I’m having a hard-to-focus moment today, so I’ll take a quick break and show you what’s new in the great outdoors.
My friend Erin & I hit up the farmer’s market on Saturday and I bought some flowers and kale. I can’t wait for these to start growing like crazy – I hear it’s the vegetable that keeps on giving, because you can cut off a stalk and another one (just as large) will shoot out. Grow, baby, grow!
I got some new cushions for my Pier 1 patio chairs, too! The table’s a little small but I’m kind of liking it…
This is the side of the yard that I hate- these bushes grow like crazy.
I sucked it up and trimmed them – the only casualty was a single blister. :)
Here’s the view of the backyard and fire pit as you enter the back yard. Look closely – the lanterns are starting to look rusty.
Years of exposure to the sun faded the lanterns and they’re rusting. We have four of them around the yard.
I taped them up and painted them with my NEW FAVORITE spray paint, Rustoleum’s Oil Rubbed Bronze!
Doesn’t that look so much better?
I like the Oil-Rubbed Bronze finish so much I’ve also painted a mirror frame and a flower pot the same color. What – else – to – paint ?!
Sidenote: I’ve been finding these little red mites (?) crawling all over the stone and wood deck. Does anybody know what these are? They’re super tiny, they’re red, and they have a bunch of legs. They’re EVERYWHERE. It’s unnerving to think that I’m sitting on hundreds of these bugs if I park it next to the fire pit. How do you get rid of them?
Nerd alert…
Our running buddy, Heather, brought me a gift the other night for playing hostess to our running group party. It’s a geode! She found it while she was on a run.
I’d heard that we had geodes all around Indiana, but didn’t know how to find them or what they looked like. I even saw a guy try to sell them on craigslist. $50 for a bunch of rocks you found? Really?
This Craigslist post tipped me off to what these things look like. So, the other day, when I was walking around in the creek next to our house looking for plants for my terrarium, I found a round-ish rock that looks like it *might* be a geode. I picked it up and took it home.
As a kid, I had a rock collection. A “ cheater” collection, no less, but I would get cool-looking rocks from The Nature Company or get one of these kits from the Scholastic book ordering catalog we got at school. My favorite was pyrite, or “fool’s gold.” I learned to love shiny things at a young age. ;)
I took a few shots at my maybe-geode with a hammer, except it scratched up my hammer! After about 5 swings, I felt really silly for beating up a rock, so I quit hammering on it. The next night, a friend of mine with a Geology degree confirmed my round rock as a geode. When I asked how to bust it open, he said that a good way to crack open a geode is to crack it with another geode.
The next day, I went looking for more and found a lot of bigger geodes in the creek bed, now that I was actually looking. On my first good throw (I felt silly for hammering a rock. Now I was throwing a rock at another rock.), it broke open into 5 sparkly pieces. It was like Christmas!
Have you made any fun discoveries in your backyard latley? Am I alone in thinking throwing rocks is cool? Tell!
AHH you are after my geologist heart. Geodes are awesome. Sometimes you find them filled with bubbly looking ("botryoidal") quartz instead of crystals- those are my favorite. Other times pink calcite, other times plain old quartz, really the possibilities are endless and it makes for fun hunting. You sould see my shadowbox coffee table- full of the best specimens from my rock collection.
ReplyDeleteAnd, I used to think those red bugs were chiggers, but I learned that they aren't. What they are though, I can't tell you- mites of some kind. Haha, I know that is helpful!