The old and the dead.

This year I've noticed "upside down" planters have been very popular.  I was first going to write this blog on how crappy they are and how I've yet to see any that actually work.  Last night I decided to be a total creepster.  I walked around our neighborhood and took pictures of other peoples plants.  On this quest of mine I found that I just suck at growing tomatoes in my upside down planter.  On closer inspection today I realized that my plants are infested with mites.  F-ing little white tomato stealer's.  Here are a few pictures of people who gets delicious tomatoes this year.

This is from our Big Beef plant.  Check out the size of the tomato compared to the tiny books in the background.  This is what started my upside down planter quest.

I hate these people.  They make it look so damn easy.

And now for our plants......sigh

They don't look bad until you get closer......

So the mites win and in the trash our plants go.

That was the dead, now on to the old.

In two weeks it will be my birthday.  I'm going to be 28.  Ten years ago on my birthday I made a life decision.  I was 18, I had a three month old baby, and I was broke.  I decided to go work in a bar.  At the time I didn't think of it as a huge deal.  I thought more along the lines of this will definitely enable me to buy some pampers and pay the rent.  And it did.  I worked my ass off all night long only to stay up with the baby all day.  After about three months of this the lack of sleep finally caught up to me.  I fell asleep at the wheel and flipped my beautiful, fun Acura Integra over four times into a bean field.  In Hollywood, during a car crash scene they usually slow everything down to help you see the chaos and understand the complexity of it.  In real life it goes even slower.  At that time I was in love with the snack Funions.  The bottom of my car was littered with empty wrappers.  While my car was flipping all these wrappers were floating in the air.  I was plugging my nose because for some reason I thought I was drowning.  All I could hear was this really bad and obnoxiously loud honky tonk song.  And then it was over.  I was hanging upside down.  There was mud, broken glass and funions EVERYWHERE!  I  managed to crawl out of my busted back window and run to the road.  It was about 4 am and pitch black.  I was still about 5 miles from the town I lived in.  I had no shoes on,  There was blood pouring from my head and leg.  I looked like a crazy woman straight from a low budget horror flick.  The first car that came down the road I flagged down.  It stopped and I ran towards it screaming "Please don't be a scary person!"  (I've always had a way with words.)  A lady (probably my age now) stepped out of her car and promised me she wasn't a scary person and told me she would take me into town.  I went to get into her SUV only to find she had white leather seats.  I was covered in blood, mud, glass and whatever else was flung on me.  She was a life saver.  That tumultuous car wreck could have been an omen for me then and is a great metaphor for me now on how the next several years have went.

I've since then lived a decade longer.  Somedays while looking back I'm not sure how I've made it this far.  I have come full circle in my life.  I have a few more wrinkles.  I have some great stories.  I met the most amazing people.  And I am once again at home with a newborn.  However this time it is under completely different circumstance.  Where I was invincible last decade, I feel my age these days.  I'm amazed at how I used to take care of business like it was nothing, worked three jobs and was a single parent.  I can barely keep up now as a stay at home mom with a loving helpful partner!  The past ten years have flown by.  I hope the next ten take their sweet time and future wrinkles stay at bay.

 I will now leave you with one of the cutest things I've ever made doing one of the cutest things a baby can do.

Rub a dub dub......