First Sunday of Lent

Bon jour!

This is the first Sunday in Lent.  It's also the first day of Daylight Time.  For the first time in my career as a practitioner of both Lent and Daylight Time, I overslept. Of course I should have used the alarm clock.  But since I'm such a habitual early riser, I had no idea I'd really need it.  Mea culpa.

As penance, I am going to make Theodore and me go to Anderson's Nursery in Point Loma, where we shall wander amongst the plants, want all of them, and hardly buy any. As usual.  I am particularly going to ask for a Flannel Bush (see yesterday) but they may not have one as there may be no "native plant" section.

In our back yard, directly outside our patio space, there's a fence that delineates the boundary between our property and the neighbor's.  Just on that fence, almost literally, there is a huge old eucalyptus, a survivor of the horrible cutting down and tearing out of many huge old trees in what has now been denominated a Flood Plain. I have loved that tree for its shade and its shelter of hawks, before the crows drove them away, and itsshelter for many tiny little birds that twittered a lot at evening before shutting those eyes for the night.  The little birds are about gone, but the crows have continued nesting there and I hoped the tree would be gone this year before nesting time.  The realtor-manager (Yavorsky) has postponed dealing with the tree, which must be dealt with as it's shedding twigs and small branches at an ever increasing rate (mostly into our patio.) Eucalyptuses have a bad habit of dropping large branches (tree trunk size) and even of falling over completely when their time comes.  This tree is in a terrible shape, its major and medium branches twisted and bent, its foliage shaggy and barely alive.  Every time a breeze blows, I tremble. The house to that property is maybe seventy or a hundred feet away.  We are just beneath it. It's about forty feet tall, maybe taller.  What is that to a twenty foot deep patio? Calamity.

I'd like to landscape our patio area a bit, to organize some of the great plants and trees we have sitting in pots, waiting for a permanent home in the ground. My Lenten prayer is that the tree situation gets resolved.  I hate to lose it.  Would settle for a severe but professional trimming with removal of some of the more unstable limbs.  But that would be even costlier.  And it's not our decision.  Tomorrow, I'll tell you some more about the conglomeration of plants we have back there. It's time to catalogue anyway! YAZZYBEL