Barnaclebutt

Yesterday we were supposed to spend the day in Sacramento for the first round of Lacrosse playoffs. The weather was wet so the games were cancelled leaving us with a totally unplanned Saturday, a true rarity around here!

Maddie and Katie were working all day on a service project for Young Women in Excellence so Marc and I decided to take Ellie and Jonathan to the Environment Fair to learn more about "going green," (Marc has been muttering about solar panels ever since we moved here).

The smalls were reluctant when we told them what we were doing, but they perked up when we got there and the different booths were abounding with FREE STUFF. It turns out that to Ellie a free pencil warrants as much excitement as a Christmas present because at the end of the fair she announced it was, "the best day EVER!" She came away with some mighty fine loot including a pedometer, a ruler made from recycled money, an energy efficient light bulb, several lovely pamphlets, and a couple of cloth grocery bags (I get pretty excited about those too).

From there we high tailed it over to the Heather Farms Garden Open House to check out the beautiful gardens with great examples of plantings that use native plants. Even though we're not actually doing any landscaping this year, I love to fantasize about it. Is that weird?

The lure of planting proved irresistible and after gelato we stopped at the nursery to pick up a couple of heirloom tomatoes and strawberry plants. I've been pouting all week because Osh was out of heirloom plants when I went last Saturday so that made me very happy.

And for our grand finale we released oodles of ladybugs over our roses in the hopes that they would eat all the aphids so I can plant those strawberries in the same beds. Let's wish them luck!