Gardening and other Stuff in January

We've been kept busy this month between working on our flower beds and helping our neighbor Barbara after her fall last month.

We've dug out the front flower bed in front of the dining room and lowered it about 3". When the house was built, the flower bed was sloped towards the house and whenever it rained real heavy water would puddle up against the house. When we would have some really heavy rain, we would end up having a small pond there. 

I did all of the digging (my back is better than Mike's - go figure!) and Mike emptied the wheelbarrow and we had about 20 loads of dirt that I dug out of there. Now all we have to do is to decide what we want to plant in the space.

The first thing we planted was a Tibouchina Tree, or Princess Flower. We tried centering the tree between the front entrance and the side wall. Then we tried centering the tree on the dining room window (which is centered on the inside wall, not on the outside wall of the house). 

We eventually settled on centering the tree in front of the window - which looks good when looking at it either from inside the house or from outside.

We had a really heavy rain (2") earlier this month and a large flock of cattle birds were
across the street and I took a photo of them.

Barbara still can't drive her car with her broken right foot, so we have been taking her to her doctors' appointments. She does have a home nurse come in to help her and to do her grocery shopping for her. She has season tickets to the Vero Beach Theatre and was unable to attend this month's play and gave us the tickets. Mike and I really enjoyed the play "Social Security" and we laughed a lot. Afterwards, we went to Ay Jalisco for dinner.

Our Keurig coffee pot started acting up and after doing some research about the problem found out that it was getting ready to quit. We bought a Cuisinart single serve coffee maker and have been really pleased with it. 

If one thing breaks, wouldn't you know that something else would break! We had to replace our printer this month. We bought a HP 8610 all-in-one printer. I had been wanting one for quite a while, but couldn't see the need to buy one since our other printer still worked. I know printers have come down in price quite a lot now, but if it ain't broke why replace it? I'm really enjoying using the new printer especially since it's wireless and we can print from our smart phones and laptops without being "wired".