So here's the deal: I went to bed at about 11:15 last night, and I woke up again at 12:45. I didn't get back to sleep until, oh... let's call it 4:15, for the sake of argument, and then of course I was roused by the alarm at 6 this morning. So I got somewhere in the neighborhood of three and a half hours' sleep, and it wasn't even consecutive. Just a couple of naps, really.

So I'm falling back on the last resort of the exhausted: a picture entry.

Here's Thelma the tomato plant, about a month after Karen gave her to me. She's growing nearly as fast as Penny. Though the tallest plants you see there are the basil. I need to harvest that and dry it, or something. They're thirsty buggers, too -- the pot has a reservoir in the base, and it holds about a gallon of water. I've been having to refill it about every two days.

 

A sort of fuzzy shot of some of Thelma's tomatolings. The biggest one, I discovered last night, was rotting on the bottom, so I had to pull it and throw it away. Alas. But there's lots more coming.

 

This would have been a very pretty shot of the marigolds if I'd been able to convince my camera to focus where I wanted it. There's theoretically a manual focus feature on my camera, but it doesn't work for me. The next time I go to buy a camera, I think I might spring for a semi-professional model with a real focus feature that will let me do macro shots. Anyway, the marigolds are pretty.

 

Today is "Red Carpet Day" at Penny's daycare. They told us to dress the kids up as "celebrities," and the school-age class is going to be given a bunch of disposable cameras, and they'll run around taking pictures of everyone. At least, that's what I understood. I wasn't sure how to dress Penny as a celebrity, but sunglasses always help, right? Also, I bought these little plastic balls to hold her pigtails. They're cute, and they're supposed to be easier and less painful than the bands. To their credit, I did manage to get her pigtails almost perfectly lined up on the first try. On the other hand, it took me about twenty attempts to put that first pigtail in. I needed a third hand, or something. I'm not sure if that's a function of the holder doohickey, or the fact that I got less than four hours of sleep.

--Liz