Sometimes, I just can’t think of a post title. This is one of them. Considering I’ve been doing this for nine years, I know you understand.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes for Don. He had a busy day with two shows, a cake and a celebration with the cast, and an exchange of birthday videos with Little Z (this has become their tradition.)
He sent me a video of the cast singing Happy Birthday to him – it’s pretty neat when you have trained singers serenading you. I’m so glad they honored him yesterday.
The Annabelle hydrangeas are turning white.
And the Endless Summer hydrangeas are turning pinky purple.
These day lilies are blooming on the far side of the house. I love the ruffly edges.
Today I meet with the agent(s) handling the house my friends are interested in. It’s a spectacular house. You could fit five Mockingbird Hill Cottages within its walls. I’m really looking forward to checking it out. If we give Rick and Doug a big thumbs up, they will most likely fly out here to make an offer. It’s a beautiful day, so I should be able to get some good photos to send to them.
Victoria, a reader of this blog, wrote me to ask if I would be interested in a set of mini Fiesta-like bowls that she had in her possession. Of course, being a former Fiesta collector, I immediately said yes. They arrived in my post office box this week. Aren’t they sweet? I love those colors.
Thank you, Victoria! I ‘m pretty sure that Caroline is already thinking about where she’ll put them.
Happy Sunday.
So many gorgeous blooms! It is not raining this morning…yay! I’m glad Don had a good birthday. I can’t believe it’s the last week of June. Another month flying by. Heading to church with the family this morning! Happy Day my friend. Hugs!
I know! It’s almost July! How can that be?
The Fiesta bowls are so cute! The things that one can find for a dolls’ house is amazing. I am so happy the cast treated Don to a happy birthday serenade! You are going to have so much fun when you go out there. Please take pictures to share with us.
Have a lovely Sunday.
I will. I’ll be sharing here and on Instagram, Debbie.
No title needed—those spectacular floral shots are plenty. And those sweet little bowls, the perfect apostrophe!
Happy house-touring…sounds like fun.
It was fun, Shanna. It’s pretty spectacular.
Those bowls are adorable, the flowers are gorgeous…and you are going on a house tour! Yeah…sometimes life is in the simple things…which is perfect! ;)
Thanks, Donnamae. The house was really beautiful. And huge!
Have a fun day house looking and playing with the mini-bowls.
Thank you, Wendy!
The bowls are wonderful! I have a set of the old Pyrex bowls, and the colors of those are just what my set is…. shade variances, but quite the same!
My Endless Summer is at the same blooming stage as is yours! My Limelight is just setting the blooms. It is going to be a great year when they “flower”!
Glad Don had a happy birthday day! I’m sure it is one he will remember. Have a wonderful time viewing the house today. Sounds like it will be a fun Sunday afternoon!
My limelight doesn’t flower until later in the summer, but the other two hydrangeas are up and beautiful.
Hi Claudia, Totally switching subjects…..what’s the Model # of your portable Cannon printer? Are you still happy with it?
It’s the PIXMA IP110. Yes. I really like it.
Hello and I’m visiting from Idaho and found your blog though Sue. Your lillies are sure pretty mine haven’t bloom yet.
If you fine the time stop in for a cup of coffee.
Thanks for stopping by, Dora! My aunt’s name was Dora and I’m very fond of that name.
sorry to be a day late in wishing don and little z a very happy, healthy birthday (i was moving)! sounds like don had a busy and fun day. trust little z had the same.
nice of you to help friends with their house-hunting. feedback from a trusted friend or family makes things easier, especially on such a big thing as a house and moving cross-country!
hope you have a good week ahead!
My reaction to it was so positive that they’re flying out tomorrow to see it for themselves, Kathy.
How nice of the cast to do that for Don!…I wish we could see the video…I’m sure that little man had a great day too!
Little Z had a great day. Lots of presents and fun.
Love the little bowls! So colorful…festive FIESTA.
Had to think about that…yes…of a group of professional singers doing Happy Birthday; that would really be SOMEthing!!
