Mother Nature ruined my evening.

This was the view outside my office right before 5 pm today:


(No, Missy, that's NOT a funnel cloud.)

There were weird clouds everywhere, and all afternoon the sun would come out and then five minutes later it would look like a really bad storm was getting ready to hit:






I had made plans to go with a friend to Edmond tonight to a spinning guild meeting, but at five o'clock the skies looked so bad that I figured I'd better stay home. Of course, by the time I got home--the sun was out, and all the rain was gone. Go figure . . . .

It rained here all weekend, a good, slow rain that we desperately needed. I'm sure we're still well under our normal rainfall rate for this time of year, but we'll take all we can get. It beats Nebraska right now--buried under all that snow!

Of course, now all I want to do is play in the dirt. I started some seeds about a week ago--Christmas grape tomatoes, dill, sage, rosemary, basil, and oregano. I now have seedlings! I started some common and garlic chives, coriander, white moonflowers, and Grandpa Ott and Scarlett O'Hara morning glories today. Hopefully I'll get some plants out of all these starts. I've never done this before, and it's been fun to watch what happens. I ordered some 8-ball squash and a couple of small eggplant varieties, all good for containers. Hopefully this year I will do better veggie-wise than I did last year.

Walgreen's has a lot of really cute garden decorations--whirlwinds and chimes and stuff, all really cheap. I found the cutest windchime there--it's a "shirt and shorts" with sunglasses, flipflops, and a sailboat as the chimes. It's awfully long, but it was so cute I couldn't resist.

I've had my Christmas icicle lights up since November--I like the soft light they produce. I didn't want to leave them up all year, so I found some cute hot-air balloon yard lights at Target that I plan on hanging as soon as the weather clears up a little bit. There won't be as much light, but they will be up and out of the way of my plants, and that's important.

I also bought a 20-inch plastic pot to plant loose-leaf lettuce in as soon as I can get some soil. Hopefully I can have quite a big of lettuce until it gets too hot to keep it growing. Then I'll replace it with something else and wait until it cools down to plant some more.

And lastly, I can proudly say that I am NOT at the bottom of my company's NCAA bracket competition--I'm currently in 10th place. Unfortunately, two of my Final Four picks lost last weekend (damn you, Wisconsin!), so I'm thinking I'll probably sink like a stone this weekend. Still, not bad for someone who doesn't know anything about college basketball.