Beautiful Day

It's absolutely gorgeous outside here today. 

We woke up early this morning, and the temperature was still nicely cool and temperate so that opening the windows and letting in some fresh air was really lovely to start off our day.  Helpful since I made some French onion soup in the crockpot yesterday, and my house reeked of onion still.  (Not the most refreshing of scents to hit your nostrils first thing in the morning, let me tell you, no matter how good the soup may have been.)

We're trying to get back on the school schedule wake-up time, and it has been painful and ghastly.   Which just validates my need to be evil and do this for a week or so prior to the start of school every year, I think, but it certainly doesn't make it any easier knowing that since neither The Peanut nor I are morning people.


I've spent the last couple of days making bulletin board bits and pieces for the first display at the start of school.  I mocked up some "books" out of colored cardstock that I usually use for scrapbooking projects.  Since I don't really have a real bulletin board to work with, I'm going to use one of the doors as a vertical board space for display.  That should work, right?  The kids will see it when they come in just fine, and I'll be able to add in a bit more color right up front.

Tomorrow will be the first day I've been able to get back in the building and work, so I'm anxious to finish up all the projects that have been sitting the last few weeks -- the last bit of shelving, the wall decals that go up higher on the upper walls, the "books we love" display of several old favorites...there's a long list and a short window of time to finish it all, so cross your fingers for me and hope for cool weather the next few days.

Have spent a little time this morning puttering around the house and am headed out to fill my bird feeders shortly and perhaps pull a few weeds.  The thistles are growing like gangbusters -- again -- and nothing seems to get rid of them.  If anyone has had success with ridding their yard of irritating thistles that seem to multiply when you pull them out, please, please let me know what you did.  They are driving me bonkers this year.

Regardless, the flowers in our yard are full of honeybees, bumblebees and butterflies.  And the little hummingbird moth that's been paying visits is busy flitting from bloom to bloom on the butterfly bush by my sunroom window.

The sun is shining, but for once it isn't disgustingly hot and sticky -- at least for now, anyway -- and we are going to find some way to enjoy it just a little bit.

If you have a few good thoughts and prayers to spare, please send them our way -- my mother had a hospital scare yesterday evening and may have had a mini-stroke -- not enough to be debilitating, but enough to give us all a big scare.  More testing to come to be certain, but please send some good, healing thoughts her way.  And one of my great aunts -- who is 102 years old! -- fell off her porch steps yesterday and broke her neck.  Because the universe hasn't sent us enough to worry about the last few years, clearly.  Guess the lesson is that it isn't about fairness at all, but it just is...and you have to make peace with the fact that this is how life goes whether you like it or not.

How are things with you?  Do tell...

(Photo by Christy Hardin Smith.)