Officially Summer!

As of today, it is officially summer.  I always thought it was weird how summer doesn't technically start until the third week of June even though it feels like mid-May is the start.  It doesn't help that July usually marks the time when stores start getting fall items in and you see ads everywhere for "Back-to-School."  I worked at a shoe store in high school and it was always so depressing when, 3 weeks after my summer break started, I had to start putting up back-to-school signage and seeing nothing but fall merchandise.  Even though my summer break wasn't even half over, it always seemed to speed up rapidly at that point.

Aside from stores, the scenes and scents of summer are everywhere.  My hydrangeas bloomed late last week, there's color everywhere, crowds of people are at the beach, kids are outside running through sprinklers and the smell of food on the grill is strong enough to overpower the leftover scent of the 9,400 moth balls I used under the porch to deter the groundhogs.  Ahhh.  One thing that always makes me happy and evokes thoughts of summer is the smell of sunscreen.  I never buy unscented sunscreen--the smell is just too good.  Sometimes I'll even put a little on in the winter, when it's cold and gray and depressing, and it never fails to pick up my mood.  I can't help but think of swimming, or reading in the sun on a big beach towel, or eating ice cream outside on a hot day.

I love those hydrangeas.  The purple ones didn't show up until we had lived here several years; the first year I noticed them I think there were just 2 or 3 flowers.  It gets bigger every year and now there are dozens.  The white hydrangeas and the front porch are what sealed the deal for me on this house.  Those two bushes are enormous and they get bigger every year.  The flowers are the size of dinner plates.  Last year it got too big for it's own good and became weighted down so much that the flowers rested on the ground.  It also had some dead parts leftover from previous seasons stuck inside and eventually the middle parts of the plants looked pretty bad and the sides couldn't support it anymore.   I read up on how and when to prune that type of bush and ending up cutting it down to about 8" from the ground.  I felt like I had just murdered it and thought there was no way it could come back from that, especially since this was in March and it had just 3 months to get its act together.  Thankfully it worked out and now looks better than it has in years.

Over the weekend a certain someone graduated to big pool.  My parents have a pool and last weekend it was open for business:

What a life :)

Enjoy the longest day of the year today!

~Stacy