Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh.

My gardening season may be over before it even begins.

While planting the garden this morning (yes, a little late, but recently that’s how we roll around here), I had not one, not two, but three, yes THREE, encounters with snakes.

Ohmygosh.

The first: I almost stepped on one in the driveway that has been smooshed. Ewww. Creepy.

The second: I was hoeing the spot for the green beans and I don’t know what exactly happened, but let’s just say I killed my first snake (without even intending to!) and leave it at that. I will say two things: 1. My garden hoe can now lovingly be referred to as the ultimate stealth snake killer. 2. There is one less snake in my garden.

(And just for the record, dead snakes terrify me almost as much as living snakes.)

The third: I was 93% done planting -the end was in sight – when one slithered it’s way across the garden. I made myself stay put rather than following my usual instinct, which is to run like a mad woman while screaming like a banshee. That’s progress, right?

Ugh.

I know I need to conquer this phobia of mine, but really? Three snake sightings in an hour’s time? Good grief.

And now I have the willies so bad that I’m watching for them everywhere, even in my living room.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a loooooong gardening season.

I knew I hated you even before I started using you today. I expected an awful, terrible mess to clean up after applying you, the final coat, on both porches this morning. That’s why we bought throw away brushes and rollers, so I wouldn’t have to mess with cleaning them out, because I know cleaning up after using you is a huge pain in the tuckus.

What I DIDN’T know was how you long you would take to dry. I didn’t know that when I painted both porches during morning nap time, I would be stuck in my house for hours on end until you dried. I didn’t expect that when trying to leave the house carrying Abby and the mail on a jaunt to the mailbox, we would get stuck and have to leave both of my flip flops in your still-wet-and-taking-your-sweet-time-to-dry state. And I was less than thrilled at having to walk across you barefoot to get back inside the house, thus coating my feet in white, impossible-to-remove paint.

My poor, poor flip flops will bear your scars forever. I’m pretty sure they hate you, too.

Sigh. Thank you for teaching me to read labels on paint cans before using them. And for teaching me to not paint both porches at the same time when using you in the future, thus causing us to be house-bound. We hate being house-bound.

I do appreciate how lovely you make our porches look. But I do NOT want to see ANY sign of you until it’s time to undertake this project again next summer.

Sincerely,
Jen

•  ”Invite people over, even when your house isn’t perfect.  You don’t have to be perfect.  Perfect is scary for us normal people.”  – comment by Angie on Making Couple Friends post at (in)courage

• “Most people who go to college, for example, they go for four years, and they spend a lot of money to do it, and they don’t get any income during that four years, but what they’re learning is information that will eventually make them valuable to somebody. It’s exactly the paradigm with photography. You have to think of it as college. If you’re just starting and you’re just thinking about it now, expect to take four years of learning the craft, learning some trade behind it, and spend some money, spend some time and resources, and when you come out of that, you will probably be at a point where your earning college grad money.”  Dan Heller, in this interview.  LOVE this thought this week because it reminded me (and reassured me) that it’s going to take time and hard work and lots of learning to make them happen…they aren’t going to happen immediately or over night.  Duh, Jen.
  
• “God does not expect me to be qualified, He wants me to be obedient and unafraid.” – Tresia, from her blog post Under Qualified

I mentioned a while ago about my flub while painting the back porch last fall, and how I used the wrong paint and it peeled off and looked very white trashy.  Well, in order to fix my mess of a porch, I had to power wash the deck to remove the old yucky paint and start all over again.

It was my first time using the power washer sprayer thing, and I think I highly overestimated the “fun” factor.  I thought I’d turn it on, spray the deck, and bada-bing, bada-boom, we’d be ready to prime and paint again.   Uh, no. Power washing is kind of hard work…and a lot more time consuming than I thought.  Plus, I got soaked from the knees down in the process.  It took me three attempts before I felt the surface was ready to be primed and painted.  Good grief.  And of course, I didn’t even think about taking before and after pictures for your reading enjoyment, but I am just thrilled this little project is over and done with…hopefully…until next year.

(Ok, quick sidebar.  When you apply primer, is the correct to say you “primed” it or “primer-ed” it?  I’ve always wondered about this.  Saying “primer-ed” bugs me, but I’m not sure “primed” is correct, either.  Sidebar over.)

On to the south porch, which admittedly has been abused and neglected for quite a while.  It’s a work in progress…Jon rebuilt it a year ago and wants to do a bit more to it before it’s finished, but I decided to go ahead and paint it, too.  It looked incredibly sad, so I thought a fresh coat of paint would spruce it up a touch.  I made sure to have at least one dog and some random wood in the yard for the picture, just for that truly authentic white trash vibe.

