new theme, crystals, and why is my subconscious dragging up my mother

I’m going to try a new recurring content in my posts, My Life in 100 Objects, the idea taken from Rosemary Murphy of Share My Garden. She has a separate blog for this but I’m just going to scatter them through my own future posts. So here is #1.

This painting, 47" x 37", by William Anzalone hung in the breakfast room of my childhood home directly across the table from where I sat. It’s what I looked at during breakfast and dinner. I have claimed this painting as my own almost from the time my father first bought it though I don’t remember what age I was. Anzalone would, in the future, have a big impact on my artistic ability. I took Drawing from him in college at the University of Houston during which I learned not only how to draw (as opposed to just sketch or scribble) but how to see the thing I was trying to draw and other rules (who knew there were rules for drawing) like how to render a curved object and perspective among much more. I remember the first class when he told us the hardest thing to draw was a straight line, not because it was so hard but because of our fear of putting pencil to paper. I didn’t get possession of this painting until after my father died and my mother went to live with my brother in the PNW. It currently hangs above my bed. 

Sunday I finally hung all the rest of my crystals that I've been accumulating. They look great. What took me so long! Well, beside the fact that my desk is up against that wall of windows and it’s a tight squeeze to get back there.

I took the screen off the window first which I had been planning to do for some time now so I would have a clearer view of the bird feeder since the screens are old and cast a gray filter. Also I don’t ever open those windows (see above) and they won’t stay up anyway, have to be propped up. I just leaned the screen up against the bank of windows on the outside, hadn’t put it away in the garage yet, and the next morning a little green tree frog and an anole were taking shelter behind it.

The frog was still there when I put the screen away.

Every day when I go out there’s another branch or two or three that has fallen from the oaks and the pecans, ones that were broken during hurricane Beryl but not fallen. I’ve just been piling them up next to the magnolia tree during the burn ban instead of putting them in the truck which pretty much makes the truck unusable for anything else. 

As you can see I also pulled the kidney shaped small pond out of the ground since it was finally light enough with all the water evaporated and the water plants dead. Now I have this big hole to fill. I may set the pond up elsewhere in the future but I won’t sink it in the ground as before.

I had another weird dream Monday morning. I was in the kitchen of my childhood home and it was a mess with dirty dishes and empty food containers strewn over all the counters. I was shocked that no one was cleaning the place up or providing decent food for our old senile mother who I suppose was in her bedroom (where in real life she spent much of her time sleeping her life away). She wandered in and got a box of dry cereal from the cabinet and started just eating handfuls out of the box. When I tried to take it away from her telling her to at least put it in a bowl with milk she grabbed it back and wandered back out of the kitchen. When I walked into the family room and looked out the sliding glass door into the backyard, there were three men digging up bulbs and plants. I opened the door and yelled at them to stop and to leave and then I went back into the kitchen and out the back door to get the license plate number of the car they must have come in but it was a police car and there was no license plate and as I was writing down the name of the police department the men came around from the back and tried to drive away. There was more to the dream before I woke up but the rest of it is murky now.

Today is the day. I am not going to watch any election returns and plan to stay off social media, preferring the shock or awe on Wednesday morning but hoping to greet the day with jubilation. 

 

rain!, yardwork, weird dream

Getting a few fully open full size flowers on the confederate rose.

It’s been so dry here, no rain for at least two months, that big cracks were opening up in the shop yard, and neighbor’s yards as well. 

Pot plants had to be watered every day and flower beds frequently. It was almost to the point of not being able to water enough. And then last Tuesday we finally started getting little showers, five or ten minutes of light rain, I was so excited I went out and took a picture of the wet driveway. 

We had a thunderstorm Wednesday night, about an inch and a quarter cumulative of the week by Thursday morning. Several showers on Thursday and remarking how much happier everyone seemed to be at yoga that night, a little shower Friday and finally yesterday a day of real rain, periods of hard rain to light rain off and on all day. 

As of Saturday morning’s issue of the local paper the county’s mean KBDI (Keetch-Bayrum Drought Index) was 645. Anything over 500 and it’s a burn ban so I’m hoping with yesterday’s rain, my rain gauge showed 2 3/8" this morning, it will be enough to lift the ban because my burn pile is huge. 

Tuesday morning Joe and Mary, who maintain the shop yard and around Pam’s house, took out the completely overgrown herb bed in the front that Pam had. I had mentioned I was going to take it out over the winter and since they weren’t getting their mowing income as regularly, no rain no growth, they proposed to undertake the task and I agreed. So that’s done. And, yeah, as usual, no before picture. 

