It’s raining this morning, still raining I should say as it started sometime last night. It’s a slow steady rain but constant and is bringing in three more nights of cold weather, one in the low 30s so I have to decide if I want to bring the stuff back in that I already moved outside. I was surprised to notice I haven’t posted since Monday when Jade came over with a bag of mending and alterations she wanted done. One of the projects, as she calls them, was to tie die a mustard yellow dress she had bought because while she didn’t care for the color she liked the little sun image in black on the front. So that was the first thing she did while I worked on removing the band at the bottom of a sweatshirt. She sent me this picture Tuesday morning after she unwrapped it and before she washed it.
She went to yoga with me that night and it was the biggest group in years, relatively speaking, 10 participants. All but one of the regulars and semi-regulars showed up plus two new women and Jade. Tuesday we finished up some of the mending/alterations and then she left in the afternoon heading back to Austin. And so since it was my night to cook I fixed one of the HelloFresh meals delivered last Saturday, Marc fixed another Wednesday night. Both were very good but even so still a little too pricey. I’ll fix the last tonight and then it’s back to planning my own meals.
Wednesday was a beautiful day and I managed to get out and start turning the soil and weeding to get ready for planting the spring garden and zinnias but now with this rain it will be a few days before it’s dry enough to do more. And then it was time for lunch, walk the dog, feed the half wild kittens, get ready for yoga and just as I was about to walk out the door Abby called at the last minute asking me if I would lead the class as she was tied up at the bowling alley, of which she is the manager, with some sort of training on the new equipment. So I did that.
Thursday we had a full complement of volunteers plus the elders at SHARE and were steadily busy with about 30 food orders, mostly the larger families. I took a picture of one of the four large bins of home goods we got from the regional food bank last week so you could see what I was talking about.
This is some of the stuff in those bins. Clients only get to choose something from here once a year.
Not much has started blooming yet besides the 10 petal anemone and my little dwarf redbud tree (this is the most it has ever bloomed).
The one over at the shop is still just bare branches but the maple tree is blooming. I saw an ash tree starting to put out it's spring green yesterday while walking the dog. The chinese fringe flower trees are thinking about blooming producing a few clusters and the first of these little lilies whose name I can never remember that will blanket the yard soon but that’s about it.
Coming back from feeding the wildlings I was chatting with my neighbor Gary who has recently been adopted by/adopted a big orange male tabby who roams the street. I’ve caught him over behind Pam’s house twice now. Gary’s thinking about getting him fixed so he will not roam so much. We both commented on how many stray cats there are around here lately. there’s always been a couple slinking around but several more now. There’s an orange and white male that a neighbor feeds but he stays outside, Gary’s orange tabby who just showed up in his yard one day, a black short hair that is completely wild, a gray and white male that I think fathered Momcat’s kittens (this is the kitten I call handsome boy),
Momcat of course, a black long hair cat that Gary mentioned which I had not seen until I walked to the back of the yard and Minnie had treed it,
and this big gray male (who also could be who fathered the kittens) hunkered down under the deck. Cat is not pleased.
I have no idea if they are all strays or belong to people in the area. So, yeah, that’s been my week.
Good job on the tie-dye, Jade!
ReplyDeleteUh. I'm glad that black long-hair isn't in my yard. I'd be so tempted to try and take him/her in.
Sounds like you've had a busy week and done some good things. Whatever that red flower is, I like it. The rest of your yard will take off for spring soon. Looks like we'll be getting your rain and then lower temps starting tomorrow.
Both those grey toms are good looking fellows. Long hair cats are tough upkeep. When I brought Toby home, Jan's first comment was "Another long hair!" We were forever cutting out his mats and combing him. I finally took to having him buzz cut every spring. I think he appreciated it, too.
ReplyDeleteThese cats look well groomed and very well fed for strays! Here, a stray looks mangy and poorly and as soon as it's spotted, an army of elderly ladies rushes out with food and treats. But our strays are vagabonds, they don't want to stop being strays. There's an empty old residence nearby with a large overgrown garden and rumours have it that it's "owned" by strays. Years ago, my daughter crawled through the hedge to have a look and came back stinking of cats but didn't see any.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid my mother gave me a packet of zinnia seeds when I was bothering her as she weeded the garden. I planted them, they came up and bloomed. I was hooked. I think that yellow dress looks great.
ReplyDeleteGreat tie=dye job! Glad to see your early blooms. Cats are hard on the bird populations I've heard. But they are such sweet little guys all by themselves, doing rodent control we hope!
ReplyDeleteExcellent job Jade! I love the dress (or as I would call it, tunic - ha!). She needs to model it for us. That's a lot of neighborhood cats! I wonder if people have decided that your area is the place to dump cats - or if it's just that where there are two cats there will soon be six (if they're not fixed). Your flowers remind me that Mike told me one of our daffys is blooming - I must go check it out!
ReplyDeleteThose cats all look pretty healthy, so if they're strays they appear to be doing well for themselves. (More reason to have them spayed/neutered!)
ReplyDeleteJade's dress came out great!
That tie-dye dress is really nice. I like the sun, too. I've never done any of that, but the tie-dyes that the Liberian women did when I lived over there were utterly gorgeous, and quite different from what we see here. They did a lot of wax prints, too. When they combined the techniques, the effect could be stunning. I wish I'd kept some of those fabrics, but eventually I figured out that I wasn't going to do anything with them, so I passed them on to some good seamstresses I know. Now, given the internet and such, if I ever got a hankering for more, or even some, it would be easy enough to get the real thing, even from here in the U.S.
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