Spring is sprung

The crepe myrtles budded out this weekend and got this far by the first official day of spring. I'll try to remember to take progress pictures over the next couple of weeks to see how fast they grow. We didn't hack off the tops of the crepe myrtles when I was a kid, but everyone around here does, and it has taken a couple of years to get the lawn guy to not cut ours back quite so far. I saw last night that the hibiscus has tiny buds - it suffered terribly in our early November freezes last year. The daisies have come back and are blooming again, but I haven't put in any new color this year. Perennial, that's the kind of plant I like!

A couple of nights ago, I finished the book series I was reading, so now I'm left floundering. What do I read now? I had been reading a fantasy series called "The Bridge of D'Arnath" by Carol Berg (for more information: http://www.sff.net/people/carolberg/darnath.html). I stumbled across Berg's fantasy novels about a year ago and really enjoyed them. Her stories are very engaging and very intelligent. They are also very unique: she tends to write in what I would call a first-person omniscient perspective. That is, the narrative is first person, but the reader doesn't feel limited by just the narrator's perspective. It is different and she makes it work.

The baby blanket has entered some kind of knitting purgatory where it is not getting any closer to finishing. I would swear that I counted stitches at lunch yesterday to see how many rows I had left to do, then I stitched a few rows. When I was stitching last night, I counted again and came up with the same number! So either the knitting I did in between evaporated, or my count got off, due to other numbers being thrown about (we were playing poker at the same time - yes, I knit during poker).

I sent off another package to a model stitcher - this is always a very exciting time. It is like sending your creation off to grow up and come home all done. The most aggravating thing was that I had to stand in line at the post office; the USPS has removed the option to mail items to Canada from the Automated Postal Machines (which I found out when shipping to a shop). So I had to stand in line for 20 minutes instead of taking just 2 minutes at the APM.

Tonight, I've got to get back to drawing. I've got one drawing done, but I need to revise it and make it smaller. Usually I like bigger as better, but I'm hoping to make a deadline, so smaller it must be. It is really cute though!