Roses

Wow, I left the house in the car 3 times today! Since I work from home, many days I only leave the house on foot to walk the dog. But today I drove the car 3 times.

This morning I went to the bank to make a deposit before starting work. Then just before noon the package from our accountant arrived with our tax returns in it, so I signed them, attached the W2s, sealed them, and left the house again for the post office.

One of the things I absolutely LOVE about in living in a very small town is that on April 15th, the tax filing deadline, I could go to the post office and mail my returns in under 5 minutes. If I tried to do that back in Northern VA, there would literally be a line outside the post office, and a line snaking through the lobby, with at least an hour's wait. So I got our tax returns postmarked and into the mail. Now I can hardly wait for our refund checks!

I returned home and finished my day's work. When Spouse came home he suggested we go to Home Depot to look at plants so I left the house in the car for the 3rd time.

We have a gift card for Home Depot, and our friend John gave us some good suggestions for plants that are suitable to our sun and soil. Unfortunately Home Depot had a very poor selection, so we went to Lowes where we found all kinds of good stuff. It figures the place where we had the $100. gift card would have nothing, and the place where we had no gift card would have all the stuff we were looking for. I wish there was some way to convert that Home Depot gift card into a Lowes gift card.

Spouse really loves roses so we looked at shrub roses. They grow more like a shrub or bush and not like the long stem varieties. I'm not nearly the fan of roses that Spouse is, but I agreed to buy 8 pink shrub rose bushes tonight because I understand that roses will look great with our Victorian style house.

Neither Spouse nor I are gardeners. Fortunately we don't have to be as long as we stick with the low- and no-maintenance plantings suggested by our friend John. These roses will need to be trimmed once or twice a year and that's it. Eventually the bushes will grown into each other, creating a hedge of roses. Hopefully we can figure out how often to water them so we don't water-log them nor allow them to fry in the unforgiving afternoon sun.

Our yard guy Ray is going to plant the roses for us and re-mulch the beds. As the existing plants in the beds begin to awaken we'll get a better idea of what and where we want to fill in. Having a nice looking yard is important to us, yet neither of us wants to do any gardening, so we leave it to those who love it, like Ray.

Crush du Jour: Freddie Prinze Jr.