Variety

So we spent a long weekend up at Mom and Dad's. That was nice. We don't get many chances to go away together these days with the man's schedule, because he generally works a few hours even on his day off, but he took a night off and managed not to have anything scheduled for his off days. Yeah! It was nice to spend some time with the family.

We picked a good time to go. Mom and Dad's pond has had a leak in it for quite awhile and they had moved all their koi to a temporary holding tank for the winter. They repaired the pond last week and we had the good luck to be there for the transfer of the fish back to their pond. There were so many of them! We counted them and took some pictures of them and measured the biggest ones. The fish are pleased to be back home and are very happy when you come to see them. They all swim over and beg for food.

My husband loooooves the pond and spent the whole time fawning over it and Dad kept telling me that I'm going to have to let the man build a pond. I say we get a house first and furnish it, then perhaps we can argue about what to do with our money next. Besides, he can live vicariously through Dad. We are still looking for a house and have one we're considering, but as usual, there's a catch.

Anyway, another one of my favorite things about going home is actually being outside and enjoying all the flowers and plants. The lilacs were in bloom and so were the crabapples. Lovely smells everywhere. I checked on my tree peony and it has 7 fat buds on it. That may not sound like much, but its slow to come and well worth the wait for them.

I managed to finangle Mom and my husband into helping me with pinning my blue/green king-sized quilt and have finally started quilting it. I finished the top sometime last summer and have had it riding around in the trunk for ages and am just now getting around to quilting it.

I've also been plugging away at sewing on the yo-yos and am happy to report that I now have 120 attached, 280 to go!