At any rate, the semester is over. I am glad. Graduation has come and gone and after one final meeting this afternoon, I will officially be on break for about two weeks before beginning my summer teaching schedule (more on that in a later post).
Yesterday I woke up feeling ambitious and spent the better part of four hours outdoors accomplishing the following tasks: 1) planting sunflower and zinnia seeds in a very large bed in our backyard. I planted a lot of seeds this year including sweet peas, lavender, bachelors buttons, and nasturtiums. If even half of the sunflowers grow, that back area is going to look awesome. Here’s hoping. It’s not a complete gamble. I planted just a few back there last summer as a test and they did pretty well.
2) Bringing up our patio furniture and assembling it. While this may not sound like a particularly arduous task, there are few things you have to take into consideration. It was 86 degrees yesterday by 11:oo am. The table, umbrella and chairs were down in the 
basement, so I had to lug them up the narrow, slick, muddy steps. The table was in pieces and we all know how good I am with spatial relations, so the fact that it only took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to put the legs on is a major accomplishment. But perhaps the biggest obstacle came when I discovered that Nimbus, our cat, had used the umbrella as a litter box. To say it was gross, well, that doesn’t even begin to describe it. At any rate, I had to disassemble the umbrella, wash it, and then put it back together. Good times.
And finally, 3) Sweeping off our back porch. Again, this doesn’t sound particularly complicated, but when you have a gigantic tree (I think it’s an oak) shedding seed pods (we used to call them helicopters when we were kids) at an alarming rate, well, let’s just say I don’t know why I bothered to sweep.
The reward? That came in two parts but both were equally gratifying. The first part came when RJ arrived home from work (yes, he started his new job this week. Hooray!) and said, “Wow.” The second part came when I came out this morning to sit on my back porch, with my tea and type this blog post. The pictures above are some of the flowers to bloom this year.
Brianna Pike 