September's here!

Sunflowers are such a great late summer flower. This one came up all on its own, from a seed dropped by a bird or squirrel making his getaway from the birdfeeders we had out front this year.

I interrupted a couple having an intimate moment...how embarassing!

I swear the one on top was giving me the evil eye. Deserved, I guess.

Not quite as sexy, but the blooms on my garlic chives are also looking lovely right now, especially when they blow gently in the breeze.


And that's it for the garden, everything else is brown and sad and done blooming. It looks like the mums are getting ready to explode soon, though.

We're doing some fall redecorating--moved our living room around over Labor Day weekend, which is so much more of a process than it sounds. All the home entertainment stuff has to be set up and wires run in new places and holes drilled so wires can run under the house and through the walls...my poor hubby. General Eisenhower had less trouble preparing for D-Day than Todd does setting up his home theater.

But the room looks better. It's long and narrow (like 10-12 feet wide) with a fireplace at one end, a doorway at the other, and windows on the one long wall. It's been hard to figure out a way to set it up so the couch can face the TV (necessary for Todd's optimal surround speaker placement.) The TV competes with the fireplace and the room has never had a focal point.

After visiting his boss's new house a few weeks ago, Todd suggested putting the TV on the wall above the fireplace and turning the couch to face it. I wasn't sure the couch would fit well placed across the room (have I mentioned this is a narrow room?) but it did, and now things are falling into place. The focal points are combined, and the bonus is that we'll be able to face the fireplace and enjoy our winter fires, instead of sitting off to the side and letting the heat wash past us.

I'd share some pictures, but there is literally stuff sitting everywhere--all the wall pictures I'm not sure where to put now, odds and ends, and stereo equipment and wires all over the place...so I'll wait! We've also decided to pare down all our components--get rid of the separate receiver and the 300-CD changer and the two separate DVD players, and Todd found a great system on Craigslist with small speakers and a DVD/CD/receiver in one. So we'll just have that plus the satellite box and one DVD/VHS player left so I can watch my piles and piles of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS. So, three components instead of five, I guess.

All the neighborhood kids started back to school yesterday, and we've had a few cool nights here and there so one might start to hope that fall is on the way. Not today though--it's 93 degrees. Ick! I want to go buy some sweaters and move to Maine!