I know better

I do, I know it’s never a good idea to invoke the gods, but apparently I forget or get a little cocky. I should not be telling people I don’t get sick because the child infected me. Actually, she infected Marc first and I guess he infected me. I woke up Monday morning with that feeling in my nose and throat that I was getting sick and it worsened as the day progressed. I only had one really bad day and night and that was Monday. Tuesday I felt some better and my nose had dried up but no appetite and no energy, achy, my face and right eye hurt. Better still on Wednesday but no real appetite and no energy though I did get the weekly grocery shop done. Consequently I’ve done little else besides read and nap all week, besides the grocery store I mean. I was hoping to feel completely well today but there’s still some lingering effects.

I ventured out in the yard today for the first time this week to a few little surprises; the first oxblood lily (also a sign of the changing season),

one little rain lily from the bit of rain we've been getting,

and when I went across the street to take a picture of the rangoon creeper flowers I saw this, the first time I have ever seen it make seeds.

I did get more work done on my little art project before I got sick. The three cattail elements are cut out and the foam core spacers cut out but I haven’t glued them to the cattails yet because I’m still working out the spacing since I only have three layers instead of four like the previous shadow box. I also started painting the background water and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Next is finishing the background water and painting the heron. Maybe I'll get to that this weekend.

We’ve been getting a bit of rain, more than just a five or ten minute light shower but far from the sustained rain we need. At least I haven't had to go out and water some part of the yard and pots every day. 

You may remember we put my sister’s house on the shop property summer of 2020. Six years later it had settled enough that the back door deadbolt no longer lined up and the front door was out of square and sticking so Tuesday and Wednesday Rocky and his helper were under the house adjusting the level. Both doors now open, close, and lock properly. Unfortunately, he had some bad news. Some of the piers of mortar block the house sits on are starting to lean and the dirt pad is hollowing out from water getting under there. The whole house, every pillar, needs to be redone. They set the mortar blocks directly on the dirt pad which was built up higher than the surrounding yard to prevent water from getting under the house instead of on 3” thick 18" square concrete pads which should have been put down first. Aggravating that, my sister planted a row of crinum lilies across the front right up next to the house 

which over time have compromised the slope of the dirt pad and the hurricane in 2024 didn’t help any. So, all those bulbs need to be dug up and moved, each pier needs to have the dirt built back up and be rebuilt with a concrete pad first. Yay! 

SHARE is closed today and we were all supposed to show up Wednesday to start moving everything out so the flooring people could start on Monday. Obviously, I did not go yesterday, but I talked to my neighbor on Tuesday who also volunteers and he and another volunteer had gone there over the weekend and it only took the two of them 2 or 3 hours to completely clear out the back food area; all the baskets of canned goods, all the boxes of other food, all the shelving, all the tables, the three freezers and the refrigerator. I might go over there after breakfast and check it out or not. I am curious so maybe. 

Apparently my curiosity is not enough to make me actually leave the house.

The wheel is turning but oh so slowly

The morning glory bush is coming into full bloom. It’s a good thing it’s drought tolerant. 

Even the rangoon creeper was being affected by the drought, dropping leaves until I started watering it but now it’s putting out some new flowers.

We were getting a much wanted and needed rain shower yesterday morning. I was afraid to take my eyes off it, afraid that if I did it will stop. I didn’t think it would last because I could see clearing sky to the south. Aaaaand, it stopped. I don’t think it rained even 10 minutes. We’re supposed to get more rain today. We’re finally getting a break from the brutal heat, our highs for the next 10 days predicted to be in the low 90s. The calendar ticked over from August to September, days are noticeably shorter, and there is a subtle difference in the air. Still plenty humid though. I made it down to the other end of the street to photograph the pampas grass and its new plumes, one of my harbingers of fall.

I went out right after I got up this morning, grabbed the shovel and set out to do some weeding. Did a little bit in the bed that had the zinnias last year and then headed back to the far flower bed that I have ignored all summer except for watering the two clumps of crinum lilies now and then. This was as far as I got before I started sweating and the sun started creeping in. That dirt is so dry, not a lick of moisture in it.

