Today's adventure was driving to Enfield, guided by the onboard GPS, to visit The Gardener's Dream- a huge nursery. John wanted t find some Jelly Bean blueberry bushes.
This is how we use the GPS- we plug in the address and start following the directions the voice dictates, but we, having lived here all our lives, know certain shortcuts, so we took shortcuts until we got to 190 in CT. If the GPS was a real woman she'd have been totally pissed off with us for not following her directions! We had fun putting words in her mouth, like, "I told you to stay on route 20! You're not listening to me! You're going to have to stop and ask for directions! Hello! Are you even listening to me?" Not until near the final quarter mile, we didn't listen to her very much at all!
Anyway, we found the Jelly Bean blueberry bushes and got two (they were $30 apiece.) Then John wanted a butterfly bush. Huge, fat bumblebees and honey bees were sipping nectar on many of the flowers. he had to shake a ginormous bumblebee off the one we selected (another $30 for this bush). Then, I really couldn't leave without two fireworks fountain grass plants. I just loved the vivid pinky-red and stripes! Awesome, and they were on sale, two for $25. I could have easily filled the Rav-4 with this big bushes, but we'd picked up 4 forty pound bags of cat litter and two cases of cat food already. Three bushes rode in the back, the blueberries on the floor behind the driver's seat.
John planted the blueberries when we got home. I would have liked to have some blackberry and raspberry bushes, but they would really attract the black bears and probably wouldn't last long. I want to go back there though, they have some amazing plants and bushes! I also liked the Japanese holly!
We need to pull out al the bushes in front of the house and replace them. Huge project that will have to wait until John's neuralgia subsides. He's still got a lot of post-herpetic pain, poor guy.
After all the errands were done I put together volume I of the Christmas stories and got it all set up and into review. Then Kelly came home and I showed her the cover design and she grumbled that
Christmas Stories, Volume I is a pretty lame title, that I need to come up with something better. I have to come up with story titles...my brain is fried.
So, this evening I created my first contest on facebook- suggest a title for this volume of nine holiday stories. I will choose the title I like best. If it's your title, you'll win a signed copy of the book, and I will credit you inside the book as being the contest winner. The book will retail for $14.99 on Amazon.com next month. The contest will run for one week. If you don't have facebook you can still enter the contest by emailing me your title suggestion to sebuffum415@gmail.com.
Here's what's in the book- nine inspirational, traditional and contemporary holiday stories all set at Christmas time. The stories are about:
-a young woman whose prayer is answered on Christmas Eve
-a young widow and her daughter who receive a holiday surprise from a kind stranger
-The rollicking Riley family whose five children get up to a little Christmas mischief
-a young woman who loses everything who has the best Christmas ever
-a church congregation who has recently lost their leader who gather together to celebrate Christmas anyway
-a department store CEO with no Christmas spirit who encounters a Customer Service rep possessed of an abundance of holiday spirit
-a fish-out-of-water NYC director who arrives in Maine to direct A Christmas Carol and quickly alienates everyone associated with the production
-a little girl who finds a silver sleigh bell in the street and believes it was lost by one of Santa's reindeer, and
-a man and a woman who have both suffered tragedies who find one another when a salvaged window from a burnt out cathedral is installed in a new battered women's shelter.
May the best title win!! Put your thinking caps on and send me your title suggestion by 6PM EST next Saturday, August 29th.
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