What's Up, Down or Done

I Gotta Move Someplace with More Neighbors....

2011-01-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

That is the opinion of my husband (and maybe also the current neighbors).

Okay, I'll admit that since I don't watch TV, neighbor-watching is a major part of my entertainment. But I always figured God made neighbors long before there was TV for that sort of thing…so my interest is natural, right?

Living out in the country as we do, most of our neighbors are pretty far down the road. We rent the granny apartment on an organic farm, so I do have that family and all their critters as part of my landscape. It may not be enough however.

See, I spent a couple days last Fall interfering in the love life of one of their roosters.

Now, wait! Let me explain: Hunter is a magnificent hunk of rooster, shiny black with robust comb and neon greenish lights in his sleek feathers. But he has a problem: he's old. And not very aggressive. So the younger and bigger roosters pick on him.

He has spent the last two summers very happily out in the orchard with 8 or 10 hens for company. But when the frost comes, he must move to the barn with all the other chickens, where life is pretty unbearable. He is not allowed any girls or space or even food, without the big white rooster and the silver Wyandotte rooster trouncing him.

So this year, he opted out immediately and returned to the orchard, even though it would soon be much too cold for a single bird to roost there. Also, all of 'his' equally elderly hens went to the stew pot, but the family was sort of attached to him as their very first rooster, and wanted to spare him.

I felt sorry for the poor fellow, and continued to give him scraps from my kitchen, because he couldn't even get near the barns for any grain without not only the main rooster, but also a gang of adolescent cockerels from the spring meat chicks, hounding him. Hunter wisely stayed away from all that hormonal chaos.

So a couple days after the great chicken move, I noticed two of the pullets from this summer's chicks were hanging out with Hunter near where I put out scraps at my front door. (The house is between the barns and the orchard) I figured it wouldn't hurt his street cred with them if I just happened to toss out some more bread. Make them think he is a great provider, so maybe they would stay with him and provide warm company.

Worked well until sunset. They spent all day with him and were top heavy with crops full of all the good stuff he found for their delictation. But they didn't follow when he went off to roost in the orchard. And it got dark on them and they were then lost!

So eight o'clock at night they are still standing on my porch, which is a fair piece from the barns, but still. It does kind of support the notion that chickens are brainless. Of course, maybe they were just using the 'old' man, hanging with him for the food he found, but not willing to actually commit…

When the farmer found them out there where they didn't belong, he wasn't patient and understanding with them, if you know what I mean. Probably ruint all my work, I thought, since the traumatic end to a beautiful day would no doubt stick in their heads. Poor Hunter might have to live on his memories.

Hunter showed up at my door next morning with the light. It was a very foggy and drizzly daylight, so you can't exactly call that bright, even if it was early… A couple hours later, I noticed that the two girls were back! And they had brought along a friend.

I was thrilled, of course. A successful matchmaker admires her work….until she notes that the third 'girl' is actually an adolescent rooster. He was not aggressive, however, and Hunter accepted him without rancor.

Which lead me to wonder about this chicken's sexuality…like maybe it's confused? It seemed to prefer Hunter's little harem to the absolute warfare out in the chicken coop. Who wouldn't?

But still…

When I shared my concerns with the aforementioned husband, that's when he declared that our next move would be somewhere with lots more neighbors!

New Zealand - Trip Finish

2011-01-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

After about 20 hours cramped on three different airplanes (and several hours going through customs and security in various airports) we really enjoyed those last four hours in Amtrak business class seats on the train from Chicago to Ann Arbor. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

New Zealand - Tasman Day Trip

2011-01-11T13:22:00.000-08:00

Husband spent several days in Wellington, across on the North Island, for a health informatics conference, but I got to continue vacation. Lucky me! I love being able to wander about and take my time and meet people, not to mention sample yummy things to eat. Saturday mornings, Nelson has a farmers' market, which includes a variety of cooked on the site foods, as well as arts and crafts.

I found fruits and veggies and plants for the garden (spring bedding plants dominated), had an outstanding breakfast of fresh crepes wrapped around bacon and scrambled eggs -- all cooked at once on a flat round griddle. There were paintings, sculpture, leather work, wool yarns and knitted woolen clothing, wooden toys, and inlaid wood tea trays and kitchen utensils. Husband found the perfect Kiwi hat at a stall with hundreds of caps and chapeaux. AND, I found a lady cooking real Mexican recipes out of a tiny wagon in the middle of the market. She's married to a Kiwi and got bored living out on a vineyard, so he set her up in the wagon and all of us were happy!

When husband returned from the conference (he flew over, and even got to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's airplane in the Wellington Airport) some of our new friends wanted to take us on a little tour of the area. Everyone, including the tourist bureau, thought we should at least see some of the Tasman Reserve, which is this huge National Park area just over the hill to the west of Nelson.

