The Last Couple of Days

Front yard & deck after the storm

Salivating at the thought of the kids going back to school? I'm not really. We have had fun the past couple of weeks, especially watching a bunch of movies. I just found out that HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc., all have on demand. I knew that on demand had movies that cost four bucks, but if you have the pay stations, you can not go to on demand and watch them for free whenever you like. And they are yours for twenty-four hours. Stop, go shopping, cook dinner, walk the dog and go back and resume play too. Very cool. I was watching movies on the pay channels that we don't use enough, but they start at odd times and I either missed the first five minutes or go on to another channel. HBO on demand was the best of the lot.

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We watched Crash. Excellent movie. Loved Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Big Bounce, an Elmore Leonard book, was funny and starred Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman. Can't go wrong with that pair! Bewitched was surprisingly funny and fun with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. Watched other movies too in the past couple of weeks. Fun.

I mentioned I was in a cleaning mode lately. Yesterday was the refrigerator. Top to bottom. Out with the old. Have you ever thought rearranging the shelves would help keep it organized? I have tried that again and again and yesterday I rearranged the shelves and layed out the rules. Leftovers go here. Yogurt, sour cream, jello, small items go on this shelf. No longer under the deli bin where they get lost. That is now reserved for tortillas and basically leftovers. Only the very top shelf is high enough to hold a two liter bottle of seltzer, oj and cranberry juices. The next shelf is for the big Costco size salsa and real maple syrup and mayo, among other things. We are going to make this work!


Front yard and deck

We cleaned out the snack cabinet too. Really, it is a snack cabinet and has been for eight years. Every kid that comes in our house knows where the snacks are. Rolling shelves come out and there are Airheads, licorice, Crackers, Raisins, Cookies, Croutons, Pretzels, Chinese noodles, those sorts of things. We filled up a black trash bag with all the stuff in there yesterday. Out with the old. It got to the point that we were tossing things in there but when the girls wanted a snack, there was nothing to eat! It has already worked. Zoe was looking in there this morning and gazing at what to have. It has not been restocked, but I did know where the Ritz Crackers were. Katharine was impressed by that. LOL

We got the tree out of the house the other night too. Everything looks so much more spacious when the big tree is gone.

Although our weather is nothing like what they are experiencing up in Northern California, we finally got our first real storm of the season. Not a huge rain event, but the wind was downright scary up here in the eucalyptus grove. Our front yard is full of bark that has fallen off the huge trees. We leave it on as was recommended, so they are not the beautifully stripped trunks that we may see around town. We have strips of bark wanting to fall off and it usually takes some good wind and rain for that to happen. The bark protects the trees from three threatening types of bugs, currently eating the eucs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One kind of Lerp eats just new foilage. Another eats the older leaves and yet another eats anything. I did have to laugh at the creepy neighbor and wonder how he was doing in the storm yesterday. Bark, branches and leaves falling onto his itty bitty house. He has a flat roof and it is new. He was out there in the storm putting plastic on the roof with big river rocks. I was nice enough though, to not tell him those are our rocks! They line our side between our driveways. He was outside raking and put all the bark into a pile that I bet he is taking photos of to show how messy the eucs are! They are known as trash trees and he lives in a eucalyptus grove for cripes sake!

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Our street and yards are covered with long strips of bark and I am happy to say lots of the blooming flowers are washed off the trees. The flowers looks like snow falling in a light wind. And they make me sneeze! They are very pretty, they make a huge mess and that is okay. Our back deck is a disaster at the moment. There are three umbrellas out there. Two that are rectangular. One is tied up and it fell over a couple of times before I left it on the ground. The other rectangular umbrella never falls, but did yesterday and we lost a mosaic bird bath and a hummingbird feeder. We did close them before they fell. The other umbrella is a standard octagon. I had it up all summer, tilted to keep the morning sun out of our eyes. Locked securely between two eaves, it never moved and I never put it down. Yesterday, Zoe and I decided it should probably be put down and it was a joke watching us in the wind and rain. I had visions of her being taken away in a big gust of wind. The problem was I could not get the umbrella off tilt. So, we took it apart at mid level of the pole and put in on the ground, while wide open. It survived and while I was just putting it back up, I remembered the button to push to put the umbrella off tilt! I will have to get it locked into the eaves again. The heaters fell over, a fan blew over but the house is still standing and no trees fell on us. It was a good day.

These photos are of the front yard and deck. The girls wanted to take photos of me out in the pouring rain while trying to get Charlie to do his business. The creepy neighbor was watching us from his front door. We got soaked but making the kids happy is what I live for...

The gardener comes tomorrow and normally, I would not have him clean up all the mess. However, he is just back from a three week vacation to Mexico. I think he can do the clean up. Plus it is very difficult to clean up with a broom or a rake until it dries out. So, there!

sunrise a couple of days pre-storm