Back from Vacation!

I bet you didn't even know I was gone! A lot of times I post when we go to the beach, but this year I got very paranoid about letting the world know we weren't at home. Not that I think you, my dear friend, would spread the word to local robbers and bad guys, but sometimes robbers and bad guys read blogs. Okay, probably no robbers or bad guys read this blog, but, well, sometimes we're not entirely rational creatures, now are we?

Plus, I spent a lot of time at the beach napping. Or else rocking on the front porch of our rental house. Here's what my view looked like:

I like a beach house with a front yard. We were on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, on Ocracoke Island, and the beach itself, the part of it where you can actually hang out, is about a mile up the road from where we stay. The nice thing about Ocracoke--or one of the many nice things about Ocracoke--is there are lots of trees. There are also hidden family graveyards, and one really good bookstore, called Books to Be Red. We can't figure out why it's not Books to Be Read. Maybe they started out as a distributor of Marxist tracts?

Isn't that a great old tree? All the trees on the island get beat up by the wind, and are quite beautiful and spooky.

So, anyway, we had a nice time. There's always at least one day on vacation where you wonder why you ever had children, because this trip would sure be a lot more enjoyable without them, but for the most part the boys were friendly and fun. We played a lot of Scrabble and ate a lot of pimento cheese (well, not Will--pimento cheese is waaay outside of Will's comfort zone, as are most foods with coloration or flavor).

We came home Sunday to lots and lots of rain. Big floods over in Chapel Hill, The creek she's a-rising, Mama sort of stuff. My garden is looking pretty beat down, and the dang squirrels are eating the green tomatoes. Plus, the mulch around my flowers is starting to smell sort of bad. But the green beans are doing great!

And the rain continues. It's supposed to go away tomorrow, at which time I'm going to hang strips of fabric soaked in peppermint oil on the tomato cages. Will read that keeps squirrels away. From what I know of squirrels, nothing keeps them away besides a shotgun, but maybe we'll get lucky.

There was a statue of St. Francis in the garden of our beach house, so Will and I started making offerings to his little bowl. We found a couple of plastic gems and a snail shell, so we put those in, and on our last day we put one of the plastic red-eye tree frogs we keep in the car (because you never know when they'll come in handy while driving) into the bowl. We hope he'll still be there next year, as we plan to be there next year, too.