Hi, blog readers. Remember me?

Well, after a long silence--most of July and all of August-- I'm back to give you mostly a photo log of what I did with my summer vacation.  I've been moving plants out of the beds in front of the house because we are having them replanted with more things that resemble landscaping choices.  I've moved lots of monkey grass, hostas, and irises and glads.  This is our little shed in the backyard.  In addition to the new plantings, I also finally got around to hanging the Louis Sullivan decorative tile from one of the theatres in Chicago.

These are some of the hostas I transplanted around the screened porch and the house.

My herbs are planted in pots again.  I began my annual battle with the slugs over the basil with a little trick I read about on the Internet: gluing pennies to the rim of the planter.  Supposedly, slugs don't like to crawl over copper.

Actually, the little cup of beer each evening works the best, but between the two methods, at least I have basil this year.  The squirrels, however, ate every one of the dill plants right down to the ground.  Who knew their tastes were so sophisticated?

Jim and I also took down the old pasteboard shelves holding his DVDs and put in proper metal library shelving for them.  The king-sized bed in that room, which made it nearly impossible to make the bed, was donated to the homeless shelter and we got a full-sized bed which looks so much better and which I can now make with ease.  The TV in the other bedroom was ancient, so we replaced it with a cute, little flat screen TV with a DVD player built into it.

The summer also brought us two visits from Anna, a week in Florida with my parents, and five days in Washington DC in early August right before school started.  We've just made it through our first full week of school.  It's going to be a real challenge this year because I no longer have my wonderful and dear assistant, Sue. (Thank you, budget cuts.) Elementary librarianship is a much younger person's game, but I will muddle through the best I can.  I'll do another post soon on all the slides that we had scanned onto CD-ROMs.