I didn't mean to get political

Today is the last day of my two weeks of full time employment. After today I go back to my 3 or 4 Saturdays a month and the occasional day filling in. Not tomorrow though. Tomorrow my sister is working, an arrangement made when I thought we would be doing a workshop that weekend. And next Saturday the store will be closed because it's the annual Juneteenth Festival.  I guess the store will be closed on the 30th as well as that is the Freedom Festival, Wharton's 4th of July celebration.

The store is closed on those days because the square and surrounding areas are full of people and parades and booths and activities which is not conducive to business.  People aren't on the square to visit the local establishments.  When they come in the store it's to get out of the heat or to ask to use the bathroom.  I don't know what the other stores do, but Miss Hattie's closes.

I like living in this small town even though it is very conservative, very religious, and, quietly, racist.  Well, I don't know that it is any more racist than any other part of this country, and by 'this country' I mean the entire US,  but I've recently had a few encounters here where the person with whom I was speaking let their racism bubble to the top, one even using the 'N' word, something I haven't heard in a very long time.

I don't like that word (or any of the words used to malign people with racial or cultural differences) with it's inherent connotations of shiftless, lazy, ignorant, deceitful, useless, especially when it's being applied to a person who is working to improve his life or a group of people who are gathering for a celebration of their release from slavery.  I don't chastise the speaker for their choice of words when I find myself in an unpleasant conversation but I do speak up for the maligned individual or group.  

I think white America tried to convince itself that racism was a thing of the past in this country when Obama was elected president.  Considering the obstructionism from Congress he has faced since taking office, I'd say that racism is still alive and well in America.  His opponents and detractors are quick to assure you their position is not about race, blaming him for the results of 8 - 10 years of Republican policies, but the fact is, the old white men in our government closed ranks the day he moved into the White House.  They  were quite public and vocal about their intent to make him a one term president before he ever got a chance to govern.  Never mind that he has continued most of Bush's policies.

When your hatred of a black individual causes you to vote against policies that are good for the country and your constituents and prevents you from doing your job of representing the people who elected you, when your stated intent is to run that guy out of town on a rail instead of giving him a decent chance to govern, when you blindly blame him for the results of your own misguided policies of the last white man president who moved massive amounts of money out of the hands of the middle class and into the hands of the already rich, when you vote against bills that you previously supported because they might make that guy look good, that, my friend, is racism.

The hatred and vehemence spewing out of the conservatives these last four years is unprecedented and I for one will be glad when white people finally become just another minority in this country because I am sick to death of this attitude of entitlement and superiority.

one little thing and one big thing

the little thing:

3 day old baby cardinal

the big thing:

this beauty weighs 1 lb ¼ oz. that's a quarter next to it.

shop girl

Working at the antique store every day leaves me little time to do much else. I've been taking model making stuff and working on my current botanica erotica wax which I think I am nearly satisfied with now. I also finished cleaning up an oleander bowl wax. And I have plenty of time to read and comment on blogs. The browser on the computer at the store doesn't play nicely with blogger though so I can't really post.

Today is my day off and I only have, oh, about a million things to do on that one day. I have three azaleas that are in desperate need of planting, 20 ears of corn that need putting up, the oleander bowl mold to fill, and finish up my W post.

OK, not a million. Half a million.

Monday I'm back in the city for another meeting for these now mythical walls, still all talk and no action. I am showing the new samples of the more detailed version of the mountain and the design team is going to pin up the full size drawing in four sections. These samples are much bigger and heavy, 18” x 24” and 18” x 30” on 3/8” glass. Marc made me a nifty little dolly to cart them around on.

And then Tuesday finds me back at the shop for four more days. It's been very quiet this week with no sales at all the last two days. But at least people came in.

So I try to check the garden in the morning and evening, picking fruit and picking off bugs, cutting away and removing the decaying material. It all goes in the compost pile with the intent of returning it as mulch the next time. The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen.