Scariness, right?  Here’s the after pic:

Obviously not perfect (especially since I missed that little eave on the end and couldn’t find the ladder to get up high enough to paint it…it’s driving me bonkers) and not even close to being finished, but loads better than before.  I’m hoping to put some lattice around the bottom (the dogs crawl underneath it all the time and trample my flower beds in the process…bad doggies) to pretty it up a little bit, but for now any improvement is a good improvement!

This is the second time I’ve ordered plants for the yard from an online nursery. Often it’s much more affordable to go that route, and since we’re all about keeping the costs down lately, I chose to order from Four Seasons Nursery this year. In the past, I’d ordered from Spring Hill Nursery, and I was thrilled with the plants I received from them; but their prices were WAY higher this year so I had to pass on ordering from them this time around.

Here’s part of my order, fresh out of the box:

I know what you’re thinking: not very impressive. Kind of scary looking, actually. I’m always shocked when I unpack the plants, because I expect them to look like, well, plants. A lot of the time, a nursery will ship them in a dormant state, which causes them to look dead on arrival. But every plant I’ve ever ordered has done very well and usually outgrows the plants that I’ve bought at a local store within a year or two, so I think it’s totally worth it.

I try to add a few things to my flowerbeds every year, just to keep things interesting. And this year, I’m adding two new little flower beds around the house, which I hope, hope, HOPE the dogs don’t massacre.

So here’s what I ordered this year:

• A 4 pack of green peppers for the garden
• 12 lavender plants
• 6 festuca
• 1 white spirea
• 1 butterfly bush
• 5 red twig dogwoods
• 2 red bud trees
• 3 red painted daisies

The lavender, spirea, festuca, and butterfly bush are all for the new flowerbeds. I thought I might try the red twig dogwoods either around the utility pole or along the fence – not sure yet. The red bud trees were literally $.99, buy one get one free. I don’t really have a set place in mind for those yet, but they were too cheap to pass up so I’ll stick them in the ground somewhere. It’s fun to see how the landscape around our house changes from year to year…and it’s even better when you can do it affordably. I think my mother is wearing off on me.

It’s that time of year in central Nebraska, time for wind and rain and hail and tornadoes.  When you pass official storm chasers on your way home from work, it’s probably a pretty sure thing that you’re going to be getting some pretty major weather very soon.

Which means it’s also the prime time to practice some weather photography!

After the threat of severe weather had passed and my child and I emerged from the basement (I am a paranoid pregnant lady, so yes, we were indeed in the basement for a few minutes), I put her to bed, grabbed my camera, and headed to the porch to snap a few shots of the retreating storm.

It’s tricky to catch lightening while holding the camera still, so this was the best shot I got of this storm.

But about an hour later, storm #2 rolled in just south of our house, so I headed back outside to try again.  This time I grabbed my tripod in order to keep my camera more steady and better capture the lightening.  It made a HUGE difference, and my tripod and I are now BFF’s.  These are all straight out of the camera, no edits.  I can barely edit normal pictures…I would have no clue where to begin editing night time lightening photos.

We had some crazy central Nebraska weather that evening, that’s for sure!

The auction ended up being mostly random household/garden items, with a few photog supplies and props thrown in.  I purchased a few things, but nothing all that exciting.

Until…

The auctioneer announced near the end of the sale that they would next be selling the outdoor scenes/props, etc.  Interesting.  The owners had lots of outdoor photo sets, and they were going to sell all of the pieces and parts one lot at a time.  I was fascinated, so of course we had to stick around and see how it went.  (By that time, most of the crowd had vanished.)

Stuff was selling totally cheap, probably because they were huge pieces of structure that you couldn’t easily move.  The first random items I bought in this part of the sale were these two concrete culverts.  I have no idea why I bought them, other than the fact that Tresia made me.  I didn’t take a picture of them, and I don’t know what on earth I will do with them, or even how the heck I will move them since they each weigh a ton, but I own them.  And I paid $1 for the pair. (Oh, Tre, by the way, I’ve decided to give you one of them, since you were so encouraging as I bid on them.  Consider it a symbol of gratitude.)

Then we came to this little shaded structure.  It was totally rustic and cute and had loads of charm.  It was something that I could see in our yard (more than anything else that was being sold, at least).

