And they're gone

All the foster puppies went to their new homes yesterday.

I cried a little bit.

Typical day in the nursery

When the two girls conspire, you know there's gonna be trouble.



Big boy Bowser and little Yoshi were play buddies.



Yoshi won every puppy battle. Bowser preferred to roll around.



Princess Peach was the rowdiest of the bunch.



Princess Daisy loved to sneak behind me and bite me on the butt while I wasn't looking, then clamber into my lap with a blinding halo over her furry little head.

For a while, I thought Mario would never get adopted. When prospective owners came to visit, he would fall asleep behind the toilet.

King Louie was the biggest goofball. Here I caught him passed out with his head in the crook of the toilet base. It made him snore incredibly loudly.

After a struggle, I regained my senses and ultimately decided not to adopt Luigi. But I admit, I kept hoping his adoptive family would back out so I could keep him.

So long, little guys. Good luck in your new homes...

I realized as I went through all the puppy photos that I didn't get any pictures of the puppies with Dozer or Star. Not that they really hung out at all.

Dozer thought of the puppies the way a person might think of a pillbug--strange little pests, not worth even a sliver of interest. He usually acted as if they weren't even there, though he did a good job of not stepping on them.

Star was... Star. Weird and silly. She developed a habit of strolling over to the nursery and making gutteral grunts and grumbles through the baby gate, as if holding some sort of conversation with the swarm of puppies. You know those YouTube videos of dogs that say "wow wuff wroo" and people in the background say "Awww! I love you too!!"? Star's conversation was a bit like that, a very human-sounding babble.

And so, life resumes its "normal" pace. I'm about to go back to work full-time, on top of the freelance job I'm working. And I'm still taking economics and statistics classes too.

Don't even get me started on the massive list of extracurricular items I want to tackle by year end.

In other news... new mailbox, completed front wall, and functional wall lights! Yeah! One more project crossed off the list.



The folks across the street had their mailbox stoned in at the same time, so we match.



Garden Festival Fun

On Sunday, Byrd got me up bright and early, bought me donuts, and took me to the Zilker Botanical Gardens for the 50th Annual Zilker Garden Festival. We may not have landscaping at our house yet, but I love to go peruse the vendors' wares and ask questions of folks with greener thumbs than my own. This morning we were one of the first people to the festival, and by getting there early I laid claim to the only white-flowered wisteria I've ever seen, and certainly the only one for sale at the show, for a mere $35. I felt it was the crown jewel of the festival, and I think I was right; as Byrd lugged our prize to the exit, heads turned and people pointed and whispered at this unusual plant.

It's here that, in years past, I bought daylilies for my mom and bamboo for Byrd. The bamboo had since grown to ridiculous proportions in a huge tree pot in our backyard. I admit, we were terrified of it. This black plastic pot, which was almost 3' in diameter and 2' high, had started to bulge on one side. On Sunday, after consulting with the bamboo vendors at the festival, we decided it was time to tackle our fears head on. The bamboo needed to be divided for everyone's sake. It was such a monstrosity at this point that we couldn't move the tree pot, and we were worried that the creature was going to be rootbound.

Bamboo is, of course, notorious for spreading like wildfire across any open expanse of soil, and we didn't dare unleash ours. I had thought it was the clumping kind, which doesn't spread nearly so quickly, but yesterday when we rolled up our sleeves to address the problem, we discovered that my memory was totally in error. After taking a hacksaw to the black plastic, Byrd and I managed to peel the pot away. In the dirt, instead of tubers from a clumping bamboo, we saw woody roots--runners, the sign of a spreader.

Several hours later we had hacked up most of the bamboo. I carefully selected three small healthy sections to go into three medium-sized (portable, manageable) planters. The rest was chopped small, tied with twine, and placed on the curb for trash pickup. The extra roots went in the trash, and the soil that could be salvaged was spread out in low spots near the back gate.

So, until the day we finally get our landscaping taken care of, we have a jungle on our small back porch! Three pots of bamboo, a small white wisteria, a large purple wisteria, a young Sago palm, and a huge elephant ear. This morning I spotted some extremely fat bumblebees inspecting the new wisteria (our purple one didn't really bloom this year, I'm not sure why). It smells lovely, of course.