing and we're safe and sound to carry through the weekend. I did however, hear the weather lady say this morning that we're in for another round of storms on Monday and Tuesday, so I guess we'll start all over again with the nail biting then. Poor Tubby! I don't know if his little heart can take all the stress.....