Morning: a mixed blessing

It's annoying enough to find yourself stirring to a bright sky and a cacophony of birds at 6am, but it's most aggravating when it wakes you in the middle of dreams where you're visiting with loved ones you only ever get to visit in dreams any more.  Though they say we only remember the dreams we are woken from, so I guess without all this early morning bright and busyness I wouldn't remember these visits I've been enjoying for the past several days.  But then, I wouldn't be starting each day with this bittersweet melancholy if I couldn't remember these dreams either.  I've heard it suggested that visitors in the dreaming usually have a preferred time for visiting, and now I'm wondering if I woke up every day at 6am how many similar dreams I'd remember.

I managed to get back to sleep yesterday, and actually got a couple of hours of sound sleep after a night of tossing and turning.  That meant a late start to the day though, which meant yard work later in the morning than I'd planned, ...which meant more intense sunlight beating down on my shoulders.  I was an idiot and didn't put on sunscreen.  I only meant to be out for about fifteen minutes, and that turned into about thirty.  And then I spent some time in the sun hanging laundry on the line yesterday too.  By the end of the day, my shoulders were a pretty good pink.  You'd think, with my fine Irish skin, I would learn to always sunscreen-up before going out, especially this close to the summer solstice.  But even now I'm thinking if I go out early enough, I won't have to put that goop all over my skin.  *sigh*  I will put it on though.  I hate it, but I know I need it.  Mean, mean sun.

So I finally got my old flower bed cleared of waist-high wild growth and filled back up with compost on Sunday.  Earlier in the season I'd planned on laying out a perennial bed and planting according to plan.  It's been so damn humid though, and it's so very unpleasant to be outside in it, once the bed was ready for planting, I just randomly sprinkled all of my flower seeds in there.   All of them.  I put in the packets I bought new this year and anything I had left from previous years, including some large packets of wildflower mixes.  It's my mystery garden now.  Tiny green bits are already peeking up.  I've very curious to see what grows.  I'm going to have to weed it *VERY* carefully as things start growing.  Fortunately, I'm quite familiar with all the weeds I just finished pulling out of the ground there, so I should be able to identify and evict those.

I've also started digging my garden for misfit plants.  I hate it when all of your seeds germinate and you have to cull the herds.  I also hate pulling plants growing where they aren't supposed to, especially when I'm curious as to what's growing.  So this year I'm clearing out the mess that used to be our blackberry brambles, and putting a misfit garden in.  I've already transplanted some stuff there.  This will be another fun experiment, seeing what survives the transplant, and what becomes of it all.  I'm pretty sure I have some pumpkin growing from pumpkin guts I composted last year.  I'm going to have to move some zucchini and cucumber over to the misfit garden this week too, as all of those seeds decided to try growing this year, and there's just not room in the veggie garden for them all.

As for the blackberry brambles, they've migrated into the tiger lilies by the garage, which is the perfect place for them, since the lilies are abundant and I won't have a weedy mess growing under painfully sharp brambles.

The tiger lillies by the kitchen window are back this year after being choked out by morning glory vines for a couple of years.  I got tired of that damn non-flowering vine choking out my lilies last year, and asked Craig to spray the vine with a topical poison.  It worked perfectly.  The vine is gone, and my cheery orange friends are back and blooming this year.

Enough yammering about my yard.  I'm going to go have a seat out there in my favorite spot and enjoy a bit of this morning, as long as I'm up, before it gets too hot and sticky out.  Don't know if I'll do more yard work today or if I'll give my shoulders the day off to fade a bit.  That would be the smart thing to do, but the siren song of progress is so hard to resist.  For the moment though, iced coffee, seed for the birds, my favorite seat and a few more minutes thinking about loved ones (much loved!) I sadly don't get to see anywhere but in dreams any more.