14 degrees? No thanks.

This week I started my vegetable garden, planted sweet peas, hand picked tangerines, oranges and lemons, and enjoyed the blooming desert plants in my garden all while the East Coast enjoys a blast of Arctic air.

Here's my babies enjoying the sunshine. Making sure I don't do anything rash like suddenly whip Milkbones out of my pockets or hop the fence to play with a coyote, Henry carefully guards my every move.

Here's Lola (did I mention she's shedding because it's so warm?) enjoying the sunshine, chasing lizards and just being gorgeous.

Now we're off to dog beach. I'll take my camera along just in case I didn't get my point across.

Sunny lemons

In a moment of calm during the massive rainstorm that has been bashing the west coast, I scurried outside and picked four ripe lemons from my new lemon tree.

Of course, with every lemon I pulled from the tree would cause the branch to snap back and soak me with water droplets, but nothing makes you feel sunny like some fresh lemons. And, nothing tastes better than those lemons turned into lemon curd.

Green

Green seems to be a color that provokes the most emotion from people. My mom has always considered green to be her favorite color. One of my sisters has painted each house she's owned green. A friend of mine bellows an operatic note, "GREEEEN!", because she is so in love with the color.

The one green item in particular that would provoke a woman-on-woman cat fight in my yarn store was Manos del Uruguay wool in citric. If there was only enough to make a felted handbag, or heaven forbid only one skein left on the rack, (that they knew of, I always had a personal stash of a skein or two to quell my own yarn anxiety) serious bartering would ensue. "I really need it this week," one yarnoholic would say.

"I have more on order and it should be in this week," I would console.

"OK, you can have it this week," says another junkie, "but you better bring me a cappuccino next week!"

Don't get between women and their yarn.

My sister's obsession with green goes above and beyond convention as well. Generally my sister's obsession with anything goes above and beyond convention, but green goes to new heights. I'm not talking about any green either. It must be bright lime green. Each house she's owned has been painted bright green, she'll have a lime handbag, and always a green company logo.

Luckily she is a designer that understands contrast and emphasis. Green is never used ad nauseum, it is always tastefully combined with excessive amounts of zebra stripe.

Green to me, on the other hand, has started to mean garden. Previously our yard looked like this:

A cesspool of demon weeds called foxtails.

We cleaned the living hell out this yard. I did silly things like packing huge amounts of plants and my (other) sister into my car in successive trips to the local nursery.

In the process of working on our yard I developed a new appreciation for the color. I always thought plants had green leaves and the flower was the color excitement. Not the case. Leaves and greenery range in depth and hue from soft green of sage leaves to deep dark redish-green foliage of my nectarine tree.

Henri Matisse saw these subtleties long before I did, specifically choosing a different green for each leave in his painting, Goldfish.

Green builds the perfect backdrop for the beauty of other colors including the remarkable colors of flowers. I have begun to look at green with new appreciation. Something I should have been doing all along. All that discovery and laborious work ultimately paid off because this was the setting for our wedding:

A Stranglehold on my weekend

So apparently there's a new game out this week, Stranglehold. I discovered this because suddenly we weren't listening to the news, but rather gunshots rung through the house. I enjoy auto racing games, sports games and the like. These first person shooters ON THE BIGGEST TV IN THE WORLD with full surround sound and a blasting subwoofer are another thing all together.

I grew up in a fairly quiet home. My parents didn't listen to music too often, they wouldn't let my brother blast punk in the eighties, and the television was hidden away in a small room at one end of the house. As the drastically youngest of four children, my older siblings moved out by the time I was eight years old. Without the others in the house my parents and I lived in a quiet environment, with the exception of me and my girlfriends giggling about who knows what. That made me a creature that likes silence. This is where Thomas and I have a bit of disconnect, he being the eldest of four. I don't suspect his house was loud, but I think there was always something going on, somebody with a friend over, a sister practicing the piano or the television. Result: he's more comfortable with music on, I like silence.

So, I decided to spend my evening outside. I like Thomas to get some time doing what he likes to do even if it's not my favorite way of spending time at home. I'll make the most of it by tending to my plants that were slightly neglected in last week's unbearable heatwave.

And by admiring Lola and her dedication to eating sticks, playing with her toys and napping.

Long legs make long shadows

It's going to be another warm day here today. Nothing like the east coast, but hot none the less. No breeze, no air conditioning, but lots of baking sunlight.

I've been trying to keep my newly planted garden alive by giving it just enough water to keep the plants from wilting. This theory will hopefully make the plants root deeper making them hardier.

By the time the cooler days of autumn arrive, I should have stronger, happier garden dwellers.