Garden Work

This morning I dropped off Mom's scarecrow, "Autumn Beauty," at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens in Gainesville.  It went easily into the car and was easy to set up there in the parking lot area where some of the others were already being dropped off.  Most of these are from organizations like schools or local businesses, so it's just kind of fun to have one done by Mom there, just for the fun of it.  We've always wanted to add a scarecrow to the the group, and this year we finally were able to go through with it.  Mom worked quite a bit on it, and the end result, as you can see above, came out very nicely.

It wasn't too bad of a day today.  The weather was gorgeous.  The hummingbirds were dropping by, and our garden area is looking nice.  Here's a hibiscus we got earlier to attract some of those hummingbirds.

These blooms have been popping up on this plant for months, sporadically and in different locations, but always a bloom on this plant.  It won't be long before we have to bring this one in.  It's getting colder at night.

This beauty is just one of several we have along a path at the side of the house.  The hummingbirds really like these plants, as do the hummingbirds.  We'll have to keep these and maybe even get more!

And here you can see the beginnings of our backyard work.  We have a good ways to go on this, but the windmill is there along with a little scarecrow and some planted flowers.  We'll be moving things around a bit and enhancing it as the work goes along this month.  Because here's the focus:

The fire pit is set up, at least the foundational part.  We'll surround this with sand and pea gravel, and of course we have to fill the fire pit up a bit more as well.  And we'll need chairs too.  So we have some work to do on this still, which we'll be doing one small portion at a time.  The weather has been ideal for this sort of labor, just a beautiful day outside.

Maddie had her Team Edge practice today, and yes, the class is smaller here in this photo due to all kinds of conflicts.  There was a Free Chapel Youth event that Maddie missed this afternoon, a large scale sort of thing.  But as she said, "Team Edge was a commitment," and she was going to make sure she was at practice.  One reason she really wanted to be here was that it was Miss Walker's last day as an instructor for Team Edge.  She'll still be here as a student, but she'll be missed by Maddie, who has loved learning from her over the past three years.  There are several other instructors that she enjoys learning from here, and who knows?  Maybe she herself will be an instructor some day!

We got home and did some ghostbusting, returning to the Sedgewick Hotel and all the chaos within.  Maddie and I have been returning to the "Sanctum of Slime" once more, seeing if we can actually make it all the way through this time.  We started at the beginning just to get familiar with things.  We haven't had a problem yet, but we know it's going to get pretty insanely tough in a bit.  We'll see, but we've also made a promise not to get too worked up if it gets too challenging.  

Tonight's feature was "Wallace and Gromit:  Curse of the Were-Rabbit," which is again one of our favorites.  It is so brilliantly written in my opinion.  Just tonight we noticed a new line that we hadn't noticed before, "Run, rabbit run!"  Which may or may not be a reference to the song, but it still caught our attention.  It was just a little thing.  There are so many other lines and references that are so great though, from "harmless mind alteration" to "Queensbury rules" and "I rather like your hair pinned back!"  I could go on and on.  The transitions in this movie from scene to scene are just perfect, flowing the story from one sequence to the other.  We could watch this one over and over again, and to help celebrate, we actually had all kinds of cheese and crackers with us.  It's somewhat of a tradition, as Wallace loves cheese so much.  He's crackers about cheese!  Anyway, although we didn't have any Wensleydale, we did have some cheese with cranberry in it, and a new one from the Cheese Shop, some Norwegian Jarlsberg.  I cannot read that name without hearing John Cleese say it:  "Norwegian Jarlsberg."  I've been going steadily through the list of cheeses from the Cheese Shop skit, and this one we hadn't tried before, but we actually really like it.  The last time we tried a new cheese was that camembert cheese, and that was not our favorite.  Actually, I think I'd rather eat crayons.

It was a quiet day, closing up with a quiet night.  We went to bed earlier tonight, given that we have to get up early tomorrow for another big Sunday.  I'm speaking tomorrow morning and it should be a nice message.  Tonight we read from our Kingdom Keepers book, pushing along with that, and we also prayed of course.  And soon after, we were all asleep.  Got a big day tomorrow!