Spring Color

How about this ruby red, shiny new laptop?  Our beloved old 2005 laptop lost its video right before my trip to Boone.  While I was gone, my husband ordered this lovely new one just for me.  I have been learning to use the new Windows 7, Microsoft 7, Internet Explorer 8, and load it up with new programs and files. 

While I was searching for the software for making CD/DVD labels, I finally found a disk I had been searching for.  After my father sold his house and moved to Boone, I found a box of my grandmother's photo albums that was left behind.  I scanned a lot of the photographs and documents, which are true treasures.  This is my grandmother when she visited my grandfather at a Marine Corps camp during World War I. 

Dogwood and azalea time is my favorite season in North Carolina.  I love it when the days get warm and the flowering shrubs and bulbs start to show their glorious colors.  This large azalea is at the edge of the woods in our back yard.  They like the dappled sunlight.

This shrub is loropetalum, which is also blooming profusely in my back and front yards.  The flowers look like purple fringe.

Everything looks so green in my yard all of a sudden.  (Think of the Masters tournament images...nothing beats springtime in the South!)

Of course, if you want to have gardens, it takes a lot of work to dig, plant, weed, and care for the plants.  When we bought our house in 1994, the builders put in some Nellie Burford hollies along the foundation.  How I wish I had dug them up and discarded them when they were small!  They grew way too large for foundation plantings. I had DH cut them down, but they left behind incredible stumps and root systems.  This year I decided not to put up with all the holly sprouts coming up from the roots. I excavated all three stumps on this side bed.  This one is still left behind, as my back gave out before the stump came out.  I will save that for another day!

And here is one more photo from my grandmother's album...down here at the bottom because I am having a hard time moving my photos around in Blogger using IE 8. This is a World War I picture of my grandfather Robert B. Turner on the right, with my grandmother next to him, and I believe my great-grandparents to the left.  I will need to go over these with my father to get all the identities correct.  A true treasure!