Brain dead

Man oh MAN, am I just so tired of this humidity? It has been non-stop and I cannot WAIT for fall weather. I love that crisp, clean air and having it a little chilly at night. This summer has been like living in soup. It's hot and it's just so darn damp outside, you can't do anything without breaking into a disgusting sweaty mess! I had to work outside yesterday for a few hours. I cannot even tell you how much water I drank during the day and I only had to go to the bathroom one time! I sweated out the rest! And I easily ingested a gallon of water between 11am until 4pm. That's some serious sweating, my friends!

Now, since I am a weather geek I have several weather sites that I visit regularly. I know about barometric pressure lows and highs and the jet stream and El Nino and El Nina and all that silly meterology crap! The dewpoint is certainly a useful measure of what the day is going to feel like and our dewpoints have been ridiculous. It is 70 today. SEVENTY. That means if it's 70 degrees its going to feel icky. And then if it's 82 degrees? You feel awful. That would be my weather forecast if I were your friendly meteorologist in TV:

"Hi people! Don't even bother going outside today. It's going to be icky and sticky and just gross. Stay inside! Turn on the a/c and call it a day! That's about it! Back to you, Ted..."

We don't need to know what it's doing on the other side of the country, right?

Annnnyway, we've got some good weather coming our way after this dang hurricane Earl goes away. They built it up so much over the last few days that everyone has been in a panic about what's to come. As per ususal, it's pooping out as it hits the cooler water and the jet stream is going to veer it away from much of Massachusetts. Just in case, though, I went to our boaty yesterday and got it secured to the dock with extra lines and retied fenders and put the chairs inside. Let's cross our fingers that all the precautions will have been for naught...

In other news, I have no brain today. With the pressure preceding this weather system coming, my brain feels sort of like it's made of styrofoam. I have no brain waves and my sinus on the right side of my head is sort of painful and weird feeling. I'm not going to do well on an IQ test if I were to take one, is what I'm saying. I don't know that I could even recite the alphabet today!

I guess I sort of feel like Sadie today. The dumb dog forgot how to go down the stairs this morning! I wish I were joking! She FORGOT. I had to catch her to prevent her from falling down the entire flight of stairs. I could see it in her expression when she was standing at the top of the stairwell. Sort of a look of bewilderment like "Huh. How did I get up here? What are these uneven squarish long things that are in front of me? Perhaps if I just jump everything will be okay?"

I was SO glad that I was watching her every move. She easily could have broken her leg doing what she did. MAN!

So, here she is...My little dumbo:

What a face!

Here's Koty!
Doesn't it look like he's telling me off? He probably was!

Right now I am eating a locally grown tomato. They are SO good. I sliced it up and drizzled it with this amazing dressing that is also made locally. It's a basil vinaigrette and it's to DIE for!

I bought the tomatoes yesterday at this little garden center in Salem called Thomson's Garden Center. They don't have a lot of stuff, so I usually don't go there since I generally need a bazillion things for the jobs that I do. Well, I had about 10 minutes to burn, so I went over there to see if they had anything for these dish gardens that I was going to create for my new client! Of course, I ended up buying myself a couple things (hello! Do you read this blog?). I limited myself to two echinaceas. One is creamy white and the other is the traditional pink variety. They are adorable:
I think I may need to get a couple more for the other area in the side yard! They were only $8 each! A steal!

And, I also ended up getting hens and chicks for the dish gardens I was doing and I also had this:That's a snake plant! I inherited a bunch of plants from a former co-worker and she gave me a snake plant. It has since grown and grown and needed to be separated, and the other day when I was watering it, this little guy just broke off in my hand! So, there ya go! A free plant to add to the dish garden (which came out beautifully, I might add!). Aside from the snake plant and hens and chicks, I used three types of sedum and an aloe!

Ok...I gotta run. Off to make sure boaty will be safe in the storm!

The scene the crime, as it were!

As you may already know if you've been reading this here blog, yesterday was my 8th wedding anniversary! We had a lovely, lovely wedding and a whoppingly fun reception! It was quite the par-taaay! There was a lot of whooping it up, dancing, drinking and general fun going on that whole, entire night! We kicked the last revelers out at 4am. I was pooped, to say the least.

We had the wedding itself in the seaside garden at the House of the Seven Gables, which just happens to be a short walk from our house! So neat! Here's a bit of the garden:So pretty, right? Spectacular.

As we walked down the "aisle" (which was grass between the rows of chairs!), the very special schooner, The Friendship, sailed by under sail!Since we are both just lovers of boating and the ocean, we felt it was a really good omen for that to have happened!

Here was our great invitation; created by my husband's very talented sister:That entire thing perfectly captures our life - our fine city in the background, the ocean, boats, whales, and most importantly, the dogs hugging each other at the bottom of the card! On the left is my beloved Lady and she is hugging our boy, Koty there on the right! I love the hearts coming out of them and their happy faces! That really summed it up for them. They chose each other out of 20 other dogs that were playing together one afternoon on Salem Common. They didn't want to play with anyone else - just each other! And so began their love affair; which apparently rubbed off on us!! It was a big lovefest with the four of us.

