Pushing little children; With their fully automatics; They like to push the weak around

Our golden bleeding heart is still going strong

An iris ('black gamecock') in the rock garden; It's actually a deeper, richer purple than what is captured here.

Alliums

We went to see "Where were you when you were taken?" at the Broom Street Theater last night for our date night. The theater and garden outside have been rennovated and were much nicer than the last time we were there. The play was written by a local guy and was pretty funny. We had dinner before the play at a Thai restaurant that we like. I mostly love going to that restaurant because they have sticky rice. I have a pathetic addiction to mango sticky rice and I can only get it there. I only ate half of my entree, so I would have plenty of room to finish off my sticky rice. I also got a few servings to go. The girls like it, so I got one for each of them, and of course one more for myself. It's currently in the refrigerator waiting for me. I am greatly looking forward to eating it later tonight!

We went to Jenka Blossoms this afternoon with my parents. We go there around this time every year to get our unique specialty annuals and herbs. We got all the plants I need to fill our containers. We then had to stop at Home Depot to pick up 20 2 cu. yard bags of organic potting soil. We came home, I made dinner, and then we started working on containers. The kids (L & H) and the dogs were out back with us.

We figured if we worked quickly, we may be able to get all of our containers planted tonight, so we could focus on weeding tomorrow. M & I were going back and forth between the back yard and the driveway, hauling the soil and plants to the backyard where the containers were laid out. M came into the back and told me there were police standing in our driveway with their weapons drawn. He asked the female officer if everything was okay, and she shouted that he should stay in the back. Given that we had children and dogs in the yard with us, and I could hear all the other neighborhood children outside playing, I was a little concerned with the lack of information. I told the children to take Chloe, get in the house, and lock all the doors. I wanted them safe, but we had planting to do and not too much daylight left to work with.

I went into the house to look out the front windows to see what else was going on. From my living room windows, I could see our whole two-block street blocked off from traffic, and police officers all over, up and down our street and the bigger street that we tee into. Several of them had big rifle-y SWAT-type weapons (yeah, sometime it's obvious that I'm an anti-gun hippie, like when I try to describe guns) and many of them were trained on my house. On my fucking house! Plus we still had the two officers with their weapons drawn standing in the middle of our driveway. The police were shooing everyone back into houses, as the neighbors were all starting to notice and want to know what the hell was going on.

I made sure the kids were all settled, and then went back into the back yard to finish containers. We did keep working, but had to keep stopping. Cops were running through our and our neighbors' back yards, asking if our back fence opened, trying to go through our yards. We would periodically hear them yelling stuff out and stop to try to determine what was going on. Between the interruptions and our nosiness, our work was going significantly slower than we had planned. I finally got to a breakpoint and we stopped working for the night and came in to clean up. We still had cops in the driveway at this point.

By the time we got our hands scrubbed and reassured the kids things were okay, I noticed the neighbor across the street was peeking out the door and then came out and headed over to another neighbor a couple of doors down. We couldn't see very many cops at this point, and they weren't yelling at us for coming out, so I too headed over to Leders to exchange information. Just then a cop came walking by and someone asked if they got the guy and they said that they had "apprehended the suspect and made an arrest". Apparently there was a guy either pointing a gun at or shooting at (not clear at this point) cars on the busier street that ours tees into, and he came to our street. He does not live in this neighborhood--he's from the fourth ward, which is the neighborhood in town where things like this happen commonly. I don't know how or why he ended up in our little neighborhood where things like this don't happen. It will be interesting to get some new and get the whole scoop.

When we came in, we found the kids had gotten flashlights and a cat and were having a blast hiding in our closet, giggling away. It was quite an exciting evening in our boring little neighborhood. We'll have to finish up our containers tomorrow.

H is spending the night tonight, so the kids are still downstairs being wild and silly. M just got upstiars here, so we are going to go watch a movie and I'm going to continue to work on another necklace I'm in the middle of making.