One of my goals was to prune as much of the garden as possible before the trip, because it will look like a jungle when I get back. Thankfully, there wasn’t as much to prune as I thought. I was surprised while pruning back one of my roses….my Lily of the Nile is about to bloom! It hasn’t bloomed since I planted it a couple of years ago, I suppose because of drought. The recent rains must have been just what it needed. Sadly, I’ll miss the show while we are gone.

I decided to buy some canvas duffel bags to hold our laundry on the trip, so that they will be easy to stuff into nooks and crannies in the van. I probably could have made them for cheaper, but I am out of time. Besides, this morning I took my sewing machine to be cleaned while I am gone. I got 3 canvas bags to collect laundry like I do at home: one for whites, one for lights and one for darks. But they are so plain looking that I got a crazy idea. What if I planted flowers on them? I have tons of craft paints sitting around in a tub, I could paint while I watch HGTV tonight (getting more crazy ideas). The kids loved the idea and dd gleefully suggested I could paint white flowers for the whites, etc. Hmmmmm. We’ll see if I can accomplish that!

The final major moment of the day, at least so far, was getting our hair cut. I have always done dd’s hair myself. One of her SI quirks is that she is extremely fearful of having anyone else do it, although they’d do a better job. She likes the place I go to now, nothing fancy but it is open and airy with a beach theme and that puts her more at ease. While I got us signed up, I said we’d both have shampoos and trims and she got extremely teary eyed. The beautician got concerned and I explained the situation. We decided to take this one step at a time and forego the shampoo and just do the trim. Whew, another milestone accomplished!