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Terrible weather in Toronto

June 19, 2008 by Tricia

Since last Friday we’ve had some pretty bad weather here in Toronto. Severe thunder storms with winds that knocked down trees, super heavy rain and more!

The other day … I think it was Monday we even had hail!

I grabbed my camera as soon as I realized it was hailing, but the rain was coming down so hard that the hail melted in my area before I could take a picture of the grape size hail!

Even this photo doesn’t really show how hard it rained that day. I believe there was still a little bit of hail coming down while I took the picture:

Apparently some areas of Toronto had worse hail than we did. A lot of cars were dented! The news said we should look for “hail” sales at dealerships in about a month!

It’s been so cold too! I turned our furnace back on, although it hasn’t been quite cold enough for it to turn on … so we’ve been sitting in our house with sweaters or blankets covering us. Hard to believe that it will be summer in about 27 hours! If feels more like autumn around here.

Watching old shows on TV

June 19, 2008 by Tricia

I’m not feeling so hot today so I’ve just been lying down and watching TV for a good portion of the day. Unfortunately there really isn’t much on.

For a while I was watching Melrose Place. You know, I never did get into watching that show back when it was one of the hot shows on TV and I still couldn’t get into it. For some reason some of the characters were walking around dressed in what appeared to be equestrian clothing. They weren’t riding horses so I have no idea why they were dressed that way.

I do like watching some of the old shows on TV … Archie Bunker in All in the Family is usually funny. It’s amazing to think how bad attitudes were in the 70’s when you see shows like that or the Jefferson’s, Good Times and so on.

Actually when I’ve been watching the old shows – even reruns of Rosanne I’ve been having fun spotting actors that are in current shows or who’ve made it big in movies like George Clooney and many others.

Do you ever watch old TV shows? Spot any familiar faces?

Blooms everywhere

June 15, 2008 by Tricia

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It’s amazing how quickly the garden changes at this time of year isn’t it? Two weeks ago I still had some tulips – like this beauty peeking out from around another plant –

Now that tulip is gone, but it’s been replaced by blooming peonies, columbines, hundreds of roses, geraniums and more … I can’t even think of all the names of the flowers that are currently blooming in my garden right now. It’s a delight to walk out there though and smell the fragrance of all those roses at once.

Other short bloomers that are mostly gone now are/were my Dover Blue German Iris:

These German Iris’ are still blooming. I think the only reason they’re still around after our storms and heat waves are because they’ve chosen to grow up into one of my large rose bushes this year. I guess they are getting a little more shade and staying cooler so they’ve lasted longer than they usually do.

Is your garden full of blooms too?

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information. GTS participants remember to check in at As the Garden Grows each week so that we’ll know you made a new post!

Rainy weekend

June 15, 2008 by Tricia

I can’t believe the storms we’ve had in Toronto this weekend. Late Friday evening we had a huge thunder and lightening storm that caused the power to go out briefly a few times.

The storm and power failure actually knocked out our TV for a while. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you already know how much trouble we’ve had with our DLP TV lately such as having to replace the color wheel and the special light bulb. Those were expensive! So when the power flashed on and off and our TV’s front panel lights were all flashing and the TV wouldn’t turn back on we thought the storm had wrecked our TV. Luckily after leaving it off for about 30 minutes it worked when we turned the power back on. Big sigh of relief. We certainly can’t afford any more repairs for that TV.

Now today we’re having thunder storms again. This time the TV is not on and we’ve got it unplugged too. We do have a power surge protector, but we aren’t taking any chances. That TV is just too expensive to repair to take chances.

The only other problem with all this rain is that I can’t get out into the garden. I’ve got flats of annuals to plant but you can’t plant in the rain and it’s not good to plant in wet soil as that ruins the composition of the soil.

Hopefully the weather will clear up soon and I can get in the garden in a few hours.

Need to find better ways to cool our home

June 11, 2008 by Tricia

Now that it’s finally get warm outside here in Toronto I’ve come to realize that we need to find a better way to keep the house cool in the summer.

We have window air conditioners, but they seem to only cool half the house. If I go upstairs into the non- air conditioned spare bedroom on the south side of the house it’s almost as hot as if we didn’t have any air conditioning at all. Same for our kitchen which also faces south.

I have curtains in the kitchen and a roman blind in the spare bedroom, but I’m thinking about getting some wood blinds so that I can use them to block some of the strong sunlight that comes into both of those rooms in the morning and early afternoon.

I figure if I can keep those two rooms a little cooler the rest of the house will be cooler too and perhaps we might even be able to turn the air conditioning down a notch or two.