Spring garden and Radiation tattoos

This is spring in my yard. I love these change of season things in my own yard. Spring brings snow peas and broccoli which means sweet dipable veggies and many more stir fry meals. The orange blossoms are blooming and fragrant. We still have some oranges to pick and juice so I can have fresh OJ in the freezer all year. It got a little warm over the weekend, so I made the first iced tea of the season and turned on the swamp cooler for the first time
Roses are sending out their first beautiful enormous blooms.
Irises are blooming
Purple irises bloom about a week after the white ones.
These are my Rio Samba roses. They start yellow, turn to orange and then pink. All flowers love spring in Arizona.

For other news on the home front, Jules and I went to the radiation oncologist yesterday. Studies have shown better results using both chemo and radiation at the same time, so he went today to get tattoos to guide them in the radiation each day. He wanted to have the last supper tattooed on his chest however, they put tiny little dots which almost look like a freckle. He will have radiation for five and 1/2 weeks, five days a week. It will take a maximum of a half hour each day. They don't expect that he will have burning on his skin and he will hopefully tolerate it well. He will have to get a feeding tube, but will only use it if he starts having swallowing problems. This may happen temporarily due to inflammation and swelling of the tumor in his esophagus. We would have waited on the tube, but the doctor said that it takes about a week to get a feeding tube put in. He could become very weak if he cannot eat for a week and be unable to tolerate the chemo & radiation. Good nutrition is very important for a positive outcome. We like the idea that he will be chewing most and hopefully all of his meals. Jules says that it is hard to get steak through a feeding tube. Even though we eat steak only about once a year, this is very important to him! He will have his 1st Radiation treatment and 2nd chemo on April 21.

Garden delight

Mom and I went on a DBE garden tour today. It was a beautiful garden in the desert. We are always up for any garden activity! I was taking a picture of a cholla (jumping cactus) and loth and beholth I one jumped right onto my shoe. The home owner came out with tweezers and pulled the thorns out of my shoes. They also had a person playing a didgeridoo!

The Move continues and a miracle occurs!

First for the miracle. Stephen Childers who is 18 and has been on the heart transplant list since before Christmas, got a heart at 2am this morning. Stephen is the son of Sharon another school nurse in the my school district. We are all so happy! I ran into Helen another nurse in Fry's parking lot and we were laughing and crying with joy as she told me. Thank you God! Please pray for his body to accept this heart and for him to have a great life!

This is the big mouth Merlin. How's that for a cat? We are still in the process of moving Julian's office home. He went to work today and found that Quest had turned off his internet, though they were just supposed to disconnect the land line phone. So, we moved his computer home and spent all day getting his computer connected up to the web. Buy a wireless router by me who doesn't know the difference between a router and a motem. Having to call the company and getting a man in India, very nice. He got me back on the web through the new router. When we realized that Julian didn't have a wireless card in his computer, the nice Indian man suggested we get our computer man to come over and install a card. Having heard stories from Kirsten, I know he thinks that we can just call and he will come. They are shocked that we clean our own houses, do our own laundry, etc. They always call people to do whatever needs to be done. probably wiser than spending a whole day struggling with something we don't know anything about. Anyway by 5:30 we had the wireless going, the problem I'm having now is that it keeps kicking me off. The biggest problem for Jules is that he realized that he cannot keep his same e-mail. After agonizing and griefing for several hours and making several calls to see if there is any way he can keep his same e-mail, it came apparent that he cannot. He finally sat on the couch and surprised the hell out of me when he said, "I think that this will be a blessing. I will have to e-mail all my clients and they will realize that I am still around." As he would say,"you just Ayrauded them." Meaning finding good out of a bad situation, making lemonaid out of lemons. This is actually something we all learned from my Mom. Thanks Mom!
This is CC warming her butt on the new HD cable box. Her new favorite spot!
These are 2 peach faced parrots. I've seen as many as 20 together. I see 2-6 of them every day in our yard.
Yours truely working on the computer. Sometimes I sit on the workout ball to exercise my core.
The nasturiums are all blooming now. We had a salad for dinner tonight. I used nasturiums, brocolli, snow peas, cauliflower and tomatoes from my garden. It was delish!
The African Daisy's are blooming now. They are colorful, perky and vibrant.
These flowers are a bulb. Part of my friendship garden, I think. I think they are in the onion family, cause the have a faint onion spell. Below are flowers from my new peach trees. I hope to have both peaches and apricots this year. I'm especially excited about the apricots because you can never get apricots in the store that taste like apricots. At least not like the ones that I ate while sitting up in one of our apricot trees at home when I was a kid.

