Good morning, sunshine!

It rained overnight (thank you, Mother Nature, for watering the garden and plants for me) and the prediction is for more rain and even flash flooding here in southern West Virginia today.

But we early risers got a glimpse of the sun before it slipped back behind the clouds:

Five minutes after this shot the sky was grey and all I could see was fog.

I've been spot-checking my weight occasionally this month and am delighted and baffled by a four-pound loss. I said I was done with the struggle, and I am. And four pounds in less than a month isn't all that amazing, but for me, well, it is.

I've been having homemade yogurt with a little strawberry jam, sprinkled with chia seeds, for breakfast almost every morning. Lunch is usually something left over from dinner or a PB&J. Dinner is whatever I can make that's fast and relatively healthful. No time for snacking and I don't usually eat anything after dinner. So food has been pretty normal, and the only time I'm hungry is four or five hours after the last time I ate.

Imagine that.

All I've done for intentional activity is work at the garden center. I think I've maybe been to the gym twice, and maybe walked a half dozen times. Most of my exercise has been of the "tote-that-barge, lift-that-bale" variety, except I'm toting wagonloads of plants and lifting 40-pound bales of Pro-Mix.

I actually like this kind of exercise better than going to the gym, but I 'm grateful for those four months of working out intentionally. It would have been much harder to be this active and I would have felt much more helpless.

Before I went to work yesterday afternoon, I spent the morning planting cardboard in part of the garden. I tilled it first (rototilling is quite the workout!), then laid down dozens of flattened boxes. Next I'll throw some compost and/or manure on it and then cover it all with straw, just as I did last fall with the current tomato and herb beds. I just don't have time to plant as much food this year. I know I'll be sorry later in the summer, but – as the young folk say – it is what it is. I'll have tomatoes and edamame and a few peppers (for drying) and some zucchini to eat fresh. The rest of the garden is laying fallow this year.

Which is fine, really. With all the other stuff I've got going on, I don't have time to eat, let alone can or freeze!

So … did you see the sun come up today?