And today, in a perfect Life Imitating Art scenario, my very own Tom Jones, a.k.a. Chef Dan, put on his Beverly Hillbillies "Farmer Dan" hat and built us a Raised Bed "garden box" in which Green Acres Goldstein planted tomatoes, peppers, & basil! And I still am Eva, dancing around the Elkhorn Inn in my high-heeled, marabou-feather-bedecked satin mules! (Yes, I own a pair of Frederick's of Hollywood marabou mules, and yes, they are fire-engine red, and yes, Dan got them for me, along with several other Extremely Cool & Embarrassing Things, and yes, I truly believe that Every woman needs to own at least one pair of marabou mules (they are only $29 for goodness' sakes!), so even if she only has one (or two or three) husbands and not-so-many diamonds, she can still dance around the house crooning "do you vant a gin-and-tonic dahlink? like Eva Gabor!
Today was a Green Acres day, and while Dan was building the Garden Box, Iceman cut back the grass & Elisse-tall weeds, and lo and behold, the climbing roses were all in bloom- with no help from us at all, LOL! My two silly little Columnar Apple Trees actually survived our nutty winter, and one even has a little apple on it! The peach trees are full of tiny, little peaches, and the grape vines (which had to be drastically cut back) even have a few tiny little bunches of grapes! I put the windowsill herb boxes outside, and have two little Hardy Chicago Fig tree saplings on the windowsill, waiting for Farmer Dan to dig holes for them, too! And tomorrow, (assuming it doesn't pour), FFA Aggie Goldstein shall go out there (and not in heels this time) & plant the rest of the veggie & herb plants, and my tiny carrots and red "watermelon" radishes, and the corn, sunflowers, squash, & beans (on my cool, new Gardener's Supply Cucumber Trellis) in an "Indian garden"! I doused my new seedlings with Root Shield, to hopefully ward off the stuff that so often kills 'em, and I have my QVC RootBlast to put in with them and TerraSorb to hold in water & a shpritz bottle of Sevin to hopefully whack the damn Japanese Beetles... I am DETERMINED to get my garden back to what it was the year before last!
I actually spent the better part of the day on the computer, in my continuing vain & fruitless quest for replacement cushions for our balcony's outdoor furniture, discovering beyond the shadow of a doubt that it's cheaper to buy entirely new sets of patio furniture than to just buy cushions, and that NO ONE makes chair cushions for last year's short-backed chairs any longer. You can now ONLY buy high backed cushions, which are a good foot too high for last year's chairs. This is 'planned obsolescence' at its most disgusting, especially during an undeniable economic collapse, and it literally has us buying entirely new sets of (made-in-China, of course, because there isn't anything else that's even Possibly affordable) furniture. I was on dozens of websites, sent dozens of emails, and finally called the manufacturers of the chair cushions we want to replace: short backed seat cushions are simply not being made any longer, so if that's what you have, you have no choice but to throw them out and buy new furniture. Lowes wants $600+ for cushions (which won't fit our chairs, anyway, and for which we'd have to wait 2 weeks!), which I find rather obscene, but Pottery Barn wants $1200 for a single chaise, and chairs are $300-$700 a pop, and that totally blew my mind. I guess I'm 'out of it', but that during a depression of epic proportions I literally can't fix up our balcony properly- and we're not talking fancy-shmancy, either) for under $6000 (which is not happening in life) left me with my jaw around my knees. But BigLots may have just come to the rescue! Again! :-) More tomorrow!
