two projects

Big black dive bomber mosquitoes are out in force. Takes them a nanosecond to start swarming any hapless creature foolish enough to venture outside. I took my life in my hands just now to go out and take this picture.

There are minnows in the old turtle pond and the rainwater tub but I think I’ll get some mosquito dunks anyway. The only other standing water is in the birdbaths but that gets changed out regularly.

Pam’s house across the street is a manufactured home with typical sort of tan walls with one very brown accent wall in the living room. Before she even moved in she didn’t care for that wall (me either) and I suggested we paint it but she hates to paint and even though I was willing to do it she shrugged it off. Well, Pam is gone two and a half years now, the walls are empty of all her stuff and Robin and I have decided to start painting that house. Robin wanted to start with the smallest bedroom which she’s going to use as a bedroom/playroom for Paisleigh and Harrison since she takes care of them while Mikey works. Now that the kids are in Arkansas with their mother we got started on Sunday. 

The first thing Robin did was to take the thin narrow slats off the wall that cover the joins between the wall panels. The walls are thin sheetrock with a vinyl (?) covering so not taped and floated to make seamless walls. Sunday, I caulked all those seams. Let me tell you, those slats covered a multitude of sins. I did my best but some of those panels were not flush with each other. I suggested we texture the walls first to help hide the inconsistencies but Robin prefers smooth walls to textured and she’s the one who lives there. All the nail holes, because there was not a square inch of wall that my sister didn’t have something hanging, still need to be filled before Robin paints but we bought the paint yesterday. She picked out two versions of a kind of sage green, one a little darker than the other. We had previously gotten samples of the two colors. 

I liked the darker version but Robin chose the other lighter one. Once again, she lives there so her choice. We’ll see how it looks after the room gets painted, not the color but the caulking of the uneven seams. I may suggest we leave the slats on when we do the next area.

The other thing I did Monday was to start on my new art project, a kind of 3 D scene in a shadowbox. The elements will be done in watercolor so I painted two leaves and tried two different methods of gluing the leaves on foam core to give them some substance/thickness. The first one I glued to foam core before cutting it out but while I was doing that an easier way occurred to me which was to cut the leaf shape out of the foam core a little smaller than the water color and then glue them together.

Now that I’ve got that figured out I can start on the actual elements for the piece, the first step is to make the drawing.

Today’s agenda…feed store for mosquito dunks, library, weekly food shop.

Two more day lilies. I didn’t notice the little green spider on the yellow ones when I was taking the picture while fending off blood suckers. 

just another unexciting week

shrimp plant

I have 70 emails in my inbox this (Friday) morning. I’m probably going to just have a delete party without looking at any of them. Well. most of them. There might be one two that are not newsletter notifications. I try to go through them every morning, reading some, deleting others unread, or saving some for later but apparently later never comes, hence 70 emails. Yesterday, of course, was Thursday when I have no time in the morning for anything other than getting ready to leave for SHARE and Thursday afternoons I have other things that need doing and evenings are spent reading or watching something on TV. 

I’m keeping nominally abreast of the news but I just don’t have the capacity for a deep dive right now. I mean it’s all bad, every day the orange turd spews garbage, lies, steals, plans another military aggression, announces some other vanity project that destroys the integrity of the people’s house and surrounding areas to be paid for by the taxpayers, rewarding the J6 insurrectionists, or just being a total embarrassment on the world stage while he formulates another plan to either steal or cancel the midterm elections. I just can’t. I don’t see how these people, the independent news, immerses themselves in it daily. I appreciate that they do but holy moly.

I winnowed it down to seven which I may or may not read.

Paisleigh and Harrison left with their mom Thursday for Arkansas until possibly the end of June at which time they will return here. Paisleigh will start school in August so they’ll be in residence here until next summer though their mom gets one weekend a month and alternate holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It remains to be seen how often the monthly weekend exchange takes place since it’s a 10 hour drive and even meeting halfway to make the exchange, which the court has ordered, that’s still 5 hours for each of them on Fridays and Sundays. 

A big storm blew through Tuesday night giving us 3” of rain and another cool morning on Wednesday. I’ve said this before and surprised that it wasn’t but that was probably the last cool morning. It rained again lightly Thursday morning and another possible storm this Friday afternoon. Regardless, it’s hot and humid out there now, 83˚ at noon. We’ve been turning the AC on intermittently to cool the house during the day, turning it off at night. It stopped working Sunday evening and Monday and Tuesday were barely tolerable but the guy came out Tuesday afternoon and did whatever he did and it’s been working fine since.

