Good morning! I hope you all had a super Tuesday yesterday!
(Get it?)
(Sorry.)
As I mentioned in my post on Monday, the weather has been nice in Oklahoma. Because of the nice weather, my labs have been out and about more, and because they have been out and about more, they have been coming home with…shall we say, trophies. And because we live in the country, trophies can mean any number of the following:
armadillos
possums
skunks
rabbits
raccoons
random bones from who knows where
random skulls from who knows where
The country is a cruel, cruel place and the labs just love it. It might be a little tough for some animal lovers to handle, but while it isn’t exactly the natural order of things (I don’t think labs are indigenous to the area), it is a part of life out here that one tends to get used to. Yesterday when I was walking out to my car, I passed an armadillo, a skull, and a femur in our yard.
Then I passed out.
Not really.
I fear I’m almost used to it by now.
Here’s another problem with the weather. This is a photo I took back in 2014, but it perfectly represents what my garden looks like right now—both the raised beds in the foreground and the larger garden in the background. It’s dead and brown and lifeless, and what I start doing when the weather starts getting really nice….
Is, I start thinking about how much fun it will be to start planting things…and even though I try to stop myself, I start planning where I’m going to plant my tomatoes and where I’m going to plant my peppers and where the herbs will go and so on.
And you might be thinking “Well, what’s wrong with that?”
Well, here are the two things that are wrong with that:
1. Once I start thinking about it, it’s only a matter of time before I lose patience and actually start planting things. And since the weather has been unusually warm, I’m starting to think about it much earlier in the season than I usually do. This means I’m probably going to lose my gourd (no pun intended) and start planting things the second week of March, which will be way too early because we will probably get an ice storm the third week in March.
But once I start on this path, I’m powerless to stop it.
2. The other perilous thing about thinking about gardening this early is that I will likely overplant. It’s the same thing that happens if I start Christmas shopping too early: I’ve tried that before, and what happens is, I wind up buying too much because I want the Christmas shopping fun to keep going. So if I start planting in a couple of weeks, by the time July and August rolls around, I will be in some kind of tomato-based horror movie.
It’s happened before.
I’ve been so excited for my linens to come out. They’ll be in stores this week, I feel like they are the butter on my muffin, the icing on my cake, the squirt whipped cream on my coffee. I’ve been using the linens in my own kitchen and household, and they just make me smile.
Which brings me to a revelation I had the other day: I love working on PW products. I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned to you that I have a little bit of a problem that if I don’t love doing something, I tend not to do it. Just ask my dad! He always used to joke (but he wasn’t joking) that if it wasn’t fun, Ree wouldn’t do it. And you can find evidence of this by opening the door of my laundry room.
But working on dinnerware, bowls, platters, cups, napkins, kitchen towels…oh, I am really, really enjoying it. There have been a few learning curves for me, a few lessons learned, and it definitely requires a lot of detailed attention on my part…but I’m finding that the more I do it and the more I figure things out, the more I’m truly enjoying the whole process.
I feel about it the way I have always felt about blogging: That it’s a fit for me. And that’s a nice feeling to have.
Thank you so much for being supportive of me in the things that I love to do. Your support is a huge part of why I love to do it!
In other news…Charles. The old fella is doing just great these days. In case you missed my posts about it in the fall, he fell ill in October and, without wanting to sound too dramatic, we probably came within 24 hours of losing him. But with the help of amazing, heaven-sent veterinary intervention (and a little vanilla ice cream, Charlie would probably say), he was brought out of the danger zone and has improved every day since then.
Marlboro Man and I aged about thirty years during the whole process, but at least Charlie’s doing just fine!
Ugh, we love that darn dog of ours.
This was a Snapchat photo I posted on our way home from Colorado a couple of weeks ago. We had left at something like 3:00 am, and I was a little bit out of it.
Anyway, I didn’t post this to show you my early morning cranky bottom. I posted it so you’d look at the orangey orange color of my hair, because a few days later I went and de-oranged it a little bit, which made it kind of darker. Here’s a Snapchat video I posted:
I’m still getting used to not being orangey orange orange orange, and it really doesn’t matter much anyway, because my hair has been in a ponytail ever since.
But at least I know the color is different! Ha.
Then there’s The Merc! We’ve been working on “the merc” (mercantile) as Hyacinth and I have been calling it. Hyacinth has been helping me a lot as we plan the store side of things, and we’ve been having a lot of fun. It’s so nice to work on an old building because we don’t have to start from scratch. We really just want to honor the building and add things that bring out the natural beauty—not reinvent the wheel and create a crazy retail space that could be in any structure. The electrician is just about finished with the mercantile side and we start diving into the restaurant side next week.
I’ll take pics and keep ya posted!
But first I might take myself a little nap.
(Super Tuesday wore me out!)
Love,
P-Widdle Diddle