Some Daisy Flowers and My New Bike!

Keith ordered me a Christmas present that took a while to get here, a Christmas present that at first I was kind of mad at him for spending the money on when a few days after he ordered it word came out that he might get laid off after the holidays. Fortunately he did not get laid off but almost everyone under him in seniority did, so it was close there and we're still a little nervous about the future like will layoffs come around again next January, but for now we're breathing a little easier but trying to plan ahead just in case. The railroad has recalled some of the guys that were cut off but not many of them so he is still down there at the bottom of the heap.

Anyway, he ordered me a tricycle in bright orange and it came a few weeks ago. I have my official old lady bike now!

It has a big basket for hauling groceries or whatever and is remarkably easy to ride once you figure out that you can't ride a tricycle like a regular bike, no using your body to go in the direction you want, you have to turn the handlebars like turning a steering wheel. Takes quite a bit of getting used to but once you do it's very smooth and actually seems like less effort to pedal that a traditional two wheeler. It has 3 speeds, a front brake and coaster brakes like the bikes we had as kids. That takes some getting used to also, I have to remind myself to push backwards on the pedals along with using the hand brake to stop. I've been grocery shopping a few times with the bike and the basket can hold quite a bit of grocery bags. I was totally paranoid the first time I locked it up outside Walmart so bought a second lock and now lock it up with two locks. I figure it would take a thief a bit longer to go through two locks than one!

A few years ago I had planted a bunch of white daisy flowers out in the front flower bed and they got really big and then all of a sudden died off so I took all the dead ones out. Then we had some rain and we noticed hundreds of what I thought were weeds coming up in the flower beds and it was a good thing that I was too lazy to pull them out because it turned out that the daisies had scattered their seed all over the flower beds and now we have hundreds of little daisy plants blooming away! Sometimes laziness can be a good thing?

And the rain also made our brown lawn green up, it's mostly weeds but looks a little better than it did. I'm sure once the summer comes it will all be brown again, but it's kind of nice to see the green out there even though I've had to mow it each week!

I'm feeling better since I got meds to get rid of my sore throat, but whatever it is that we both have leaves you with a dry cough that will not go away! It's not too bad in the daytime but as soon as you lay down and try to sleep you cough, cough, cough, and it's really hard to sleep when you are coughing.