Gardening in the Big O.

First, I do not jest about the name: whether it's specific to a particular radio station or Omaha-wide, I have not yet discerned, but it refers in this context "Omaha" and not what every single other person in the English-speaking world thinks when they hear the phrase "the big O." Ahem. Anyway.

We've inheirited a good bit of garden, although there's room for it to be reinterpreted a bit. So far, some of our favorite things:


This is a birdbath that came with the house, and our old (bought from a garage sale and repainted and recushioned) chair, now tucked together on a small patio area underneath some birch trees in the backyard. Speaking of birches...





There are four nice mature birch trees in the back yard, full and pretty and casting a lot of shade. There are two varieties, from what I can tell, one the more usual smooth white bark and the other one with shaggier bark. There's one on my campus of this latter variety that has a sign, but I don't remember the actual name.



Finally, some rhubarb. I'm going to make a crumble or a buckle or a crisp or something nice when our realtor comes to dinner later this week, and tease her for identifying it to me when we saw the house as zucchini.

Having moved, now we rest.

We got to the point in the unpacking where I spent an hour or so pulling weeds today in the front yard. Note to the uninitiated: morning glories? Are danged persistant. I even found one long vine of them entwined around another weed. When your weeds have weeds, you know you've just bought a house where no one liked to weed. Or something. We're tired and a little cranky and just got our Internets back, so there's this big backlog of garden photos and random observations that I'll have to spool out over the next few days. One bitty one now: the best bit of dialogue from the whole move -

Mike: [in Omaha] Have you seen the piece of paper with the code on it for paying the movers? I think I saw it next to a shampoo bottle, sitting on the edge of the car trailer. In Illinois.

Me: Um... is it in the orange plastic pumpkin, the Halloween one, in the trunk of the Volvo?

[seconds pass]

Mike: Yep, there it is! Damn!

Me: I knew it was either there, or inside the wicker trunk with the phones.

On the road again...

So we're in Omaha, poised to close on the new house tomorrow. Our little moving adventure has been a bit bumpy so far - when Mike went to pick up the biggest possible U-Haul truck plus trailer, the U-Haul guy discovered that someone had tried to steal it during the night, and the starter... wouldn't. This is never auspicious. So they swung over to the next-closest place, which had truck but no trailer. The movers (who drove up in a Mercedes that belonged to the substitute mover, whose friend was vacationing in Morroco and asked him to step in, whose usual job was owning a Middle Eastern restarant and being hot) worked their butts off, and we had the truck plus trailer (obtained from the first U-Haul place) loaded by noon.

Here it got tricky again. We had some more stuff. Maybe a lot of stuff, to be honest. First Mike thought he'd just fly to Chicago for his next business trip and load it in a truck and drive back to Nebraska, but then his dad (henceforth known as Al, the God of Moving) suggested that we could just get another truck, plus a trailer for the second car, and he'd drive that. So what do you call people who can't move without two U-Haul trucks? (We call them "Renata," at our house, but we're now equally guilty.) More than that, what do you call a caravan that includes one car, one huge U-Haul towing a trailer, and one small U-Haul towing a second car? I call it an embarassment of U-Hauls, but it did the trick, and I'm sure not complaining about being able to bring the outdoor furniture, various plants, and the playroom bookshelves.

Our driving had ups and downs - it was cool when a swarm of Corvettes drove by, at a surprisingly sedate speed. It was less cool that we were limited to speeds of about 60 mph, so it was a long drive. But we were well-fed with cookies and dried fruit and lemonade juice boxes and bottled shmancy coffee drinks, and we generally did pretty well. Our first night in a hotel, the kids posed at the cornfield next to the hotel - the corn was at least 8 feet tall and Peter really wanted to go investigate but we decided not to let him be a child of the corn.

More pretty flowers

Today I took a break from packing to weed for a couple of hours. There's a visceral pleasure in pulling up weeds, especially maple seedlings. I hadn't weeded either the vegetable garden or the front flower garden in weeks, so it was time well-spent. Grace sat out in the garden with me and read to me from her book on the Titanic, which was very interesting (as well as a great pleasure: she has a nice reading voice and is always willing to stop and answer my questions, plus she shows me all the illustrations.) But we're grieving over having to leave our pretty flowers; they're mostly perennials, so I know they'll be back, and they're mostly low-maintenence, or they'd be dead by now, but it's a bittersweet feeling to look out over what used to be bare ground and see flowers blooming, and then to weed the beds for the last time.

The lilies are about to bloom, and the yucca has formed seedpods.




The purple coneflowers are just starting to bloom, and I think they darken after opening; otherwise these are just a very pale variety.




The black-eyed Susans are opening, too, and they should last at least a month or so.




Finally, Peter took a bath with his toy fishing rod last night - those Wilder genes are really shining through.

Pretty pretty flowers

Our indoors is too unspeakably grim for words or even images. It's bad. There are boxes and orphaned toys and whiny children and whinier adults, and it's hot here even with the A/C, and there are just ever and even more things that need to go into boxes.

But outdoors, it's starting to be really lovely. The hydrangias are doing their big, beach-ball thing, the black-eyed Susans are about to go nuts, the yellow nameless daisy things are going strong, the bee balm looks really healthy and awesome, and the daylilies just started blooming today.







On the utterly random upside, I rediscovered the pleasures of bum-pinching today (don't worry! it was one of the designated bums I am allowed to pinch!) and there's just something delicious about making your kid squeal and scoot across the room in surprise. Then, of course, you all re-enter the coalmine atmosphere of moving preparations, and it's Grim City all the way until the gin runs out.

Fourth of July

So, awww.... sweet kids at a parade. We had a nice time, despite the tense mid-fifties couple who had staked out their spot at 7:15 for a 12:00 noon parade, and were visibly irked when I sat on the curb to the left of them. They sniped at well-mannered teens, told my kids to make sure that their [presumptive grandchild] "gets a chance" to get some candy (she was bigger than my *very* happy-to-share kids, and did plenty well in the candy scramble) and were just generally very overbearing about the whole thing.

This is Peter's "talk to the hand" pose - he is very clear when he doesn't want his picture taken.



Finally, ice-cream-covered kids at the zoo on a gorgeous summer day - half the pleasures of childhood condensed into one moment.



Now, back to the regularly scheduled tasks of the day... must. pack. boxes.

Couple of random photos...

We've got a significant Cute Kid Photo backlog, but a couple surfaced since we went on our trip.

Number one - great graduation pic, currently gracing (hah!) the Div School website.



Number two - embarassing photo of me running on Harriet Island [note to Peter Wimsey fans: um, wait, no relation. :p]. I did a decent 5K - a few seconds faster than my personal record, so that's fun.



We've got some Omaha pics and some fresh garden updates, but first we're going to try to recover from the road tripping.