Friday after breakfast I worked over there pruning back and clearing some of the rose bushes Pam had that were being smothered by Virginia creeper and that invasive ground cover that has taken over after the Harvey flood and had blood literally running down my arm and leg from pricks by rose thorns (fucking plavix). I never bled like this on eliquis. So glad it’s only temporary. 

I have a correction to make. The flowering plants I’ve been calling Philippine lily is wrong. They are Philippine violets, barlaria cristata. I think I knew that originally. 

I had a strange dream this morning. I was home from school, as in didn’t go, but I was not of an age to still be in school. I wanted to disassemble my blue skirt to alter it and so my mother came and sat on the bed with me as we ripped out all the seams, taking it completely apart. She had to go do something then and told me I would have to receive all the deliveries that were due that day. Then I woke up. The woman in the dream was not my actual mother visually or behaviorally. My actual mother would never have sat on the bed with me chatting and helping me take apart a skirt. The mother in my dream was the one I always wanted. So I wonder what that was about so late in my life. 

 

one last plea

With five days to election day, many of us are fluctuating between hope and terror. Five days until we find out if we have a democracy or a fascist authoritarian bent on destroying this country. Trump and his campaign have dropped all pretense, at least when he’s not accusing Harris of his own intents.

Republican Speaker of the House Johnson has come right out and said they will get rid of the Affordable Care Act in the first 100 days depriving millions of people who can’t afford private insurance of getting healthcare and depriving those who can afford private insurance but with pre-existing conditions of healthcare and denying care for new problems just like it was before the ACA. Of course Johnson denies it now that his statements in a closed door meeting have become public. He denies it because it’s unpopular but he still intends to do it. And worse, Trump is going to put anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health.

Trump has told us he will round up millions of legal and illegal residents and put them in detention camps for deportation, hard working tax paying people our economy depends on, even revoking earned citizenship and ‘remigrating’ them which in his own words will be ‘bloody’. Or maybe he’ll decide to use them as forced labor instead when industries that depend on those people start to fail.

He has said he intends to use the Justice Department to round up everyone who opposes him who he calls the ‘enemy within’, not just other politicians but judges, lawyers, election workers, and I suppose that includes people who voted against him and jail them. 

He wants to use the military against Americans on American soil to stifle dissent. He intends to silence the press, already threatening to revoke the licenses of news outlets who don’t praise him. 

Trump wants to put Elon Musk in charge of the economy and has said they will cut the federal budget by $2 trillion. You can bet that the military budget won’t be cut so that amount will come out of all the programs and departments he wants to get rid of. No one will even notice the cuts, he says, as he gets rid of FEMA, the Department of Education, the National Weather Service, the EPA, SS and Medicare, food assistance just to name a few. Musk has been posting on X and saying in interviews that the American people need to suffer hardship and that they are going to intentionally crash the economy so a new order can rise out of the flames. You know who benefits from a crashed economy? Rich people, millionaires buying up all sorts of assets at bargain prices and basically getting a labor force that is little better than slaves while we lose our homes and businesses. 

They will implement Project 2025, or Agenda 47 as Trump currently calls it, and turn this country into a christian nationalist theocracy forcing their religious extremism on the population at large.

An adjudicated rapist and self proclaimed sexual assaulter; who is responsible for ending Roe v Wade, the women now dying because doctors are refusing to treat dangerous pregnancies and miscarriages out of fear of being prosecuted, and the rising maternal death and infant mortality rates in states with extreme abortion bans; Trump is now telling us he is going to protect women “whether the women like it or not”. By that I assume he means keeping us unemployed, pregnant but without the healthcare we need to survive pregnancy and childbirth, and under the control of a man.

Don’t count on the courts to protect us, he already has the Supreme Court in his pocket, or the other checks and balances that stopped his worst last time. They’re going to fire everyone and replace them with loyalists not to the constitution but to him and they’re already making lists and vetting people. They also already have a list of people they are going to target immediately. If you don’t vote for whatever reason, if you put party over country this election or think it’s all just talk and they don’t mean any of it and vote Republican, when it all comes crashing down it will be your fault. 

Trump has been using nazi language against Americans when he calls certain segments of the population vicious bloodthirsty criminals, demonizing those he wants to purify the country of. He is calling his opponents the ‘enemy within’ straight out of Hitler’s playbook. His Madison Square Garden rally reminiscent of the nazi rally there in 1939 was non stop racism and misogyny, full of complaints and grievances, calling America a garbage country. His ex-wife Ivanna told us he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. His father was a known nazi. Trump claims he is not a nazi and yet he holds hate rallies, his speeches echo Hitler’s, his plans to cleanse the country of ‘undesirables’, and his desire for a police force to do his bidding…this is nazism. Trump, Musk, and that slimy little weasel Steven Miller are telling us exactly what they are going to do. 

