Sunday, May 18, 2025 - Day 278

Sunday, May 18, 2025

📣 LIVE EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT 🌻 Season’s Sunflower Hour — Special ALS Episode.

In just 2 days, we’ve got something real to share. 🗓 Tuesday, May 20th
🕖 7:00 PM CST
📍 LIVE on YouTube

Join me and the family for a candid conversation about life with ALS — or as we’ve come to call it, that shitty disease.We’ll talk about the hard stuff, the funny moments, and even those questions people haven’t had the nerve to ask out loud.

💬 Got questions? Bring them.
🎥 Tune in live, interact in real time, and be part of the story. 
🔗 Click here to watch on YouTube ______________________________________
 Good morning!

The robins are happily chirping to one another. Somebody must have scored a mother lode of worms.

Yesterday was my first time out in the garden. To get there, I hopped in the lightweight power wheelchair. It drives reasonably well on the grass — although there’s a lot of wheel-spinning in certain spots. Eventually, I can make it to the edge of the garden. I haven’t tried this after a rain… probably a total fail. Once I’m at the edge, I can reach in maybe one or two feet and pull the tops off the weeds. It’s not much, but it’s something.

The irises have bloomed, and many of them are already falling over. I’ve never understood why Mother Nature produces plants that can’t stand on their own. So every year, I stake them up so the cluster of flowers can stand proud. In large groups, they’re really beautiful. On the ground? Not so much.

A couple of weeks ago, I brought this up with Cathy K, and she told me if I want the irises to remain standing once they bloom… I need to split them. Split them!? I don’t need more irises. So now we’ve got fall gardening to do — even if we don’t keep what we split. Anybody want irises?

When I was getting ready to start staking, Cindy said she wanted to come out with me. I think she was a little concerned I’d make a bonehead move and do a face plant in the mulch — or, even worse, land on top of the irises and it would be a crime scene with photos of bearded irises flattened by my bearded face. If I dyed my beard purple then I would blend in and become the garden.

So I wheeled out and managed to get a stake in the ground. Then I tried to wrap a zip tie around the iris and the stake. That was laughable. Without functional opposing thumbs, closing a zip tie is pretty much impossible. Thankfully, Cindy had come along. For the next hour, I played surgical assistant as she called out what she needed: stake, hammer, zip tie… repeat.

Eventually, I got frustrated with my menial part and decided to head back to the house. On the way in, I grabbed a beer from the garage fridge so I could sulk over another failed activity, and turned on the PGA championship for afternoon excitement. A much more relaxing and enjoyable activity so I forgot all about the gardening and settled in.

Today I’ll try to hook up the hoses…with some help from Cindy. It’s probably going to be Cindy hooking up the hoses and me assisting. Let’s see how it goes. I’m glad I have a backup in golf should things fail again.

Next up: the peonies. Another plant that can’t stand on its own once those big, aromatic blooms open up. These are my favorite flowering perennials. You could get drunk just smelling them — and once you bring a few cut flowers inside, the sweet bouquet fills the house with magic.

Have a great Sunday.

Love you guys!❤️