Friday's Findings........

The rains have set in and will stay for quite a while.  It sounds like we may see sunshine by Sunday. I can't be sure in this house that it is raining. To know if it ism I look out at the deck to see if the deck  is reflecting back at me.

Barney has had his breakfast fill and now is down for most of the day.  We warm our living and dining area with the fireplace on cold mornings. The furnace stays off when we do that and it keeps us from heating the whole house. Barney doesn't like rainy days so he won't ask to go outside very much. He has learned to look out the windows that are down low in the living room.  We have decided that when he barks while looking through the one window that he is barking at the fake, plastic Canada geese in the yard down below.

Things have been put away enough that I now can photograph this area. No boxes sitting around, at least in this area. On a dark day the light does a good job of filling in light on the one side of the room. The oak antique furniture blend in well with our new furniture.  Our bedroom furniture is a strongly influenced in design by Arts and Crafts design so it looks a little different than our  oak dressers and chest of drawers.  Ironically the old oak pieces that we already owned originally were covered with dark varnishes. This one was painted green.  I did have to make a special trip to the hardware to find screws to fit the pulls.  The size really isn't being made anymore but they found one that would thread on and hold the pull tightly to the draw. I had dangling pulls or three of the different pieces.  For safety we put two screws on each bolt to keep everything secure.

I placed the flowers into the light of the sliding glass door so I could get good photos.  The old fashion yellow and brown iris is the next cemetery iris to bloom.  I keep trying to dig portions of them when I see what is blooming.  I know I won't get everything moved to the new place but I will at least try. The small lavender one is one that I want to seek out again and be sure that I have a piece of its rhizome.  The colors are so similar with some of them that I have to look closely to see the differences of them.

I mowed most of the yard yesterday at the old place.  It was good that I did it then as we are now hemmed in with rain for quite a while. The grass has slowed down a lot already as we move on past spring. I don't have any power on my push mower at the old place so I end up mowing that in two different days. The orchard is still full of wild violets so I don't worry about cutting them down anyway. I did notice that out cherry bushes will not have fruit this year.  I did see them flower but I think a freeze took them out. I really didn't check out the apple trees to see how they fared from a freeze.  I definitely had lot of blooms on the apple trees.

Thanks to all who identified this as a geranium.  I remember I had tried to grow one of this kind and failed.  Now that I know that this is a geranium I then started calling the other geranium plant, that is sold everywhere for summer bloom, the hardy geranium.  They are definitely two different kinds of plants. I brought my one hardy geranium with me and it is very much alive.  It is in its adjusting period from being placed outside but it will bloom again.

When I shared with my blogging friends at the beginning of buying the newer house, I had commented that downtown Des Moines is directly south of us.  I did't really know that we can take an offbeat highway at the bottom of our subdivision and drive straight down to the downtown area. It is nine miles that takes us along a river plain and an old town called Highland Park. We first pass through the town directly across the division to us called Saylorville, of which the lake is named after.  When we hit the end of the road we take a jog or two up the hill to get to the hospital. We also can take the same road and are close to my wife's friend who lives in an apartment west a mile or two of the road.  It surprised us as to how close it all is an how often we will be using that road.

We will be hitting NW 6th drive again this morning to make a hospital visit.  We have stopped counting the days since our first visit and know there will be many more of them.. I wish everyone to have a great day today. Thanks for stopping by my posting today,