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The Webster Groves House & Garden Tour to benefit the people of Haiti was on Sunday. When my friend Carol, who was the mastermind of the event, asked us to have our house on the tour a year and a half ago, it seemed like a good idea. As the date grew closer, we grew more




frantic. With me in New York for a week, followed days later by my brother and his girls staying with us for 8 days, we only had 5 free days before the event. I cleaned the inside of the house during the week, but we left the outside stuff for Saturday morning. Jim applied new mulch and tidied up the gardens while I washed windows, removed cobwebs and cleaned up the outdoor furniture. Then we headed out to pick up a couple of small indoor plants and the dining room table decorations, and returned to a monsoon! There went the mulch all over the sidewalks, and the windows and furniture looked like I had never touched them. Crap!

But we pulled it all together Sunday morning, cookies began arriving, and Carol came early with 2 girl scouts to help set up the lemonade, water and cookies we would be serving. I have to say I was very impressed with the woman who brought 4 trays of cookies, filled with homemade houses and flowers to tie in with the house/garden theme. (I need that house cookie cutter for my book signings!) Carol also set out some nuts and mints. Jim and I set up the 5 display boards we had created. We had placed photographs of the original owners along with pictures of the house through the years as changes we made to it.

A few minutes before 1:00 the first tour-goers arrived and it was steady until the end at 5:00. The people on the tour were super-friendly and very appreciative that we had opened up our house. They seemed to particularly enjoy looking at the photo boards. And I have to admit that after all the work we have done on the house over the past 23 years it was gratifying to hear all the compliments. We saw friends that we hadn't touched base with for awhile, and fellow author Anne Collins Milford of "How Not to Marry the Wrong Guy" acclaim showed up with her friends. I had set my books up for sale, with 20% going to the Haiti fund, and one woman said she came on the tour specifically to get my book :) I ended up selling 4, with a couple people saying they would come back to get a book as they were not carrying cash. (A woman called today and she is coming Thursday morning to buy one.)

In the end about 350 people purchased tickets for the tour, and they made (after expenses) over $5,500. Not bad for a first time effort! Jim and I really enjoyed talking to all the people, so we're glad we did it. We just don't ever want to do it again! For a thank you gift from the committee, we were presented with a basket hand woven by a Haitian artist containing coffee from Haiti, and a statue of a woman holding a baby while balancing a basket on her head (multi-tasking Haitian woman!) which was sculpted from soap stone also by a Haitian artist. What a way to bring the whole project full circle!

...hope everyone will be there... Sunday is the Holy Redeemer House and Garden Tour raising money to support the medical and educational needs of our sister parish in Haiti. When my friend Carol planned this a year and a half ago, there was no major disaster in Haiti. Just the struggle to survive that Haitians face every day. With the earthquake that struck early in 2010, a lot of attention has been focused on this poor country, and the thinking is that more people will attend the tour due to the fact that proceeds are going to Haiti.

Jim and I committed early on to have our house on the tour, as long as it was understood that we would only open up the first floor of the house. Our upstairs is nothing to show off, plus I worry about people going up and down the steps. (You can take the girl out of the insurance industry but you can't take the fear of lawsuits out of the girl.) Since we put on a major addition two years ago and have begun to build some beautiful planting beds, I think we have enough to offer the tour-goers. Carol, being the over-achiever that she is, has six homes and gardens on the tour PLUS an additional five gardens. It will be a challenge for people to get to all the locations in a four hour time period.

Our garden closest to the street is still in recovery mode from having the street department tear it up while repairing the storm water lines. On Tuesday we had a bunch of shrubs delivered, and on Wednesday Jose and his crew came and installed all of them. I've been watering, and hopefully the plants will perk up a little more before Sunday. And don't even get me started on the damage the rabbits have caused.

I have a bit of cleaning left to do inside, but we will really have to focus on the outside tomorrow. Cobwebs need to be swept down and windows need to be cleaned. I also need to purchase the fresh flowers I want inside the house, and I am looking for a little something to put on each plate in the dining room. I am thinking about small ceramic pots with a marigold in each? Or maybe a flower shaped decorative candle? I have some cute clear glass dishes with matching cups that my mother-in-law gave me, which I will put at each place. That way I don't need to put out silverware and worry about it walking off. I'll come up with something.

