Hilton house wrap-up

A few notable moments from our stay at the Hilton:

Photographing plants:

Marian asked me to photograph her peonies as they bloomed, and of course I couldn’t resist shooting her other flowers, too. I was greatly intrigued by what I called “space needle” flowers. They were flowers without petals. I
took many photos of them. When Marian returned this weekend I commented on them. “Oh, those are aliums that have already bloomed and lost their petals,” she said. Agh! I’m a lame brain! I thought she had some rare funky species of outer-space flower or something!

Killing plants:

One of my jobs was to keep her indoor plants, front porch plants, back porch plants, garden plants, and vegetable garden plants alive. Most things that were planted in the ground survived. The potted plants did not fare so well. See this beautiful one? Yeah, it shriveled up by the time I was done with it. Marian was good natured about my murders and was also very patient as she taught me (again! I’m a slow learner) about how to care for potted plants. I am determined to get it right! (Says the girl who killed almost all of her own houseplants this last winter when she was sick!) I also was so unobservant that I totally missed the chipmunk and groundhog infiltrations in her vegetable garden. I could blame it on pregnancy brain, but honestly, I think the problem is my general “blondness” that rears its ugly head once in a while.

Breaking Appliances:

The water heater broke with a week left to our stay. And they don’t make that kind of heater anymore, so the new one will take almost 2 weeks to come in. Of course, the water heater broke on the day that we had out-of-town friends stay the night. Bathers were subject to what my family calls “Lake Superior washes.” Eee! I was not one of those bathers. I am not brave. I went to my own house for showers when I could.

A few days later, after a really long day of hard work, I sat down to watch an hour of TV before bed. And the TV broke. Agh!

So there we were, out in the an old antique house, no hot water, a broken TV, no normal internet or normal working computer. We were roughing it! Haha.

After that I was afraid of some other catastrophe—you know, things come in threes. I kept a wary eye on the dogs, lest they befall doggie malaria or something. I certainly was not going to let a dog be the third blow!

Dog watch:

Marian said that I could cut Maggie’s hair. I was so excited! I love stuff l

ike that! And Maggie was a total peach about it. She LOVES people attention. Here is a shot I took of her before I trimmed her mane. Look, it’s Aslan!! J (Maggie is not a natural model like Lucy.)

Here are some shots of the dogs playing “Launch.” (For a gross story about a Launch game snafoo, read “Ruiner of Fun.”)

Birthday boy:

JB celebrated his 28^th birthday. Happy Birthday, Jeddie!

I tried to be a good wife by making him his favorite cake: spice cake with homemade pneuka frosting (a brown sugar frosting). Well, his birthday fell at the beginning of water heater drama and I was just crazy busy and ended up jacking up the frosting—I didn’t have enough to spread around and when I tried to spread it farther, I ended up pulling up part of the cake and it got smashed in the frostng. I told him that I had made him a Kindergarden Cake, because it looked like a Kindergardener made it. He said that we could just make more frosting and put that on. So we did. It still turned out looking like this: