Bleeding hearts, clothes lines & church pictures

I'll start today with our bleeding heart that is just growing like crazy in our little corner garden up near the house.  Last year it was just one little hardly recognizable clump of leaves and this year we have this!

We took a little field trip to Poplar today, about 30 miles away, to their hardware store so we could get the parts we needed for clotheslines.  Small-town hardware stores are so great; they have just about anything you'd want.

I've been wanting clotheslines since last summer but knew it was going to be kind of a process. Materials needed: 1 1/4" pipes for the upright posts and crossbars, t-joints, caps, other hardware for connecting the coated wire, and cement to keep the posts in the ground and straight.  But we got the guys who built our house lined up for another job (eave troughs along the garage to lead into a rain barrel), so they'll put up the clotheslines at the same time.  Yay!

Yes, we have a dryer but last summer when we started doing lots of sets of sheets for the B&B, I realized that the sheets came out of the dryer in a wrinkled mess.  So following the advice of my B&B mentor out in Vermont, and Oprah, and probably my mother, too, I started ironing the top sheets, but what a job!  They looked nicer on the beds though.  So I'm hoping hanging them up outside will dry them flat and nice and sunshine-y fresh!

This afternoon we were scheduled to have our pictures taken for the church directory.  I found out things have changed a little in the church directory business since I was last in a church directory.  The brochure explaining how it was going to work (which I read five minutes before we left for the appointment) suggested that we could be creative in what we wore and brought along as props, we could bring pets(!), and make it a picture that was personalized for us...but we didn't do that.  Ours turned out to be a pretty typical church directory picture, but he did a good job.  He asked if we wanted individual pictures.  At first we said no, but then I remembered that it's good to have a decent picture every once in a while in ones life.  So we did.  Lifetouch comes through again!

And finally, on our trip down to check out the lake, we saw our friend, Mark, busy re-constructing the picnic shelter that was damaged in a storm last summer.  I think this one will be there for a long time!

Gardens are growing in spite of temps barely above 50˚ every night!