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.

7 book reviews

The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - The latest in the FBI Special Agent Pendergast novels. At the end of the last book, Constance, rebuffed by Pendergast, uses the time machine to go in the past of an alternate universe/timeline to save her siblings Mary and Joe and kill the evil Dr. Leng, destroying the machine in the process so that Pendergast cannot follow her. But he has other plans and locates a man brilliant enough to be able to reconstruct it and enlists the aid of friend and sometimes partner D’Agosta to help him save Constance from a mission doomed to failure. I really like these books and read it fairly quickly and got to the last page and dammit…to be continued. Now I have to wait til the end of August when the conclusion is released.

The Guest by B. A. Paris - Iris and Gabriel return home to find their friend Laure, wife of Pierre and their best friends who live in Paris, has moved into their home in London while they were gone for a hopefully romantic weekend. Laure and Pierre are childless by choice while Iris and Gabriel have a 20 year old daughter. They met at a resort during a first anniversary vacation for Iris and Gabriel and a honeymoon for Laure and Pierre and hit it off immediately and became fast friends. Laure had left Pierre when he confesses he just found out he has a daughter from a one night stand years ago while they were married. Pierre refuses all communication from best friend Gabriel, Laure overstays her welcome by months and gets involved with the part-time gardener Joseph and disappears after Iris heard them arguing. A murder mystery when a search finds Laure dead and the investigation proceeds. It’s an engaging story which kept me guessing until the end when the murderer reveals all musing about the past four months.

Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich - The further adventures of Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter and her sidekick Lula and the two men in her life Morelli and Ranger. Typical fun read with an ending I did not expect.

She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica - The way this is written it’s as if it’s a straight timeline but it actually jumps back and forth between the recent past and the present which doesn’t become apparent until near the end. Meghan, a nurse, is a divorced single mom of a 16 year old daughter, Sienna. Meghan is assigned to a woman, an apparent attempted suicide from jumping off a bridge and miraculously survived and who is in a coma, in the ICU where she works and it’s doubtful the woman, Caitlin, will survive. One day Meghan, who is something of a bleeding heart, runs into a friend, Natalie, from high school who needs rescuing from an abusive husband and Meghan responds, caring for Nat and confiding in her her own secrets. Things start to unravel as these two story lines eventually merge. Was Caitlin pushed, is Meghan being targeted? Then one day, Caitlin opens her eyes.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters - Joe and Ruthie are the youngest of five siblings from the M’ic Maw indigenous in Canada. Every summer the family travels to the blueberry fields in Maine to pick berries. The summer Joe is six and Ruthie is four and the rest of the family is out of sight elsewhere, Ruthie is sitting on a big rock not far from their small cabin eating her sandwich while Joe wanders down to the lake out of sight of Ruthie. When Joe comes back, Ruthie is gone. The family searches but she is never found. In Maine, Norma is growing up the only child of a very restrictive but loving mother and father, not allowed out to play, who dreams for years of another mother and another life until they finally start to fade. The story is told alternately by Joe and Norma as they grow up and reminisce, Joe who carries the guilt of Ruthie’s disappearance and how it affected his life and Norma who comes to realize that there is a family secret that she eventually thinks she knows until she learns the full truth. This is a really good book, the story well told and I really enjoyed it.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawson - Martha Ballard is a midwife and healer in her 50s in a small community in Maine on the Kennebek River in the late 1700s and as such she is privy to the lives and secrets of the townspeople which she records in her daily diary. One November a body is discovered in the frozen river. It is hacked out and brought into town and Martha is called to come examine the body. She declares him murdered, beaten, hung, and thrown in the still running part of the river where it floated downstream until it became caught at the bend and encased in the ice. The new Harvard educated doctor in town disagrees with her assessment, calls it accidental drowning, no investigation is begun. When a local woman accuses the dead man and the leading citizen and judge in town of rape, Martha becomes an important witness to the injuries and is determined that justice be done. Her insistence puts herself in danger as well as a member of her family as she investigates the murder and rape on her own. I really liked this book as Martha relates the births in the town, the herbal remedies she provides, the flashbacks of her own life, the lives of the women in a society ruled by men and the laws that punish women but rarely men. 

Angel Of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - the conclusion to The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng. Just as it seems Constance, Pendergast, and D’Agosta have failed with Leng having killed her sister Mary and abducted Joe and her younger self, Pendergast’s evil brother Diogenes, who they all thought had dies when Constance pushed him into a volcano, walks through the door claiming to be their salvation. He informs them that the man who reworked the time machine has come through and got himself arrested, that Diogenes was the last to come through as it self destructed having been left on maximum for too long. Constance, Pendergast, D’Agosta, and Diogenes, seemingly trapped forever in the past of this alternate timeline, plot to deprive Leng of his victims and kill Leng in the process and then once again all seems lost. I’m going to stop here in case you are a fan of these books.

