Welcome to the Internet!

I have finally joined 2005 and started a blog. Only several years late! But the blog medium still seems to thrive and I enjoy visiting some, so here I am with my own. I am used to soliloquizing to the internet, so this seems like a perfect place to collect my thoughts on the things I think about each day. I think about my kids, my home (and why the garbage *always* smells), my husband, my cats, my garden, my sewing...my, my, my! I am not a mommy blogger. I have no intentions of monetizing my web presence. I am simply a narcissist who likes talking to herself and admiring all the pretty things in her life.

Like this:

This is clematis (the Mrs. James Mason variety, I believe). It bloomed just a few days ago. I love the delicate little fuzzy bits in the center. Maybe I should learn some flower terminology so that in the future I can use the correct term for the fuzzy bits.

This clematis was here when we moved into our house almost six years ago. It was big and bushy and, along with the peonies, one of the few flowering residents of our yard. A freak snow storm in October of 2006 damaged the trellis it lived on, and we managed to attach it to a new trellis, but were frightened to do anything more than that. We figured it was best to let it do its thing; it had survived for so long without any human interference after all. I spent the next few years adding perennials to the surrounding bed and finally last summer I found the courage to prune this creature. There was so much seemingly dead "wood" behind the leaves and I cut it all back, almost to the ground. It was then that I discovered we now had two clematises (that's right, right?): one at the base of the trellis and another about six inches away just growing along the ground. I had thought that the vines on the ground merely traveled over from the base, but they turned out to be their own thing. I let the ground clematis remain the ground clematis and this is the plant that produced those flowers above. The trellis clematis made a strong comeback this spring and has already climbed the height of its home. It isn't flowering this time around, however. Maybe it will give us a few flowers later on in the summer, as Mrs. James Mason likes to do.

I love the resilience of plants and I might be really weird to say this, but I hope they have some time after we're all gone to take over the world again. I think they've put up with enough from us.