Gratitude #76

Welcome to my monthly gratitude post. There is a group of us who write these, so feel free to join in anytime you like and let LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color know. You can hop over there and see more  uplifting posts.

I just love Calla lilies and am I happy that we have the perfect spot for this group of five. This is their third summer! They are in a south facing bed close to the house, so I think this is why they continue to survive the winter.

I like vegetables from our garden. These radishes were absolutely delicious!

I like black mulch. Especially when it’s on sale. MacGyver did a bunch of refreshing as well as spreading it on this new bed. I like the zinnias I planted from seed in the arc between the Asiatic lily and the hydrangea. I can’t wait until they bloom!

I love murals. This one is on a bookstore in Amherstburg. I love the quote:

A word after a word after a word is power.

I love the rhododendron gardens in Amherstburg. They were planted in 1986, the same year that Brianne was born. I actually have a picture of them shortly after they were planted, which was close to Brianne’s birth, when my mum had come down to be with me for her birth!

Our weigela are beautiful this year! They’ve given us such a gorgeous display and also privacy. 

I like this sunflower collar Dayna bought for Xena. She was so patient while Dayna made several attempts to put it on correctly. 

I love the poses Miss Bella strikes, especially her twinkle toes, this one complete with puppy paws, see below. She does this quite regularly, especially in the summer months.

Here she’s stretched out on the deck. I like our early morning routine where she taps or scratches the patio door to be let out onto the upper deck where I usually brush her. She is very good about staying up here; the few times she goes to venture down the stairs I just have to say. “Uh-uh!” and she turns right around!

I love my grand-cat Harper. She’s striking quite the serene pose here. She and I were waiting patiently while the moving van got unloaded with Dayna and Tyler’s belongings. 

Not to be left out, here is a picture of Rufus with his paws crossed as usual. The chair cushion had been tucked under the patio table from when it had rained earlier and we hadn’t put it back on the chair, so he made good use of it!

As a few of us do, I usually mention good TV shows and books. I finished From Scratch on Netflix, and plan to get the book out of our library. It really was good, and lovely to ‘be’ in Florence again as well as see Sicily. We watched Kiss the Ground and The Biggest Little Farm, both of which were excellent, and I highly recommend them. I’m halfway through Gather and learning a lot. I’m also being reminded how there are no borders on Turtle Island, and how similar of philosophies beliefs and customs there are between the Indigenous peoples of North America. I wish we would turn to them more for their ancient wisdom, especially regarding forest management. 

I finished The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston, the current book in my University of Alberta book club. Wow, what a great read about a lost culture in Honduras, similar to the Mayans, finally found and mapped using a very cool new technology called LiDAR. Douglas was part of the first successful expedition to it. I’m just about finished On a Night of a Thousand Stars by Andrea Yaryura Clark. I seem to be in Central or South America with the past few books! This one takes place in Argentina, about the desaparecidos, men and women who were forcibly ‘disappeared’ during the years of a military coup after they deposed the wife of Perón. It’s a fictional story, though based in historical events. It’s alarming how far right Nazi beliefs and reigns of terror can all too easily occur. Finally, after months of waiting, I got Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. It won Canada Reads 2023, and will be my next read, probably quite an interesting one!

The prompt for today from LeeAnna asked if we like going to state or county fairs. I am not really a big fan of them, maybe because I grew up in a big city, where we didn’t have anything like that. There was an exhibition associated with Edmonton’s Klondike days festival. Mum took us kids several years, and one year I entered some dolls I had made and well I won the category! Here there is The Harrow Fair, Harrow being a neighbour town to Kingsville. I went for the first time last year, as well as entered my quilt, fleurs, in the only quilt competition that year (Covid was still making things slow to start back up) a people’s choice competition that was supposed to be anonymous… Didn’t win anything, but it was interesting seeing all the various competitions and categories they have.

Harrow is a  farming community in the area, and this fair is a big deal, a midway and all. Will I enter something this year? I’ll have to check out the categories online and see! 

All right, speaking of quilting I’m off to get Rainbow Neighbourhood done.