Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. . . . Molly the Cat stopped and quickly turned towards the sound of the noise. She watched a big bear of a teenage boy running on the sidewalk across the street. Where was Molly several minutes beforehand when a noise behind me caught my attention. I watched a young man roll down the street on his skateboard holding to the leash of his running big bear of a dog. Mornings are wonderful around here. It's the letter P today on ABC Wednesday . Click here to check what other bloggers from around the world are writing, por favore signoras e signores. Thanks, ABCW team!

"Tell me everything will be all right," I said to the Husband. "Everything will be all right," he said. I like to be reassured now and then. Molly the Cat looked over at me. "Everything will be Okay, Lady." Purrrrrrrrrrr. It's a day late for ABC Wednesday . Better late than never. Click here to check out the participants. Thanks, ABCW team!  Oh, the theme this week is the letter O.  

Wild mustard greens is one of my favorite foods. I like to sauté the greens in garlic and soy sauce. Add a bit of bacon grease, if I feel like being fancy. Yummm. When I was a kid, it was common for the Daddy to pull our car beside an orchard or field full of wild mustard. The parents got out to collect bunches of greens, while I wandered about, gazing and doing who knows what. These days I wouldn't gather any wild mustard unless I knew the property owner and was assured that the property is certified organic. Last year, the Husband and I decided to grow our own mustard "field", not only for food but also to help put nutrients back into the soil. We purchased a pound of mustard seeds online, but sowed about a third of the bag. Toss is more precise. In December, I tossed the seeds willy-nilly into the backyard. Today it's a mini jungle of green and yellow back there. Some of the mustard plants are nearly five feet tall. I read that these plants can grow betw...

The VHS tapes have been staring at me in the living room for more than a month. It could even be two months. I think that was the last time the Husband and I opened a bunch of boxes from storage to determine what to use, keep, throw, donate, recycle, maybe repurpose, or maybe sell. I think these VHS tapes are ones that I thought we might be able to sell online one day. This morning I finally did something with 12 of the VHS tapes. I bound them together with duct tape to make two walls for a bottomless planter. That's it in the photo. Pretty cool, huh? The planter would've been made of all VHS tapes, but I didn't have enough tapes. Fortunately, I kept the doors of a small cabinet, which fell apart last year, for the other two walls. I figure the pretty flowers will take the focus away from the funky taping. Maybe later I'll pretty up the planter with color or simply put something beside the taped VHS-tape side. It feels good to make something! Today I'm ...

Molly the Cat leads me out the front door before breakfast most mornings. "Go see what needs to be done," she telepathically prompts me as she begins her patrol of the perimeter. "No cats here," she sniffs. "Ooooh, ladybug." I check out new flower seed sprouts, note what sprouts need to be thinned and where I might replant them, bend over and pull up weeds, and so forth and so on. Sometimes the Molly's and my morning routine lasts a few minutes, especially when it's cold or rainy. "Forget this," says Molly when she quickly does an about-face several feet from the front door. Other times, we're out there for an hour or so, weeding, planting, digging, watering and whatever this heart pleases. Now and then Molly circles me to make sure I'm doing a decent job. What I like the most is looking up from my task and seeing Molly lying near by, eyes closed and body purring in the the sun bubbles. I feel like I'm doing the...

I'm sulking. As in my teenage-self sulk, which was playing my guitar all Sunday afternoon, singing Flowers on the Wall , Elusive Butterfly , Bridge Over Troubled Water , and other angst songs, in the living room. I did do that. One time, during a pause, the Mama called out from the kitchen, "Are you done now?" hahahahaha . The poor Mama. She was a saint to endure two or more hours of my off-key singing and probably out-of-tune guitar. Okay. Focus. Back to the subject I began. I'm sulking. I don't want to do this not-a-hysterical operation even though I know it's a preventative measure that may let me live the full life that I'm meant to have. Don't worry. It will happen. In three weeks, I'll no longer have a reproductive system. I'm way beyond baby-producing time so my fist-size of a womb with attaching tubes and ovaries will be no more. I've never given birth. I wanted five kids. Maybe I have them in parallel universes...

