Remarkable Saturday

Remarkable!  The Phactors actually don't have anything particularly pressing, no actual, events or appointments or anything on their calendar.  What a Saturday!  It's also a quite nice day for January, a high temperature right around freezing, sunny, with no wind. None the less things were found to keep us active and amused.  Having perused the most recent issue of bon appetit magazine, a couple of recipes caught our attention, so a trip to a grocery store was needed to buy a few items needed so that those recipes could be made during the coming week: a mushroom, leek, and fontina frittata, and shrimp and wilted escarole salad.  A wedding gift was picked out and shipping arranged, a set of dishes with a very tasteful floral pattern, for a niece in Florida.  Framing was chosen for a small print purchased at the end of last semester from a student sale.  A stop at the local pet store was necessary to get kitty kibble and admire the latest bunch of cats for adoption.  A very handsome patterned and slightly cross-eyed orphan got some oohs, but another adoption is out of the question right now.  Mrs. Phactor set to making a batch of double-chocolate (white & regular) cherry cookies.  This is definitely a keeper recipe although it only made 71 cookies not the 72 cookies it said it made!  Me thinks someone snagged one.  Winter always take a toll on the estate and although all the winter storm warnings so far have been duds, sooner or later one will be predicted correctly, so if the predicted ice storm hits tomorrow, it will be a mess.  Precipitation just never comes in the form you'd like.  But the pleasant weather did allow TPP to police the yard and gardens taking several wheel barrel loads of limbs and twigs out for pickup.  Might as well start with a clean slate if an ice storm is coming.  Later dinner is planned with friends at an Indian restaurant with a southern menu, and then betides out for drinks.  On the whole not a bad day at all for having nothing to do.

Uh oh! Honey dew weekend!

This is not a good sign.  Mrs. Phactor is on the patio and the table is covered with various bags and boxes of bulbs.  In the spring bulbs are great; in the fall they make my back ache because they need to be planted.  The first couple of hundred go OK, but then it gets to be work.  A 3-year plan to eradicate lily of the valley under a big burr oak and plant a sward of English bluebells is in it's final year.  This will be a tiny version of the planting in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that inspired this action, fall out of Botanical Geek Tour #1.  So if TPP spends too long with this blog things will begin to get ugly.  Last weekend the monsterous elephant ears by the pond were dug, and now it looks funny because those huge leaves, over 6 foot tall, made such a presence, now some new perennials will be planted.  A bed of tall, purple leafed cannas must be dug so a couple of hundred tulip bulbs can be planted.  While the weather has been very much fallish for three weeks now, cool at night, flirting with frost but not quite getting there, so the cannas still stand tall, so that means some massive rhizomes are anchoring the whole bed.  At any rate somewhere there's a shovel with my name on it.  And come spring, today's work will look wonderful.  And mocking me from the adjacent kitchen chair, one of the kittygirls is looking quite smuggly comfortable. Unfortunately the weather is iffy and rain threatens to change our plans.  So if it rains Mrs. Phactor will probably want to go and buy more bulbs.