I haven’t felt like doing much this week. The rain makes it impossible to do any real work out there even when it’s not raining because everything is so wet. I’m not currently engaged in any artistic endeavor. Mostly what I’ve been doing is reading the latest Pendergast novel by Preston and Child, Pendergast the Beginning, his first case as an FBI agent. I have 70 pages to go so that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of the day. Now that June is breathing down our necks with its heat, humidity, and now mosquitoes from the rain I’ll probably be more inclined to get out my paints and pencils.

Yeah, so that’s what I did yesterday, read those 70 pages and finished the book and then it was time to feed the kitties and too damn hot to walk the dog, later I told her, and then it was time to fix dinner.

After that long long long dry spell, when every community around us except us was getting the rain we needed, these storms are welcome but why do they always have to come in the middle of the night?! I suppose if I didn’t have a neurotic little dog that trembled hard enough to make the bed vibrate and panting bug eyed in constant motion when she wasn’t trying to lay down on my pillow above my head I’d be glad they came in the middle of the night because I’d be asleep! This one last night started with distant barely audible (to me) rumbles of thunder which caused Minnie’s head to pop up like a jack-in-the-box. Oh great, here we go. The lightning and thunder got closer and closer until it was literally right on top of us. One extremely bright flash and an almost simultaneous crash of noise had me hoping it didn’t hit anything. Eventually the storm moved on, the dog calmed down, and I was able to get to sleep until my pill alarm went off at 8:30 (I keep meaning to reset that fucker to 9). Now I’m up and Minnie is crashed out in her little dog bed. 

Another of my neighbors came to the door last night. Jose works on a farm and the farmer allows him to take as much corn as he wants after, I guess, he’s sold the bulk of it. Anyway, he brings us some every spring and last night he handed us a box of 30 ears. Since I’ve already put up all the corn I intend I’ll spread this around to my daughter and Rocky.

A few more day lilies.

outdoor work and indoor work

Sunday morning, no tai chi, no yoga. Instead I fed the cat and dog, took my morning meds, scrolled through my email for maybe half an hour and then went outside. I’ve been telling myself that I need to get out there first thing in the morning, before coffee, before blogging, before breakfast because it’s the coolest part of the day if I want to work on the flower bed on the east side of the backyard. Especially since that’s the only time it’s in shade until late afternoon. Today I finally did it.

This is the most neglected of all my flower beds for that very reason. Plus it doesn’t need much attention because it’s the one with the rock rose, the orange fall blooming cosmos, german verbena, mistflower, and the mexican bird of paradise which are hardy and come back and bloom in spite of me. But all that neglect eventually reaches critical mass and something needs to be done. One of my objectives was to dig up the big pot that had the bridal bouquet plumeria in it. You may recall that I didn’t dig it up or the big pink plumeria last winter as they had just gotten too big to deal with and left them to do or die. Well, they died and I need that pot.

I worked for about two hours pulling out a lot of the mist flower because it was taking over and has a dense root system, dug up the dayflower that also has invaded one end, pulled other weeds and grass, got the pot out. Then set the sprinkler up to give it a good watering while it was overcast. I didn’t get all the weeds out, like all the ground cover that is trying to take over that the flood from Harvey generously spread around my yard and every joint of leaves will root another plant though I did get out some of it. Still plenty more work to do but that’s another day and it looks much better.

This morning I got back out on this overcast and humid day and dug up the ground cover. But let’s back up to Saturday. I put up 29 of the 46 ears of corn (had two for dinner) and got 16 1/4 cups of corn, mostly one cup bags but a few 1/2 cup for adding to cornbread. 

Remember our resolve not to turn on the AC until June that I posted on Saturday? It lasted to Sunday morning. It was 83 in the house, so Marc turned it on until the house cooled off and then for another hour or so while I was in the kitchen producing heat and steam blanching the rest of the corn and getting it freezer ready, another 10 cups.

I’ve been going on about the pink angel trumpet and its sensual voluptuousness but my yellow angel trumpet (also in a pot because trying to get them to grow in the ground the last several years was a dismal failure and produced no blooms) had put on a few flowers as well.

snakes, corn, and peaches

I do know what happened to the wren nest. I went out in the garage Thursday night to roll the big trash can out to the street, looked over at the shelving unit and saw

a young rat snake. Oh you little bastard, if you look closely you can see at least three lumps in it’s body, and I guess it’s been laying low hiding behind the other things on those shelves while it digests its meal. I can’t really be too upset. It has to eat too and it does me a service keeping the mice down but now all five nests located this spring have failed. This is my third sighting this year of a live snake. Also found a dead one coiled up about 18” off the driveway. At least the house finches had some successful nests as I seeing juveniles begging food from their parents at the bird feeder, mostly being ignored.