I'm creating a structure at the sidewalk end of our front yard. Not a fence. Just look at it. What creature could that evolving spiderness-of-a-something keep off our property? Giggle. Hmmm, maybe that's something I ought not to giggle about. I'm making this not-a-fence out of skinny branches of the fruit trees we pruned a few months ago, as well as from the second-time-with-The-Mama era. I'm not kidding. You can find all sizes of branches in our yard that I'd say were at last 10 years old. Some lie on the ground waiting for their time to become something helpful, such as the stakes holding up the boards that the Mama put around her flower and vegetable beds. Have I digressed? Doesn't matter. :-) That's my story for the letter N , this week's theme of ABC Wednesday . Click here to check out the participants from around the world. How cool is that? Thanks, ABCW team!

It's past noon and I haven't done what I said I would do today. But, I did make apple scones for breakfast and went out to the front yard with Molly the Cat to deadhead daisies and pull some weeds. Now I'm writing about it all. All distractions from filling out income tax forms. Doing the taxes should take less than two hours. I already did a first pass last month to get an idea of the damage to our checkbook. So, no big deal, right? I'm listening to the Full Sail album by Loggins & Messina in hopes that it will get me into the mood. Yes, right after I imagine myself snorkeling in Hawaii.  Ah, such pretty fishes.  I'm linking up with All Seasons , a meme hosted by Jesh of Artworks from JeshStG. Click here to check out other participants.

If I had written this post several days ago, I may have been called it Hysterical Report . Actually, I thought about renaming this blog to The Hysterical Report . I'm glad I waited. I'd rather not be hysterical about anything. I am on a new adventure. No. I take that back, it's not new. After 12 years, this adventure's path has come into the foreground. It's simply not a good idea to let the grass grow over this path anymore. My in-my-face-but-not-hysterical-adventure is an upcoming hysterectomy. Da-dah! Oh-oh, did I lose you? Come back when you can wrap your head around the concept of a hysterectomy. It took me awhile. I realize it helps for me to write about it. Yesterday afternoon I got a chest x-ray, one of my three pre-op things to do. The other two are an EKG (next week) and several blood tests (a week before the operation). Did you happen to flash on the Operation board game, by the way? Because I did the X-rays in town, I repeated myself a lot to the lab...

A year ago, this day, we buried the Mama. "I already have a place," the Mama said. "With your father. They saved me a space on top of him." Always a forward thinker, as well as practical-minded, the Mama bought a dual burial grave site when arrangements were made for the Daddy in 1982. He was buried in the Veterans section in the cemetery a few miles away from the house. The section was new, so the Daddy scored a front row seat, beneath a big old shade tree that was planted in the same year as the Daddy. I'm sure the Mama was pleased with where her bones are resting. In life, the Mama liked to watch people go by. When I had to arrange all the funeral stuff last year, I was very thankful that the Mama took care of the burial site. I was also grateful that after 34 years the mortuary had a pristine paid-in-full record of that transaction. I hope the Mama's spirit is having loads of fun and laughter soaring through the Universe at beyond warp speed.  I have ...

These evenings, one of Molly the Cat's favorite perches, after consuming a bunch of dental treats, is her post that sits on top of a coffee table. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  I think if the girl could talk, she'd tell me to stop with the camera already.  Murrrrrrrrrrrrrr.   It's the letter M at ABC Wednesday . Click here for more M posts. Thanks, ABCW team!

Today marks the anniversary of the first year of the Mama's spirit roaming through the universe. This photo was taken a week before the Mama's final adventure of life begun. I'm glad that the Husband, Molly the Cat, and I got to go through that last amazing trip with the Mama. One of these days I'll tell the tale. Sweet cheers to the Mama!