They took us out to the Riwaka Resurgence:

I was feeling pretty tired by the time we got there, because we had already had a couple miles of walk around town, plus another hour or two of driving tour, but Althea assured me that it really wasn't much of a walk to the Crystal Pool and the Resurgence...

It was about half a mile of this -- beautiful, but a bit taxing for those of us who do not run up to the Center of New Zealand every morning. (See last post)

A resurgence is the spot where an underground river comes back to the surface. Riwaka River flows for some of it's length deep in limestone caves and comes out at the Crystal Pool, clear and icy cold.

Some of the local wildlife got into this shot of the cave opening...

As the water flows down towards the sea, it warms up, but before it does, there are several pools that look very much like something out of an exotic National Geographic Magazine spread.

The water really is this color, and absolutely clear. There isn't even any moss or algae in it for a mile or so. And the walk is literally hacked from the side of the jungle choked gorge. I kept thinking I would see Tarzan any minute, but over all it was incredibly serene. It is a holy spot for Maoris, and I can see why.

On the way down, near the car park, is a lone picnic table on a grassy spot next to the water, and this was the view out towards the pasture and mountains. See the native brush slopes on the right? And the conifers on the left? A perfect day for a picnic, or just resting the feet sitting at the table and wondering what that bird was which we could hear but not see... I kept asking, "What's that plant? What bird is singing?" until I think everyone was exasperated with me.

Alas, all good things do come to an end, and so we left New Zealand after 17 days of fun and wonder. It wasn't long enough.

New Zealand - Nelson

2011-01-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Nelson, NZ reminds me very much of Morro Bay, California.

It sits on a jewel of a little bay, protected by a long spit, with hills surrounding and long, agriculturally fertile valleys inland. As it faces north, it has more sunlight (being southern hemisphere) than any other city in NZ (or so the Chamber of Commerce says). That makes the weather more like Avila than Morro, if you all remember what summers were like: we'd want to go to the beach, but only Avila is south-facing and without fog in summer.

One major difference, though, is that from the bay, you can see snow covered mountains:

The town is about 50K, including several suburban areas, but very quiet and almost sleepy while we were there. Downtown is discreet, with wide streets and buildings mostly limited to 2 stories.

Many of my photos are dark, I think because the sunlight is SO intense; confuses my little digital camera into focusing on the sky instead of anything in the foreground. Sorry.

The residential areas have narrower streets than downtown, but one thing I wanted to show all the California family: see these closely pruned trees?

That is, believe it or not, a sycamore tree! Can you believe that these huge trees could be kept to a mere 20 feet tall? And why ever would you want to do that to them? Of course, Nelson isn't semi desert, so maybe sycamores can get way out of hand there -- like just about everything else in the garden.

While we were planning our trip, initially with no idea what we wanted to see except for Christchurch, I happened to mention in email to a friend (Hi, Naomi!) that we were finally going on a vacation after all these years, and she wrote back immediately to say that she had a friend in Nelson! Well, thanks to Skype and the Internet, we met Baki and Dayanira, and through them several of the other Bahá'ís in that area.

One of our new friends was planning to be out of town for several days and offered her home (renting to visitors is a common practice in NZ) and she is a darling! We managed to meet her in Christchurch as she was returning and we were leaving.

This is Margaret's house, our home in Nelson for about nine days.

It sits on a smallish (by USA standards) lot in a beautiful neighborhood full of trees and flowers. Her garden is especially lavish, with way more plants than anyone would think could be crowded in together successfully. (I found this true of every garden I saw in NZ!) Love that garden!! So many flowers I haven't seen since I left California...camelias, for instance.

Margaret has an old-fashioned garden, and one that matches the unwritten rule that every Kiwi must have a cabbage tree in front and a lemon tree in back. Cordyline australis looks a bit like a Joshua Tree, only it gets to be 60 feet tall in NZ! Plus, she has a lemonade tree in the side yard. I SO want one of those! Looks just like a lemon, very thin skinned; peel and eat like an orange; tastes like the very best lemonade you ever had. Sigh. Not available in the US, and not likely ever to be, given the restrictions on citrus even crossing state boarders, let alone national ones...

Sunshine comes into her kitchen every morning!

And see what a lovely wide view she has of her side yard? Yum! We enjoyed our sojourn, and fed the cat, who is very old and regarded us as pretty hopeless idiots, but maybe not too dangerous if we held the can opener. She even led me over to where the catfood was, and assured me that she should also have canned food morning and evening (which we found later was not the case). Margaret might not be too old to travel, but the cat was too old to tolerate her absence well. (Or yours truly has sucker clearly stamped upon her brow)

We walked every day, venturing down town and out to the beach:

The bicycle belongs to the postman sitting in front of a tiny grocery for his morning break. Mail is delivered by bicycle all over city areas on the South Island. Carriers sort the mail by routes and the bundles are dropped at suitable points along the way, like this grocer, so that the whole load doesn't have to weigh down the cycle from the beginning. Pretty nifty, and boy were those carriers, male and female, in good shape!