My neighbor’s brother grows hybrid sweet corn (no GMO) and that’s where I get my corn to put up every year. Leonard brought me 4 dozen ears Friday morning. 

Marc and I got all 48 ears shucked yesterday, 

now today comes the blanching, cutting it off the cob, and vacuum sealing it for the freezer. Nearly every ear had some worm damage, even exposed over a dozen worms of various size. 

Some people might think that’s gross but to me it’s reassuring because if a worm won’t eat the corn then I don’t want to either. 

I also got some local peaches yesterday. They're small but sweet. 

My own tree which gave me about 50 peaches last year, isn’t doing that great this year. It bloomed but not as much, set fruit but the little starts are falling off and the ones still on the tree don’t seem to be growing. Been too dry I guess though I try and water it at least once a week.

Summer is pressing down on us. Mornings are still pleasant but supposed to get into the high 80s today. We’re going to try to hold out on the AC until the end of the month but it depends on the humidity.

That’s about all I know. SHARE was busy again last Thursday, mostly big food orders. It was a food delivery day, plus we got some donations in as well as what we get from HEB, Walmart, and the dollar stores. HEB sent us +/- 50 bouquets of flowers. Seems they over ordered for Mother's Day. They came complete with a plastic sleeve with handles and a vase for about $40 I think, so everyone got flowers with their food order for as long as they lasted. I brought home two bouquets and divided them up into three vases, one of just the roses.

------------

book reviews:

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng - Set in the US after the Crisis, a years long depression eventually blamed on the Chinese for which Americans of Chinese heritage pay the price, the PACT Act, laws written to preserve American culture, credited with bringing prosperity back to the nation based on suppression of anything considered unAmerican. Children are removed from their homes if their parents aren’t considered patriotic enough and placed with ‘proper’ American families. The story centers around poet Margret Miu and her son Bird. One line of one of Margaret’s poems written before the Crisis becomes the motto of the resistance of which she has no part and Margaret abandons her husband and 9 year old son before the authorities come and re-home him. Three years later Bird follows clues left by his mother and finds her in New York where Margaret is in hiding, working on a project to fulfill a promise made to the parents of the missing children, families she has tracked down to bear witness. 

King Sorrow by Joe Hill - Arthur, a college student with access to the rare book section of the university’s library is coerced into stealing rare book to keep his mother, who is in prison, safe. When his friend group, Colin, Donna, Van, Allie, and Gwen, finds out they come up with a plan to free him from the drug dealer who sells the books to pay a debt. One of the books he was ordered to steal is the Crane Journal, a grimoire bound in human skin, which includes instructions on how to call forth the dragon King Sorrow from the Long Dark and one drunken and drug fueled night they implement the plan. they strike a deal with the dragon, Arthur’s tormentors will be dead by Easter and they will be protected. What the group thought was a one time deal was a deal in perpetuity and if they didn’t provide the name of a victim by Easter, the one of them must die instead and so with Colin taking the lead they feed King Sorrow names of heinous people in an attempt to justify murder. When Arthur comes up with a plan decades later to free themselves from the dragon, things go sideways. More than one person doesn’t want to send King Sorrow back to the Long Dark. Joe Hill is an excellent story teller and while this book is long, 870+ pages, it keeps you engaged. 

miscellania and day lilies

Well, I have no idea what’s happening with the wren nest in the garage. I have neither seen nor heard any activity since Saturday. No parents coming and going, no baby bird noises. The nest does not appear to be disturbed but I hesitate to peer too closely. Seems it’s been plenty of time for the little eggs to have hatched.

More car cleaning on Sunday. Saturday I did the outside, Sunday I did the inside, even those hidden areas when the doors are closed where dirt and grime builds up. Monday it was glass and vacuum. I did not try and clean the upholstery besides vacuuming. This car has not been this clean since I drove it off the lot 12 years ago. What brought this on? I have no idea.

The last couple of days my suspect email list sent by the spam blocker on my Earthlink account has been inundated. Tuesday, 109 spam emails on it. WTF? Harbor Freight, AAA, various insurance companies, CVS, CostCo, Lowe’s, and more, all wanting me to claim my free gift! Let chance! Hurry before the offer expires! And then there’s all the meds offered shipped right to my door. Today it’s back to the normal +/- dozen.

My determination to do some yoga or tai chi every morning lasted about two days. I haven’t been rolling out of bed until about 8 and you’d think the two hours until I fix breakfast would be enough time but apparently not, not if I want to stroll around the yard first thing, sort through email, read blogs and comment, answer comments or write. I do need to figure this out because I feel so much better and stronger when I do.