 

fall bloomers and WTF

While it still gets in the low 90s during the day, mornings and evenings are cool and all the fall bloomers are, well, blooming. I don’t usually take pictures of the whole expanse of these plants so I am plus the close ups of the flowers I usually post.

I planted the rangoon creeper on the section of fence beside the drive into the shop yard where it can get all the sun it wants.

The pink trumpet flower, also planted in the shop yard for the same reason, it’s the only place that gets full sun. It’s just starting its bloom cycle and later will have more flowers.

Pam did not want the cutting from my morning glory bush, also a sun lover, which I thought she could plant in front of her house so I planted it last spring. It is glorious.

The white phillipine lilies are really kind of invasive sprouting up everywhere and after they finish blooming I’ll probably dig some of them up.

The next two are just coming into bloom. The shrimp plant has really taken over this section of the yard.

And the orange cosmos. In a couple of weeks it will be covered with flowers and I’ll post another picture of it when it is.

The mist flower doesn’t look like much in the big picture but it’s one of my favorites. 

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

This post was just supposed to be about flowers but things are getting more extreme by the day and I have to add, just what the fuck is wrong with people in this country. 

Meteorologists are now getting death threats for explaining why hurricanes and the weather in general is getting more extreme. Mention global warming or climate change and the MAGAts just go insane because violence is the only way to deal with anything they don’t like and they don't like people talking about climate change.

Over the weekend FEMA had to pause their recovery efforts in two counties in North Carolina, the areas hardest hit, because of threats to the workers helping people on site. In one instance FEMA personnel were ordered out of the area after National Guard members reported encountering 2 trucks of militia members out ‘hunting FEMA’. Btw, FEMA does not have the power to either condemn your storm damaged property or confiscate it. 

And finally, Trump held a rally in Coachella, CA on Saturday in which he went full on fascist informing us of his intention to denaturalize citizen immigrants and using the armed forces, if necessary (and of course he, or rather Steven Miller, will find it necessary) to round up illegal and legal residents as well as anyone he considers a ‘radical left lunatic’, you know the Hitleresque ‘enemy within’. This rally was held in the desert five miles from the parking lot. He had attendees bussed in only when it was over, there were no busses to take people back. Report is that the bus drivers were only paid to take people to the rally. Trump left without a backward glance stranding all those people in the desert in the dark. So who are his supporters blaming? The democrat mayor of Coachella and democrats in general.

long day and rummaging through more tubs

Monday I called two people and another on Tuesday for bids on cutting down, cutting up, and hauling away the hanging limbs on the two pecan trees. One Monday and the one on Tuesday came out the day I called. The second guy I called on Monday didn’t return my call until Wednesday afternoon after I had the work done Wednesday morning. He called again yesterday evening. Too late guy, should have returned my call on Monday.

The man I hired and his two helpers did an excellent job and very reasonable. The one limb hanging by a shred of bark came down quickly and was cut up in minutes. It probably took the about 30 minutes of discussion and moving the extension ladder around to finally decide how to approach the more dangerous dangling limbs on the other tree though Tuesday afternoon the two limbs that were detached but hung had fallen on their own.

When those two limbs came down with a whump I guess I jumped because John looked over at me and asked was I nervous; yup, little bit. This is what the trees look like now. I hope the one closest to the house will regenerate because I’d hate to lose it completely.

Wednesday was a long day. After the crew drove off with the trailer full of more than half my pecan tree 

I went ahead and emptied the truck onto the now really big burn pile (went wide instead of tall) and Marc went out to run some errands. I got a phone call later…car trouble, car wouldn’t start. After a series of phone calls between Marc, myself, Robin, and car mechanic grandson Mikey, Mikey’s domestic partner Audra showed up to jump the battery with the fancy little battery charger gizmo and then followed Marc home with Paisleigh and waited until Mikey got off work so I got a nice little visit with my great granddaughter. When Mikey got here he and Marc went off to get a new battery and he switched it out for us so, car fixed.

Earlier this week I was looking through more of the tubs in my sister’s shed and found more christmas ornaments, a fancy elf or fairy as the case may be, 

her antique plastic Mr. Snowman that you can put a light inside, 

a tub full of santas and nutcrackers, all of which will go to SHARE. I pulled out these crocheted and starched snowflakes that Pam made to see if anyone in blogland wants them.

Also found her soap making stuff and another tub full of her genealogy research…documents and pictures. Her younger daughter took all the binders of the family lines that were in the house right after Pam’s death and she’s coming to get the rest of the genealogy stuff today. The soap making stuff I’m going to post on the local chat page on FB free for the taking. 

Now that the weather has cooled off somewhat, key word here ‘somewhat’ since it’s still getting into low 90s during the day but the mornings are nice and cool, the shrimp plant, the white philippine lilies, the rangoon creeper, the morning glory bush, and the pink trumpet flower are all blooming but this post is already heavy on images so can wait until the next post.