4th of July in a Garden

Wow, July already…. This summer is flying by; the solstice has come and gone, and it’s another week of Code Orange air here in Georgia (which didn’t use to bother me, but now it does). I think we hit 102 yesterday, though I’m not sure what it was with the heat index – melty hot, is all I know. The rain dried up for a couple of weeks, right after Little Kid left for boot camp, but we’ve gotten a bit in the last few days, which the water bill is thankful for, since we’ve had to water the garden. Speaking of, check out the man-eating tomato:

And the cucumbers are enjoying the new garden spot, as well:

We’ve spent this long holiday weekend puttering around out in the heat; we bought a few new sets of dragonfly lights for the deck, and added more flowers; too bad it’s too freaking hot out there to spend very long, but it’ll be nice in October if the plants all survive:

The last month’s stitching progress only covers two projects – Secret Victorian Garden took 4 weeks to finish Part 9, one week per corner. There was only 1 bead on each corner, but there is lots of metallic in there, so still blingy 🙂 There’s not much left to go now on this one – there’s more in each corner, and then a border all the way around. And then the hundreds of Swarovskis!

And then my travel project, Blackwork Journey Save the Stitches, is moving forward, though I tell you, this is a huge piece of fabric to try to wrangle on my travel stand. But so far, it’s going pretty well. It takes me some thought to get used to some of the fill patterns as I do each section – some are almost too easy, and other have me backing up and trying again. The Glisson Gloss metallics are almost not heavy enough – one of the colors really disappears, so I may need to double up on it – I think if I chose a different one, it’d be too heavy. This is 3 of the 4 blocks of Part 2 done:

That’s all I’ve worked on since my last post; the work days have been extremely long and have left me staring blankly at the TV some nights. Fortunately, I have a couple more days off this week to rest up some more, as I’m inheriting some rather involved programs from one of my coworkers who gets to make a lateral move over to a documentation position (and I get her further out of my systems – which is a good thing), and I need the extra brain cells to get these new programs figured out, since I will have more customer interaction 🙁 Not exactly the direction I was hoping to take this year, but I guess it’s the one I’m stuck with, for now. So, while taking advantage of my days off, I’ll be working on this next:

I don’t know if there’ll be more fireworks in the area tonight, or not – the big show at the subdivision down the road was on Saturday night, which had 3 dogs in panic mode here. They were all over last night, too, just not too many big boomers. So glad fireworks are legal here now. Not. We’ll see if a dog manages to bury herself in the bathroom floor tonight. We have steaks marinating for the grill later, and the big bowl of potato salad; hopefully it cools off a bit before we get too hungry – that’s our big Independence Day plans 🙂 I’d show you a picture of strawberry-raspberry pie – but we already ate big pieces of it 🙂 Happy 4th of July, and Happy Stitching! Next time, it may be an Olympic update!