I reckon I've just been too lazy to write for the past week or so, or maybe it's just that I haven't had much to write about except rain, rain, RAIN, and I'm sick of that subject.  So let's talk about something else.

Last Friday was my brother's birthday, and it was a big one (75!).  My sister made him a delicious carrot cake, and we gathered at his house on Saturday to eat and visit.  My siblings and I have taken the pandemic precautions seriously from the get-go, and the three of us have not been together for over a year.  It was nice to finally see everyone at the same time, now that we've all been vaccinated.    

Saturday evening, I went down to the garden to plant the squash and zucchini that I'd sprouted from seeds.  Yeah, it was muddy, but I waded in and punched the sprouts into the dirt.  Nanny came out to the back porch as I made my way across the yard.  She was upset.  Some critter had dug up all of the petunias that we'd planted in her flower pots a week or two ago.  Not only did it dig up the petunias, it dragged them all over the yard, and Nanny had to go around gathering up the plants.  I suggested that we set a live trap to see if we could catch the vandal.  I suspected that it was an armadillo (because I blame everything on the armadillos).  A friend told me she had trapped an armadillo by using a rotten banana for bait.  I didn't think that armadillos would go after bananas, but I had a half-rotten banana on my kitchen table, so I came home to get it, and we baited the trap with it.  We also strapped a trail-cam to a porch post so that we could at least see the culprit even if we couldn't catch it.  

Sunday was Mother's Day.  My older son invited us to his house for a cookout.  Of course, it rained - a light drizzle in the middle of the day - but we cooked out, anyway.  Later, when we took Nanny her present, we asked if the trap had caught the petunia thief.  It turned out to be a raccoon, but the trail-cam filmed it pulling the banana through the back side of the trap; it never went inside the trap, so we didn't catch it.

Later that evening, a storm came up, and a tornado touched down less than a mile up the road from our house.  Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the tornado tore up a neighbor's barn, uprooted a bunch of trees, and damaged rooves along a 5-mile path.  The Husband and I were standing at the front door, watching the sky swirling above us as a wall of rain approached from the west, when the local weatherman came on TV and started naming communities all around us that were in danger.  I said, "We probably shouldn't be standing in front of this glass door."  The tornado formed and touched down less than 5 minutes later.

I got some good loot for Mothers Day.  The Husband gave me a metal peacock garden ornament, and our younger son gave me a tall shepherd's hook with a solar light to hang from it.  

Yesterday afternoon it was sunny, and I took Mr. Peacock outside to scout out a place to put him.  I wanted to set him on the timbers surrounding the old raised bed in the front yard, but the landscape timbers were so rotten they wouldn't hold a nail.  (I was going to bend nails over his feet to keep him upright.)  I ended up setting him on the dirt and stuffing the back parts of his feet under the timbers, but this set him at a crazy angle, like he was looking up at the sky, so I stuffed a piece of a limb between his butt and the landscape timber to set him upright.  A couple of hours later, another little rain storm came up, and . . . 

Mr. Peacock needs a better plan.

About suppertime, Granddaughter #2 called to see if I would alter a dress for her.  She's "graduating" from elementary school to middle school this year, and the school is having a graduation ceremony and a dance Friday night.  Her mom had brought her a fancy dress to wear to the dance, but it was a little too big.  The shoulder straps needed to be shortened, as did an elastic strip at the back.  The shoulder straps were easy to fix, but the elastic strip gave me fits.  I had to send her home with a promise to fix the dress before the dance.  After supper, I sat down and managed to take up the elastic enough to protect her reputation.  ;)  I'll take it to her tonight when we go to her softball game.

As for the vegetable garden . . . <shaking my head sadly> . . . .  I am resigned to having to re-plant most of the seeds I planted a few weeks ago.  Some seeds just never came up.  Some came up, but a rabbit ate the sprouts.  

I bet rabbit dumplings would be good.