SHARE is getting new flooring on the 14th so it will be closed for two Thursdays. What we have now is linoleum tile and while it is old it is still perfectly serviceable. I’m of the opinion, and I’m not the only one, that that grant money should be spent on food, especially with all the cuts to food assistance by this administration. We’re getting vinyl in the back where we sort food donations and fill food orders, carpet in the clothing and interview/waiting area which I think is a particularly bad choice, much harder to keep clean. So next Wednesday it will be all hands on deck to move everything that isn’t nailed down. All the shelving units and everything on them, all the tables and chairs, all the freezers and refrigerators, all have to be moved from the back either further up front or in a moving van rented for the purpose so that the new vinyl can be laid down in the food area and then all that stuff has to be moved back. Then all the clothing racks, shelving units, tables and desks and chairs and everything on them has to be moved for the carpet to be laid in the interview and clothing area, and then all that has to be moved back. Since the volunteers are all retirees, four men have been hired to help. 

A while back my grandson got a zero turn mower. Next thing I knew my daughter sent me a little video of 4 year old (5 in October) Paisleigh driving it. She was amazing, figured out the steering, the start and stop, right away. She drove that thing all around their yard never hitting anything. So Wednesday, Mikey brought the mower over to the shop to replace a wheel and while it was here he went ahead and mowed the yard but not before Paisleigh had a turn at it.

I’ve been working on my shadow box project. I think I’m done with the paintings of the cattails. I’ll do the water background next, leaving the heron head for last. I may go ahead and cut out the cattail elements first and work on the spacing. I have an inch and a quarter depth on this one.

Not much else going on this Labor Day weekend.

 

nature of things

There’s a cypress tree in the space between my property line on the east and the fence around the backyard of Montreal’s old house. If you know anything about cypress trees their roots send up ‘knees’ and if the area around that tree is mown, whatever growth gets shaved off by the mower and they end up looking like this. This is a big one. Most are considerably smaller in diameter. This one is 14” at its widest.

August is always hot but the last couple of weeks have been brutal, and still no rain. but here we are at the end of the month, days are getting noticeably shorter and the next ten or so the highs have dropped about 5 degrees, so mid-90s. Not much but I’ll take it. And rain is predicted for the next several days. One can only hope. It’s about all I can do to keep the plants in pots and stuff in the ground watered, keep the water freshened in the three birdbaths. I have plants that need to be repotted in bigger pots but I just can’t seem to make myself mix up the dirt and do it knowing that I’ll come in wet with sweat dripping off me, then sit under the fan on high for the next 30 minutes while I cool off.

The clump of pampas grass at the other end of the street is putting out new plumes (I took a picture but the sun was just blasting it and I'm not walking down there again before I post this). That surprised me, it’s one of the signs that the season is heading toward change. It seems early. Snow-on-the-prairie is also a portent of cooler temps but I haven’t seen any of that yet. The tallows are dropping leaves though but I think that has more to do with the drought than changing seasons. Speaking of tallows, there are two small ones on the west property line one of which lost a big limb last year. That limb had been dead for a couple of years before it finally fell. I was walking by that tree yesterday when I noticed a hole had opened up at the base and obviously dead bark above it so I reached down and pulled the bark away and more and more and wood pulp, some of it so dry it basically turned to dust in my hand and pulp that was wet and spongy. That whole tree is rotting from the inside. 

First picture above shows all the material I pulled out down on the ground, next picture a close up. Looks like a torso with the hips narrowing at the waist and widening with two arms reaching up. Both those limbs are rotten all the way up all while they are furiously putting out new foliage from the solid outer bark. The last picture is a chunk of the soft spongy stuff that came out of the center.

I filled the bird feeder yesterday morning. The white wing doves had it more than half empty in about an hour. This morning they are already coming to check it out but it will stay empty today even though the little birds keep looking in my window like aren’t you forgetting something? I’ve been seeing a little hummingbird mornings and evenings and more butterflies; fritillaries, swallowtails, long wings, a few sulfurs; migrating through, also signs of season change. The orange cosmos has some open blooms but haven’t started their big display yet. They are a favorite of the migrating butterflies though this one is on the Mexican bird of paradise.

