~ new oven, never again to be so clean ~

I've just read two novels in a series called the Psychic Eye mysteries, written by Victoria Laurie. In A Vision of Murder, a “psychic intuitive” has a run-in with a nasty ghost in a haunted house. She explains to her detective beau and his sidekick that ghosts are people who have died but not gone over to the Other Side, or heaven. They are stuck here, more or less, until they realize they've died and move along.

I had never thought of that Other Side as heaven but darn it, the more I do the better I like the idea.

***

A telephone conversation with my friend Kim down in Swift Current gave me the prod I needed to transplant a few of my annuals this evening. I had forgotten that this, the Victoria Day long weekend, is planting time. No pots are prepared with soil because the garden's still too wet to get into, so I discarded my plans and let what was available for space right now lead the way. Thus, into the ground in three different spots went the blue lobelia, the purple-centred orange and yellow daisies, and two pretty hanging vines.

I walked to the shop after dark to close up the bedding plants that remain. It’s cool enough out there (surprisingly, after three such warm days) that it could freeze and I’d be kicking myself in the morning. But ah, the satisfaction of seeing those babies in the ground was worth it even if I have jumped the gun. If they survive they'll take off into crazy growth and happy blossom now that they’re out of their limiting pots and have room to stretch out their roots.

Tomorrow a few orange cosmos may go into the ground while I cross my fingers that the sun shines and the wind blows for another two days, drying up the flooded garden so we can prepare it for sowing on Monday or soon thereafter.

My temperature has been taken, and the diagnosis is ... that seasonal malady ... Flower Fever.