Waiting...

It's been pretty quiet here a la Brave New Home. Things just seem to slow down in the summer, lumbering about in the thick and humid air. We have a lot of things in the works but for now we are just...waiting.

First, we're waiting for the chimney guy to get around to scheduling us. He's playing a little hard to get, so that's annoying. I'm |this close| to starting over again to find new estimates, but I get the impression that this guy is good, just absent-minded*. Plus neither of us are excited at the prospect of taking time off for work just for some guys to stop by and tell us a price.

*Now it's in here for posterity. So when the project is over and I'm really angry and curse this guy out, I can look back on my adorable naivete.

Second, we're waiting on our garden. I have lots of pictures of our plants as they've been growing up but we have still yet to have any victory on produce (except basil--lots and lots of basil), so I would rather not post about it until I can sum up our experience.

Third, we're waiting on the weather. We have a big plan for the yard, but there is no way we're going out to work on it now. Between the heat, the humidity, and the mosquitoes, we wouldn't last an hour.

Fourth, we're waiting on time. Life has been a little hectic but I decided that eventually, I would repaint the new chest in our entryway. Eventually...

More long term, we are waiting on the finances to catch up to my desire to remodel the upstairs bathroom. But that's not happening for some time.

One thing that didn't wait? Our new house plants. They didn't waste any time in dying. I thought I must be getting better at the whole gardening thing, since I have some violets and an orchid growing in our kitchen. And vegetable plants that are thriving. The plant that we had in the living room originally was doing pretty well too, but it turned out that it was toxic to cats. As was nearly everything that was being sold at Home Depot or Lowes. So you can imagine my excitement when I found a few plants at a local farmers' market that came up on the toxicity list as being safe for pets. One is either a Boston Fern or a Feather Palm (it says Boston Fern but then gives the scientific name as Nephrolepis exaltata, which matches up to a Feather Palm online). The other is a Peperomia. We potted them in something pretty (really loving the new Skurar pot from Ikea on the left) and went about our merry way. Here's a picture of them from May 15:

And here they are last week:

Yeah, let's mark that down in the FAIL category...