The female cardinal that built her nest in the rose bush on the fence by the gate to the Little Back Yard continues to sit on her eggs. She's getting pretty used to me. She won't fly away now unless I get too close or go through the gate. I try not to go through the gate. This is the second cardinal nest in a rose bush I saw this year. The first was out in the bush in the day lily bed but one day she and her eggs were gone.

Update: one baby bird now in the nest. Looks like it just hatched. The other egg was pushed out and I found it on the ground. I tried to get a picture since mom wasn't sitting on the nest but dad was very unhappy with me so I just shoved the camera in and snapped. Not a very good effort as you can see.

spring reading

So, I've been in the habit of publishing my book list every seasonal quarter and I was wondering if that's just too many at one time. Do y'all out there actually read through the whole list? Would you prefer, perhaps, every two months?

It's a fairly long list this time, being snake bit as I was. Had lots of time to read.

The Athena Project by Brad Thor - super secret super crack all women team of agents for the government sent on important missions and they get the job done.  Oh, yeah, and they are all beautiful as well as trained and deadly.  A fun read.

Breaking Silence by Linda Castillo - a community with an Amish presence experiences a series of hate crimes against the Amish people that coincides with the death by misadventure (or is it?) of an Amish husband and wife and brother who die in the manure pit on their farm leaving four children orphans.  The captain of the small police force, born Amish, is frustrated in her attempts to solve the crimes by the refusal of the Amish to cooperate.  A good story with an unexpected little turn at the end.

The Keeper Of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen- this was written by a Danish author and I found the translation to be a little stiff at times but it was a good story about a police detective and his two partners that were ambushed at a crime scene.  One is killed, the other is paralyzed, and the third suffers survivor's guilt and his caustic attitude does nothing to endear him to the other detectives in his department.  He is given a 'promotion' and relegated to his new office in the basement where he is given cold cases to work on.  The first case he and his 'assistant', a civilian hired for janitorial, driving, and go-fer duties, is the disappearance and presumed death of a young beautiful rising politician.  But she's not dead...yet.

The Expats by Chris Pavone – Kate, who has kept her life as a CIA agent secret from her husband, is given an opportunity to re-make herself and stop the lies when her computer nerd husband proposes they move to Luxembourg when he is offered a lucrative job as a security consultant for a secretive banking institution there. She quits her job and they make the move with their two young boys. Things don't go exactly as planned as her husband is always at work or away on business leaving her to try and live the mommy life she thought she wanted. Things get interesting and suspicious when another American couple move to town. Using her contacts in the CIA, Kate starts to learn things about her friends and her husband and the deceptions they are themselves involved in. Her husband is not who she thought he was. A good story with a little twist at the end. I found the writing style to be confusing at first since the story is told in the past, present, and future but always in the 'present' tense. A different type face separates the 'future' from the rest. And also, it takes a while to find out what Kate's deception is as regards her husband.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – post-apocalyptic America has been divided up into districts, each district enclosed by an electrified fence, and ruled by a totalitarian regime from the new Capitol somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The population is kept at starvation levels for the most part, slaves basically, producing the goods that the Capitol wallows in. 75 years previous one of the districts rebelled and was bombed into rubble and as a result the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games as a reminder of that failed rebellion. Once a year, each district sends one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to the Arena to fight to the death on live TV and all citizens are required to watch. The last one standing wins and is showered with riches and prestige and exemption from ever having to participate in the Games again. This year District 12 selects Katniss and Peeta and the game is on.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – Every 25 years a special edition of the Hunger Games is presented and unfortunately for Katniss and Peeta the next year is it. The special edition for the 75^th anniversary of the Games has all the 'tributes', the children sent to the games, being drawn from previous winners no matter their age or general condition. Since District 12 only has three winners to choose from, Katniss and Peeta end up being sent back to the arena but the rebellion fomenting in the thought-to-be-destroyed District 13 prior to the last year's games catches fire and spreads and their leaders, whose attention was caught by Katniss and her rebellious attitude, have different plans for the game and for her.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins – The rebellion has spread to every district and all but District 2 are under their control. When Peeta, who was captured by the Capitol shows up on air doing propaganda for them a rescue mission is planned for him and the other captured Tributes. Now begins the last offensive to take the Capitol but Katniss has plans of her own. She is determined to kill the President herself. I really enjoyed these, want to see the movie but I wanted to read the books first. I was under the impression that these were 'young adult' books and I know they are popular with teens but I found them to be a well written easy read, not that I think books for young adults aren't well written.

