It is a sure sign that winter is half over when all of the flower seed catalogs start to arrive in the mailbox! My wife loves to look through the catalogs and try to figure out what new plants she might want to buy this next spring. She tries hard to plant perennials that are deer-resistant. That’s a challenge, but so far she has done a very good job at it! We get a lot of compliments from the neighbors about her flower garden! And since they are mostly perennial gardens, they are a minimum of work. She doesn’t enjoy weeding, but she sure does love how the gardens look when she is finished weeding them!
I can remember when I was younger and needed Math help with my homework, the only option was to stay after school and meet a Math Tutor in the library. I was lucky in that the school provided the tutor for free. Sometimes it was the teacher that stayed after school, and sometimes it was one of the teacher’s star pupils. I was very grateful either way; without their help I never would have passed math!
Nowadays, kids don’t have to stay after school anymore to get homework assistance. If they have access to the Internet, then they can get an Online Math Tutor to help them out. This is a great convenience to the parents and students because the student can get the help at their own schedule convenience, and they don’t have to worry about trying to ride a late bus home. That’s even better news since due to budget cuts the late buses were all cancelled a few years ago and parents had to drive all the way into town to the school to pick up their kids!
Winter would be a lot easier if our equipment didn’t keep breaking down! I don’t understand it at all. We take really good care of all of our equipment. It is supposed to be built well, yet it seems that the equipment is constantly breaking down! I’m tempted to buy brand new stuff because then the warranties would cover the costs of repair, but it is hard to justify the extra expense. Sometimes even having the repairs covered under warranty isn’t enough – breakdowns incur lost opportunity costs, not just repair costs. Built in obsolescence is the villain here, of that I am certain!
One of the things that always strikes my fancy in the summertime is driving past Duke’s barber shop on the West Side Rotary and look at the window boxes on the front of the building. Ever since I can remember, Duke’s has had the best garden window boxes I’ve ever seen. I don’t know who it is that is in charge of the window flower boxes, but that person is a true artist. They are always overflowing with cascading plants of some kind; ivies and petunias.
If it wasn’t for the beautiful flowering display, that building would go completely unnoticed by so many people! But those flowers add a really nice touch of class that makes the entire building look inviting. It certainly inspired me to look into getting some for our house! One extra good thing about them is that you can start the gardens indoors to get a head start and then move them outside in stages, to harden up when the weather starts to warm up.
My sister lives in the mid-Atlantic region, and she says that they have had a very unusual winter this year. Lots and lots of snow. The past several winters there has been hardly any snow to speak of. This year they have had what would appear to be a traditional New England winter, with lots of it! Frequent, heavy, and lots of accumulation. She says that it has essentially paralyzed the region. I’m not surprised to hear that – the DOTs down there don’t plan for these types of things. They must be way over budget and winter is only half-way through! I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the next budget meeting is held and they decide that they need to raise taxes to cover the shortfall! The residents will not be happy about that at all!