Thank heaven for small favors

I'm happy to report that the avocado trees seem to be thriving! Yeay! There's one thing that I'm doing right, for now. The jade tree is also still alive. So maybe I don't have a "brown thumb" after all, or maybe it's just that Celeste hasn't taken an active interest in gardening again. She ripped my last two plants out by the roots several times, until there just weren't enough roots to sustain the poor things. I suppose getting transplanted over and over gets tiresome, too, so they eventually gave up and just quit on me. I wonder how big the avocado pits will grow to be...I haven't actually SEEN an avocado plant, although I believe they are trees.

Yes, Toady, the jade plant is one with a woody stem and cushiony leaves. Kind of a succulent or cactus relative. No thorns, but a desert plant.

For the time being, Celeste is preoccupied with getting herself into our bed. She seems to be obsessed with the idea. She's big, though, and a dog her size in the bed makes it uncomfortable for the two of us. Yesterday afternoon, I looked in when O was taking a nap, and she was there on the bed in the usual dog posture: head toward the foot of the bed, with the butt end almost on the pillows. It was just a mercy that she didn't have her usual case of noxious fumes...poor O might have passed away or at least passed out while Celeste was passing gas.

Our Big News today is that we got a washing machine. It will be delivered and installed tomorrow. Yeay! We are rejoicing here - no more weekly trips to haul dirty clothes to the laundry; no more washing heavy jeans and coats by hand; no more clothes hanging for three days in a row and smelling nasty. I can't seem to wring enough water out by hand to get them to dry in less than three days. And I've even got a clothesline to hang them on! And they threw in a vacuum cleaner with the purchase of the washer. Woot! We killed two birds with one stone!

I have only two fiber projects in the works for now and lots of reading: a purple moebius scarf/shawl and a black alpaca skirt for Greenlee. Both are progressing at a decent rate, so I hope to have them finished in about a week. And, while I was in the US, I discovered that I was STARVING for reading material. So I bought a few of the latest spy novels and some other literature, and Suzzanne gave me a couple of good ones to read too...8 good-sized books in all. One of them I read while at the farm. I whizzed through "The Mistress of Spices" on the plane back to Peru. Yesterday I finished "Spy", by Ted Bell. Presently, I am reading "Angels and Demons", by Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame. Oh no! I can see the end of my summer reading before the end of the summer! Thank goodness for Amazon.com. I'll be perusing the best seller list for my next reading adventure. Any suggestions for good reads?