Perfectly beautiful weather.....

Today was very warm and sunny, with bright blue skies, a tropical breeze, and everyone's garden is blooming and just bursting out in all sorts of colors. Wherever you walk, you can smell the yellow jasmine, azaelas, roses, white lilacs, and all sorts of flowering plants that I can't identify. If my dear friend Frankie were still walking the earth, she would've called me around noon-time today to say "Darlin', it's just wonderful to be alive today, isn't it?!" Yes, Frankie, it surely is, and I wish you still were.

This morning started off early..... I woke up before the alarm because today is piano-lesson day (and just about the only day of the week when we set the alarm). I was all ready to practice a little bit before going to K's for the lesson, and our neighbor's daughter S rang the bell and asked if one of us could drive her to school. She woke up late, and missed her first class, and her mom had already left for work. (S has her own car, but she had a little accident last week and the car is being repaired.) So off I went with S, and we had a nice chat between here and the high school, which is just outside the subdivision. This is S's senior year, and she's going college-shopping this weekend. She will either go to Austin or San Antonio for college, and she can barely wait to get a "taste of what's out there."

S and her sister M used to come over here for tea and cookies when they were little girls. And sometimes they came for lunch-- they liked my husband's grilled cheese sandwiches. They came to our Christmas parties with their parents every year, and they came here in their Halloween costumes to take pictures in front of our fireplace. And sometimes, they just came over to say hello and play with the cats. We've watched those two girls growing up during the last ten years, and they've matured into well-spoken, confident, and responsible young ladies. When M went off to college two years ago, we didn't have a weed in our front garden because V (the mom of S and M) would come over here and pull them all out--- it was her way of coping with the stress of "losing M to Austin." Now it will be S's turn to fly out of the nest.... and I expect V will be back in our garden, pulling weeds.

I'm sure the Mardi Gras festivities and rodeo events will fare better this weekend, now that the weather is back to normal. The rodeo parade was held on one of those cool and cloudy days, and some of the Mardi Gras parades were all wet and soggy--- hard to catch beads if you're holding an umbrella.

There was an article in today's paper about the school children who had to move to Houston when the hurricane destroyed the schools in New Orleans. It seems that the New Orleans kids wanted to take off for the Mardi Gras parades in Galveston--- when they lived in New Orleans, schools closed so everyone could take part in Mardi Gras. Well, as the saying goes: "This ain't New Orleans."

The Houston school districts don't close schools for Mardi Gras, and they don't close schools for rodeo. (They do close for heavy rains, however, but the sun is bright and shining this week.)

Speaking of the beads that are thrown during Mardi Gras parades--- in New Orleans, if the beads land on the pavement, no one picks them up. They say the beads have to be caught, not taken up off the ground. Well, I guess no one in Galveston takes that into account, because I've hardly ever seen Mardi Gras beads left on the streets of The Strand. Any beads landing on the pavement are scooped up as quickly as they fall onto the Galveston streets.

Don't know how I got from the beautiful weather to picking up beads.....