Laura, Nicki and Mr. Toad

Most of the wildflower seeds I scattered at the beginning of the season don't seem to have taken, so in order to add some color to my yard I bought some fully grown phlox yesterday.
The 'Laura' and 'Nicki' varieties are lovely purple and purple and white. It was a nice reward after the weeding-with-abandon I've done over the last couple of days. Clover and some sort of annoying succulent-looking ground cover had taken over my vegetables, so I did lots of weeding there too. I sprinkled some fertilizer on them today and gave them a little water, though not much because it looks like it's going to rain- just in time for the 4th.
Due to that possibility of rain I decided to clean the porch. We're having a few friends over for grilling and fireworks tomorrow and we may need to hide out if it's stormy. When I moved some of our fold-up chairs from under the outdoor couch I was startled to find this:
I didn't realize that our friend, Mr. Toad, had moved into the porch. After a bit of chasing I relocated him back outside under the flowers where he usually lives. Henry likes to call him "Ribbit Ribbit" but I think "Mr. Toad" is a better name. In any case, we hope he's happy where he is.

On a different subject, we've been doing small amounts of home improvement, or home improvement prep. Here's Pete and Henry installing new lights in our bathroom. You can see that the horrid wicker medicine cabinet is still there, but it's not long for this world either.
Here's Henry in the new vanity we bought to put in that same bathroom. It's a little bit smaller than what we have now, so we're going to have to re-tile the floor, which really could stand to be done anyway. We're waiting for a response from our handy man to see if he can help us with this, as we're not sure we're up to the task.
Pete also spent some time on Sunday cleaning out our garage. This is the first time we've ever parked a car in there! Very exciting! It probably won't last, but on the 4th we're not supposed to park on the street on our block- because the fireworks are around the corner. It doesn't really make sense to me....but we learned the hard way last year when all of our friends had to scramble to move their cars. This year we thought we should make the most of our driveway so people don't have to worry about it.
While we're talking home improvement- take a last look at those outside lights and the mailbox. They're on our short list for replacement as well. We're taking full advantage of the new Lowe's that's practically right next door.