She went to the Rainbow Bridge today, sleeping under the neighbor's tree. She was born at 11:45pm on April 28, 1996. She died at approximately 4:30 pm today July 19, 2011 at the grand old age of 15 years and a couple of months. I have to admit it did not come as a surprise. She has been failing for months and it was only a matter of time. Considering her history and the horrific torture and maiming that she underwent at the hands of sick teenagers one Halloween many moons ago it is no small miracle that she survived as long she did. Consider that her mother Lari at 16 is as hale, hearty, onery and evil as she ever was and it is evidence that Alpha had good genes that were able to overcome her injuries.

She will be missed by me and, more tragically, by her daughter Cadbury, who loved nothing more than snuggling up in a ball with her Mum and purring up a storm. She will also be missed by my Mum and Norman who very much enjoyed her visits to their room where she would park herself on the end of their bed every morning and refuse to move for the rest of the day.

No doubt she has a busy evening ahead of her, meeting up with siblings and doggy friends on the other side of the bridge. In the meantime I have photographs to remember her by.

Here she is scolding Ms. Peaches who of course was trying to torment her elders.



Here she is with Cadbury her daughter, the two of them were inseparable.



Night Night Alpha, say hello to everyone for me. I will miss you my darling little kitty.

Today is my 20th wedding anniversary. It is also the 21st anniversary of the day I met my husband. I am pretty certain that absolutely no-one would ever have thought that our relationship would last this long. Between meeting and him proposing was exactly two weeks, from meeting and marrying was exactly one year. It sounds nice but when you consider that I was in the UK and the husband was in the US and between meeting and marrying we spent a grand total of 6 weeks together (and that included the original two weeks), the rest of the time was spent writing to each other every day and the occasional phone call. A tiny matter of the first Gulf War also got in the way of that.

We have been through some rough times that I think would have doomed many a couple. As it turns out our love for each other has endured. As is usual for this time of year we are apart. He is in the mountains of Eastern NC at a band camp. One of these years we are going to get to spend our Anniversary together. :)

I hate to throw anything away, I would much rather reuse or repurpose something than have it end up in a landfill somewhere. So, when my husband asked me recently when we were clearing out the garage if I wanted to throw away some old patio furniture I told him to keep it. One of the pieces was an old, very rusted, formerly white metal patio table. As I had decided to refurbish the chairs that went along with it by spray painting them silver and adding some cushions from the local thrift store I decided to refurbish the table.

It had long been my ambition to use some leftover ceramic tiles from our bathroom project and as the chairs had been spray painted silver I began the project by spraypainting the table base silver. I dug out the old tiles from the garage and then picked up two sheets of glass mosaic tiles from the clearance bins at Lowes. I sliced the glass mosaics into strips and used them as accents on the table top and also cut them into individual tiles to frame the edge. I had to make some pretty interesting tile cuts, as I was tiling a round table with square tiles, and the grouting of the ceramic tile and the glass inserts was fun as they were two different depths, but all in all I think the project turned out really well.



It needs one last wipe over with a damp sponge once the grout has fully hardened but I think it will look nice on the new patio I am building out in the front garden under the sycamore tree.

One thing that always annoys me is what to do with the skeletons of patio umbrellas who's fabric has long since died. In this case I dug an old skeleton out of the shed and used it as a framework for three different types of Morning Glory to grow up. It is looking quite nice now, even before the plants have begun flowering.



The next project was an idea picked up from the HGTV message boards before HGTV became Home and (absolutely no) Garden TV. It is an old bowling ball (picked up for a dollar at a local thrift store) covered with glass marbles picked up at the dollar store to turn it into a classic gazing ball. This is still a work in progress.



Finally a classic Lowe's "dead plant section" trash to treasure. I picked up this braided hibiscus tree a month or so ago, originally $30+ the poor thing just needed some water and some love and I got it for $5.00. Today she rewarded my kindness and sprung into the most incredible double peach blooms that are really spectacular to see. I MUST MUST remember to bring this baby indoors prior to first frost this year as I absolutely want to preserve her for next year.

This evening I came home and as usual grabbed some dog treats and cat treats from my storage bin and gave them to the animals. I left the drawer to the storage bin open and thought nothing more of it.

So far Judy has sneaked into the kitchen and stolen two bags of T-bones dog treats and literally tippy toed behind me as I am sat at the computer center and snuck into the bedroom to hopefully open the packages and devour the snacks. It is hilarious watching the tippy toe thing because we have vinyl tile floors, and doggy toenails tend to make a noise.

DH just arrived home and after walking in the bedroom to deposit his workout clothes handed me two bags of t-bones and one bag of Pupperoni that Judy had managed to get in there but had not yet managed to get into. The funny thing is that I didn't even see the Pupperoni bag going in there.

Dogs are the funniest things ever.

As many of you know I have been attempting to create an "English Country Garden" in my barren wasteland that is Eastern North Carolina. I have of course given up on Lupins, because they simply will not grow here. This weekend however I decided to try Hollyhocks (purely because they were in the dead plant section of my local Lowes).



They are sold in the US as a perennial, but I am pretty sure that is simply because that people in the US are just a tad too dense to understand the difference between a perennial and a biennial. Hollyhocks you see are not a perennial, ie they will return every year, no they are a biennial. A biennial is a plant that puts out leaves the first year it grows from seed, the second year it puts out flowers and sets seed and then it dies. The plants that return in the same spot the following year are the seedlings and NOT the original plant. As the Hollyhocks that I managed to snag from Lowes for pennies were actually in full flower and already had set seed, so I grabbed myself an envelope and harvested the seeds, while scattering some at the base of the plant so that the cycle could continue itself.

Why is it that Lowes are able to sell a plant as a perennial when it clearly, clearly, not? How can they do that? Is it not fraud?