After New Mexico

Last night I dreamed I started blogging again.

Certain in Life

I'm leaving for a weeklong vacation in sunny New Mexico tomorrow morning with a friend. We're flying in and out of Albuquerque, hoping to spend some time in Santa Fe, Taos, and up into southern Colorado perhaps...should be an adventure! And I'll get to add another state to my "visited" list.

As if that isn't enough fun, I found out I'll be getting a $600 tax refund this year. Why yes, I did wait until the last minute to do my taxes. Procrastination strikes every aspect of life for those afflicted with it.

It's probably a good thing anyway, since now the $600 can be useful for the post-vacation monetary slump that inevitably arrives when you get home and tally up the expenses and say, "Whoops..." I mean, of course I'm planning to stay within a certain budget, but it's certainly possible that I may fail. And now I have a buffer to ease the blow if that happens, instead of having already received the $600 and spent it on something frivolous like paying down a credit card.

Mr. Thel and I did some yardwork recently. There are two little flower beds in front of the house that were empty but for a shrubby rhododendron, a scraggly rosebush, and some bluebells. We put in some forget-me-nots, a mallow tree, and a lobelia laxiflora, which will brighten up the front a bit. Mr. Thel also planted some vegetables in the backyard and some cilantro and strawberries in another corner of the front yard.

Tomato plants will go in next month--I'm most looking forward to those. No storebought tomato has ever been good enough for me, having grown up on garden tomatoes. I'm salivating just thinking about them. My dad used to eat them like apples. Messy apples, but you know--just right off the plant. I'm thinking about a thick slice of tomato on top of mozzarella and basil, layered atop a big slice of bread or a ciabatta...yum!