Various and sundry topics

Nothing too exciting going on over here. Or at least that I can put in a blog post. Here are some highlights of the last couple of weeks:

1) My cucumber plants are infested with cucumber beetles, which make them die unexpectedly. I've had to pull out 3 of my plants, which of course were full of beautiful yellow flowers and baby cucumbers. This made me so upset that I had a dream about cucumbers and bugs last night.

2) My mom came to visit. We went to Houghton's Pond for the first time ever and went swimming! Also we went to the MFA, which was disappointing because most of the Impressionist wing was in storage because of renovations to the building.

3) The contractor finally finished the spindles on our stairs. So our big home improvement project for the year is completed ... well, except that we have to give the walls one more good coat of paint. For some reason, the paint already chipped in one spot. It's kind of odd. Anyway, it looks great.

4) And speaking of home improvement, I have officially filled up our first scrapbook of home improvement photos, receipts, etc. 8 years of stuff. We are so glad we are keeping a book because it actually makes us feel like we're making progress.

5) We have new neighbors across the street in the house that was on the market for a long time (Rita and Ray's old house, for those of you who know our street). There are lots of young couples with kids on our street now. It's really nice. I sort of hope that our street will be similar to my street when I was growing up. There were lots of kids in the neighborhood and we almost always had someone to play with.

We're looking forward to the weekend ... no plans! Yippy.

By the way, for those of you familiar with the Shaw Festival, is there anything good playing up there this year? We might go over Labor Day weekend.