The Lost Years by Mary Higgins Clark – a biblical scholar discovers a parchment that he believes was written by Jesus himself. When his daughter becomes alarmed at not being able to get hold of him she rushes over to her parent's house and finds her father dead of a gun shot and her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, cowering in a closet with the gun. A search finds the parchment is missing. Pretty good whodunit.

City Of Dragons by Robin Hobb – This was the third and what I mistakenly thought was the last of this series that started with Dragon Keeper and was followed with Dragon Haven. Made sense since all her other writings were trilogies. But no, I was disappointed that this was not the third and last book but only because I was expecting that it would all come to a satisfactory conclusion. It's a good story but now I will have to wait til the next one comes out to see how it all ends, if it does then.

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich – the further adventures of Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter and her sidekick Lula. This one didn't make me laugh out loud but it did elicit a lot of chuckles. It was good. Better than the last one I think.

The Book Of Mortals: Forbidden by Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee – 400+ years previous, after the last world war went nuclear and devastated the planet a charismatic leader arose uniting the populations of earth under one Sovereign. A new religion, Order, was founded and a virus unleashed that turned off all emotions save fear. A small secret group, the Keepers, was founded to save the last vial of uninfected blood for the day when a special royal boy, who was immune to the virus, would be born to come to power to return emotion to the human race. Now that day has come. I didn't realize this was a series until I was nearly finished. In fact, I looked closely at the cover to make sure this was a one volume story. Alas, it was not. This is the first. It was a good enough story and I'll probably seek out the next volume when it is published.

The Lost Angel by Javier Sierra – another novel translated into English, this one written in Spanish. A historical novel based on Noah and the flood myth and also on that peculiar passage in Genesis about the sons of god coming to earth and getting it on with the daughters of men. Only in the story, the sons of god are angels. There is a lot of interesting information in the novel about the flood myths which appear in just about every culture worldwide and which are probably the historical remains of an actual catastrophe that occurred at the end of the last ice age when all the water captured in glaciers was released and sea levels rose drowning all the civilizations that lived on or near the coast lines. And there's also a lot of interesting stuff about the Noah story and the Elizabethan mystic John Dee in particular. But the story itself is kind of stupid. It's a convoluted plot to get a physic, magic rocks, and a tablet up to Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat during a gigantic solar storm that they caused so that the descendants of the angels can ascend to heaven. It'd be a little easier to swallow if the human/angels weren't arrogant and condescending. And besides it doesn't make sense because according to the story, it was the angels cavorting with human women and having babies and the offspring getting uppity that pissed god off enough to destroy the world and if Noah was one of these human/angel hybrids (which the story says he was) and he repopulated the world then every person living today would be an angel descendant. But no, apparently it was just a couple of Americans, a couple of English, and an obscure tribe of Armenians.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje – although this is written like a memoir or autobiography, the notes at the end declare it a work of fiction even though the central character's name is Michael. The story is a series of memories of the 3 week journey he took when he was 11 when his family on the Asian island of Colombo where he grew up put him on a ship for England alone to go live with his mother. He met two other boys about his age who were also traveling alone and having no supervision, they basically ran wild learning about life. As an adult, he reflects how that trip shaped his life. I enjoyed this one a lot.

The Betrayal of the Blood Lily by Lauren Willig – A historical novel set in India in the early 19^th century during the time of the East India Company, the story centers around a young woman who chaffs at proper behavior expected of young ladies and finds herself married off and sent to India to let the scandal of her marriage settle down and a captain in the East India Company army who find themselves drawn to each other as they hunt down a spy named The Marigold.