I’ve been working on the new shadow box, started painting the cattails. Because the elements are long and narrow I decided to glue two pieces of watercolor paper together to stiffen them up, give them more body. Experimented with one of the leftover first attempt at leaves on the previous box to see how much more difficult it would be to cut through two layers (and glue) of paper. More effort but doable especially since the cuts are all going to be mostly smooth straight lines (as opposed to serrated edges on leaves). 

The neighbors next door that were renting Montreal’s old house moved out. Last weekend I saw a flatbed trailer backed up to the open front door and a few days later I noticed all the curtains were gone and no lights or activity, no car coming and going. Today they came back to finish cleaning up, picked up some trash around the yard and then emptied the house of trash and piled it all up on the side of the street and drove off. 

No idea if they are going to come back for the trampoline frame and jumping surface which never got attached (I think not at this point). But that pile of trash? The rural trash pick up that we residents in the county have to subscribe to (and I have no idea if they did since I never saw them put a trash can out, they were burning it for a while and I saw them put a bag in someone else’s can once) will not pick that shit up, not like that. Neither will the county. So it remains to be seen if the owner of the house will take care of it when they come inspect the house and property. Which surely they will do.

the rich, 80, and misc pics

Beauty berries beginning to turn their glorious deep purple.

In case you ever thought rich people didn’t live in a completely different universe while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet, a rich guy in Houston who lives on River Oaks Blvd., the place for the obscenely wealthy, just bought this 15,000 sq ft mansion next door for 15.5 million dollars and plans to tear it down because…he never liked that house (though I hesitate to call it just a house). 

He plans to combine his property, an acre, with the newly acquired acre and put in an English garden and build a pool house. An English garden in Texas, on the Gulf Coast Plains. We do not have the climate for an English garden though I suppose if he went with native perennials he could get something comparable. Whatever, the guy can buy a $15.5 million mansion just to tear it down he definitely has enough money to hire a slew of gardeners to maintain it. The only saving grace is that he plans to donate $4 million in usable materials to Habitat For Humanity, that and one less mansion and more flowers and trees.

Baby steps on the new shadow box which I still haven’t received. I ordered it last week and thought it was supposed to come on Monday, but apparently not until the weekend. Meantime I transferred the individual drawings to watercolor paper.

White wing doves continue to mob the bird feeder on the days I fill it. Anywhere from 5 - 8 crowded on it with just as many on the ground and twice as many in the trees above it and when they’re not mobbing the bird feeder they’re mobbing the birdbath. 

I have to go out there every now and then and shoo them away so that the little birds have a chance. I’ve had two unusual visitors to the bird feeder today, a blue jay earlier and just now a flicker.

This is my favorite little water sprinkler. It gets moved all around the yard and when I remove it from whichever hose and am through watering for the day I try to put it back in the empty pot in the barn that I keep small misc yard stuff in so that I know where it is the next time I want to use it. I don't always remember to do that and so I spent Saturday looking all over for it. I looked in all the places in the yard it could possible be and could not find it. So Sunday I got online and ordered a new one after searching for it again even though I figured it would turn up eventually. I walked out Monday morning, turned the corner around the garage and there it was in plain sight on this overturned bucket right next to a pot with a plant in it I water nearly every day. I must have walked right past it a dozen times. Well, now I have two.

I was laying in bed last night thinking about Dolly Parton dying at 80 yesterday, the 25th (I already did one eulogy this week and so many have already written about what a shining soul Dolly was). She was only 4 years older than I am. It was a very sobering realization. And now this morning we learn that Tim Curry also died yesterday, also 80. Do I only have four more years left? Or seven, Joanne was 83. Eighty seems to be a threshold I am rapidly approaching. I looked in the mirror the other day, something I don’t really do that often besides just a glance, and I thought I looked older than I did just a few days previous. It seems that’s how it goes, maintaining a look and then overnight new wrinkles appear, bags under the eyes not there one day are there the next. While my hair still has more color than gray, the gray continues to creep in. Even so, I’m aiming for late 90s and have two women on my father’s side that bode well for that.

