Viking Horde Media

Everything takes forever. That’s probably not true, but sometimes it seems to be. I have a long to do list, that I can’t seem to get through, because everything takes forever. I've gone out to the garage 3 or 4 times now to clean it out. And it’s still not done. Oh, it’s looking better than it was, and it has about half what it used to have in it. But I’ve still got a lot to go before I’m through. We accumulated a lot of junk over the years. I hadn’t realized how much until I

The birds are back! Actually they’ve been back for weeks now, but it’s been too cold at night to leave the windows open, so I haven’t really heard them much. I’d see one or two occasionally in the yard, but that happens all winter. Late spring and summer is when I really notice them. They make an incredible racket outside starting from before the sun rises in the morning. It’s a very nice way to wake up. Much better than the alarm clock. Later on in the summer I don’t appreci

It’s raining, it’s pouring… Well, not around here, unfortunately. We could almost always use rain. Funny though when it does rain we all miss the sun, and complain, of course. You just can’t make some people happy. Where I grew up it rained a lot, at least compared to where I live now. It would rain for days on end. I remember several times where it rained every day for two weeks or more. It never does that here. When we went to go back and visit relatives, I remember telling

Once a Mom, always a Mom. Every time I hear about a disaster, or a terror attack, or other problem the first thing I think of is, “Do I have any children there? Are any of my kids in danger? What about my grandkids?” Eventually I’ll get around to worrying about the rest of my family and friends. But my main worry is for my kids an grandkids. I’m such a Mom. My children are grown, for the most part. They have lives of their own. I know they can take care of themselves. Probabl

I left it until now to talk about some of my more spectacular failures with berries and trees. We had a strawberry patch at one point, but the berries went wild, made few very small berries, then died out. We planted a raspberry bush, that grew for several years, never berried, and died of unknown causes. I even tried planting asparagus and rhubarb one year (I love perennials, remember). They died instantly. That didn’t work. I’ve been trying for years to get a tree to grown

Last time’s blog was about vegetable and flower gardens, today I’m on about fruit trees. We don’t have a very big yard so I’ve tried to be careful about placing trees. It hasn’t always worked. I planted a series of dwarf fruit trees along the back fence, but only two of them made it through the kids. And one of them almost didn’t. The plum and peach trees died, but the apple trees survived. One has grown very, very slowly. The other takes some explaining. The kids almost kill

Flowers and veggies and trees, oh my. It's that time of year again. Spring is here. Now it’s time to consider what to plant in the garden. Well need flowers for the flower bed in the front yard, veggies for the garden in the back yard. Then there’s the question of berries, fruit trees, and other assorted perennials. Now is the time for preparing and planting. We picked up several packages of flower seeds at the store to plant in the front flower bed. I prefer the perennial fl

Another important bit of advice I’ve come up with to tell my children is: Find something that you really like doing for a living, because you’re going to be doing it for a long time. There’s no sense in putting a lot of effort and education towards doing something that makes you miserable. Every job has something about it that you find enjoyable, and every job has some part that you don’t like doing. You want to find a career where the good in the job out weighs the bad. The