It's not quite the same with Sadie and Koty - he sort of tolerates her and she reFUSES to play with poor Koty. He tries every single day to play with her and she just stands there frozen like a statue. It's terrible! Poor Koty!

Anyway, back to the story!

The reception for this shindig was at our house! Not something I would recommend to anyone. Ever. Ever ever ever. We had to move out all the furniture, clean clean clean the house, get a huge bar stocked, find a caterer, get plates, cups napkins, silverware, and do all the decorations! We also did the flowers ourselves (surprise!) and basically had 130 humans leaving cups and plates and crap EVERYWHERE! What a mess! Anywho, our favorite band, Lonely Gus and the One Night Stand - (again, says a lot about us that a band with that name would be our wedding band!) - set up in the corner of our huge living room (it's like 600 square feet in there):


We decorated the entire ceiling in there with funny handmade fishies and sea creatures and then hung streamers from the ceiling, as well! Here is one of the fishies and two streamers I saved:It was quite festive!

To celebrate our anniversary last night, we first went to our go-to place for a drink, Finz:


We then walked downtown for dinner and ate at a brand new restaurant called the Adriatic Restaurant and Bar:

OH. MY. GOOD. LORD! The food was exceptional and the waiter was fantastic. I cannot recommend this place enough. Honestly, the best meal I've had outside of Boston. Ever.

It was a wonderful, delicious evening and I can't wait for our 9th next year!! : )

Happy Thursday (or Friday if you're reading tomorrow!)!

Ciao!

Holy Heat and High Humidity

OH. MY. GOOD. LORD. ON. EARTH.

This weather BLOWS, as my teenage brother-in-law would say. I say it SUCKS! Funny that sucks and blows means the same thing, you know, sort of. Well, let's not go down that road, right?!!

For the love of ALL THAT IS HOLY, would someone please turn off the furnace outside? Please? And the humidifier? Could we please give that a rest for the remainder of the year? PLEASE? I am SO done with this humidity crap I could scream!

We've got 95 degrees and VERY high humidity which makes it feel like about 100. It is September tomorrow. HELLOOOOO? Could we turn on the fall weather for a minute? I never, ever remember having a summer like this in Massachusetts before. NEVER. We might get a week of this crap, but this is really, really getting ridiculous? It never stops! Oh, wait, unless it decides to rain for 5 days and then we get flooding and misery in that direction.

I'm just saying Mother Nature is PISSED off at us and has been showing us what she can do! Man! Some crazy shi*t out there!

And I'm sorry I have not been blogging regularly. I've been wicked busy (bonjour, fellow Massachusetts people - you know of the "wicked" busy saying!). Aside from having houseguests (again. I know.) I have been busy busy with my new client getting pretty houseplants put in their proper places, then shopping for ceramic pots for all of them (30 in all!), then had the daunting job of planting them all in the pots yesterday and the lugging them BACK to their proper locations throughout her sprawling house! My right hand is SOOO sore today from carrying the bags of soil hither and yon and then carrying the heavy ceramic pots with soil and big plants all around. Whew. It was quite the job!

Good news is that they look fantastic and she's already hiring me to do more plants inside, then I'm decorating her front door with a garland and swag and then she wants to buy pots for her front porch and have me fill them with fall plants! Isn't that so exciting?!! I'm psyched! Oh, and she's also hired me to put together a pretty gift with a certain plant for a friend of hers! Definitely keeping me busy and out of trouble!

In other world news, I picked my first eggplant!
Isn't he just so adorable? I love his roundness!

Got these yummy local tomatoes at a garden center the other day:There is absolutely nothing better than tomatoes at this time of year. They are glorious!

My bonsai schefflera is doing fabulously well! Look at this adorable new leaf:It's a little over the size of a nickel. SO cute!

Had another Black Swallowtail in the back yard:
There are butterflies out there constantly this year. Lots of those Painted Lady butterflies and I just saw a couple of Monarchs today!

Mongo the butterfly bush is now officially over 17 feet tall. I went up to the deck with a tape measure and then dropped it to the ground to see how ridiculously huge this thing has gotten. It's verging on 18 feet. Oy vay!That's not normal!

And last time I was outdoor plant shopping, of course, I bought myself a couple goodies! Just some rubrum to add some seasonal color.
I like them in there with the nasturtiums and bolotonias that I planted a while back. Nice color combo.

So, that gets you up to the current day. Nothing too exciting going on...Oh! One more bit of news. The cute kenilworth ivy that I had in the flower boxes? They bit the dust. Grim reaper came to claim them. They died. Dead. Bye bye. Adios. So I ripped them out of 5 of the flower boxes on Sunday and replaced them with the cute purple million bells that I had ordered months ago! I had been growing them in pots, so I just took them out of the pots and plunked them in the flower boxes! They seem to be happy in their new location, so that's exciting! I'll take a picture when they get more established and a bit bigger!

Lastly? Tomorrow is our 8th wedding anniversary! Woo HOOO! 8 years and I haven't killed him yet! Just kidding! It's been a wonderful 8 years! Yaaay for us!

Ok. That's all she wrote!

Happy Tuesday!