Outdoors and Throwing Rocks

I’m having a hard-to-focus moment today, so I’ll take a quick break and show you what’s new in the great outdoors.

My friend Erin & I hit up the farmer’s market on Saturday and I bought some flowers and kale. I can’t wait for these to start growing like crazy – I hear it’s the vegetable that keeps on giving, because you can cut off a stalk and another one (just as large) will shoot out. Grow, baby, grow!

I got some new cushions for my Pier 1 patio chairs, too! The table’s a little small but I’m kind of liking it…

This is the side of the yard that I hate- these bushes grow like crazy.

 

I sucked it up and trimmed them – the only casualty was a single blister. :)

 

Here’s the view of the backyard and fire pit as you enter the back yard. Look closely – the lanterns are starting to look rusty.

Years of exposure to the sun faded the lanterns and they’re rusting. We have four of them around the yard.

 

I taped them up and painted them with my NEW FAVORITE spray paint, Rustoleum’s Oil Rubbed Bronze!

Doesn’t that look so much better?

I like the Oil-Rubbed Bronze finish so much I’ve also painted a mirror frame and a flower pot the same color. What – else – to – paint ?!

Sidenote: I’ve been finding these little red mites (?) crawling all over the stone and wood deck. Does anybody know what these are? They’re super tiny, they’re red, and they have a bunch of legs. They’re EVERYWHERE. It’s unnerving to think that I’m sitting on hundreds of these bugs if I park it next to the fire pit. How do you get rid of them?

Nerd alert…

Our running buddy, Heather, brought me a gift the other night for playing hostess to our running group party. It’s a geode! She found it while she was on a run.

I’d heard that we had geodes all around Indiana, but didn’t know how to find them or what they looked like. I even saw a guy try to sell them on craigslist. $50 for a bunch of rocks you found? Really?

This Craigslist post tipped me off to what these things look like. So, the other day, when I was walking around in the creek next to our house looking for plants for my terrarium, I found a round-ish rock that looks like it *might* be a geode. I picked it up and took it home.

As a kid, I had a rock collection. A “ cheater” collection, no less, but I would get cool-looking rocks from The Nature Company or get one of these kits from the Scholastic book ordering catalog we got at school. My favorite was pyrite, or “fool’s gold.” I learned to love shiny things at a young age. ;)

I took a few shots at my maybe-geode with a hammer, except it scratched up my hammer! After about 5 swings, I felt really silly for beating up a rock, so I quit hammering on it. The next night, a friend of mine with a Geology degree confirmed my round rock as a geode. When I asked how to bust it open, he said that a good way to crack open a geode is to crack it with another geode.

The next day, I went looking for more and found a lot of bigger geodes in the creek bed, now that I was actually looking. On my first good throw (I felt silly for hammering a rock. Now I was throwing a rock at another rock.), it broke open into 5 sparkly pieces. It was like Christmas!

Have you made any fun discoveries in your backyard latley? Am I alone in thinking throwing rocks is cool? Tell!