And last a little green tree frog hanging out on the moon. The moon being that part of the carved glass set of windows in my bedroom.

Joanne

I learned Saturday that Joanne Noragon from Cup On The Bus finally succumbed to something she could not recover from through sheer determination and stubbornness. The previous Wednesday, her daughter Beth had posted an update on Joanne’s blog that her mom had finally met her match. It took her quickly. The last year or so, Joanne has only posted twice, recovering from a broken bone and then another spending months in rehab.  If you were a visitor to her blog you know what an amazing woman she was; strong, tough, determined, politically active, constantly engaged with life; and how much physical trauma she suffered, from chronic pain to a series of broken bones to a severe head injury, and recovered from over her lifetime. She was not one to let things like that control her destiny and true to that she made the choice, at 83, not to fight a battle that could not be won.

I don’t remember how I found Joanne’s blog but I’ve been visiting her at least since December 2011. At the time she was working for the township in which she lived in Ohio. Earlier in her life she was a self employed artist/artisan with her sister Jan weaving cloth and making garments from it. The two of them traveled all over doing shows until it was time to find other ways of living. There came a point when Joanne felt it necessary to gain custody of three of her grandchildren and that was the focus of her life, getting them through school and prepared for life as an adult. In the spring of 2018 when the last grandchild was still under her care she and Laura did a road trip, eventually making their way down here to the Texas Gulf Coast Plains and me. You can read about that visit here if you are interested.  Meeting Joanne was like getting together with an old friend whom you haven’t seen in years.

Joanne was weaving again in 2015 making garments for a small gallery (forgive me if I don’t have the chronology quite right, I’ve been scouring her archives jumping around so I may not have it exactly right) but the gallery closed (I think) and at some point she gave away her entire weaving studio. Three years later in 2018 she desired to weave again and got back one of her looms and began weaving dish towels just for the enjoyment of it and gifted myself and others with her efforts. When people realized she was giving them away demand grew and she stocked up on an array of colors and opened her online shop. I purchased several more for my self (I have 7) and for my grandgirls and you had to be fast because they sold out quickly. 

One day, after she posted a picture of a garment she had made back when that never sold and I commented how much I liked it, I received a package in the mail and inside was the blouse.

Joanne was a force of nature who overcame more adversity than most of us experience, someone I admired and considered a role model. She will be remembered and missed.

Fly high Joanne. Return to the stardust from whence you came.

drawing, hot, docs, shoes

I did spend time this past weekend on drawings and I have a composition for one of the shadow box ideas. This one will be bigger, 5” x 7”, horizontal presentation. 

I like the composition but it’s going to be harder to construct because the elements are much narrower so I’m not really sure exactly how I’m going to put it all together. I may set it aside and work on the other two sketches before I commit. I didn’t do much else over the weekend except draw and read and play The Vault, a puzzle game, on my phone. I've made my way through 49 so far. You have to find hidden objects that activate the puzzles which you have to solve to be able to open the vault.

Monday morning when I went out about 8 am it felt a little cool. Whoa. Checked the weather app, 74˚. So I got the shovel and turned the ground where the four tomato plants were, added some compost and turned that in trying to get a jump on preparing for the winter garden. Then at 12:30 it was 88˚ felt like 109˚ and continued to get hotter. Still no rain, the ground is cracking, the grass in the sun is turning brown, high temps 99˚, feels like stepping out into a blast furnace with the wind from the south. The next chance of rain is Saturday. Tuesday morning I dug up four small coral porterweed volunteers put them in pots (two days later they seem to be fine). 

The dirt was so dry it just fell away from the roots so I don’t know if they will make it even though I saturated the little pots with water but little things don’t like to be bare rooted. There are two more fairly big volunteers but the ground was so hard I watered them first. I’ll see about digging them up later. Yesterday I watered the porterweed and it burst into bloom this morning. The individual little flowers are only about 3/8" across.

