Me-All, Canadian Thistle-0 Whoo hoo!

I have just spent the entire day pulling weeds out of the big flower bed along the back side of the house. I had some guys coming to clean my windows and decided I would do the right thing and not make them suffer pain and agony while they worked. 98% of the weeds were Canadian Thistle, most in front of the windows-natch. I pulled every single one of those suckers out! 6 wheelbarrow loads full! I have to say, I am very very pleased with the beauty bark we put in last fall and this spring. It doesn't stop the weeds from growing, but it sure makes them a LOT easier to pull out.

I got some special gloves for this project. I splurged and bought myself a pair of real leather gardening gloves. Usually I use the cloth ones, but they are no protection against Canadian Thistle thorns. Ha ha! The leather was totally impervious.

I also did this job at great risk to myself. The thistles were covered with yellow jackets. I'm not sure why that was, but I had to spray the weeds with Ortho wasp/hornet/jacket killer first and let it do it's dirty deed. Then I had to very carefully pull each one so as not to accidentally touch any part of my body with the plant, lest I get stung.

It's not particularly cold out. But the Jackets were pretty slow. I would have thought they'd have been buzzing around my head trying to do me harm, but they didn't. Must be in the mid to upper 70's. It was perfect for weeding. A nice gentle cool breeze was blowing. I really enjoyed myself. There's nothing quite like the feeling of getting all the weeds out of a flower bed so it looks pretty again. I have clean windows to look through too! How sweet is that?!

Yesterday I got to teach the bead embroidery lesson. My student called to tell me Wednesday wasn't going to work, so could I do Sunday. I had plans, but they weren't set in cement, so I dumped them. It went very well. It is always so amusing when I tell someone "this is really easy to do" and I get the "oh yeah, right'!" with the rolling of the eyes response. Then 30 minutes later you hear them say "Is this all there is to it???" Heh heh. That happened.

The mailman delivered a package today. This book:


In Russian it says "The Art of Beaded Weaving". The author is M. Ya. Anufrieva. It's a 'rare' beading book, known here in the U.S. as 'the white russian book', that was published in Russia. I found it on Ebay for a very reasonable price. I thought it was coming from Alaska, but as it turns out, it was shipped all the way from Moscow, Russia. My daughters boyfriend has dibbs on the postage stamps that came with it. I am SO excited to have it. There isn't a word of English in it, but the charts and graphs are so good you don't need words. The eye candy is awesome.

If you should desire to get this book, troll for it on Ebay. It shows up every once in awhile. There are two versions of it. The original version was published in 1999 and has blue trim, rather than red trim. The revised version (the one I got) was published in 2002 and has red trim. What ever you do, I'd advise against Amazon.com. It's listed at 500 bucks on there--which is a ridiculous price to pay.

Morgan is doing great.

I think I'm gonna reward myself for a job well done today and go play for awhile--with beads.

Have a great evening.