Written weeks ago while home:
It's great to be home surrounded by green! I miss green in the desert. It's wonderful to be with Dana, and Sunday was Darby's birthday and we got to spend some time with her. Next weekend we'll see the comedian Sinbad at the Walton Arts Center, a comic we've always enjoyed and laughed with - what a treat! Lots of landscaping and planting and yardwork to do, which is great! I love being outside working with rocks and dirt and green things!
Written today to explain what I wrote weeks while home:
It was lovely to be surrounded by green!! I had no idea, before living in the land of brown, how refreshing, positive, and rejuvenating it is to be surrounded by green, luscious, living things! And as a bonus, I was home during spring when so many things were blooming!
I took these pictures with my iPad just to see how it would do to capture some detail. Then I went in and got my big camera to get some better shots. Sadly, I forgot to download those pictures and bring them with me, and somehow while home I managed to disable the utility that let's me connect to my home system from KSA. At some point I'll get Dana to help with that because I'd like to see those shots and share them. For now, though, I hope these will do!
And everything was blooming! The dogwoods, redbuds, daffodils, and wild flowers everywhere. We live in the woods and there is an amazing variety of beautiful little flowers that come up out of the leaves.
Another thing hiding under the leaves is rocks! Our hillside grows them better than anything. The layer of topsoil is relatively thin over a layer of stone, and when the oaks and hickory trees push through they break up the layer into smaller stones. Sadly this also means we have many mature trees that souls live for another 50 years in good soul, but that have reach their limit in the fragile foothold they have at our place - they tend to blow over at some point, and we have several we'll need to remove soon.
But Dana and I have been planning some landscaping projects for years that are finally underway! A big part of that involved me moving several tons of rock that I dug up to make a new walkway and rebuild a wall. We also moved part of our fence, put up some lattice to cover the area below a deck, and planted a whole bunch of flowers, but sadly we ran out of daylight and energy before we could get them all in the ground.
There's never enough time on one of these trips to get done everything you wish to. It's tough to jam in a year's worth of doctor appointments, dental cleaning and a new crown, work with our accountant, and re-landscape our place in a few weeks. I don't think we could've gotten much more done! And don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I loved working outside and doing hard, physical tasks.
My next big trip away from KSA will be in August - more on that later but we're gonna have a blast! This coming weekend I'll take a short trip, though. When I was in high school I was fortunate to be able to go on a choir trip, and part of that was in Jordan where we saw the ancient city of Petra, carved out of the mountains (below).
This weekend I will go to Petra's sister city, Meddin Saleh in Saudi Arabia, at the other end of the trade route. I planned this months ago and am now questioning my judgement to put one trip so close to the other. I'm still tired! But it'll work out and I can't wait to see what kind of images I can get - I'm a much better photographer now than I was in high school. One of these trips home I will take a few hours to find those Petra images (which were pretty good, if memory serves) so I can have a matched set. I'll let you know!
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