So Sad!

It seems that Darling Daughter has lost track of the number of days until Gwamma and PawPaw come, but she has a good excuse—her classmates got so annoyed with her continually announcing the countdown that she stopped counting. The shame! The infamy!

My pleasure in container gardening has turned to rage at the ants who dare to chomp my plants. Somehow, our *fourth floor balcony* has become an ant haven. They don't seem to be damaging my food plants (chives and parsley), but they're eating the hell out of the leaves on my (not yet) flowering plants. They really seem to have a jones for one type with long, grass-like blades; they've eaten most of them down to the stems! After a few violent, ineffectual rages, I got smart and looked for ant killer when I went grocery shopping. Success! The stuff smells like seasoned salt but kills like cyanide. Woo! hoo!

The ants are lucky that I didn't take a page out of the neighbor's book and bust out a flame thrower. L.H. and I thought that was kind of overkill for weed removal, but to each his own.

L.H. is in the dog house right now. [I wonder if I need a set of crocheted fridgies like his grandmother has—a dog house and several animals, each labeled with the name of a family member. The problem with that set-up is 1) magnets don't stick to our fridge, 2) I try to avoid crocheted ugliness, 3) it's a little too passive-aggressive for my taste, and 4) it's more fun to tell off my loved ones in person than to relegate their crocheted likeness to the crocheted dog house.]

Anyhow, yesterday L.H. talked us into a "short" day-trip since the weather was so nice. A "quick" trip to two nearby towns turned into an 8-hour excursion that included a hike to a spring that is allegedly the site of a major event in the Nibelungenlied (when Siegfried gets whacked), and another hike (that D.D. and I passed on) to a chapel dedicated to Saint Walburga. We packed a lunch to take with us, but we were still starving and tired when we got home. L.H. is in the dog house because he conveniently "forgot" to mention that he wanted us to do the last two things, which doubled the length of our outing and added the hated element of strenuous exercise.