There was quite a lot of provision for tourists in Nelson -- it is sort of an artist's colony -- including a couple mile walk down the riverside to the sea. We passed gardens and parks and lots of not very wild life:

This fellow probably has a mate sitting on a nest nearby, but we couldn't see her. There was a duck with a passel of ducklings in the same area, and even some seagulls horsing around having mid morning bath in the shallows of one gravelly stretch of the river. I couldn't get them in the camera without blur, they were having such a good time.

And only a couple blocks down the street from Margaret's house is the trailhead to the Center of New Zealand:

This is a 20 minute hike, according to Andrea, who does it every morning, but took my husband a couple hours. It winds uphill rather steeply through a series of hairpin turns, every one of which offers stunning views of the city, bay and valley beyond. He took lots of pix, but strongly advised against my trying it. I think he worried that I might indeed make it to the top, but then I wouldn't be able to get back down again, and there is no other way out except walking back down.

As it was explained to us, the monument was set some years ago in a fit of National Pride, before GPS, when map makers believed the top of this little hill was indeed the geographic center of New Zealand. Turns out the actual center is a kilometer or two away, but the monument remains. That other spot just isn't as picturesque...

One thing Nelson has throughout the town is extensive bike accomodation. Bike paths run from beach to bay to downtown to historic sites and more. And some of them are quite wide enough for two lanes of travel!

And, frankly, I find separate walkways and bikeways comforting, given that I still haven't mastered the drive on the left thing....

New Zealand - To Nelson

2011-01-10T14:07:00.000-08:00

We came back from the Forest Primeval at Te Nikau to the Wild Coast Cafe around lunchtime and caught the northbound NZ Transit bus, which is much bigger than expected, and full of really large windows so we wouldn't miss a bit of the scenery.

Along the coast, that scenery was pretty exciting, largely due to the unfamiliar experience of traveling on the left side of the road -- that part hanging on the edge of cliffs with sometimes very large drops to the rocky coast below.

In places, the road drops to single lane due to wash outs, and some even have traffic lights if the drivers cannot see the other end to know if there is oncoming traffic.

Traffic lights? This suggests a long term solution... And the story the driver tells, pointing out a little pole by the side of the road about 20 feet up the bank above the washout 50-60 feet below us, is that the river in flood a few years back filled this incredibly steep ravine over 100' feet deep. No wonder the government isn't in a rush to spend millions rebuilding the second lane....

That big bus makes every tight turn seem rather exciting, as I mentioned. We were sitting near the front, which I do not recommend to the faint of heart, LOL. Driver was quite non-chalant, often driving with just one hand...not showing off or anything, but because he makes this 7 hour drive from Greymouth to Nelson every day, back again the next. He's bored!

When we headed away from the coast, climbing into the mountains and dropping through lush valleys, the rain which had been threatening all morning arrived. It was not bad, though, just drizzle, and not enough to ruin the views.

Most of the valleys had rivers through them. Large rivers in wide rocky beds, and with quite a lot of water from spring snow melt. And many of the bridges? One Lane. Not because of wash outs, but originally designed to be less expensive that way. Imagine squeezing the great big bus across this!

I swear, it looked like there wasn't 6" clearance either side! And note: driver is sipping his coffee and maneuvering one-handed. =:o After three or four bridges like this, and some of them offered tummy turning views hundreds of feet down into spectacular river gorges, my hair did quit standing on end, LOL.

You can see where part of the mountain looks forested and part bare...Native, jungly brush and trees have been cleared and fast growing conifers planted as seedlings. This is the lumber monoculture which provides exports mostly to Japan. It is just a mind-numbing huge operation, and can't be easy, either. It takes bulldozers to clear the underbrush, and these are not nice round foothill sized mountains. Whoever those dozer drivers are, they must have nerves of steel.

A couple hours along, about half way to Nelson, we stopped for snack and driver rest in a particularly beautiful valley, and tell me what you think this town looks like:

Snake River, Idaho? Durango, Colorado, back in the 1970s? Any small mountain town from the 1950s California? Amazing.

That is one thing we noted about much that we saw of the rural communities (and even some parts of the cities) on the South Island: the architecture and lifestyle remind me VERY much of my 1940-50s childhood in a rural farming area outside San Luis Obispo, CA.

