I love watching robins take baths (or avoid them as the teenaged ones do) and various birds drink from the makeshift basin (tupperware container) we have on the patio. It was a happy accident that I had left it out there with water in it once and noticed the birds appreciated it.
Oh, and the garden is still mostly green. There is the tiniest sweet pepper and cucumber, neither of which I don't think will actually grow up, but the tomatoes are doing pretty well. And potato plants seem to be thriving. I finally moved the lavender from the little container it originally came in into a little pot for each plant but they had started to whither really fast; they were doing quite well earlier.
There was a huge storm Monday morning. Colin woke me up, pointing out the window. I sat up, saw that there was sheets of rain pouring down the window, and fell back into bed hoping for more sleep. "Oh, that's nice," was about all I could muster. The power in our house apparently went out for less than an hour that morning.
We had considered going south to Deerfield that day but decided against it. We went about doing our usual home-bound activities. By mid-afternoon, we'd decided to go run a couple errands and hang out in a coffee shop in an area usually about 20-30 minutes from our house. While driving through our town, we were intrigued by the lack of lights - no stoplights were working and all the businesses looked black and shuttered up. Of course, that didn't ward us off at all. In retrospect it would have been a good time to turn around; we ended up sitting in traffic for three hours. And only being able to get one little thing at a hardware store and grabbing some coffee to go. The cafe was jam packed with people on laptops and everything else except the hospital seemed to be shut down. We went so far we saw the lake.
Tuesday was really not much better; I went to get some milk and other food stuffs at grocery store in the opposite direction that we took the day before. First, I had to pay for gas with cash. Then the store was closed. So I went to another store, which was open but had no milk. Had nothing that usually is kept cold or frozen, in fact.
There are trees and branches down everywhere. I left half an hour earlier than usual for my shift at work this morning anticipating bad traffic but it was actually just fine. However, I learned that some coworkers still don't have power at home, including one who doesn't have running water either. There's apparently something like 100,000 people who probably won't get power back until Saturday.
What was the storm damage to my garden? One unripe tomato ripped off by the wind. We were just plain lucky.
...
I went for a walk near the college today and stumbled across some black raspberries. There was quite a lot of them and it didn't look like anyone or anything had eaten them. They were yummy.
The wedding is in two weeks and one day. We've gotten so much done but it feels like there's still so much to do, despite how low key, small, and simple we're keeping it. I don't want to imagine the headache organizing a more normal wedding would be - ick.
I'm feeling a little more awake now so I'm going to go get more things checked off the wedding to do list.
