Pink and white, not red

I like things to go smoothly and evenly and with routine. I'm pretty boring that way. Even though I've been traveling a lot for the past few years I still find going away for a weekend destroys my routine and upsets my system. My normal insomnia is increased and I'll go several days on either end of my travel without sleep. My house is a mess, my yard overgrown, my fridge is empty and my eyes blurry. Last night I finally slept soundly and I'm feeling normal again. Yay!

I ran last night with Pam, our normal short short route. I took the first couple of steps and wasn't sure my legs were ready for running yet. I had a lot of discomfort in my upper quads, or maybe it's my middle IT bands. I'm not too sure which but my thighs were not pleased. After a couple of blocks and a bit of stretching they were ok. In fact, it was a pretty good, if somewhat slower than normal run. The nagging blister/bruise on the bottom of my toe didn't feel too good, and the couple of bruised toenails will take a while until they stop hurting, but otherwise I think I'll be able to start increasing mileage a bit again. Which is good, with the Mill Valley run tomorrow. I had hoped I'd be able to do more than limp a couple of miles.

My neighbor was able to fix our fence. Somehow the cross bars had shrunk, or the posts shrunk, because the bars had lifted away from the post. It's the same way in a few other spots along the fence line. My neighbor told me that he was astounded at how little the previous owner of my house had paid for the fence so I'm sure it was because of cheap wood, short nails and shoddy workmanship. Nice neighbor fashioned a shim to bridge the gap and renailed all the boards with longer nails. It's probably the strongest spot in the yard now. Too bad that the next place the fence will fall apart isn't shared with his yard; I'll have to hire someone to fix it then. What? Fix it myself? Uh, right. Me with a hammer and nails? Bwahahahah!

Mister neighbor also kept exclaiming about how beautiful my garden is. The peonies are in bloom now, many plants with many flowers each. He had no idea what was hidden behind my fence. I let him know that it was, in part, due to his removing his big sweet gum tree. Now that part of my yard gets much more sun and the peonies are responding happily.

It's funny, but there are supposed to be bright red ones, white ones, pale pink, deep pink, etc. but they mostly tend to be either purple, pink and white, or white. I don't know if bright red is just a color that doesn't bloom true or if the description of the plant was simply inaccurate. I also can't tell the difference between the plants that cost about $30 each and those that came in a Costco package for about $10 each. Oh, and the insects in my garden are thrilled at all the peonies. Looking closely at the flowers it's easy to see where they've been nibbled on. The ants are the worst, crawling all over to get the sweet sweet nectar, so I can't really cut and bring the flowers inside. I don't mind; they last longer on the bush than they would in my kitchen.

I resumed knitting on my never ending superlong wrap. I tried it on, hoping I'd like how long it is already, but I think it stills needs about a foot more. Snore. I'm really tired of black, really tired of the same 2 row repeat. But I figure since it's taking me months to finish I should make it the right length. So it's back and forth and back and forth and yo, k2tog, k1 and purl along the back and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz