I spent my afternoon in the yard hacking away at the blackberry brambles in the garden, driven into action by a confluence of forces. My new yard waste container sat gaping, ready to accept whatever I might feed it. The weather was mostly sunny and mostly warm. And John mentioned when he was here this afternoon (changing the light bulb in the ceiling fan, thank you) that I ought to get to it.

There are berry bushes all around the perimeter of the property, so I wasn't wiping out an endangered species by getting rid of those plants that are choking my garden. I was just reclaiming some of the land from an uninvited gatecrasher. I must have done a decent job, since you can no longer tell that the flowers and trees outside my front door were until today at the mercy of an intrusive cousin.

We haven't had a lot of rain, but enough so that I haven't had to do any watering by hand lately. And it's also been enough to make the brown part of the yard start showing signs of life. The green months have come, and they've come to stay until next May, when the golden brown of California will reclaim the fields and hillsides.

The stepping stones along my front walkway are set amid a kind of groundcover that I can't identify. But it has the unique characteristic (unique to my limited gardening knowledge, anyway) of tiny yellow blossoms that come out in the sunlight, to the delight of the bees and butterflies, and then retreat at night.

I learned something about laundry today. If you leave seven T-shirts in the dryer for four days, not even twenty minutes of air fluff will get the wrinkles out.

This gem of information will do me absolutely no good, because of course I will at some point once again forget to take clothes out of the dryer. It's what I do.