Angelina's Garden

Today is a rainy, February, gloomy sort of a day.  I am at my kitchen table letting the gloom settle in on me like loose silly putty on an upholstered couch, getting depressed about the weather and my blog and my to-do list.  My favorite green tea is out and Monday is the first day of Lent!  With perturbation, I open my blog page to see that the last post here was November 26. Ouch!

I love writing here so much; yet, I haven’t been here in months.  I have literally pages of topics I want to write about and explore and share here with you.  So, what have I been doing that has kept me away?  A million things in a million directions.  And, since I haven’t been able to get myself back here in months due to, well you know, life… I am just going to start again.  I’m dusting off these keys and jumping in. These nimble fingers will bend to my will once again.  It is time!

Winter weather, childhood milestones, marches, sickness and parish life: These are the themes so far this year.  These iPhone pictures show where we’ve been and what we’ve been about.

From the get go, on day ONE, January 1, change was upon us. We had only a few days at Christmas to say goodbye to Ben who left for the Hermitage of the Holy Cross Monastery on Jan 2.

Then, there was getting the # 1 daughter set up in her new apartment at UGA.  Mattresses, a desk, and a succulent collection were all important things to be hauled into the shared space on a 27 degree day.

Then, there was a nasty sickness that managed to hang around our house for 2 weeks!  Coughing, sneezing, tissues, Tamiflu, ibuprofen, charting, and echinacea were all common vocabulary words around the fire those weeks.

Then the snow came.  These southern chickens would not go out into their snowy run, so I had to bring the water bucket to their covered space.  Of course, having multiple days below freezing meant this urban farmer had to haul thawed buckets of water out to replace the frozen buckets twice a day.  Somehow, in spite of the bitter 7 degree temperatures, these 10 chicks laid a half dozen eggs in one day!

With snow, came our favorite snowy past time, sledding!!  By the way, if you don’t have a Zipfy, like the green one my husband is holding below, you need to ask Santa for one next year.  Zipfy is the best, safest, most resilient sled known to man!  It works great on pavement, hills, ice, snow, even pine straw.

Unfortunately, with the snow came a bitter frost that burnt the camellias and froze beer on contact in 20 minutes flat.

 

Somehow, we managed to get some school in during January, but it was difficult.  I had an idea:  Let’s see if these jade plants will revive if we use fertilizer!  I figured, these jades were on their last leg, so nothing to loose.  So glad we’re studying botany!

 

On January 19, with most people healthy in our house, we made our way down to the Atlanta March for Life.  So glad I phoned Father Tom to join us.  He represented the Orthodox clergy in the area and gave us an anchor as we walked the streets of downtown.

The first week in February, our Riley had his Eagle Scout Court of Honor! He’s in the middle, literally!  He’s our middle child, # 3!  So proud of his Eagle Scout accomplishment and glad that COH weekend is over!!

Pinewood Derby is always a rowdy activity in the winter!  Especially when you make your Pinewood Derby car into a taco.  Note how this slightly dramatic competitor is putting hot sauce on his taco car to make it “go faster.”

 

Thank God Father Paul has come to bless our house yet again in 2018.  We always have him do a double blessing on the teenagers’ vehicles, which he is doing here with a flourish of holy water.

Which bring us to last weekend, which had us on a college visit to Georgia College on another wintry day …

and Meat Fare!  Goodbye meat.  See you in April.

So, you can see we’ve been pretty busy with all sorts of wonderful things and most of this business is just pretty typical at our house.  2018 is going by in a hurry as evidenced by these cell phone pics.   And since this is standard fare, I will just have to adjust my schedule slightly to get some more time at these keys.  That’s the goal, anyway.   See you very soon.