Vacation Gone Wild

So I took a vacation from work.

It was meant to be a “work around the home place” vacation – one where I caught up on my weeding, put down newspaper and cardboard mulch in the garden to keep from having to weed more, cleaned my house from top to bottom, and re-do the brick walkway in the backyard with landscape fabric to get rid of the grass going crazy and trying to invade my herb garden and strawberry bed. It was going to be a great plan.

Didn’t work out that way.

Friday, July 1^st, I developed a tooth abscess. To the point we had to call and bother my dentist at 9 pm so he could call in a prescription for pain killers and antibiotics. At 10 am on Saturday, we met my most kind dentist at his office and he ground that particular tooth down and suggested we might have to pull it since it’s already had two root canals – the most recent one just a few months ago. Woohoo! By 2 pm that afternoon, we discovered I cannot take hydrocodone with acetaminophen without getting nauseous and all those fun things that go along with nausea. By 4 pm, I looked like a chipmunk storing nuts for the winter in my cheek.

Not the best look for me. Just sayin'.

Needless to say, I didn’t get much yard work done last week. And we won’t even go into the whole unsuccessful IUD retrieval procedure on Tuesday. It was not my week.

But – I did finally get my house cleaned. Well, parts of it anyway. And the strawberry bed got weeded. We also harvested our first yellow squash from the one volunteer squash plant that came up in the corn. None of our melon/squash/cucumber section came up. Only volunteers in other parts of the garden. We’re grateful for whatever did come up since it’s been so darn dry this year. We’ve had maybe an inch and a half of rain since January. We see clouds and get our hopes up, then it rains somewhere else. *sigh*

My Rhode Island red hen is sitting on banty eggs at the moment. She tries sitting on the leghorn’s eggs, but since we don’t have a full size rooster, we sneak those out when she’s eating, since nothing is going to hatch out of those eggs anyway. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that maybe we’ll get a few new babies!

I’ve lost 5 of my tater plants – I’m not sure what is killing them underground, but it’s annoying me to no end. And I’ve yet to see a single new potato on the others. Methinks this tater experiment might be a failure. Luckily the onions are doing pretty well, so I don’t feel like a total root crop failure.

My eldest son turned 18 yesterday. I’m having a bit of a crisis about it – but quietly, because how silly is it to have a crisis about the fact you managed to raise a handsome, intelligent, witty, kindhearted child to the age of 18? But really – 18? How did that happen? It’s just surreal. Does this make me officially old?