As we came out of the mountains a few miles west of Nelson, the land flattened out into fields and vineyards and orchards. Thousands of acres neatly divided into relatively small plots: apples, peaches, grapes, kiwi fruit, blackberries in a snowstorm of of huge blossoms. And truck gardens of cabbages, lettuce and greens of all kinds, asparagus, onions and leeks. Didn't see a single corn field or soybean planting, but maybe it was too early in the season for them.

We got into Nelson right on time, and I think the bus driver would have taken us right to our door, had we not arranged to be met. At least, he was arranging to do exactly that for one or two of the other passengers, who were headed to one of the backpacker hostels downtown. Apparently on his way home. Guess he takes the bus with him over night...

Baki and Dayanira met our bus and ferried us to Margaret's home, our residence for the next nine days.

New Zealand - West Coast

2011-01-04T11:32:00.000-08:00

Even on a rainy day, the West Coast is amazing, and reminds me of many spots along the Pacific Northwest coast of the US. Same brush-clad cliffs plunging down to broken rocky coast lines and gravelly coves. There is both limestone/sandstone type rock strata carved by wind and water into fantastic shapes, and granite and basalt and other igneous layers and lumps scattered about.

This is the area where I first began to see just how strange NZ is. Up till now I could see so much that reminded me of other places I had lived or visited, but the West is the largest area of native flora and fauna remaining, and this place is truly weird!

Think of every dinosaur movie you've ever seen. Think jungle so thick that you can't walk through it in any kind of straight line. Think tree ferns. Think DARK at night, especially on an overcast night.

That palm tree is about 60' tall, and those fern fronds about 8-10' long. The canopy wants to be up around 100'+, so you can't even see the sky through it. And even though this is a cool rain forest, and doesn't have a single native animal larger than a mosquito that's likely to bother us, it feels seriously different from anywhere else I've ever been.

Unlike the rain forests of Central America, or the swamps of Louisiana, where it seems like every living thing is out to have you for lunch, this place doesn't feel threatening so much as, well, indifferent. NZ has had humans living there only about 700 years, so my theory is that its native flora and fauna did not co-evolve with us. There is no place for us in that eco-system. No food, no shelter, no welcome. Even the Maoris brought their own edible plants and animals when they decided to stay.

We stayed at Te Nikau Resort, which is a couple miles down the ravines from the bus stop at Wild Coast Cafe

and is not exactly what might be called a resort in, say, Key West. It is a collection of idiosyncratic cabins scattered about in jungle so impenetrable that you can't see from one to another. Accommodations vary from dormitory that sleeps 9, to bunks, to the main lodge, where there are four bedrooms, a kitchen, dining, living room, laundry and little office space with a pair of computers for checking one's email.

This is, in fact, the loveliest honeymoon spot I can think of! There is a small pantry in the kitchen with a cup for cash purchases of things like eggs, tinned fruits and meats, cereal and juices (It's a looooooong walk back up to the Cafe and its mini grocery store). There is also bread or muffins available freshly made upon demand if you order a day in advance. Whole grain, of course.

We decided this was actually a favorite spot for those who were weary of camping out or backpacking, but did not want to spend the big money that Punakaiki Resort would charge for hot tubs and sea views. It was not as inexpensive as the many hostels and homes that rent rooms, but it did have hot water and washing machines and very comfortable beds.

This is the view looking back up towards the road that led to the highway. It is also where I saw my first Weka.

These are a native flightless bird about the size of a small chicken, utterly fearless of humans, or anything else, and not inclined to move fast. Those two characteristics, we were to discover, mean they make up most road kill we saw. :(

We explored as much of the area around Te Nikau as we could, always expecting to get rained on and not wanting to go too far afield. The pathways to the various cabins and sheds were more like trails made by children: narrow, meandering and fun! Definitely not handicapped accessible. If you followed them far enough, they came out on one of the access tracks and had signs that pointed to the beach nearly a mile farther and almost 1000' below. We didn't know that, of course, so we went happily along till we hit the National Park Service trails, which were much wider and almost paved, especially out towards the water.

Some of the non-native fauna...

Park service used barks and limestone fines to try and keep the jungle out of the trails...

There are often borders sunk in the ground to hold in the fines, and ditches outside of those to handle runoff. It rains here.

About two thirds of the way to the beach, the landscape becomes salt tolerant and the rain forest disappears. Not that we could see the water, though, because New Zealand flax is the native sea coast ecosystem...about 6 or 7 feet tall! And so packed together that even the Weka's can't walk through it. I did notice that some of the rain forest underbrush would squish in among the flax bowls, but it never rose above where the coastal breeze would prune it. And as we neared the ocean, it was only flax and assorted mosses.

