I Love New York Travel

Gee, how many 100-year floods have we had, now? Five in 5 years? It’s getting a LITTLE ridiculous now….

Everyone is blaming all sorts of things– global warming, aliens, chemtrails, urban sprawl, “just wacky weather,” and the Smurfs, trolls and tabletop display objects.

COME ON. lol

Part of it is the weather, just flukey weather. But I think the weather is being manipulated, to a degree. Urban sprawl also has a lot to do with it. The engineering dumpkopfs have allowed McMansions built on former flood plains. Where else does the water have to go except toward the older infrastructures (us)?

I’m sick of rain, though. We’ve had plenty for 10 years. It’s time to stop. Yeah.

Green and blue are not my favorite colors in the world, but together in nature, they are strikingly beautiful. Look at my bright green apples dangling before such a brilliantly azure blue sky! It reminds me of our trip to Lake Ontario, several years ago now, when the sod was so beautiful and green and the lake absolutely breathtaking blue.

Gee, that reminds me– we haven’t been out and about is SO LONG. I have got to do something special for these kids before summer ends. We traveled so much when they were younger (before the days of digital baby monitors), but the past few years have been pretty sparse.

June was a deliciously dry month until the final week. I loved it like I haven’t loved fine weather in a long time. After all, I’ll take the dry weather when I can have it. April and May were horribly soggy, with destructively depressing weather. June came ’round and it was SWEET.

I purchased a patio set (our old one was ruined by the April floods) and a screened in portable gazebo, and I’ve been having a blast. In the evenings, I might read Washington Irving stories on my iPad or ipod touch 8g (the Kindle app is so cool!), or we just light candles and tell funny stories to each other. Thanks to the screened gazebo, I can sit outside without being harassed and eaten alive by bugs.

The only downside? No peepers. None. The evenings are eerily silent. One pal said it’s just temporary, they’ll be back next year. I hope so. Summer isn’t the same without them.

Anyway, it’s July now and it’s turning out to be very nice, too. We’ve had a few thunderstorms, but no damaging rains. I can relax for a bit.

How’s your summer going?

?????

After a few years of pruning, then not pruning, then watering, then not watering…. I think I may have solved the problem why my beautiful Nikko blue hydrangeas won’t bloom.

Not enough sun.

I got them because they love shade. But apparently, there’s a bit TOO much shade here, now. The maple tree (unseen in the photo) has apparently grown quite a bit these past 10 years, and now towers over the shrubs.

So now I must decide… move the hydrangeas?

I was sifting through the old garden photos yesterday, looking for an appropriate picture for a blog post. Wow. This was one nice garden. Seems like eons ago. Because my garden presently is a disaster. I have had neither the time nor the energy to tackle the massive annual invasion of weeds. I don’t know what it is about my yard, but the weeds here are horribly tenacious. EVERY year, it’s a battle. And then, April floods wiped out everything, except the weed seeds. They thrived on the destruction. It almost makes a girl want to quit.

My beautiful birthday lilies are gone. They usually bloom this time of year, but their spot is barren. I can only guess that the torrential rains scooped them up from their nest, plummeted them down the watery pike into someone else’s yard. We inherited a rose bush that way, a few years ago. I hope my beloved plants are not in some rusty steel drum container floating along the swamps… I like to think they are being taken care of by a good gardener.

Anyway, I doubt I’ll get a veggie garden in this year. And my flower beds that I’ve worked so hard for these last 10 years are devastated. How can it be that one flood and a year’s worth of weeds wreck 10 years work? Something’s horribly wrong with this world.