Ah, yes, summer is humming along.

I've always thought that June goes nice and slow, but once we pass the Fourth of July, boom. Look out. Everything's in a race to the finish.

I'm getting some things done, though. I recently followed part of my own advice about "the power of paint" and gave our kitchen a new look. For years, it has been light blue, a color I chose with enthusiasm because blue is my favorite color and the light shade looked fresh and airy.

But slowly over the past several years, I had grown to loathe that light blue. It looked washed-out. Wimpy. Ugly!

First I thought I'd go with a sagey green. It's cool like blue, but deeper.

But suddenly that wasn't right, either. I decided I had to have Tuscan yellow, whatever that means.

I went to the store and stood in front of the paint counter, pulling out little sample cards, trying to decide how various shades would look. I finally made the bold move, picking the "Sunburst" pictured on this page.

With the first few strokes, I thought, "Oh, no, I have once again made a tragic mistake about color. This is way too dark."

But with a few more strokes, my confidence grew. I decided I liked it. Bold, yes. Dark, sort of. But also bright, cheerful and up-to-date. I love our kitchen's new look.

Then there's the bathroom

About eight years ago, I pulled the blue metallic flocked wallpaper off our master bathroom and it's been waiting for paint ever since.

The time is getting closer, though. Although there is no new color on the wall, I have purchased the paint itself, and for me that's more than half the battle.

I chose another bold color - "Soft Chamois" - that I think will complement, and update, our 1960s blue toilet and sink.

And about the garden

My late May plantings of zucchini and cucumber seeds went virtually nowhere. I don't know whether a critter ate the seeds, the seeds rotted in the ground because of all the moisture or I somehow got them in too deep. But of four hills, only one lone cucumber came up.

Wanting some produce before the first frost, I bought bedding plants at the store and put them in the blank hills, where they are doing nicely.

Weeds have been threatening to take over, though. Every time I get ready to hoe, it rains and then the ground is too wet to work.

As for flowers and ornamental plantings, I enlarged my native plant sun garden and planted six clumps of Indian grass and a yellow coneflower. The Indian grass appears to be hanging on by a thread and rabbits ate half the coneflower, but I'll reserve judgment until next season.

My previous plantings - butterfly milkweed, wild bergamot and New England aster - took awhile to establish, too. As I have mentioned before, these are rather rangy plants without the neat, compact growth habit of plants that have been hybridized for that quality, and they have just one bloom season.

But there are big pluses that make up for the minuses. I love that they are natives, and when I walked by the other evening after work, I stopped in my tracks. There on the vivid orange blooms of the milkweed was a monarch butterfly and eight to nine bees.