Here's view is from the highway, looking down about 1500 feet. It is from an aborted hike towards Pancake Rocks trailhead, which the signs did not mention was actually about 4 miles away, by the time you added in all the twists and turns and hills in the road. And then it would be another long walk down from the trailhead to the water (and then back up again!). After a mile and a half (in addition to the two miles we had already walked to and from the beach) of puffing we gave up and went back to Te Nikau. Husband got some great pix, however. Check them out on his Flickr! site. Scroll through his galleries to the one's he has labeled New Zealand Trip.

This whole area is just stunningly beautiful, even on an overcast day. And the park paths are well maintained, but unmarked. You need to do your homework and are obviously expected to use good sense and know where you are. For instance, the last 50 yards to the water in the cove is of steps cut into the sandstone -- with no handrails. There is one small sign warning that when the tide is in and the mossy rocks are wet, it can be dangerously slippery. The fall from those rocks is about 20 feet into surf and there is a sharp undertow. But other than that, Kiwis apparently figure people can take care of themselves. And it might be true, since you have to be in pretty good physical shape just to walk down to those rocks in the first place!

I wanted to stay on the West Coast much longer! The lodge was so comfortable and the young people traveling through on their various Gap Year adventures all had great stories to tell. There were so many interesting looking trails to explore, and it would have been fun to take a picnic down to the coves. And we didn't get to see the pancake rocks (3 miles walk up and down about 2500 feet of elevation) although we did have a small blowhole right beside the slippery rocks...

And besides, the pukekos were flashing their white bums at us, daring us to play tag...

Christchurch to Greymouth, NZ

2011-01-04T07:47:00.000-08:00

At 6 the next morning, we walked the several blocks (maybe 3/4 mile) from our motel to the train station, lugging our baggage, which now included a third suitcase because one of the smaller ones was coming apart at the seams. (Honest, we hadn't bought anything yet! I think the clearer air down under made our stuff expand...) Our train was to leave at 7:45, which would have seemed very early except that we hadn't completely recovered from jet lag, so were still waking up in the very early hours, anyway.

We took the Tranzalpine Train from Christchurch on the East Coast to Greymouth on the West Coast. Looks nice and flat and short, right? And it is flat, a grandually rising plane on the east side of the New Zealand alps, which are a ridge running down the western edge of the South Island.

Hmmm, ridge? Much more like the Rocky Mountains of the western US! You can see snow capped peaks from Christchurch, and just about everywhere else we went on the South Island. They seem quite close, but the travel time across that stretch is more than four hours. Pleasant hours, however, with comfortable seats and very wide windows.

You can't see them in this picture of the sign, but most of the car length is in glass. Passenger trains are few and maintained largely for tourists, now that roads cross the mountains in a few spots. It is said that every Kiwi drives, so there isn't much in the way of accommodation for pedestrians or public transit outside the cities! What limited rail tracks exist are used mostly by freight trains, which go faster than passenger trains, but that's okay by me because there is so much spectacular scenery to see.

Much of the Canterbury plain looks like this. It's pasture land, graneries and truck farming -- divided regularly by tall hedges neatly trimmed to look like walls. The engineer, or maybe that voice over the loud speakers was the conductor, explained that these hedgerows were to provide protection for the sheep and cows from winter winds. It doesn't actually snow that much, but the winds can be awful. It was hard to tell from the train, but these hedges looked to be trimmed off flat at anywhere from 12 to 20 feet high.

Hard to believe winter winds on this lovely spring day, but we remembered that only a week or two before we arrived, tens of thousands of lambs had died in an enormous late season blizzard . From the air, the Canterbury plains look like some huge green patchwork ala National Geographic photo spreads. This is the 'bread basket' of New Zealand.

I tried to get some pix of the newest farm animals, but they don't like the trains and were too far away. Our impromptu guide was telling us that the move to raising deer as meat was somewhat controversial, as they require more pasturage than sheep, goats or cattle, which means more water to irrigate pasture, as the summer has little rain. I squinted at what he was calling deer and decided they look like our little California Tule elk--miniature wapiti.

Along the roadsides, fence lines and anywhere else not mowed or plowed easily, were brownish green and greyish green shrubs covered with yellow flowers. These are the scourge of NZ farmers and ranchers. Invasive species are a pain anywhere, but in a land where just about everything people eat has to be non-native, the chance of bringing in something annoying, or even dangerous, is multiplied. Early English settlers brought not only food and forage plants, but also their familiar garden, hedgerow and meadow flowers.

Enter Gorse and Broom. Nothing in NZ (pronounced locally as en-zed) flora or fauna eats them, attacks them, or otherwise controls them. And they both love poor soils, semi-drought and wintery conditions. Land cleared of the native flora in order to provide pasture for non-native animals is heaven for these two weeds. Gorse is woody and full of spines, so avoided by cattle and sheep, alike. Broom's tiny grayish leaves taste bad and being a legume it makes millions of seeds that burst outward from the pods. Both gradually fill in any empty ground until the farmer must take a bulldozer to clear again. At this time of year, we could see hundreds of hillside acres of slightly mustard yellow gorse and paler yellow broom along drainage ditches and fence rows. Clearly a constant battle.