Next Monday I go in for fasting bloodwork and the next Monday after that I go in for a six month check up with my PC doc. My dexa scan last February showed the osteoporosis getting worse. It’s been three years since the last one and only one number out of six changed more than a tenth of a point up or down but she wants to talk about going on the medication which I do not want to do for several reasons. I have been inundated on SM with ads for calcium and other supplements. The ads are all the same, very long testimonials that after taking calcium and still having continued bone loss I took this supplement because it has this special ingredient that helps the body absorb and direct the calcium to your bones and in just six months my bone density improved markedly. And of course, the only place you can buy these miracle bone building supplements is from their online shop exclusively sometimes with an automatic reorder. So I’ve written down some of the claims about the added nutrients and supplements to talk to my doc about and see what she thinks. 

Next month I have three appointments, first is with the ophthalmologist for my annual eye exam and to see if the other eye is ready for cataract surgery and then my sixth month check up with the EP (electrophysiologist, heart rhythm specialist), and last is the dermatologist which I thought was Wednesday and got up at 7 am, left the house at 7:25 to get to my 8 am appointment in Rosenberg and then drove right back home. I wondered why they hadn’t sent me a text to confirm. By the end of September I should be good to go for another 6 months.

There used to be two things I would never buy online, clothes and shoes but now I've started buying shoes online. The thing about shoes is I wear 7.5 or 8 depending on the shoe. I did buy some sandals online two years ago and judging by their sizing guide I ordered an 8, the size was fine but the quality was not and 6 months later I needed new sandals. New company that offered 3 month trial and easy free return. Their sizing guide indicated an 8 which was too big. Returned them and got a 7 1/2 which fit great. So the CostCo online sales catalog came, $7 off hands free step in washable sneaker type Sketchers. 

No problem, I have a pair of Sketchers 7 1/2, ordered a pair. Did they fit? No, too small. I ordered another pair size 8, fit great so now I have something like 6 months to return the first pair to CostCo. I’ll drive by there on my way back from the EP next month and do it then.

trivia and 50 years

The little tree frog is still in the birdhouse or was last Sunday when I took this picture. Apparently it didn’t care for having its picture taken because now when it sees me it scuttles back into the birdhouse instead on hanging out on the doorstep. 

So apparently, Christmas in July is a thing occurring on or around July 25th originating at a US girl’s camp in 1933 and, unsurprisingly, embraced by retailers as a summer sales event to clear out summer stock. News to me, how did I not know about this? 

Here’s an interesting little piece of trivia, the bullwhip was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier, producing a small sonic boom heard as a crack when flicked quickly. If you are interested in the science behind it you can watch this short entertaining video. 

Now that I finished Artemis, I’ve taken the first steps towards another shadowbox, very preliminary steps as I don’t have a completed drawing or even settled on a subject matter but I did some resizing of some drawings with which to do a couple of compositions. I’ve drawn in the main focus for three compositions I’m considering. Now to work on the surrounding elements. Maybe I’ll get around to that sometime this weekend.

Another item from the 1440 newsletter…Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe.  Two links, one of the map that you can zoom in and out of, 

the other an article  about the map and a guided tour of the universe.

Today is our 50th wedding anniversary, got married at home at three in the afternoon, invited everyone we knew and had a big party that lasted until midnight. 

We had a small amount of finger food that people brought, two kegs of beer, the Bride’s keg and the Groom’s keg, floated the Bride’s keg. The next day we went to a movie though neither one of us can remember what we saw and an internet search for movies that week of that year did not ring any bells. When we got back to the house, my parents were there planning to clean house as a surprise which we did not appreciate since we had some illegal drugs sitting around which, thankfully, they had not come across yet. We told them thanks, but no thanks, packed a bag and spent the next week at the family beach house on the far west end of Galveston Island. When we got back a week later and opened the garage with the leftover contents of the Groom’s keg, omg! That leftover beer cooked for a week in a closed garage in the middle of August and the smell was awful.

So yeah, 50 years of not just being married but working together. Feels more like 150. I came close to calling it quits a couple of times and he actually packed a bag and left once but was back several hours later but underneath it all we remained devoted to each other, that or we're just two stubborn people. We’re going out later for lunch and ice cream.