The herbs are doing great this year -- along with everything else that's green. (These herbs are several years old; they go out in the summer and come inside the rest of the year. I have a very nice working relationship with them. Sort of a co-creator type thing!)

I wanted you to see mostly just the herbs, but then I thought, why not regale you with how fucking GREEN everything is this year and how wildly everything is growing around my kitchen door! It's really just unreal. So jungle-y!! And it's barely mid-June. At some point, I'll show you what the arbor is already looking like -- and nothing is even blooming there yet. Soon enough it'll just be a riot of color. It actually is overwhelming this year, how everything is growing.



Yesterday afternoon, it was decided upon with Mom, that the little island I have out in my front lawn that normally just has 3 evergreen-type bushes, some mulch, and a stone border, is now basically going to just become part of the lawn. The grass growing inside the stone border is tall enough now to hide an entire family of lions or something. Seriously. So I'm just going to remove the stone border and have the lawncare guy just cut all that grass like it's part of the regular lawn and be done with it.

When I first moved here, my lawn was really pitiful. It was full of mole trails down underneath it and also full of dandelions -- just bursting with those. It was the sparsest, poorest little burnt-out lawn you ever saw. It was like High Plains Drifter out there. The Navajo people settled into my "front lawn" that first summer and sold rugs and pottery. (Just kidding.) But it really looked like a desert out there.

So, I hired Scotts Lawn Service the next spring, to re-seed it and make it all better. Now, 3 summers later, I have more lawn than you can shake a stick at. I have indescribably healthy grass growing all over the fucking place. You can walk barefoot in my grass and it feels incredible -- however... I was kind of just wanting to have grass growing in the general lawn area; not out to forever and ever for as far as the eye could see.

And a somber note...

My female cardinal got killed yesterday. I'll spare you the details, but it was just so sad. And Friday, when they came to kill off the carpenter ants in my window frame, they killed off everything else that was alive around here except for me and the 3 cats.

It really broke my heart. I know I don't need to be living with all those spiders but they really did fascinate me and we seemed to have a pretty cool "peaceful co-existence" going on around here. I was so distraught when the Orkin guy told me over the phone that everything was going to have to be killed.

I said, "Even my spiders? I don't want you to kill my spiders, I just want you to kill the carpenter ants."

Orkin guy: "Lady, what are we supposed to do? We can't treat for the ants and then keep all the other insects out of it. How are we supposed to do that??"

Right away, I could see I was inching dangerously close in to Crazy Lady on the Telephone territory, so I took a deep breath, tried not to sob and said -- in this really desperate whisper-y sort of voice -- "Okay, just give me a minute here." I composed myself and then said, "All right. when can you come out?"

And later that day, the deed was done. But I cried as if they were coming out here to put my cats to sleep, or something. I could just hear them screaming in their tiny spider voices: "We lived here because we trusted you!!" Ack.

Bye little guys. Have fun in the next Universe. Catch ya next time around.