Five Things for Friday

Welcome to the weekend!  What a glorious week we've had, weather wise, until yesterday, then the sky opened up and rained purple (rip prince).  Tuesday though, we actually saw (felt) 90 degrees.  Weather like this really accelerates the blooms in the garden.  Lucky you! I've got some photos of what's blooming in my garden now!

First though, last Saturday found us at the Portland Nursery.  I love going to the nursery!  The plants, the atmosphere, the promise of things to come!  Ordinarily, the parking lot is not the best part of the visit.  This visit though, found this adorable truck parked next to our car!  How cute is that!?

As usual, our trip involved the purchase of A LOT of plants!  Enough to plant 5 hanging baskets and 3 large sized pots as well as some vegetables for the hexagon planters.

I planted this hanging basket.  I just love flowers that in real life look like a child would draw them.  If you gave a child a box of crayons and told them to draw a flower, I think they'd draw something like this...

...or this one.  For that matter, that truck looks like a truck a child would draw.  That's probably why it's so cute!

These baskets were welcomed to the garden by the perennial flowers already there, such as the weigela.

This weigela is one of the first plants we planted when we moved in about 19 years ago.

It never disappoints!

This flower is a wild orchid.  It's unbelievable how hardy this plant is especially if you have ever tried to keep an orchid alive in the house.  I transplanted these bulbs when my parents sold their last house.  Come on,  I'm not the only one who raids the yard when a house is going to be sold!  Right?

Here's another flower we picked up when we first moved in.  It's a ground cover called blue star creeper.

To wrap up the garden tour this week, we have a beautiful hanging succulent.  Succulents are kind of in right now but I just want to go on record saying I've always loved them!

Besides our nursery trip last weekend, I came into the ownership of these awesome metal patio chairs my parents found FREE on the sidewalk!

  I'm going to paint these bright cherry red!  Once finished, they should look like this!
I plan on selling them at my sale this July.

Also in the sale this July will be a golden chain tree I've had in a pot for 8 years!  I grew it from a stick so there's sentimental attachment to it.  It needs to go in the ground and I just don't have anyplace for it. Who ever takes it will have to prove their worthiness!  If you're really worthy I may just give it to you along with the terracotta pot!

As you can tell, I still am loving my new camera
 however I discovered something that before I had it I never knew I needed; a photo backup plan.  I download all my photos to my laptop and pick a select few to move to Google Photos or Google Drive depending on whether they will be loaded to my blog or my website.  Those select few photos are backed up on Google so no worries there.  It's the rest of the photos sitting on my laptop which are at risk if my laptop were to ever go belly up.  Which, ironically, just happened with my Mom's laptop and my old (2005?) netbook (*best $150 ever spent on a computer!*).

 I was a little leery of just recycling the broken computers since I couldn't wipe the hard drives or anything.  So upon Jeff's suggestion, I removed both hard drives and ordered two SABRENT 2.5-Inch SATA Aluminum Hard Drive to USB 2.0 Enclosure (EC-US25) for $6.99 each.  Now I can just plug the hard drives I removed from the broken computers into the cases and connect them via USB to my laptop and voila, I now have an external hard drive I can move my photos to!

I hope you have a great weekend.  This weekend it's supposed to rain so I won't feel so bad working in the basement painting furniture for the sale.  Also the Gathering of the Guilds Show is this weekend, another great thing to do on a rainy weekend!

There's still time to order from Lora's Beauty for Mother's Day!  The 15% off sale continues all May!  Place your order soon for the special Mother in your life and a free vintage Mother's Day card will be included!
(How can you pass that up?  Every sentence in that paragraph ended in an exclamation mark!)