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes – I'm not really sure what I think of this one. I think I didn't really like it. It's a narrative by the character about his growing up and his friends and his first girlfriend. His girlfriend moves on to one of his friends and a mean spirited letter written out of anger and hurt gets sent. Once out of school and getting immersed in their lives they start to lose contact. Several years later, one of the four friends, the smartest and most cerebral of them, the one who went with the ex-girlfriend, commits suicide. Fast forward 40 years with an outline of the intervening years and the narrator gets a bequest from his ex-girlfriend's recently deceased mother. The letter resurfaces and therein starts an examination of his culpability in the events that followed. As if. As if one letter would put a chain of events into motion that could not be changed. But then that's just my opinion. So the untangling of the relationships that follows is interesting and surprising but there was also something about it that annoyed me though I don't know what. But his ex-girlfriend? She's a bitch.

 

life stuff

I almost have my 'W' post ready. It's all written up and the images are ready but it involves a little technology learning curve. I'm doing some audio recordings and I had to figure that out and then had to download a converter program to get the right file type. Now I have to upload them to a site that creates embed codes and then hopefully, it will all work when I finally publish the post.

I'd do that today except that my daughter, SIL, and grandkids are coming out so that the kids can hang with their second cousins, my sister's grandkids, who live in Albuquerque. They are visiting this week and it's been a couple of years since they were here. It's hard to keep a family together when the members are scattered around the country.

We had a slew of birthdays this past month starting with mine on April 30 followed by my DIL, my daughter, and then my son. I bought me a birthday present. I haven't hung it yet as it involves having to rearrange something else.

Rabbit Ears by Kelly Vivanco

And I made little tea cup and mug planters with cactus for DIL and Son. The teacups are from my china, my grandmother's china, and my aunt's china. The mugs are one's we acquired through various of our son's activities. I used the drill press to put holes in the bottoms.

My daughter, who has a husband, four kids, two dogs, and two cats, does not need anything else to take care of so for her I made a peach pie from Texas peaches.

Tomorrow, I start two full weeks at the antique store so my sister can have the time with her grandkids and the other employee is also on vacation. Although the economy seems to be showing signs of improvement, it hasn't really made it to this small town in an agricultural county in Texas. I'll probably use the time as storekeeper to work on more wax models.

I've got the next three botanica erotica waxes done though I haven't polished them yet.

Still waiting on the two big walls to be funded. Apparently the structural engineers are struggling with the metal base that the large glass panels will rest on. In the meantime, we did two more samples for the mountain wall. After looking at some of our work they decided they wanted to do a more sculptural rendering instead of the silhouette they had at first proposed.

This is the drawing for one of them, 18” x 30”. I haven't photographed the finished samples yet.

Well, as my friend Jody says...TTFN.

(ta ta for now)

the habit of a lifetime

Like most kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s, my parents smoked though my dad quit about the time I was 8 or 9 I think, when all the research was coming out about how bad it was. I was pretty young because I don't actually remember him smoking but I know we had moved into the new house. He used sour lemon candies, the kind that are sweet until you bite into them and get the sour powder in the middle, to help him break the habit.

I can still see the dish of candies on the side table next to his recliner. We weren't really allowed to eat them as they were his candies but we did sneak one now and then. Whenever he felt the urge to smoke, he would eat a candy or two instead. I think that for awhile he just shifted his addition to those candies.

The other thing I remember about my father smoking is that he used a human skull cap for an ashtray. Once he quit smoking it became just another ornament in the house. I don't know what happened to it after he died. I know it was still on his desk. Perhaps my brother has it or maybe my sister.

My mother, though, never quit. Not even when she started having TIAs (transient ischemic attack or mini-stroke). She only quit once she was in the family home because she needed 24 hour care and they didn't allow smoking. She was very sneaky about getting cigarettes though. She would talk people into bringing some to her. Of course it only aggravated her condition and when we found out we would roundly chastise whoever had given them to her. Eventually she ran out of people she could call.

