I'll fly away

 Today, I'm off to Cleveland for an annual conference.  Several of the senior people in my job group have retired and there are going to be a LOT of new people to meet.  Young people.  Selfishly, the people I want to get to know and have ask me questions.  Since I postponed my retirement just before the inauguration, I've been looking for ways to remain relevant in my job...I call it 'getting people to say my name.'  Or even better, being mentioned in an important email or 'getting my name in the paper'.  It used to happen all the time, but because I was retiring, I got missed in a cycle of projects and now I'm trying to create a project that becomes important.  I'm just hoping I can get something big in the next cycle.  

In the meantime, we're being audited by an outside organization and I'm trying to get all up in that and smear my name all over it, as in 'Lane provided...' and 'Lane was very helpful' or even better, 'Lane thought of a way to...."  

Vanity, thy name is Lane.

Anyway, I'll go up and make a good impression and shake a lot of hands and offer good advice and help and we'll see how it goes.  I will not indulge my terror of being the old man that fell asleep in the meeting and snored out loud.  That is NOT how I'm going out...but I've seen the agenda.  It might be a challenge.  

This is a new daylily.  The camera didn't quite catch the color.  It's more of a dark red.  All the nice daylilies are spread around, outside of the major clumps of yellow and orange.  If my Mom was right and the yellow and orange change the others to yellow and orange, then hopefully, these are far enough away to not be affected.  

These are also very red on the three dark petals and a pink-red on the lighter ones.  

This is a basket we picked up from the side of the road quite a few years ago.  I've struggled with what to plant in it.  I don't want to rust out the bottom of the basket, so I've been very careful about lining it.  This time, I used a huge plastic storage bag that has a flat bottom shaped into it and cut it to size and some drainage holes, put the coco mat around the sides and inserted the bag and filled it with soil.  We went to the garden center and picked up these pentas and vincas to fill it and this is the best that basket has ever looked.   

This was a trough I found in the phlox bed when I was putting in mulch.  I had forgotten it was there.  It was half full of soil, so I added some and two white begonias (one of which was obviously lying when I bought it...I swear they both had white flowers) and I had bought that trailing ground cover when it was on sale half price and nursed it back to health, so I put it in too.  Loving this little bit of different, surrounded by the phlox.  

I was walking around the garden yesterday.  I'd been out there working a couple hours and was trying to get "finished".  What a joke.  Everywhere I went to finish something, I found something else needed to be done.  It's never going to be finished.  And, that's the beauty of it.  It's like getting to work on the same quilt for years, starting small, growing over time, blocks taken out and replaced with something more colorful.  Or less.  Arranging colors and textures so they look balanced.  And, picking off loose threads (the equivalent of perpetual weeding).  And every year, when it's in its peak, I love it a little more than I did the year before.  

And, soon after that it becomes a chore as I try to save it from the blast furnace of climate change.  

Ya, there's plenty to talk about politically.  They're trying to pick a fight with the gays now, think pride month is the right time.  Renaming the Harvey Milk.  Blocking the park DC Pride is scheduled to happen in.  Intimidation.  The National Guard.  Fear.  

I keep thinking about Rep Sarah McBride (D-DE).  She's transgender and serving in congress.  Her days are much harder than mine.  And, yet she keeps getting up and living each day.  I can do that.  Not the congress part.  And, not the tolerating Nancy Mace's bigotry part.  But I can do the getting up and living each day part.  

However, I have too many other things to worry about today than what the orange and his false christians are doing.  I need to be focused on staying awake in meetings.  And, not getting lost in Chicago's O'hare.  

Everybody have a great week!  Do something you're good at.  And, be sure to also do something you love.  Lane