Good Morning...Albeit Earlier than Usual

We got a call a little over an hour ago...4:30 a.m. our time. Nothing earth-shattering, but somewhat important. It was Steve's sister in Houston with some important last-minute details regarding her 12-year-old daughter, Connor, flying to Albuquerque this morning to come see us for a while.

So I've been up since 4:30. It's now 5:51. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't, so I got up. I've puttered around a bit - turned on lawn sprinklers, made coffee, had cereal, read a bit of 1 Samuel. Now I'm waiting for the timer to go off on the sprinklers so I can take a shower. We've been asked to restrict our lawn watering to only 3 days a week and this is one of our days. We have an odd house number, so we get Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday to water. Even days get T, Th, Sat. Nobody waters on Monday. So after our showers this morning, I'll turn the sprinklers on again in the front yard to get the other half and I'll water our little garden in the back, then we'll head out to Albuquerque to pick up Connor.

Our garden...what an interesting topic. We have 7 or 8 tomato plants (none of which has produced anything as of yet), a couple of bean plants (from a Mother's Day "gift" Julie made at school), some cosmos (a "gift" from Caleb), some sunflowers, and a few watermelon seeds that Caleb retrieved out of his snack a couple of days ago. He asked if he could plant them instead of throw them away. It's a tiny little garden in parched soil, but the plants are still alive and even managing to grow. That's a step up from last year - we managed to kill everything.

We paid the neighbors a couple of days ago for the broken window. Our share was $183. Steve and I decided that in addition to his regular money-earning chores around the house, Caleb would help Steve wash both cars 3 times and he would help me prune all of the bushes in the front yard to work off his debt. I don't think he realizes there are 13 bushes. I've been working on bush #1 for several days now. It's going to take a while. Good lesson for him, though.

Water timer just went off. Time to go.