Lovelihood

For a next-to-closing act on my parents last day here, I drove them (at Oma's request) 50 miles out to visit a house, owned by nobody we know, crazy with dahlias. I'm talking, don't know how the neighbors can stand it crazy. Still, they're quite pretty.

As part of the The Great Boardgame Haul of 2011, the grandparents brought into our possesion a set of pick up sticks, a game whose finer points have escaped me all these years. It has proven to be a hit with The Boy, however, and we've spent some time this week developing an optimal method for dispersing the sticks in an aesthetically pleasing yet challenging array.

My jar of elastics. You've got one of those, right?

Late evening light doesn't do these guys justice. Just take my word for it that when I arrived home this evening two lovely botanical specimens were laying about waiting to be photographed.

My parents, here for the week, drove here from California. Had they flown, they likely wouldn't have been able to haul with them the case of wine, the trunkload of carefully stockpiled boardgames for the kids, and the basket of succulents divided from their own plants back home. Perfect for flanking the empty bed on the driveway retaining wall.

Picked up a cute, albeit plastic, build-it-yourself, packed-flat kind of affair of a birdhouse. Heading into winter, though, it may be absolutely the wrong time of year to hang such a thing. But it's so adorable, who can resist forcing The Boy into his shoes so we could traipse outside and hang it from some barren branch in the backyard?

My parents rolled into town with a seeming car-load of grandchild spoiling fodder. All fine and good, because included in the haul was a small case of self-bottled wine. Works for me.