Sunday, October 23, 2011

The Problem With Butterfly Friendly Plants

You might end up with these feasting on your plants:





Apparently, some little Gulf Fritillary butterfly found favor with my passiflora foetida (passionflower) and laid her egss on it! The plant is now covered with larvae in various stages, so maybe I'll get some butterflies out of it!

Monday, October 10, 2011

The Flowers are Blooming, The Birds are Singing, and Rain!

Aren't the sunflowers and crows pretty?? I pulled out Sunflower Garden Sampler to work on while sitting in the waiting room during hubby's cardiac rehab sessions. I'm guaranteed at least three hours of stitching time a week while waiting. This is my first larger PS design, and I'm loving it! Not sure why it's taken me so long to get back to it.

I have also been working on getting caught up on my iStitch Mystery SAL piece. This is parts 1-4 and it's a very relaxing, peaceful stitch. I started part 5 while sitting at the imagining place this afternoon. Had to go do my part to support breast cancer awareness. ;) I got a lovely parting gift, too! LOL

We were fortunate to see some rain Saturday night into Sunday morning. It started raining early Saturday evening and continued all night long until about 11AM on Sunday. It was heavenly!! We received about 5" of rain total. There are some places to our west, where the wildfires have been prevalent, that got even more rain than we did. We'll take all we can get! My plants certainly appreciated all the rain we got.

As I mentioned previously, my hubby has started cardiac rehab. He goes 3 times a week for 12 weeks. Each session lasts about an hour and he is connected to a heart monitor. He does various cardiac exercises. Since he's connected to the monitor, if his heart rate gets too high or they notice something on the EKG, he is slowed down or stopped. One day last week, he had some kind of extra wave on his EKG while walking on the treadmill, but not on any other of the machines. They showed him the irregularity and mentioned it could be from pain. They've been watching it ever since, but he's not had any more. On Day 3 of rehab, they increased the intensity of his workout. I think that's a pretty good sign. Saturday, his cardiac rehab consisted of mowing the yard. The nurses fussed at him about that today! LOL I know he's feeling better, especially since we figured out what medication was causing the horrible rash. The doctor has taken him off that and put him on a different med. So far, so good!!

Until next time, happy stitching!!