Summer is officially here, and it has brought the first heat wave for our area. Something tells me this is going to be another scorcher of a summer, especially since we had no winter at all.

With the heat on, I’m pretty much over yard work at this point. I got my side gardens started and some flowers finally growing. Now I just have to hope they don’t become food for critters as they usually do. I also got grass growing where there was nothing but a few patches of crab grass. Take that John! He didn’t think I’d get it to grow in the shady areas, but I did. It just took a raking up several inches of rotting leaves and branches, and a lot of seeding and re-seeding. There are still a few bare patches, but I’m hoping they will fill in eventually.

The only thing I didn’t get to was the side of the house where I have a million saplings to cut down. I’ll wait till a nice cool day to do that. Plus I’ll need to put on pants, socks over the pants cuff, and deep woods myself to keep ticks away . . . then scrub myself with poison ivy scrub afterwards to be safe. Not something I’m itching to do right now.

Oh . . . my first tomatoes are growing too! I am also trying peppers this year in the garden as well. So far that plant doesn’t seem to be growing very much.

Now it’s time to finally move onto some house work I’ve had on my list for the past three years: the two downstairs guest rooms. At this point I think the only thing I’ll get done is packing up stuff, moving it to the basement, and throwing out or donating a lot of other stuff. If I can get that done, then I know what John’s project for his time off in the winter can be . . . helping me actually make those two rooms into real rooms. They both need a repaint, and he just loves picking out paints for rooms. Plus we’ll need to probably go furniture shopping at some point for some more book shelves, a desk and a new dresser.