We had a wild day yesterday (Sunday). My husband likes anything that flies, especially if it makes a big bang, so we took this trek north up the Southern/Central California coast to see the Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Vandenberg Air Force base near Lompoc, Turned out to be a l.o.n.g. day. I just don’t do well that many hours on the road, especially considering I’ve still got a sore neck from the car accident a month ago. But, oh well, a little adventure here & there makes a new memory…
So, I’m very ignorant of all this stuff but my husband tried to explain that the rocket was carrying communications satellites. This is apparently all the brainchild of that billionaire named Elon Musk ( “[private] space transport services company” named SpaceX – – he wants to colonize Mars) who ‘invented’ (was the ‘architect’ of?) those fancy cars called Teslas. I’ve known so little of him except for stupid stuff, like fleetingly dating actor Johnny Depp’s ex-wife, although I actually HAD read one time that he went to Wharton. I did know he was young, in his 40s…but he’s not somebody I’ve ‘followed’ with any kind of interest; I’m just not into outer space and NASA and breaking the sound barrier, etc. (like my husband is but, what can I say, he’s an air force brat…)…
I would say the strip of road we decided to park on, about six miles outside the gates of the air force base, had maybe 3,000 gawkers (hard to tell; I wasn’t going to walk it!!) but there are farm roads you can turn off on, it’s a lot of flat agricultural/row crop fields like cabbage out in there, with the ocean on the other side of the mountain and I figured it would be a worse traffic jam but it wasn’t bad, the multi-thousands of area spectators for the event were quite spread out, and the weather was cool if not fairly windy, which I guess almost caused the mission to abort. There were wafts of white clouds, pretty dense over time, with low-lying coastal fog; this was noonish, with the clock ticking for lift-off…
But, oh my; the sound coming out of that thing when it rumbled to life was incredible; otherworldly. There’s no way to explain that sound. I was much more impressed with noise power of those engines than the sight of that fiery rocket going up, up, up. Kinda fun to hear a whole lotta people whooping and hollering at a successful rocket launch!
The thing that impressed my husband almost as much as the rocket was the number of Teslas on the road. We counted six parked across from us. My husband did walk up and down the road a bit, and I think he said he counted 30 of these vehicles in just our general vicinity. I guess there was some big bash after the launch for Tesla owners; the couple parked closest to us had driven down from San Francisco and they had paid $120,000 for their vehicle. (Can you imagine paying that kind of money FOR A CAR?) We were in one of our jalopies (old car that frankly is an embarrassment!!) so, yeah, we felt totally out of place but, you know, everybody was so nice, it was like tailgating. And I learned that some of the people follow these launches much like storm chasers follow tornadoes.
We detoured to lose traffic after the launch, and wound up in the footsteps of Sideways, that quirky film about two guys touring the coastal wine country, with the ‘windmill inn’ in Buellton, the town’s famous restaurant called The Hitching Post and then onto the quaint Danish-inspired village of Solvang. Saw more vineyards than I ever remember seeing before (been awhile since I’ve been up that way; years…); acres and acres of grapevines, up and down the rolling hills (hills which aren’t so green anymore; our rain a distant memory). Many herds of black Angus cattle in pastures, too.
Didn’t stop to sight-see; ‘way too many summer tourists which was the same thing we ran into later, also, in Santa Barbara. You just don’t ever want be leaving Santa Barbara to go south, on a Sunday late afternoon or early evening, especially during summer holiday, but that’s where we found ourselves. Ugh. We both know better! Before we ever actually knew one another, my husband and I both lived in Santa Barbara but, in these days, some 30 years later, the traffic is far worse; it was taking ‘forever’ just to get off city streets and merge onto the 101 Highway South and then, once on it, cars were barely crawling…and I’m getting to where I can’t stand that sort of choking traffic anymore (does this mean I’m getting OLD?!). So, it took us longer to get home, SO much longer, but we did everything we could to take side roads/parallel roads to stay off that freeway as much as possible (even when it’s not summer, this is a big Sunday crush of Los Angeles residents beating it back to the city for the Monday workweek).
Gosh, it was beautiful in Santa Barbara, though, as always. Sunny and probably 75 degrees around 4pm, lots of sailboats on the beautiful blue sea. Can’t blame people for wanting to leave 90s temps/heat further inland when it’s so lovely and cool at the beach. So many families on vacation; they’ve probably waited all year for it.
Quite the journey, Vicki! Traffic on the weekends is always an issue – here, as well. I will often delay an errand because I don’t want to run into the ‘weekenders heading home to NYC’ traffic.
Glad that Don had a nice birthday. Those Fiesta bowls are lovely.
Marilyn
He did. Thank you, Marilyn!
I love hydrangeas, mine is a shade of pink.