Lavender blues ... and a health update!

Summer keeps blessing us with beauty on a daily basis!  Every time I go out to my garden, there's something new blooming or preparing to bloom.  The Winter was very hard on my hydrangeas.  Four of them bounced back not too badly but my pink one is struggling and I'm not sure it's going to make it.  It's funny how the soil affects the colour of the hydrangeas.  On one bush I can have blue, pink or lavender!  I'm rather partial to the lavender blue colour you see in the photo above.

And of course the lavender is blooming too!  I removed my oldest and largest lavender plant this spring because it had become so overgrown and woody and replaced it with a new one.  It will be another year before the new one flowers.  This plant has been in the garden for a couple of years and bloomed quite well this year.  As I have a lot of dried lavender in the house, I decided to leave the flowers for the bees.  Speaking of bees, I seem to have quite a few of them burrowing in the garden around this lavender plant!  I never knew ground bees even existed but they do.  They don't bother me so I'm leaving them to do what bees do best. 

I saw my oncologist last Friday to see how I'm tolerating the tamoxifen.  My ca125 hit an all time high of 6707 at the end of April, then dropped to 6083 on June 11 and was 1645 on Friday!  So it looks like the tamoxifen is working.  Unless something changes, I don't need to go back until the beginning of September so I'm pretty happy about the results.

The not so good news is that my 84 year old father fell down the stairs last Thursday night.  The ambulance took him to ER where, praise God, nothing was broken.  Then he fell again Saturday morning.  Other than scrapes and bruises, thankfully he's okay.  He's been staying with us since Saturday and we're in the process of making his home more liveable for him.  That will involve things like having stair lifts installed, arranging for more care at home and having an occupational therapist assess his home to make it more accessible.  Lots to do before he can go back home.