I went out to the front yard at dusk last night and clipped some of the mums. You can’t even tell any are missing, there are so many. I will keep replenishing these vases as long as I can.

Cheery flowers now in the kitchen:

And the office:

And so it begins…

I can’t take a screenshot of it all at once but trust me, it says 10 days of rain forecasts coming up. Oh boy…

But I’m getting sunshine in my life by three close friends moving to Portland in the next couple of weeks. One of them will be living with us. It’s been a long time since Peter and I had a roommate besides each other!

This is a sign at the corner of NE Fremont & 57th Avenue. I don’t think they turn it on anymore and it seems someone started to paint over it and gave up at some point. I really enjoy old signs like this, pretty grand for just a mini-mart. I wonder what it was before.

Portland has a lot of Neon Signs and other grand old signs I want to take photos of.

Peter and I have always had a lot of books – mostly reference, because we aren’t really joy readers. And when I do get fiction to read, it’s usually from the library. We have never had a decent bookshelf so our books have lived in boxes and on random shelves. Finally for this house we bought some Ikea Expedit bookshelves for the conference room.

I was trying to decide how to arrange them. Since we don’t read by author it would be pointless to organize that way. We don’t even really know the formal titles of the books we reach for frequently, either – we just know what they look like. So, it seemed of no hindrance to go with an organization method I have seen done many times and always wanted to do – rainbow!

It took about 3 hours to do. We have a LOT of white and black spines, and though it is much less obvious, I ordered those in rainbow too – red letters on the spines first, for example.

We are very happy with the way it turned out; it’s like functional art for the conference room.

I really don’t want to think about taking all the books out when we get around to painting that room, though.

Part of moving into a new house with plants, if you’re me anyway, means you have no idea what most of the plants are going to do. So the year may bring surprises.

We got a pleasant surprise last week when the large bushes in our front yard exploded with deep red blooms. I think they are chrysanthemums, but if you know better please share.

So pretty, I had to take photos:

I like how it almost looks rainbow in the background here:

I gave this one a different color treatment and liked it so much it’s my desktop background now: