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this morning i planted 8 hostas in my backyard. they don't seem so big now but they can grow pretty wide, so i left 20" distance between plants. planting bulbs in the fall for blooms in the spring/summer 6 months later is one of those gardening leaps of faith. perennials amaze me in that they can somehow survive our new england winters, when the ground freezes solid for months at a time.

later i went to belmont. i weighed my saddlebags, about 27 lbs. worth of gear, including my camera equipment and my nintendo wii. i wanted to try it on my parents' HDTV. the thing is, the wii is only 480i resolution, essentially standard definition (the HDTV on the other hand is 1080p resolution). the wii does display in widescreen format on the HDTV however, so at least i'm seeing more.

some perennials needed to planted in belmont as well. i dug out the clump of irises and tried to unsuccessfully divide them. my father planted them when they were simple rhizomes many years ago, but now they were a tangled mess of roots, impossible to separate without cutting. i uncovered a few beetle grubs; i'm usually very kind to insects, but when it comes to grubs, i'm pretty remorseless. they feed on the roots, and anytime i come across one, i kill it right away. i also unearthed a bunch of small bulbs which i think are crocuses. i'll replant them and hope i get some flowers in the spring. elsewhere, on the other side of the garden where i want to start a shade garden, i dug out my original hostas. not sure what variety (blue?), but they haven't been doing well in recent years and i wanted to divide and relocate them to a new home. i managed to separate out 4 but my father accidently threw away one while he was cleaning up the backyard (it was in a barrel of thorn branches, not worth the effort to find). i also dug out the marginal wood ferns, and managed to separate out 5 rhizomes. i replanted them close to their original spot, but added 2 additional ostrich ferns (the fern section of the garden). to the unearthed hostas i added 8 additional hostas and planted them where the peonies used to be. i dug out some lily-of-the-valley roots that used to grow there. i was going to replant them but by then it was already dark (6:00), so i'll do that tomorrow then.

my sister has been trying to get hailey to go down to the basement but she's afraid of the stairs. short stairs she's fine with, but the longer stairs - especially down to a place she's never been - scares her. my sister tried the "putting the dog treat on a step" trick but hailey will only venture down as far as her two back feet are still on the landing.

after dinner i got the whole family involved in a round of boom blox on the wii. nothing like knocking down a stack of virtual blocks! i used to be pretty good at this game but i lost pretty much every round.