Many of my early spring flowers are purple. This is a clematis that stubbornly comes back every year. I’m thankful for that.

I grow a lot of lavender. The individual flowers are not showy but the bees love it!

Jeff, our youngest, is working on a PhD in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. The first paper on which he is lead author has been posted! It is part of a collection of working papers, and it has been submitted to the annals of applied statistics. As he says, “fun times!”

That’s Jeff, thinking deep thoughts, with Sugar the cat.

The current issue of Martha Stewart Living (May 2009) has an interesting article about color trends and what causes them. These 25 are what a lot of us are currently loving. The colors in my house are well represented here. Does that mean that I’m current and trendy?

I did some shopping when I wasn’t busy teaching last weekend. Der Kuchen Laden is a well-stocked kitchen shop in Fredericksburg, TX. I got all sorts of little doo-dads. The notched triangular tool for leaving lines in icing should be lots of fun to use on cakes.

Down the street Linens-N-More was about to close so I wasn’t able to shop long. Probably a good thing. I got this wonderful silk screened “America” dish towel made by Catstudio. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to let anyone get it wet – it may have to be a pillow. It could also be good in a quilt or garment.

In Kerrville, I found my way to Creations – one of the best quilt shops I’ve ever visited! This is the fabric I came home with. I also bought some wool for Linda, a linen jacket (for me), and upholstery fabric for my dining room chairs – oh happy day! It’s probably good for my wallet that I’m home now.

I found fences made from freshly cut cedar too! I want to put a fence like this around my backyard so it was exciting to find these.
This fence was “doubled” – there were cedar posts on both sides of the iron rebar supports.

The “single” fence had cedar posts wired to only one side of the rebar. The posts that hold the fence up are iron pipe filled with concrete. It looks like they used galvanized wire to tie the cedar to the rebar.

I wonder how long these fences will last before the iron parts rust through? Have any of you constructed similar fences?

One of the shops in Fredericksburg has an arbor over its entry made from cedar logs. The reason this is interesting to me is because my husband is on the faculty at Austin College. AC owns land that the Biology department is doing their best to return to prairie.

There is an invasion of cedar trees on this land that they are busy cutting down. It’s nice to find something to do with the excess cedar logs.

The construction of the arbor looks pretty simple, don’t you think?