A little bit of everything

So it's been a few weeks since I posted, there is just so much going on. I know every one of us can say that about our lives. So full. Too full sometimes. Summer is wrapping up, I can kind of even feel it in the air a little. We have had a rather mild summer here in the desert, as far as desert summers are concerned, a warm average of the 90's. I'll take it, at least I can sleep at night this year. So anyway, I have been dying to talk about the book The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. It's fairly new, it was written in 2011. I had seen it for sale at Target, and loved the cover but never bought it. Then a couple of weeks ago I was at my local library browsing the used 'for sale' books and there it was for $1.00 (yay!). I love when I find a really good book that I didn't pay very much for. So I dug right in and it captivated me from the first page. I read through it pretty fast, which is unusual for me. It's about a girl named Victoria that is brought up in the Foster Care system, and gets pasted from home to home. She is hard and abrasive and very dysfunctional, yet I found myself routing for her and feeling somehow connected to her character. Throughout the book there is a lot of talk about flowers and their meanings, hence the name. One of her Foster moms teaches her to love and cherish plants and their language. The characters are quirky and imperfect, yet endearing. I loved this book. I recommend this book. 

Let's see, I made the most delicious chocolate zucchini bread  from a recipe I got off of Pinterest the other day. Wow, so moist, so chocolaty. You should definitely try it. I also made my mom some spider/strip pieced pillows for her birthday. They were super easy to make and turned out adorable...she loved them by the way. My garden is still growing strong, I've been picking tomatoes, squash and peppers. I'm still waiting for my first crop of eggplant, that should be any day now. We had a couple of days of wonderful rain here, actually flash flooding all around us, but it was so nice. The air was cool, I opened up all the windows and inhaled the wonderful smell of  rain in the desert. My plants really loved the soak. Last little thing is that I finished that quilt top in those soothing colors of aqua, cream and red, can't wait to machine quilt it and use it.