Can You Dig It?

I adore the Crusaders of Love. They are from France and will be playing Beerland this Thursday 6/3.

A couple of Friday nights ago Dan and I were sitting on the porch...sometimes we are not very exciting.  Here we are, in the so-called "live music capitol of the world" and we are sitting on the porch like a couple of blue hairs on a Friday night. It's kind of pathetic but, in our defense, when you have a nice porch and enjoyable weather after a hard week of workin' for the man the porch is quite a nice place to be.  We decided the yard was looking a little shabby and bare since some of the plants didn't come back after the winter freezes, and those gaps needed to be filled.  So the next day I went plant shopping.

My first (and only, it turned out) stop was the big home warehouse store near our house.  Luckily, the garden center there was crammed with plants, being Spring and all.  I spent about an hour there, hit pay dirt, and left with about 25 new plants to put in the yard. 

Here are some pictures.
This is salvia.  It's probably my favorite plant because it's hard to kill, comes in a bunch of colors, is big and bushy and looks really great when it flowers.  I got 9 of these coral colored ones.

 Here is some magenta salvia, planted last year, that are going strong.

This is a yellow daisy-like plant called Euryops.  I got 4 of these to put in the circular flower bed.


I also got some of these purple Verbena canadensis for a little spot of color in the corners of the flower bed.

These are Autumn Sage.  I have no idea what they are going to do.  I think they will have small red flowers but at $3.49 a pop what the hell. 

These are hollyhocks.  I only got 2 of these, simply as an experiment.  I don't know how well they do here, but I really like hollyhocks.  I know they do well in high desert climates like Santa Fe...way different from Austin.  Sitting in my front yard just might be murder for them.

Here is a picture of the new cat that hangs around our yard: A very friendly, young, un-neutered bachelor.  If he hangs around much longer and we can't locate his people he's getting snipped.  He has no idea what's in his near future.

Here are some Bat Faced Cuphea.  This is another trooper of a plant, though it can get a little ratty looking in draught.  The flowers are cool. looking...they are not called bat faced for nothing, but this picture is a little sucky.




This plant is called a Dianthus. It now lives in a pot on the porch.

 This is called Tiger Eye Rudbeckia, also in a pot on the porch.

 Here is a picture of the front porch with all these damn plants including a geranium and a couple of asparagus ferns.

So, there ya go with some of the new plants. Lots of hole digging.  Not my favorite thing but it's good for the arms.

And here is a little trip around the front yard to access the state of some of the other plants-

These are monster recumbent rosemary plants.  They are great for stopping erosion on the front slope.  They get really big and have to be cut back in the Spring.

Observe the sad Sago ferns....

These live on the porch, and just last November they were bushy and green but most of the life was sucked out of them from the freezes.  They spent some time in plant rehab in a warm partially shady corner of the yard and, luckily, they bounced back in the last month and are returning to their former healthy selves, see below.

Here is a great plant called Silver Pony Foot.  This stuff is good for slopes, so we put a bunch of it on the slope along our driveway a couple of years ago.  It got pretty fried as well during the winter but it's growing back.  I really like this plant, and the leaves do in fact look like cute little pony hooves.

This is the indestructible pomegranate tree.  These things are great, grow like crazy, have nice orange flowers, and in the fall they produce pomegranates for the squirrels.

 Here is some of our Texas lantana, with a Monarch butterfly.  The butterflies are all over the place this year.

 And, here is the latest picture of the Burr oaks we planted last Fall.  I thought we killed them but they are doing just fine.

 And lastly, here is a picture of our very picky Texas Laurel.  These are nice tree-like plants that look like wisteria when they get flowers, which ours never has.  This was the first plant we installed after moving into the house and has been transplanted to a couple of different locations because it was not doing well.  But finally we moved it to it's current spot and it seems quite happy.  It has doubled in size in the last year or so and I hope it flowers someday.  If anything, it helps to disguise the hose and camouflage an ugly gray water meter.

 So, there's a little update on the yard.  Plants are cool and they don't give you any lip.  And they provide hours of back breaking labor and sweating, require much pruning and trimming and feeding and watering, and surprise you with painful thorns, splinters and bug bites...but it's all worth it

Poster Post!

Hello, long time no hear from me!  We have been super busy, and then went on vacation: We had a blast on our loooong road trip to Washington DC and many points in between. We clocked almost 4,000 miles on the car.  A lot of driving but a great vacation was had. 

-Trip #1 Highlight: The white beaches, sparkling water and pelicans of the Florida panhandle.  Glad we were able to go before the catastrophic oil spill kills it all.

-The Biggest Drag: The vomit stench that permeates the New Orleans French Quarter. Gross.

And even though I have been incommnicado does NOT mean we haven't been busy with more house projects.  Here is one of our latest.

Our recently redone office is still a work in progess.  We painted the office an almost black super-dark gray color called Sled by Behr. The east wall looked like a boring blank chalkboard and needed some sprucing up.  Dan had the brilliant idea of putting up a bunch of his movie posters.  Since Dan has been in "the movie business" for a million years he has quite a collection of some pretty cool ones.  These have been stored in various poster tubes and boxes for a long time but we decided to release them from captivity.  Really, what's the point of having neat stuff if it's not going to be out where we can see just how neat it all is? 

Dan ordered 3 poster cases from displays2go.com for around 40 clams each.  But, with all the posters already in our possession (free!), and the ease these frames offer in changing out one poster for another on a whim,  this is a great deal.  We have a permanent-yet-changeable wall of art on the east office wall that adds lots of color and style to the room.

To install them we first simply held up the poster frames and eyeballed how they should be spaced.  All 3 frames are the same size and we decided symmetrical spacing was the way to go. 

We measured the walls, did a little math, and marked with painters tape where the screw holes would be.  And we leveled!  Leveling is important, especially when hanging a group of like items, so they don't look weird and cockeyed.  Then we drilled holes through the thick plastic backs of the frames and the wall at the same time. 

Since the drilled holes were not necessarily going into the studs we used yellow plastic expansion anchors for our screws .  If you have ever put a screw or a nail in a wall, hung a picture from it only to have it come crashing to the ground  and leaving a hole in your wall you need expansion anchors!   I have learned the hard way and  I never hang anything on a wall without using these amazing devices.  They will save you a lot of time and swearing.  Drill the hole using a drill bit just big enough to snuggly insert the anchor, then screw (verb) in the screw (noun).  Really easy.  Below is a picture of Dan poking a plastic anchor into one of the drilled holes.

Fifteen screws later we had our new movie poster frames up and ready.  The frames actually flip open so it's super easy to access them.  Next, the fun part: Picking what posters to display first. Dan pulled out his sizable collection that we hadn't looked at for a few years.

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Woman Chaser.  I love Patrick Warburton, even when he played The Tick!  I love all the colors in this poster. This was our first pick.

Then, the classic Touch Of Evil, a great black and white photo with big daddy Orson Welles staring at you.  The red and yellow lettering is a nice touch.

And our third pick was this poster for the Japanese movie we think is called "The Horrifying Prophecies Of Nostradamus".  A search for this movie didn't give me much info.....but the poster is really great!  We do not speak or write Japanese!

And here is a photo of the poster frames, all done and looking good...except for the glare on Orson's face!  I'm happy with the result, and we can change out the posters whenever we want!