Pondering the meaning of "project"

Maybe I should redefine what "a project" is.  Maybe it should include finding German side tables at consignment stores, on rainy days, with four children not dressed warmly enough.  And then finding the perfect spot for it.

I know, how did they figure out it was German?

Or it could be having fun with my camera, finally starting to capture the elusive beauty of everyday life.

I should rather say - the abundant beauty, that is so elusive when you want to capture it.

 This one was even more elusive than the other two:

I guess a project could also be starting our mud pie kitchen, the one Ginny described in a Rhythm of the Home online magazine, that led me to her blog and all the yarn along people...

Or buying and planting the long coveted strawberry pot.

There is still so much to be done.  I should have been cleaning more today, since our guests will be here in fewer than 48 hours. We are still not sure whether or not this house will  be available for rent after May, so I should not be working in the garden. But today the weather was just perfect.  It had been raining for three days, the soil was soft and friendly, the sun was warm and the breeze was cool. 
And look at who I ran into at church:

Dietes Grandiflora - a fellow South African.  The Fairy Iris.

It was so strange, the first year in Texas, to keep looking at the trees and flowers, waiting for their names,  remembering nothing about them at all.

But today I did not pull up a weed in one of the garden paths, because I thought that it might be a bluebonnet.  I noticed that the black butterfly visited the Mountain Laurel, while the orange ones preferred the yellow weeds. I know that "oranges ones" and "yellow weeds" will be filled in, eventually, and I will be able to say something like "look at this, it is a dietes grandiflora.  They are wonderful landscaping plants, their common name is the Fairy Iris - don't the flowers remind you of fairies, especially on the slender stems among leaves? And the amazing thing is, they actually react to barometric pressure, or so I have been told.  When the flowers open, there is a good chance that it will rain."  And if you are not a plant person, you will be bored to death.  Sorry.  But if you are, I will listen to you with as much interest as you listened to me, and we will spend a lovely afternoon.

So I guess I will clear all of this away.  (This is only half of the fenced in vegetable garden, I have pretty much cleared the other half.)

And I will plant these strawberries.

Now that would be a project.