After about two hours, the train began to climb out of the plains and into some pretty spectacular mountains. There was still snow and/or glaciers above us, but the passes were clear and full of that peculiarly deep wet green of alpine meadows. I gather that even these meadows are not native, and the hillsides have been cleared of brush to allow grass to grow for sheep. And there are sheep everywhere, looking at a distance, rather like lice nits on a particularly ratty baby blanket. No disrepect meant; I just have a strange mind, LOL.

Cattle graze in and around gorse thickets in the flat valleys, but these are few and far between, as those valleys have been cut by spring runoff from snow melt. New Zealand describes her rivers as braided, because they are inconstant. It's flood or trickle with them. They lay wide swathes of gravel across the flat lands, and cut new beds for their silvery streams every time it rains. From the plane it looks very much like braided water!

Up close, those stream beds actually have no sand visible in them, just boulders ranging from fist size to school bus. The train crossed and recrossed several river beds on very long tressels, even though the water didn't look all that deep or wide.

That isn't sand at the water's edge down there; it's gravel so big that you can't walk on it.

I was totally frustrated by the double paned glass in the train windows because all I could get were reflections in the camera. There was a special open air car for those brave souls who wanted to take pix, and husband is one of those. He went several times, but had to come back inside to thaw out regularly. It is early spring in the mountains, so only just above freezing, to which one must add the windchill factor of a moving train.

We passed coal mines and their tiny settlements, which used to be served only by the trains before the government put a road in place. The summit is Arthur's Pass, which on the downside has the longest railroad tunnel in NZ, if not the world. It is a fifteen minute ride in pitch black which can take only one train every four hours in order to allow the pumps to refresh the air inside for the next train. If the power goes out and the fans aren't running, neither do the trains. People died in there regularly until this system got worked out!

All of this was explained to us passengers in alarming detail as our train waited for about half an hour to enter the tunnel. It gave us time to look out at what remains of the settlement of Arthur's Pass and wonder at the fortitude of those folks hardy enough to stay in a place that averages 15-30 feet of snow every winter. All the buildings were wood frame, looked to be very old, weather beaten and heated only by wood or coal. I'm betting they were uninsulated, as well, since Kiwis pride themselves on being tougher than the environment. If I hadn't seen folks out hanging clothes on the line, or smoke rising from a metal flue or two, I'd have said it was a ghost town!

On the west side of the mountains, it was a rainy day, very suitable for Greymouth, I thought, since the town is built on either side of a river flowing into a tiny bay. By the time we got to the end of the line, all was grey: sky, land, sea and town.

After the very bright sunshine of Christchurch and the plains, this was sort of a shock and neither camera dealt with it well. All the pictures we took there are very dark and dreary looking, even though it didn't feel that way at the time. The people in this shot are waiting for the same bus we are. NZ has a national transport system, so that you can usually catch at least one bus a day going just about anywhere. Out on the West Coast, these are not usually very large buses, ranging from about 30-60 seats. But they all have wrap around glass for catching the views!

Greymouth is pronounced Gray mouth, not greymuth. Awkward to say, but this EnZed, and they do things their way. The town of 30K or so is the Western seaport and handles mostly fishermen and tourists these days. It is the gateway to the wilds so popular with outdoors enthusiasts of all kinds. It used to ship coal out, but now the trains take coal from the many mines along the coast all the way back to Littleton, which is Christchurch's international port. It may reflect a change in who's buying Kiwi coal, but also allows for much larger ships to come in.

We wandered about a bit while waiting for our bus up the coast to Punakaiki National Beach and forest. This is the home of Pancake Rocks National Monument and numerous beaches tucked into coves beneath huge rain forested cliffs. It is also where our overnight stop will be at Te Nikau Resort. (I'll explain what 'resort' means in Kiwi terms later.)

Hagley Park, Christchurch, NZ

2011-01-03T16:36:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia, Hagley Park is the largest urban open space (164.637 hectares) in Christchurch, and was created in 1855 by the Provincial Government.It was opened to the public in 1856, so those trees are many of them over a century old.

That makes for very BIG trees. And well established plantings throughout, a river running through (California sized, not Michigan. In Ann Arbor, we have drains bigger, LOL) plus acres and acres of playing fields, tennis courts, lawn bowling, a botanic garden, antique rose collection, orchid house and ponds. Through all there are paved walkways, little benches and nooks and niches and picnic tables. Everyone goes, old, young, babies in strollers, rugby players and joggers and dog walkers.