Are you going to let them?

the weekend

I accomplished two things Saturday. Two months after Big Mama made her last and successful break for the wild life, the pond pump quit working. These dudes cost around $80 and I wasn’t springing for another one for a pond full of minnows. Minnows survive in puddles fer cryin’ out loud so I’m not worried about them and besides now they get their fill of mosquito larvae. Good job fishies. So Saturday, six months after Big Mama’s big prison break I finally dismantled the pond filter and cleaned it out for the last time, for the time being anyway, left it all out to dry in the sun and then put it away in the barn.

The other thing I did was use the hedge clippers to cut down all the gone by and dead red salvias between the long day lily bed and the fence sections between my property and the Wicked Bitch of the West’s property, which her son finally did come out and mow last week. Do I have a before picture? Who are we kidding, it’s me, of course not. I could take a picture of the pile I accumulated or the now clear stretch of ground but, eh, boring. So trust me, it’s a big improvement and I can now walk back there. I came in hot and sweaty and sat under the fan nekkid until I was dry enough and cool enough to put some clothes back on. And then of course I was useless the rest of the day.

I did manage to work on my skirt a little bit. Took me two tries and the use of the seam ripper to get the pocket back in correctly and then I sewed the side seam. Now I’m ready to gather it and sew on the waist band, run the elastic and be finished.

I had planned for Sunday to be a lazy day, not work outside, not get hot and sweaty, make progress on the book I’m reading, work on my skirt but my grandson Mikey called yesterday, he was over at the shop. He had come by on Saturday to talk to me about renting space in the shop to do some side work on cars. We struck a deal and he showed up Sunday to start cleaning out, moving the stuff in the bay he will use. So he and a friend not only moved everything out of that bay but they moved stuff around in the big bay getting it more organized, more organized, but it’s still a mess in there. So I spent a good deal of time in the shop trying to make decisions about what to throw out and where to put things getting hot and sweaty anyway. I did manage to gather and pin the waistband on my skirt later.

The orange cosmos are in full bloom, 

been seeing a few butterflies…a queen, a few fritillaries, a sulfur, and some long tails but mostly they won’t cooperate for pictures.

One more picture, the night blooming cereus, the whole plant (you can see some of the spent blooms dangling). It’s huge and very hard to get it moved into the garage for the winter. I’m probably going to have to prune it back some before it’s time to move it this year.

coincidence? and beautiful things

Wednesday night during one of my several dreams, I had to solve a word game where every other word in a phrase was missing and I had to fill in the missing words and the phrase was a lyric from a Rolling Stones song…”you can’t always get what you want”. Thursday morning when I got in the car to leave for SHARE and started the engine, that song came out of the radio starting with that exact phrase. Whoa! And the really interesting thing is that that song and the rest of the lyric…”but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need”…has always been one of my guiding mantras or life themes. 

Other song lyrics had a big impact too…”sometimes we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key” from Already Gone by the Eagles; “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” from The End by the Beatles.

Others just from general wisdom like ‘what goes around comes around’, or from the Navaho story of Spider Woman about the importance of balance in your life and the danger of perfectionism; or from a sign in my friend Gene’s studio which said simply ‘PERSEVERE’.

But the one I probably focused on the most especially during trying times, days or years of struggle, was straight from my own head…’this is only temporary’, a distillation I suppose of ‘the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes’.

Three other things. I made cheese enchiladas with meat sauce for dinner last night. Finally getting the hang of it. This time and the previous attempt came out really good.

My night blooming cereus, queen of the night, bloomed last night for the fourth time this year. Only half as many flowers as the previous three blooms but this time I remembered and went out after 10 pm with my flashlight and breathed in the sweet scent on the air.

Sitting here this morning reading blogs, hearing Cat thumping around the door to the little bathroom, figured she had brought in an anole. Finally got up to rescue the little creature. She was in the bathroom peering between the door and the wall. I looked, and her persistence over at the old turtle pond paid off. Not an anole but a leopard frog, still alive. 

(picture off the internet)

Dammit Cat. Don’t know if she chased it into the house or carried it in through the open back door. I picked it up and it croaked, examined it for damage, didn’t find any, carried it back to the old turtle pond, put it on the edge and it leapt back into the water.

 

sewing and voting

Early voting started here yesterday. Marc went and voted, I voted today. 