So Tuesday morning my stroll included checking on the tomato plants, blooming like crazy but not setting much fruit. The green beans however are.

We finished watching the mini-series Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant meltdown disaster in Russia in 1986. Human arrogance compounded by the authoritarian state that prized unquestioning loyalty, the belief that the state is never wrong, that Russian technology was superior to the point of erasing the knowledge of a known flaw to the operators of the plant, the insistence of the higher ups to get a safety check done under conditions in which it should have been delayed, the refusal to admit how bad it really was to the people tasked with cleaning it up all led to the disaster and the deaths of everyone involved. To this day, Russia refuses to admit how many people died. I recommend watching it.

Here are the promised day lilies.

unmotivated, blooming things, new bird sighting

Friday morning overcast, cool, and drizzly. Not a day for accomplishing much of anything. And I didn’t. Read blogs, scrolled social media, played a couple of games on my phone, read my book, fed the kitties, walked the dog, fixed dinner. Thursday night we watched episode 6 (of 8) of the last season of The Boys. If you are the least bit squeamish this is not a show you want to watch. Just trust me on this. Last night we watched the first episode of the mini-series Chernobyl, a historical drama about the nuclear disaster. 

Saturday started out overcast and gloomy but not wet. It cleared up mid-day and with the sun out, temperatures are rising. I’m still lethargic and unmotivated to do anything though I did take the boxes of plastic, cardboard, and paper to the recycling center mostly because they were all full. Now every place that I would work outside is in the sun so that’s not happening. I took a cursory look at my art journal and…nah. I think maybe late afternoon I might wash the car which it sorely needs. 

And that is what I did. While I was doing that just outside the garage I heard a wren in there giving its warning call over and over, looked up and Minnie was standing there but she doesn’t usually upset them. Looked again and Cat was sitting there so I scooped her up and put her inside and the warning chirps stopped. This is a new development which makes me think maybe the eggs hatched plus I’ve seen mom flit out several times the last two days. So Cat is housebound for a while. I failed to tell Marc and after I finished washing the car Minnie and I walked over to feed the cats and when I got back, Cat was sitting by the car and the wren was again giving out its warning call. Back in Cat went and all parties have been informed.

I did let Cat out this (Sunday) morning but I’m keeping an eye on her whereabouts and listening for the wrens (she’s now back in). I strolled outside and was immediately struck by a bird call I had never heard before. It took me a while to locate it high in the magnolia tree, brilliant red, smaller than a cardinal, I got a good picture of it with my new phone camera (I love this camera!), did an image search and it’s a scarlet tanager. I have never seen one before.

My pink angel trumpet that did not bloom last year and was not thriving until I repotted it and gave it some fertilizer is blooming profusely right now. It has 22 blooms in various stages; 2 spent blooms, 6 open flowers, 9 almost open, and 5 tight buds. It already needs a bigger pot.

Other things are blooming…spiderwort, althea (rose of sharon), a very late bearded iris, (also daylilies but that's the next post).

------------

One thing I wanted to mention, that I overlooked in the list of reasons people are leaving this country in my last post, is the brain drain. Because of scientific and medical research funding cuts, higher education funding cuts and control of curricula in our universities, the firing of so many of our scientists, medical professionals, and educators, our best and brightest are being wooed away to Canada and Europe who are more than happy to accommodate them and their research. 

------------

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn - Libby was seven when her mother and two sisters were brutally murdered. She survived by scrambling out a window and running to hide among the brush. Her older brother Ben was convicted mostly by Libby’s testimony even though she never saw him, only heard his voice. Twenty five years later Libby is contacted by a group that thinks Ben was innocent and starts Libby on a quest to find out what really happened. The story of that January day is told in flashbacks interspersed with Libby’s own investigations culminating in her own life being threatened when she gets too close to the truth. She knows she heard her brother’s voice during the murders but did he really do it?

Rage by Linda Castillo - a Kate Burkholder novel. A dismembered body is found in the woods by a creek, shallowly buried by Amish kids playing hide and seek. The body is identified as a young Amish man, Samuel, and Kate, Chief of Police of the small community of Painter’s Mill begins her investigation, talking to family and friends. Two days the body of another young Amish man, best friend of Samuel, is found crammed into a barrel. Kate finds a picture of a young woman in Samual’s things and sets out to find her leading her to a brewery/pub and a topless club. When the young woman turns up dead, Kate starts putting the pieces together but the closer she gets, the more danger she finds herself in.