Especially appealing was it being right a cross the street from where we were staying meant we could wander over just about any time we wanted. And we wanted a lot! It being springtime down under, EVERYTHING was in bloom. Except the daffodils and other bulbs were done. Did find the occasional late tulip, though.

There were, for instance, rhododendrons the size of school buses. (I'm not kidding) Look:

And masses of azalea plantings:

Azaleas in every shade you can think of from white all the way to a rich mahogany. And roses, many of them very old fashioned and very old. Also camelias, and I haven't seen camelias since I left California. And so many other blooming things whose names I don't know or can't remember!

I think this one pretty much tells it all: Azaleas, camelias, rhododendrons...and a palm tree down front!

The trees were just amazing, too. I mean: HUGE. Now, I'm from California; I've seen Sequoias. And in Michigan I've been exposed to oaks and maples of considerable size. But none of them can touch these monsters! Most wouldn't fit in my camera... For instance:

This is a Monterey Pine. Yeah, yeah, you're thinking. Been there, seen them scrawny little things...

See what I mean? That's none too small me for scale...

I loved that park! And I loved the way every scrap of yard (and Christchurch houses are crammed together closely) is planted full of flowers and trees. It is called the Garden City, and at this time of year, truly lives up to its name.

Christchurch, New Zealand

2011-01-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

Jet lag is a funny thing: it's not being sleepy at inappropriate times so much as it is a general fuzziness in mental and physical functioning. Woke up bright eyed and ready to go...at 3 am. Went back to sleep and then was groggy all day, even with a nap later. Here's the view from our bedroom window...

None of that sleep confusion dampened our enthusiasm for the city, however. We arrived on Labor Day, October 24 and planned to leave on the 27 via the alpine tourist train over to the west coast, so had time to deal with jet lag and see as many of the sights as time and body would allow.

Easy to do, too, as Christchurch has a very nice bus system, which is automated, computerized and staffed by genial people. At least it was so all the days we were there.

See? At all the bus stops, there is this little blue box. Press the button for your bus number and a little light on the left tells you how long before your bus will arrive at that stop. How cool is that?! A bus pass offers all sorts of discounts and saves time figuring out and finding change, as the 'cash' box next to the driver simply reads the pass when you set it on top. Makes loading a lot of passengers a snap.

And there were often a lot of passengers, since one of the campuses of Canterbury University was down Deans Avenue from us, and three high schools (called colleges, there) were a few blocks the other way.

Typical walking downtown. That is one of the golden trees, not Fall, LOL. There are also Pink trees and yellow trees. And I'm not talking subtle pink; they are hot pink! The leaves gradually darken to maroon tinged green, I'm told. But the bright butter yellow trees stay that color.

You may remember that a few days after we made our reservations, Christchurch suffered a huge earthquake, which pretty well trashed the older section of downtown. The area is full of century old unreinforced masonry buildings, mostly only 1-3 stories tall. We were expecting to see extensive evidence of the damage, and we did see some buildings with the inspection tags on shop windows. All in all, if we hadn't known about the quake, we might simply have thought these historical buildings were just being repaired or updated.

For example, the steeple of an historic church in the middle of downtown looks good as new. You may remember that this toppled steeple was an iconic photo of the damage, but upon closer inspection, we couldn't even see any cracks or dents in the ground.

At least, that is what it looked like from the buses. After we had a chance to walk around a bit, we did find some areas where things were not so good, nearly 2 months after the quake. Chinatown was still more than half empty, as buildings were too unsafe for shops to reopen, although most of the severely damaged buildings we saw pictures of on the Internet were nowhere to be found. Only a few vacant lots suggested that maybe cleanup had been quick and thorough.

Manchester Road (another iconic photo) is not downtown, per se, but had the oldest pub (also much photoed) on one corner. Still trashed beyond repair, but not torn down, just cleaned up around the street. Interestingly, kitty corner across the street was a two story auto parts store, all glass and steel, ala 1950s, which didn't appear to have a mark on it. Nobody took pictures of that to post on the 'Net!

We visited a shopping mall about three quarters of a mile down Riccarton Road from our motel, and went grocery shopping in the Pac-n-Save.

Noticed that many of the fruits and veggies came from California! Prices were a bit shocking, even when allowing for NZ$1 being about US$.75. Gas prices were also breath taking:

The prices are in cents, and by the liter, so that was about US$6/gallon. One interesting thing was that the price never changed the whole 17 days we were in country. Here in Ann Arbor they change every day, sometimes more than once!

Next: Hagley Park!

New Zealand Trip: Chicago to Los Angeles to Auckland

2011-01-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

It was a very long walk from our hotel to O'Hare International Airport -- and we took the trains! Who knew that the change from Red to Blue lines meant almost a half mile of stairs, pedestrian tunnels, and more stairs?

