Glorious Sun, Between Overwhelming Sleep

The headache is better, and so is the throat, so long as I don't dare sing. Today there was lovely sunshine, and I eventually dragged myself outside to try to start getting the garden ready to plant. I did almost nothing, and exhausted myself in the doing. I hate being sick. I also have the stupid positional sinus dizziness on and off today, which is not helpful either.

But still, it was very pleasant to have sunshine on my skin and fresh air still wandering through the house. And then I came inside and sat to rest a bit and couldn't keep my eyes open. There was a zoom concert I planned to attend at 8, so I laid down for an hour or two and woke up after 10:30. Um, well, I guess tomorrow I can go find the replay, but that's Not how I'd planned it.

Nor did I plan to keep taking naps all day, missing out on the glorious sun.

I also managed a little more of the stupid paperwork this morning, before going outside, also slow and brain-fogged. I sure hope this gets enough better soon that I can feel competent while I actually put the numbers into the tax program. Taxes are stressful enough without brain fog.

And I have fun things to do, if I can get past the not-fun ones.

Feeling Better and a Flower

I'm still not all better, but I'll take significantly better!

I got outside for a little today and worked on bushes that were overhanging the driveway and front walk.

The bushes in front are snowball spirea, and just starting to put out leaf buds. I pulled some dead stuff out, but mostly just tried to tie them up and together in a way that would let them grow pretty and not block passage. I'm sure I'll have to adjust them or add some more twine later, but at least it's a start--and it didn't leave me falling asleep in my chair immediately afterward.

Then in back were the lilac bushes--the very old tree doesn't need much tending, but the young bushes we put in keep wanting to sprawl all over the place. We keep winding them together, hoping the shoots will start to grow together, but so far there's more exuberance than settling in.

The hardest part was the very old rose that was here when we moved in. It's been hanging over our drive, where we park, and trying to pull hair and snag clothes and skin. Now that it's warm, we thought to pull it over toward the grass. My Angel came out to help, with leather gloves, and working together we gathered it with a cord that used to be a charging cord for one of the phones, and then with it a little tamed, it became really clear that some significant parts of it are long-dead, so we pulled most of those out, bit by bit, and stacked them to use as firewood for grilling.

Then, with the deadwood out of the way, we untied the rose and re-gathered it much more efficiently, tying it to the little mulberry that sprouted nearby a few years back. We also gave it some organic fertilizer and composted manure from last year, to encourage it to bloom this year. I plan to give it some nice wormy compost sometime soon, when I feel up to turning the compost. Worms will nibble away any deadwood under the ground, which should also help the plant.

Hopefully this year we can take down some of the very vertical parts of that mulberry tree. The high parts are too high for picking berries, and shade the garden But that's a project for a different day. A different month, most likely. It wouldn't be bad to take those branches down while there's berries, so we could claim a few of them.

And finally, I got a photo of our first flower for the year.