Isn’t it kind of cute?  I think it’s neat.  The auctioneer had to beg someone to bid $5.00 on it ($5.00!?!?!?!), and I couldn’t pass it up…another girl jumped in and upped it to $7.50, I went for $10.00…and won! (But $10 was my max, for real.)

I was totally excited until Tresia and I walked around to the other side of it and saw that there was a whole other wing to my little structure.  It is stinking huge.  There’s another section to it that we couldn’t see when I was bidding.

See what happens when I think to myself, “Gee, wouldn’t that look cute in my yard?  With a little swing or bench underneath it?”  I have GOT to start thinking things through a little bit more.  I have owned this thing for 5 days now, and still haven’t come up with ONE legitimate spot where it would look good in our yard.

And then there is the issue of moving it.  This is the point in the story when I decided to ban myself from auctions for the indefinite future.  Tresia and I were standing and gaping at my purchase, and the seller joined us.  We asked her if we could come back in the next couple of days with some manpower to help us move it out of there; she said, “Oh, of course!  And you’ll probably need to bring a tractor with you to dig up the logs.  And it’s assembled with 8 inch steel rods, so they’ll need something to get those out with, too.”

Oh. My. Word.  A tractor and 8 inch rods for a $10 impulse buy.  Jon was going to kill me.

He always tells me, “No more furniture” when I go off to auctions.  At least I held true to that, right?  It’s definitely not furniture.

Well, he didn’t kill me when I told him about my purchase later that night.   I believe his exact response was, “Well, we can always use it for firewood.”

True.

And his next words were, “So, can you go to an auction in Sargent for me on Saturday?  But don’t buy any furniture.”

Good grief.  Heaven help us.

While I was planning our meals for the month of May, I primarily stuck to one cookbook: The Healthy College Cookbook.  I bought it a few years ago (even though my college days were far behind me) because it had lots of interesting, easy, inexpensive, healthy meals that used normal ingredients.  It’s become one of my favorite cookbooks and I pull it off the shelf whenever my meals get stuck in a rut.

Jon’s been working late this week, so I planned meals that sounded good to me, and that I could make a big helping of and munch on for a day or two or three.  One of those recipes was a Greek salad.

Have you ever had a Greek salad?  I never had until this week, but somehow the ingredients and dressing just sounded uber-yummy to me and caught my eye, so I made up a big bowl of it.  And I am now officially hooked.  It.  Is.  Amazing.

(I’d post a picture of it, but you know.  iPhone.  Sigh.)

I don’t have the exact recipe at my fingertips at the moment, but basically you just mix together Romaine lettuce, cucumber, green pepper, red onion, tomatoes, feta cheese (LOVE me some feta!) and black olives.  I don’t like tomatoes or black olives, so I left those out.  The dressing calls for olive oil, red wine vinegar (which I didn’t have, so I just used plain old white vinegar and it turned out fine), lemon juice, dried parsley flakes, some minced garlic, and a dash of salt and pepper.  I didn’t dump the dressing directly on the salad, since it was a big batch and I knew I’d be eating off it for a couple of days; I stored the dressing in a separate container and just dump a little on when I’m ready for it.

It is the best, most mouth watering thing I have eaten in a long time.  There’s just something about it that makes my taste buds sing.  And I’ll be eating it often we enter gardening season, since I’ll be growing lots of those ingredients in our back yard.  Yumminess! 

Sigh.

Any hoo, we did really well with having meals planned for the entire month. I used a freebie calender from a local business and stuck it on the fridge. Worked like a charm. It was easy to access and keep up with from week to week.

We stuck to the schedule and only had a couple of changes during the month. Jon’s been fishing and bringing home a ton of fish, so I substituted that for 3 or 4 meals. And one night he accidentally forgot to refrigerate the remainder of the roast I’d made, which was going to be turned into beef and noodles the next night, but we survived.

I did a quick analysis of our food costs from March versus April, and planning meals ahead of time saved us about $50 last month. Every little bit helps! And all in all, I only spent $155.27 in groceries during April. (But keep in mind we have a freezer full of beef and some chicken, so I don’t spend a lot on meat.). Oh, that’s with no coupons, because coupons and I don’t get along all that well. I also stayed away from the prepackaged stuff and cooked/baked from scratch more, so I think that helps keep the cost down, too.

Last night I sat down and planned May’s menus. It’s kind of a fun process. As I pick a meal for each day, I keep a running list of any special ingredients I’ll need to buy for it. Here’s a peek at my calendar and shopping list. I wasn’t quite done planning at this point, but you get the idea:

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s working well so far. I’ll keep you posted on how we fare with it this month.