Therefore let us joyful be!

I have been singing in the choir at church since last summer. We are a 65 to 70 member choir. We sang Dubois, "The Seven Last Words of Christ" and Bach, "Christ Lay in Death's Dark Prison". If you have never heard Dubois work, it is very emotional. It was very touching and moving to be a part of performing these great works. For Bach we had a string quartet playing with us. The cello part in particular was amazing. Some of my favorite lines, "Therefore let us joyful be and praise our God with solemn glee!" "Death was swallowed up by Life!"

The weather here is great. Each morning is delightfully cool with a reminder of colder days and a hint of warmer and hotter weather to come. It is a great combination. Hard on the allergies, great for the soul.



My garden has new blooms the purple iris, the first roses of the season, larkspur and the bright yellow sunflowers loved by my wild bird friends.

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!

Drawing Company

The architectural illustrator in his new digs. Looks happy, huh! This is a long fairly narrow room (used to be 2 bedrooms). My office and the TV area is in the background. There has been periods of frustration. Such as today when we were trying to change the office address at Cox. We tried to do it on line, to no avail. So, I called them and got a live person. We got the address changed, but still couldn't get online with our main e-mail (which you have to use to make any changes, but is nothing either of us would choose. It was set up by an unknown person when we first got Cox and cannot be changed). I was transferred to another person who lead me astray. She kept having me try this and that and about 34 minutes later I was finally kicked upstairs. The problem was fixed in one minute or less. I was being told to sign in with the main user name (which you use when signing to get e-mail) instead of the whole e-mail address (which you have to use when signing in to make any changes). So that problem was finally solved, then I could access our bill which I realized was $50 more than it should have been. So I called back to find out why they had charged us for our followup visit to install the new Hi-def TV. Which we just boxed up and sent back after multiple visits by Cox and Vizio. We are supposed to get a new TV which we hope will not have a background hum. We borrowed Faye and Javier's old TV because we gave our old one to Mom already. Well, I picked it up and Jules tried to get the stations set on it w/o success. After a home visit by Faye and Javier, we have a temporary TV which works. But I digress. The nice lady at Cox took that $50 charge off our bill, so 3 hours later, I guess it was a successful day! Then we went for a walk in the desert part of Phx. Indian School Park which was beautiful with quail running around and yellow Brittlebush blooming. I came back and decided to update my blog and couldn't get online. So, I had to call Cox back again and the computer lady helped me. So here I am.
Yours truly and Jules in the new office of Architectural Illustrators Inc. with Carol's Insanity Company in the background.
The first iris that bloom each year are the white iris. They opened up this morning!
We are enjoying snow peas from the garden, stir fry or raw with dip!
African Daisy's are blooming now. I harvested the first seeds for next years blooms today.

Spring break, the move and gardening

This is just some of the office stuff stacked against a wall till it gets in its new place in our home office. Julian's computer is up and working. All of the stuff except tables are out of his office. The drawing tables and other work surfaces get moved on Monday!

These are nasturiums and flowers from a succulant that grow under one of my orange trees
I planted 2 peach and 1 apricot tree and this is the first year that I will hopefully have peaches and apricots to consume! Here you can see the remains of the flowers and the baby peach.
My oranges are ready to eat and are also blooming for next years crop. I just have to find time to pick and juice.
These are the beautiful flowers of the peach tree. I guess being surrounded by cotton fields and citrus orchards with citrus, apricots, plum, pecan trees in our yard growing up put this joy in my soul. Maybe I'm a farmer at heart. Anyway I really thrive on these little details of the life in my garden. I have a week off for spring break and am really enjoying it already. The ASU game against USC is just starting. Go ASU!!

Who will keep the kids healthy?

Once again School Nurse's in Madison have to fight for our kids and our jobs. Our jobs are on the chopping block and the kids will be the one's to loose their caregivers and advocates for their health. They want to replace all RN's and LPN's with untrained aides. They want to keep one RN who will have a school of her own and have to train and supervise 7 aides at the other schools. It is impossible to safely supervise someone you don't work with. As an RN that nurse's license is on the line if any of the aides make a mistake. We will see, things are very bad financially, we are in the lowest possible cut (3.1million), they also have a budget for 3.4 million cuts and 3.8million in cuts.

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.