Once my daughter made a joke about what if a man had a hernia, would it be a hisnia?

I don’t know, but I’m thinking it would get fixed faster.  Not out of the woods with my inguinal problems, and have a nice new exciting painful bulge.  However, I am without the nerve pain, to a large degree – not a trade I would have wanted to have been consciously faced with, exactly, but I will take what I can get.  As I half joked the other day, god’s gift to me is never sleeping through another beautiful morning.  The half part was the god bit.

The mornings are beautiful, and a cardinal just landed on my bird feeder with a quick flash of red.  The first tulips have faded but the second have just begun.  So what better excuse than that to post some photos of flowers from my garden (not now, from the past) for this spring morning as Mouse lies in the front yard happy as a clam – if clams are happy – probably a moot point.  But they don’t just give up, and they try to make more clams, so even if it is a poor way to make a living, being a clam, apparently even that is worth waking up to.

Nasturshalums for Winnie the Pooh

Mandatory tulips for Ottawa (and mandatory joke: A job advertised in Ottawa for planting tulips didn’t specify the wage, and upon inquiry the applicant was told the wage depended on where she was willing to plant them.  (Might need to say it out loud.))

And the wet remains of a Dr Seuss ball, or allium more scientifically:

Old fun with photoshop – but the flowers are ones I grew, and that makes it more fun.  When we bought our little cement house (21 years ago!) the front was almost all lawn, except for two lovely little ginkgo trees, and a flowering something tree and four tall evergreens obscuring the house.  Slowly but surely I have been eating up the lawn, and reached that happy stage in the last year or so for a gardener when there is almost always something in bloom, from the last snow at the end of April

to October and the first snows of winter.