Mulch and Memories

"It's our red, white, and blue breakfast,"
Evelyn said when I came in from the yard
to enjoy breakfast.

I spent most of yesterday, from before 8:00 a.m. till after 4:00 p.m., working in the yard. I took a break mid-morning for a wonderful breakfast of homemade waffles and fresh, fruit and another break about 2:00 for peanut butter crackers and a Coke.
I planted flowers and tomatoes in the bed beside the driveway and then mulched it all. (I had cultivated it Sunday, so it was ready to plant.) I started there because that side of the house is in the shade in the early morning.
The next door neighbor offered me a whole garden cart full of mulch. He'd bought too much and gave it to me free for taking it off his hands. So I cultivated and planted flowers in the front flower bed in time to use his mulch. He gave me enough to cover the whole bed!
The day grew warmer and warmer, but after my lunch, I planted a hosta in the flower bed behind the pine trees and then spread a bale of pine needle mulch to cover the bare spots all around the trees in the back of our yard.
Through it all, I used RoundUp on weeds and got several shovels full of compost from our compost bin in the back of the yard.

Aided by the chilly days and nights of
late spring, my lettuce patch has really taken off!

We cooked pork chops on the grill (from the freezer, part of our Omaha Steaks Christmas gift from Ken and Susan) for supper, and went to the Cone for dessert later in the evening.
It was a perfect, productive day, the third warm and sunny day of this three-day weekend. And it gave me the chance to make a lot of progress in with my list of spring chores.
Sunday we were at the Welcome Center at church, and I "hosted" in the Classic Service. I came across a headline in The Wall Street Journal that gave me the idea for the Communion meditation and the column I needed to write for christianstandard.com (It went live this morning). I worked on the column at the kitchen table for awhile after we got home from lunch and errands. And then, as I mentioned above, I worked in the yard.
Saturday evening we went to RiverHills Christian Church to enjoy a wonderful dinner celebrating the seminary graduation of George and Zina Dababneh. George is from Jordan; Zina is originally from Iraq, and after hard work and sacrifice, they received their degrees a couple weeks ago at the CCU graduation.

Zina and George are as attractive on the inside as they are good looking on the outside.

While we were there, we got acquainted with another international couple, Miguel and Allejandra Lara. He was an IBM salesman in Venezuela when he was converted to Christ through the ministry of Johnny Dye. Now he and his young family are living in Price HIll, and he is in graduate study at CCU. We discovered that they are attending Christ's Church at Mason, and in fact, the next morning we saw them at church.
Two inspiring couples who will one day use training received in Cincinnati to take the gospel to difficult foreign fields.