8.4.07

More Easter


I haven't blogged in over a week and the main culprit is being too busy. Work is in full gear right now until our next release in May. When I'm not working I have been taking as many breaks from the laptop as possible.

Our weekend in Basel was very nice. We attended two birthday parties for M.'s mom, the friends party and the family party. I spent quite a bit of time with M.'s niece who at a year and a half is as cute as a button. She has taken to calling me Mishie and has pulled my name into her list of 'who's who'.

On Saturday, we took a chill out day, catching up on sleep, taking a long stroll through the city and having date night, including catching the movie Babel, which we both like a lot. Here is one of the windows all done up for Easter in Basel. A crowd was gathered around looking at the big cream filled cake on the right (Bienenstich).



The week was hectic as always. In my ever growing collection of plants, M.'s mom gave me an orchid plant. It's my first one so I hope it does well. My Christmas cactus decided to bloom again. It is so cool how it starts from a minute little pink bud and then grows all the way to this huge flower. The two flowers were almost pulling the plant over they are so big.



Fortunately, this weekend is a long weekend with no work on Friday and Monday for the Easter holiday. Garden time! The shops were only open on Saturday the whole time we are home so yesterday we were running around with the rest of Munich trying to stockpile everything we needed for the whole weekend, including garden work.

The bulbs have come along quite a bit in the last two weeks while we were away.





















So, time for the next project! Two things occurred to me this spring about our garden. 1 - Less grass, more garden. 2 - More height variability in the plants. The first bed we made for the bulbs is very cute but it gets a little lost in the yard, as do the plants since they are all kind of short. For M., he wanted more privacy from the neighbors, especially on the porch we spend so much time on.

We brought out all the summer furniture and the grill and set it all up. Then we set to work on the yard. We built a new garden island (before and after):


















Around the porch, we put in a bamboo to give more privacy and a clematis just for looks. We still have one more major flower bed to put in but the work is exhausting so in the late afternoon we tidied up and had our first BBQ - chicken and grilled vegetables - delicious!





















To top it all off, we made Easter eggs. These are the ones from our neighbor, L.




Happy Easter Everyone!

Posted from Munich

3 comments:

The Big Finn said...

A Christmas cactus is sometimes also called an Easter cactus. Congratulations on getting it to bloom twice.

The garden is looking good!

lobstah said...

Happy Easter Shelly! My Christmas cactus is looking all shriveled and sad. Not enough light up here I suppose.
Oh my gosh that cake looks good!

Open Roads Mama said...

Your yard looks ready for the summer! :-) Hope you had a great Easter! Flower on the pictures are beautiful, I've been taking photos of most of the flowers I see these days, I missed flowers over the winter and can't get enough of the new flowers blooming now. :-) Have a great day!