In the meantime, I sent a bunch of photographs over to Jim's office, and he is placing them on two or three display boards. We will set them on easels out on the deck by the drinks and cookies, so people can study them as they eat. I am including the history of the Alexander Russell subdivision as well as the history of Lot 16, where our house is located. In addition there are photos of the original owners, and pictures of changes made to the house over the last 108 years. I will be selling copies of my book (hopefully!), with a 20% donation to the Haiti fund. Katie's friend Mary will be playing the keyboard and singing on the deck as well, so the ambiance should be good. Now - no rain!!!

Today is Katie's 19th birthday, and she is having a small group of friends here for dinner. Jake (a high school and college classmate) is cooking, so I picked up all the ingredients he needed this morning. He is so funny - he sent Katie a list of menus to choose from. She selected a pasta dish, and it sounds yummy. I'm hoping there will be enough for Jim and me to enjoy as well. Bon appetite!

I'm writing this as I wait for the timer to go off, telling me it is time to rinse the dye out of my hair. I'm going back to an old color I had used for years, Light Ash Brown, after a couple years of combining two colors together. The combination had worked well for a long time, but now I think the color ends up being too light. I don't know if Clairol changed the formulas or if my hair has just decided to do its own thing with the color. Hopefully I will like the end result. I leave next Sunday for my trip to Publishing University in New York, and I want to look good when I meet Barbra Streisand. Ha!

I've been working on the wall quilt for the remodeled bathroom this weekend. Today I will do the actual quilting, then all that will be left is attaching the binding. I was really hoping to do some planting yesterday or today, but this weather does not put me in the mood for either buying plants or getting them in the ground. We are now just four weeks from the house/garden tour, and I am beginning to fret about whether the yard will be ready in time. It looks good, but I have seen a couple of the other gardens on the tour and they are GREAT. We need to step it up around here, and it doesn't help that Jim went up to Iowa this weekend. Even if we didn't get any planting done we still could be planning. Or fretting together.

Katie spent yesterday organizing the stuff she brought home from school. She is setting up her containers by room, which will definitely help when she moves into her apartment in the fall. She is also purging clothes and other items she didn't use for the last nine months, and that is awesome. The Clean House folks would be proud.

There's the buzzer, so I'm off!

We went back to the botanical garden this morning as we knew the azaleas would be in their full glory. Things started off a little dicey when I went to take my first picture and discovered I had no memory card in the camera. Jim borrowed my camera yesterday as he had gone to southern Missouri to help a client place bronze geese on his property. Was I ticked? Oh, you might say that. I was definitely thinking "point and shoot" and not in a photography kind of way. Luckily I had brought my pocket digital camera along as well, so I was going to settle for using it. Then Jim reminded me that the memory card for my little camera would also work in my DSLR. Ahhh...the marriage was safe for another day.

As we headed down the main path towards the Japanese Garden, a woman with three kids in tow was headed our way. Twin girls around 8 years of age and a boy around 9 or so were getting a scolding from their mom. The one girl folded her arms defiantly across her chest and made amazing facial expressions at her brother. Jim and I busted out laughing. The mother glared at us and shouted, "Sure, laugh it up!" It was shaping up to be another fun family day at the garden. Would we find Lorenzo running through the oceans of sand in the Japanese Garden again?

The beauty of the azaleas took our minds off of other people and their whiny children. The place was just amazing today, as the colors popped around every corner. We even found a duck busy padding its nest to cushion the eggs laying there. Hopefully they will be long gone before Lorenzo makes another appearance at the garden. They won't stand a chance with him.

The other night Jim, Katie and I went out for dinner at Tuckers with our friends, who recently moved back to St. Louis from southern California. I know what you are thinking - "What, are they nuts?" Jim D. is a riding buddy of my Jim, and Jim W. couldn't be happier that Jim D. is back in town. As I had noticed when I was downtown Saturday night that the city of St. Louis still had the Christmas lights on in the City Garden, I had suggested that we all bring our cameras along and take pictures in the garden after we ate.

It was very cold, but we had come prepared dressed in layers, including long underwear. I should mention that Jim D. is a professional photographer, so he had his wonder camera and tripod so he could use a slow shutter speed to capture the night lighting. I got a new DSLR for Christmas in anticipation of my next book on barn quilts, so I was eager to try it out. I am not one for changing the settings on a fancy camera, and was content to shoot with and without a flash. As many camera classes as I have attended, I still don't quite get the aperture and shutter speed mumbo jumbo. I find that automatic works pretty well for the type of photography I partake in. Maybe I'll be a little more adventuresome with this camera since I won't be wasting film. Who knows?

It was fun to take the pictures at night, but I definitely would like to go back when I am not freezing my fingers off. I know they have some cool lighting in City Garden throughout the year, but I'm glad we were able to capture the Christmas moments for now.