This weekend didn't involve any breaking and entering at all, so really it's a testament to how much we've grown since the last one. I feel very superior.

We celebrated Earth Day by attempting to go to the zoo. It didn't work out. Evidently everyone else in the city (and probably all the surrounding ones as well) had gotten the exact same idea, and there was no parking to be found for love or money. After a bit of this, I decided that I'd probably try to murder all the screaming children if we managed to get in, so an alternative plan was chosen: we would go to the store, get our stuff done, then go home and have a picnic.

We went to the store and immediately I was set upon by a vast, overwhelming desire for... a fuchsia! If that word looks completely unfamiliar to you, it is pronounced "FEW-sha". Like the color of its flowers. I (of course) found the most gigantic one available, and we decided to take it home and install it before getting other groceries. We bought the massive thing and stuffed it gently in the trunk, then got it home and hung it up on the porch. Minimial leaf injuries were sustained, so I consider the entire thing a raging success.

Just wait until all those flowers open.... gorgeous!

It is at least as massive as it looks in that picture, and possibly even more so. I hope it does well there. I've always loved those fantastic hanging baskets that look like entire suspended gardens. Anyway, after this, the plant bug had totally bitten me (to the surprise of no one who reads this blog, I'm sure). We'd thought about going to the Tulip Festival, but again with the billions of people and horrible traffic, so I thought perhaps we'd just do sort of the same thing by going to an outdoor store.

Molbak's, as I have probably mentioned before, is basically a gardener's Mecca. It's enormous, and it's got almost everything you could ever want to purchase that has anything to do with plants. Not always the same things, as some are seasonal (see: the deadly hanging flower tree I wanted a while back), but the selection is always huge no matter what time of year it is. We wandered for a while in the humid warmth of the greenhouses, trekked outside to look at all the stuff out there, and finally settled on four little pea plants and two types of lily of the valley. All very delicate purchases!

I love the way the flowers drip off the branches. They're so graceful looking. These are both partial-sun, so we're going to put them in pots on the front porch. Hopefully they'll get just enough light through the trellis to make them very happy. The hard thing about living in a rental place is that there might be plenty of things you want to do with it to beautify where you live, but you won't actually own any of them if you plant stuff or make permanent changes to the house. So, with that in mind, we've only planted very inexpensive things and have no plans to buy anything really elaborate until we eventually buy our own place.

I'm one of those people who would rather chop off a limb than move, so once we've found a place to buy, that's it. It will probably take us a good 5-6 years to do, since we want to save up a sizable down payment and then there's all the looking, but we won't buy anything that isn't exactly what we want. I'm not really that demanding, so my list of requirements isn't that long, but there is a certain je ne sais quoi that speaks to me when I find something I just can't live without.

We've determined that our perfect house will have two bathrooms, preferably at opposite ends of the house. At least one of those will either have a two-person jetted tub or will have enough space that one can be put in without having to rip the whole bathroom apart and rebuild it. Preferably three bedrooms. We could have one as a guest room, one as our room, and one as an office/computer/music room. It'd be nice to have a place to stash all our music and computer stuff without worrying about it getting knocked over or tripping over cords.

Obviously it will have a washer and dryer, hopefully newish and front-loading, and a two-car garage! I cannot tell you just how much I want one of these. No more scraping ice off my car in the mornings! No more car covered in pollen or bird poop! The things you really want when you're in your 30s, I tell you...

Our perfect home will have enough land so we can put in various trees and plants without crowding all of it, with a sense of privacy and yet not so large that we need to hire a crew to mow the lawn. Ideally I'd want a place that was far enough away from other houses that we'd never have to cut limbs off our trees unless it was absolutely necessary (like after a lightning strike). I hate when two neighbors fight over trees and then one neighbor hacks off half of the tree's limbs because GOD FORBID there should be leaves on his property. I never understood that. Even if you do get some leaves on your side of the line, you're still getting to see the nice leafy parts too! /shrug Maybe I'm just a dirty communist. Or I'm good at sharing. One of those.

As we were going about our business yesterday, I was reflecting on just how much I love summer days. I am not referring here to the actual season of summer, although these occur then as often as in any other season, but those days when you feel like you're in the summer of your life. Right then, in that very second. You're warm, and loved, and happy. Everything feels like it's all right, nothing hurts, and you're just so effing glad you didn't kill yourself back in the black years so you could live to see these days. On summer days, you laugh a lot louder and longer, and you find yourself easily being kinder to people. Probably because you feel so good about yourself. Food tastes better, everyone's more attractive, and there's a sleepy drowse of contentment wrapped about you.

May each of you have your own summer days forever. Much love.