It's an abundant year for Sweet Peas, the road sides are covered with their bright-pink flowers!
I picked some on my walk a couple of days ago together with some daisies, they look so summer-y.

                       

The (bumble)bees love them as much as I do:

                                                     
  

The Hollyhock I got last year, which is living in a big pot on the front porch, opened it's first buds as well!
Since it didn't flower last year the color was going to be a surprise ..  it turned out to be a beautiful dark red, almost burgundy:

    

They buds will open from the bottom up, so there will be a lot more coming! (hopefully the netting will keep the deer at bay!)

The blackberries keep on growing, there's just no stopping them! 
Although James cut them down aggressively a couple of weeks ago, he needed to show them who's boss and tackled them with the big lopper and hedge-trimmer again  ... right.

                     

At the bottom of the bird-feeders, the ground-squirrels have been digging for seeds thus creating a hole bunch of holes, and since they unearthed the prongs of one of the poles, he filled all of them back in as well ... it's probably a never-ending story, they're just born to dig.
But they're so darn cute!

       

This morning we had some unusual visitors to the bird-feeders ... Acorn woodpeckers! 
The cages around the feeders, which are supposed to keep the big birds at bay, are obviously no problem for them at all ...
They're big bullies and chase everybody away, even the black-birds won't take them on.

As I mentioned above, I picked some flowers on my walk so yes .. I'm walking again, albeit short distances and with a heavily bandaged ankle!
Since I hadn't been to the far end of the property in a while, the view looking back to the RV is quite different now with the red barn gone. 
(it was in the spot on the right where all the debris is laying around )

Work has begun on dismantling the grey one (the one in the middle ) ... we'll have quite a view for a while when that one's down as well!

I did some new-to-me baking this week ... since I couldn't find any Ciabatta-bread/buns at the Winco (my go-to grocery), I decided to try to make them myself .. using sourdough of-course.

This turned out to be very easy, there's really nothing to it, although (as usual) the oven didn't perform as it should. 
But I managed to mickey-mouse my way through it and the end-result was pretty decent .. if I say so myself.

And to satisfy our 'sweet teeth', I baked a Lemon-Blueberry Bundt-cake as well:

                                               

Although it was a little to airy/cake-y for me (I like this type of cake a little denser, like a pound-cake), we nevertheless managed to eat half of it over the weekend (tsk, tsk) and the other half went in the freezer.
(We went on the scale this morning, like we do every Sunday, and I lost half a pound so hey, no problem! James on the other hand ...)

I finished the Butterfly puzzle. I loved making this one .. not too difficult, big pieces (and only 500), and so pretty!

I haven't started a new one yet but that will probably happen soon since we have a couple of very hot days coming up (high 80s/90s F), which means I will spend some afternoons in the RV with the AC on high!
As I said before temperatures have been very 'do-able' so far and even though they will rise for a couple of days, the predictions are that they will return to the 70s again for the rest of the week. I take it!

The evenings have been very comfortable this weekend where we could sit outside for happy hour on the sun-side (next to the pond) without being too hot:

Followed by dinner on the other side, in the shade ...

    

Grilled salmon with asparagus and a pasta salad. "Bring it on", says Samson ...