We are both sick of the non-stop political ads on network TV, particularly the ones for Ted Cruz here in Texas who is weirdly obsessed with transitioning and is claiming in his ads that his opponent is in favor of schools transitioning little Johnny into little Joanne during lunch without parental consent. First of all, no one is performing transition surgery on children and certainly not school administrations that require a signed parental consent form to give your kid an aspirin or put on a bandaid and that are already underfunded. And second, transition is a long process involving chemical, social, and psychological steps before final surgery. That republicans are promoting that schools are whisking your kids away and performing surgery on them without parental consent is patently absurd and yet, here we are.

Two weeks left until Election Day and the mainstream media still refuses to accurately report on Trump’s worsening dementia or his plans to turn this country into an authoritarian state; his desire to round up and punish everyone who he feels is against him using the armed forces against American citizens, his so called ‘enemy within’ straight out of Hitler’s playbook; his intention to revoke the legal status of immigrants and ‘remove’ millions of legal and illegal residents which he admits will be bloody. And then there is the plan to implement the heinous policies of Project 2025. I don’t give much credence to polls because I think they are heavily influenced by who pays for them, who conducts them, and who they call but, Jesus fucking Christ, it is still unsettling that they continue to show this as a close race.

I didn’t intend this to be a political post so moving on…

Last Saturday Jade arrived around 5:30 for help making her vintage clown Halloween costume. She had the pattern and everything else necessary for us to make it. So Saturday night we laid out the pattern and got all the pieces except for the ruffle and hat cut. Sunday was a long day of pinning and sewing and altering and by 7 pm we were both tired but we had the basic costume made and the fabric for the ruffle cut out and hemmed. 

Monday morning I gathered the ruffle while Jade cut out and sewed the hat and then we sewed on the pom poms and were done.

As long as I have my sewing machine out I decided to remake the blue patterned skirt I made two years ago to wear to my great niece’s wedding. I’ve never been very happy with it because it’s too full, the material being a little over 4” wider than what I had used with my other skirts. So I’ve almost got it taken apart enough to cut out 4 1/2 inches which may not seem like all that much but I’m hoping I’ll be happier with it. 

I might even make the new skirt out of the fabric I bought over a year ago. Similar batik pattern, different colors.

Cat on the sunning platform in the old turtle pond. She thinks she’ll have a better chance at getting a leopard frog from there I guess.

birthday party, flowers, some yard work, and speechless

Last Saturday was my great granddaughter’s pink dinosaur third birthday party. Her parents got a castle bouncy house, grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken, invited friends and family, 4 generations, the twins came in from Austin, so all of Sarah’s family was there. It was a fun day.

Jade and her mom have such a loving relationship.

And then Tuesday I went in for the TEE to check on the watchman device results of which show a very small leak well within the normal range and so I will still stop the eliquis blood thinner and go on baby aspirin and plavix for about four and a half months then just baby aspirin. But…he wants another TEE in three months to see if the leak has closed up or is stable. Damn. I told the wonderful nursing staff at the Heart Rhythm Center that they wouldn’t be seeing me again.

There’s a new car wash in town that was offering a free $25 carwash and I finally redeemed my coupon last Thursday. 

The car looks great and I even took advantage of the super powerful vacuum station and did the inside and the trunk. One of the volunteers at SHARE always ribs me about all the leaves in my trunk when he helps put the flattened cardboard in there so I can take it to the recycling container. Boy is he going to be surprised next week.

The confederate rose shrubs are starting to bloom. One opens white and turns pink and the other opens light pink and turns dark pink. Neither one is blooming all that well. So far most the buds aren’t opening fully and when they do the flowers are smaller than usual.

Today I got out and weeded the flower bed in front getting all the invasive dew berry vines out and the invasive ground cover that has taken over the yard since it flooded during Harvey and did the same in part of the long flower bed on the west side in back. I have two small purple philippine lily plants that are blooming in the front. The white reseeds readily and grows and blooms vigorously but its purple cousin is a slow grower. Of course it could be because it really doesn’t get enough sun in the front.

This morning I had a surprise visit. I was out at the back of the property when I heard a cat meowing and Lovey stuck his head out from under the Wicked Bitch of the West’s container. He came on out and while I was asking him what he was doing over here I heard another cat meow and I looked over to see Twin. Twin who is always silent. 

Looked around but didn’t see Handsome Boy anywhere. It’s a good thing neither Cat nor Minnie saw them because they would have been chased back across the street where they belong. Minnie doesn’t chase them in their territory when we go across the street to feed them because I’ve taught her not to but over here is a different story.

OMG. Marc just showed me the local bi-weekly newspaper with an article about being ready for early voting when it starts on Monday. They wrote “we have boo coo voting machines.” Boo coo. Just for the record it’s a french word and it’s spelled ‘beaucoup’. 

We’re doomed.