The rain of the last few weeks paused over the weekend, letting the sun come out for a few days.

Our neighbor Sandy took advantage of the break in the weather to have a little neighborhood pizza party the other evening. He prepped a variety of toppings along with a dozen dough balls and proceeded to spend the evening rolling out pizza after pizza on his big green egg (with some help from his dedicated crew of Kris with an assist from Edie.) Despite having one of the most amenable back yards around, we ended up standing in Sandy’s driveway by the garage all evening, nibbling on pizzas as they came off the egg.

All in all, it was a rather charming evening. We mingled with new neighbors (Sandy’s new next door) and got to know others a little better (our new back door neighbors). It was the sort of evening that reminds me why I love this neighborhood of ours so much, particularly with the weather just about perfect. All three of us thoroughly enjoyed ourselves immensely, with much thanks to our host.

With a break in the rain and lots of sunshine, the peonies finally opened up. I realized I have better shots of them on my iPhone than I do my big camera. Now that I’ve learned to use my phone camera properly (thanks to Pat and Edie), it’s sort of the camera I grab the most these days. I’m not entirely 21st century though, because I have yet to figure out how to use my iPhone as an actual phone. Baby steps. I might get there someday.

Anyway, we took advantage of the nicer weather over the remainder of the weekend and worked on getting the yard in shape, because we’ve come to the realization (or maybe just I have) that we are long overdue on doing some entertaining. Having spent the last few weekends socializing with various neighbors, I’ve fielded numerous inquiries into the status of us having some sort of gathering this spring. I’m not entirely sure we actually have a weekend free to do it to be honest, but I have had the thought that perhaps we could do some smaller impromptu gatherings if the weather was nice and the yard was halfway together. We’ll see.

The rain has returned for now though. I ordered myself a new raincoat and thought for sure that it would bring endless blue skies with its arrival. No such luck, but I did manage to get the new flower bed in here at the house and some vegetables in the ground down at my community garden plot, so at least I’m not fretting about that anymore.