Victorian Bushfire Appeal

These are gum trees in Australia, beautiful but deadly when they burn. Please donate to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009 @www.redcross.org.au/default.asp

Kangaroos, people and rural communities in Victoria, Australia need our help.
Phoenix sunset overlooking Camelback Mountain and the Praying Monk taken one street over from my house. I use the Praying Monk as a reminder to pray in my busy days.
This is the beginning of rearranging our family room into Julian's office. This is one end of the room, my office and it will stay pretty much the same. We now have a flat screen TV and have moved the couch to the empty wall you see on the right side of the picture. When we moved the couch we scratched the wood floor which upset me greatly! Now we have a long scratch about 6 feet long in the middle of the room. However, we are now watching our new High Def TV from this end of the room. The TV sits next to my computer. It is really quite cosy. Next is to move the drawing tables etc into the other end of the room.
It's harvest time for the oranges. They are really sweet this year as usual.
African Violets are blooming they like the winter and love it when it rains. They are part of my friendship garden. Given to me by Mom. I'm not sure who gave them to her. My paperwhites just finished blooming they come from my Grandma Cooley's downtown apartments.
These are Snow Peas, great for eating raw with dip or in stir fry. They came from the Sing's through my Mom.
These are my brocolli. Brocolli and cauliflower do well here in the winter. After you harvest the initial big head, they continue producing little baby floweretts that are very tender.
These are my tomatoes. Notice the Christmas tree lights. On frosty nights I plug the lights in and cover them with a sheet to keep them from freezing.
This is our new handle on our redwood gate. Julian made it. I love it.
Hanging flower basket, like they have on Victoria Island.
I put these purple flowers together. I like all the shades of purple and the different heights and shapes.

House painters and other daytime activities

Rowan painting her townhouse.

Rowan was very serious about the painting of her house. She wanted white shutters.
Look at that smile. Dilly wanted to paint Rowan's house.
They were covered with so much paint at the end that they had to run around in the grass to dry the paint, then their Mom partially washed them in the outside tub. Then they went inside and had to take a bath with the sewer roaches! Kirsten called up her Dad and said there are long cockroach feelers coming out from the overflow drain in the bathtub. What should I do? He wisely said, wait till Carol gets home she will know what to do. So, the kids took a bath under the watchful feelers of our friendly resident cockroach. Brave, huh. I got home took the overflow drain off, coaxed those evil roaches out and killed 3 large sewer roaches with Kirsten's shoe. We decided to leave their dead bodies for Jules to pick up and throw away because the rule is: if I kill the bug I don't have to pick up the dead body. Now, I don't want you to think that we have roaches running all over the house, this is really a rare situation. My worst roach story took place in 1970 or 71, I was taking a shower in our tiny shower when a roach came out of the drain and crawled up my leg. From then on for years I had to keep one eye on the drain when I showered. This was soon after I saw the movie Psycho for the 1st time, so I had to keep my other eye on the shower door to make sure that psycho wasn't sneaking up on me to kill me in the shower! One eye on the shower door, the other eye on the drain made for very speedy showers in those days. In fact, I showered so fast that I didn't get very clean till I borrowed my Dad's artifical eye, set it outside the bathroom door to guard against Psycho! My second worst roach story took place when I forgot to keep water in the trap of our little used shower. When I finally remembered I had to kill about 8 of the cuties as they ran out of the drain. I jammed my finger that time and it hurt for about 6 weeks!

This is Rowan's Dilly nap time activity each day. She has paper dolls who are triplets called Annie,Betsy and Carrie. She makes beds for each one out of blocks with bedside tables for their bottles and teddy bears. She makes her Mom speak in whispers for an hour while they sleep. They are actually modern paper dolls with magnetic clothes. Dilly knows that he is not supposed to play with them and helps put them away each day when he wakes up.

More clothes lines, sunrise and sunset

This is a picture that my cousin Annie took of a creative clothes line in Australia with adjustable lines which go lower for easy pinning and higher for drying. Kirsten and I have been faithfully hanging up our clothes on the line. I got a call at work the other day from Kirsten. She said I hung all out clothes on the line and it poured rain. They are dripping with rain. Do I have to wash them again, or can I let them dry again. We went with letting them dry, since it wasn't a dust storm. What can be cleaner than rain, right? Well they weren't dry by evening, so she was going to leave them up overnight. About 9pm it started pouring again and we finally put them in the dryer! It rained 1.3" that night! That is over 1/7 of our yearly rainfall of 7 inches.
This is a picture that I took of clothes hanging behind a townhouse in Sydney Rocks area
This is sunrise Annie took outside her window in Brisbane, beautiful huh! Good on ya Annie for getting up early!
This is sunset outside my front window in Phoenix with the setting sun shining on a thundercloud over Piestawa Peak.

Farmer Ayraud's garden

This is a small hot pepper from my garden. Jules cuts them up, mixes them in with dill pickle relish which he eats with every meal. I also have snow peas, had bush beans (till they froze), various kinds of lettuce, brocolli and tomatoes. To keep the tomatoes and peppers from freezing, I draped them with large Christmas tree lights and covered them with sheets, making a little mini hot house. Snow peas aren't as frost sensitive and do well just covered with a sheet. We've had quite a few freezes this year. My big crop of course are the oranges, I am picking and starting to juice now.