Sunny, Breezy, and Pleasant

It really was a nice day. Chris and I got up early for different reasons. I was being crowded out by Milo and Emily and Chris had an early raquetball game. I decided to go over to Gaye's house and get the yard work done early before it got too warm for that to be much fun. This went well. Gaye and I finished up about the same time Chris did (he'd shown up halfway through to mow the lawn) and the place is really starting to come together. The nearly-dead lawn Gaye inherited is now lush and green and all the birds that the bird feeders attracted are picking off the tent caterpillars that might otherwise eat the young veggie plants down to stubs. I'm a little worried that one of the pumpkin plants already has mosaic disease. I'm going to google it, and if that's the case, then pull it and just do without that plant this year. It's too soon for the squash plants to be fighting off disease. It might just be some damage from some cold nights. I did spray the blueberry bushes again--four out of five are still fighting for their lives against critters. If most of them die, next year I'm buying mature plants for those spots from local nurseries.

I got home just as Chris was finishing our yard. Worked for a bit with Max on his homework and then got to work on some of mine. I sent out some emails looking for contract work and then put together a shopping list. Chris and the twins and I went shopping and then Chris and Max and Gaye went off to see the Indiana Jones movie. With Max's permission, I attacked his room. It was the last hold-out upstairs in the spring-cleaning wars. (Not that the kitchen EVER stays clean for longer than overnight, but at least it's been really, really clean for a few hours this week at one point. Ditto every other room upstairs, but not Max's room.)

So that's what I did this afternoon. I attacked. I reorganized. I did what is probably the last Mom-only cleaning of his room (and is the first of its kind in years), and I had him help me put up all the posters he wanted before he left for the movie. It was really very satisfying.

Now what's next is reorganizing 10 shelves of children's books. It's time for another culling of books, time to make some order out of the chapter books now that they are more than two shelves worth of books, and time to get more magazine holders. The first thing that happened when I got all the magazines off the shelves and into holders was that Ben and Milo sat down and read--for hours straight--all the Cricket Magazine company (ladybug, cricket, and spider, and all the topic-related spinoffs like Ask and Click and Apple Seed) magazines that we've had on a bookshelf buried behind my desk in my office.

It's 5:30 pm and Ben and Milo and I are waiting for the others to come back from their matinee so we can start our BBQ. We're just having burgers and corn, but that's enough, isn't it? Yum :)

I hope you're all having a great Memorial Day weekend.