I remember when the first anti-smoking campaign came out. Us kids jumped on it trying to get our mother to quit. We were tired of the smoke filled house and going anywhere in the car was even worse. It's a wonder we're not all dead from second hand smoke.

Dad brought home some posters one day. My siblings and I took one of them and pinned it on our parent's bedroom door while our mother was out.

She was not amused.

Eventually I grew up and went off to college and picked it up myself. Even then more people smoked than not. Didn't really care for it though so I quit after a couple of years. I was more into smoking pot.

My first husband was a smoker too. He was also a lazy no good bum who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed every morning and look for a job, much less go to work. I would come home from my job and he would still be in bed, watching TV (the Sony Trinitron his mother gave him for his birthday), the house a mess and forget any meal waiting. That was the woman's job.

I think the day I came home and found the ashtray mounded up so full of cigarette butts that they were spilling out and onto the floor was the day I began my exit from that relationship.

Several years later I married again to another smoker but when the kids were still small in the early 80s, he quit. It only lasted a few years before he started up again but I took the opportunity to ban smoking in the house. When friends and family came over, they had to step outside to have a smoke.

Once again, my mother was not amused.

It was a very radical move at the time, to expect your friends and family, your guests, to step outside no matter what the weather to have a smoke. My mother thought that she should be the exception. It took another 20 years or so for smoking to be banned indoors in public places.

Mother eventually died from the cumulative effect of her TIAs. My brother-in-law, who smoked for 50 years, died from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer two or three years after he quit. My husband finally quit smoking again about 2 ½ years ago.

The jury is still out on him.

the tyranny of squash

We moved out of the city several years ago for a variety of reasons which I wrote about off and on when I first started this blog so I won't really go into it now. But one of the things we wanted was access to fresh organic food. Preferably food that we grew ourselves. We made one or two attempts to grow food in the city in the very lean years (I'd capitalize that except they occurred off and on with regularity) but we really didn't have any spot that got enough sun and usually by the time the occasional vegetable ripened, we had work again.

I've always liked to garden and my yard and the house next door yard, after we bought it for more studio space, was all done in native perennials and wild flowers because I am, after all, a lazy gardener. It was sink or swim in my yard through summer heat or winter freezes.

So now here we are out in the country and we have space to grow food. This is our fourth garden. The first one was kind of hit or miss because we didn't actually take up permanent residence out here til two years ago. Before that we were spending 3 or 4 days here and 3 or 4 days in the city every week depending on how the work load was going.

We have discovered that growing food is very different from growing plants and flowers. Food is a little more high maintenance.

I've always heard from people who did grow food about the abundance of squash. Our first garden, we didn't plant any squash but we had butternut come up as volunteers from the compost I had turned into the garden. They were doing quite fine with about a dozen butternuts forming until one day I went out and they were in total wilt.

A little research turned up the problem...squash vine borer worms. So I conducted a little surgery on the vines, lost about half but managed to harvest about half a dozen butternut squashes.

The next year I planted yellow squash and they were attacked early on and though I tried to cut the worms out, I think we only got one or two squash before the plants cratered. The next year it was zucchini and the same thing happened. We got maybe half a dozen and surgery aside, the plants didn't make it.

This year we planted white patty pan and zucchini. The plants grew and grew and started producing squash after squash. Never had the plants grown so big and full and lush. I've been going out every day looking for the signs of the vine borers and the plants have remained healthy, until about a week or so ago when I spied the first signs.

So, once again I was out there doing surgery on my squash plants. I dug out the worms, piled dirt on the wounds and the plants have not missed a single stride. In the past, I didn't try to save them until they were in total wilt. This year we are being held hostage to the squash.

Finally I understand.

We eat squash every night. We eat two squash and the next morning we go out and pick four more. I'm starting to be happy when I go out and see a little squash withering on the vine.

Marc has fixed baked squash, boiled squash, stuffed zucchini, orzo and zucchini salad, stir fry, grilled squash, zucchini lasagna, tuna stuffed patty pans, squash tempura, and these are just what I can remember.

We're going to have to make a trip into the city if for no other reason than to unload some of this squash!