Flower Friday : : Gaillardia?

This flower has rewarded us by growing in a pot on our patio, blooming almost year around with a lot of eye catching flowers. And we, thankless gardeners that we are, aren't even sure what it is called. My resident researcher is looking into it, but both African Daisies and Gaillardia, our best guesses, have about a million varieties and I sense that he is in need of another beer before he can continue his researches....

It occurs to me, as he has been cleaning out the pump house in an effort to rid it of blankets of dusty spiderwebs, that we have actually lived here long enough to have accumulated a lot of stuff we don't want or need. How does this happen? Despite our efforts to curate everything that entered the house when we moved here almost six years ago, our careful culling of things from time to time and our determination to keep our garage free enough of detritus so that we can park our cars in it, we still accumulate stuff. 

The back patio is littered with tiki torches. Not something that would fit into any incarnation of our lives save perhaps my childhood in Hawaii, yet there they are gently flaming in the heat of the day to consume the fuel in them. I think they were here when we arrived and we didn't know what to do with them then either.  

OilMan came in with a small bucket and shovel painted pink and green which he suggested giving to Owen for his birthday. I pointed out that Owen is no longer three years old, nor is he interested in a tiny pink and green bucket and shovel which has been sitting in the pump house for six years.

There is an astonishing amount of wood...old floorboards, bits of two by fours left over from various projects, and even some railroad ties, dripping with creosote which weren't needed when we rebuilt some stairs outside. These can't go into the recycle bin, or the green bin, nor can they be burned in the fireplace, even if we still had a wood burning fireplace, because it is illegal.

I suspect that a lot of this stuff will wind up right back in the pump house again because there is literally nothing else to do with them...but at least it is relatively free of spider webs. But those won't take six years to reappear....