This should have been posted yesterday!

 

Today, in a final step, I finished trimming back the rest of the salvia plants, then used most of the leftover dirt pile to prop them up.  Once I raked the bit of remaining dirt it looked substantially neater and tidier.  

Now everything just has to settle in and lose that "raw" look.

One salvia plant is seriously wilted and may not make it.  I think it took a direct hit when Alex was digging out the lantanas, backed up, and stepped on it.

In the backyard, the unsightly smudge is now history!

Once it dries, the colors could blend in even more.

Despite the very early start, my day was going well -

until I got this distressing e-mail from Karen.

Early this morning Mom fell after taking a leak and is now in the Salida hospital with a broken hip. I followed the ambulance in Terry's Volt, then later Elinor & Richard came to the hospital to get Elinor hydrated after she had a night of vomiting and headache. Richard is sitting with Mom now and I'm waiting for take-out at Robin's after buying remote key batteries at Walmart.  Of course the Volt picked 5:00 this morning to refuse to start while the key was cold. Once it warmed up a bit it started but then put up a message that the key battery needed to be replaced.

I had a craving for ice cream this afternoon, and satisfied it with some of the peach pieces I'd frozen using Terry's 'recipe'.  Remember how Pokey enjoyed the ones that were bruised or sampled by the birds and weren't good enough to me use?  

We heartily enjoy our fresh-off-the-tree peaches. This year, however, our crop was so overwhelmingly large that we couldn't eat them fast enough once virtually all of them ripened at the same time.