I do like Chicago's transit provisions, though, as they really move traffic at speed. We had only to look out the train windows (when they were above ground, of course) to see how we were whizzing past long lines of much slower moving cars at street level. Directions are clear, maps are plentiful, and they promise to have real time bus/train arrival info at major stops this year. However, they could use some stop info or user reviews -- such as, some stops include 5 or 6 levels of stairs with no elevators!

O'Hare has changed since last I was there (we won't go into details of how long ago it was). It is still huge, bigger than many cities in the world, but is now very well lighted, clean and includes moving walkways. Still has Cinnabun shops perfuming the air...

Our flight to Los Angeles was a 737 Airbus, and we had seats clear back next to the last row, right in front of one of the kitchens and the toilets. Not bad placement, but here's what I learned about current air travel: don't expect to use your laptop computer for entertainment. There is no room between the seats, even before they recline! Perhaps in business class there is space, and first class (which was not available for this domestic leg of the journey) looks a lot like space pod seating, with tray tables and foot rests. Alas, no longer includes bud vases.

Oh, and 737s wag their tails in flight! =:o It wasn't bad, but it was definitely there. Who knew?

Once in Los Angeles, it was another long trek between terminals (there was ground transport available, but we felt we needed to exercise a bit, since the next flight would be 14+ hours. And besides, it didn't look that far on the map...) but at least we didn't have to lug much stuff, as checked baggage was supposed to go through on it's own.

LAX is even bigger than last time I went through it.

Fourteen hours in unbelievably cramped spaces, knees crammed against the seat reclined in front of you, even if said seat back has a TV screen, even if one is supposed to sleep... Challenging. It is also a struggle to get up out of reclined seats without embarrassing mishaps. They need to install handle bars!

Several very nice things about Qantas Airlines however: they cram you in, but they apologize for it. They provide pillows, blankets, headphones, food (good food!), drinks, movies, TV, sports, music -- all at no extra charge. In observing business class and first class accommodations, I'd say business looked more comfortable, bigger seats than coach and more space between them, but without the hard cocoon shell of first class. And they are adding something called snuggle class this year, that is supposed to make up into a bed for two. Uh-huh. The pictures show two very slender folks...without seat belts...

Best I can say for such a long flight is that we survived on anticipation, and were not disappointed. First, we saw dark green dots of islands, then brilliant green fields and blue seas, then landed at Auckland International Airport on the North Island. More walking, but in bright sunshine and mild temps with a fresh breeze. Distance between terminals is only a matter of a block or two, after retrieving bags and zipping through customs, and the green -- plus flowering plants -- was very welcome. So was being able to stretch and walk!

We had time for a snack in the domestic terminal before boarding for Christchurch. First time I've had MacDonald's burger in about 30 years, I think. It was delicious, but what used to be the $.99 meal special in US was about NZ$8 just for the burger...

The flight from Auckland to Christchurch is less than an hour and gave us more views of sparkling ocean and very green islands. Here is our first view of Christchurch:

Just the northern edge of town, which is about 200K all told, but doesn't seem that urban.

We exited down a ladder and wandered across the tarmac to the terminal in very bright noon sunlight, more or less following other passengers because it wasn't all that clear where we were to go. Security is a bit less stringent than at LAX!

After finding our bags, we loaded up and walked through the terminal area to the bus stop, found the bus that would take us to within a block of our motel, and learned later that the trip would have cost much less if we had purchased bus passes then instead of later. Bus driver not only greeted us and chatted with everyone, but also got off the bus and helped with baggage! He seemed genuinely interested and happy with his job, as we would find true for every bus driver on throughout our stay there.

I'd like to say we hopped off the bus at our stop, but struggled and lugged is a better description. The stop is just back from the intersection (a traffic circle!) of Riccarton Road and Deans Avenue, so we are not far from our motel, but challenged by the traffic circle. Just how does one figure out which direction to look? (Did I mention that New Zealand cars travel on the left side of the road?)

However, we did eventually figure it out and dash across and there was our motel, two doors down:

Argyle on the Park is a small outfit, maybe 12 rooms and the owner's apartment. It really is on the park, right across the street is the edge of Hagley Park, Christchurch's answer to New York's Central Park, and nearly as old.

We are met at the driveway entrance by Tom, the resident cat and general greeter. When we walk up to the door labeled office we are met by owners Maggie and Bruce who know immediately who we are and welcome us like old friends. Wade made all the reservations and actually talked to them (via Skype) several times, making arrangements fit for honeymoon. This second floor room with view of the park was ours!

It's a one bedroom apartment, with fully stocked kitchen, TVs in both bedroom and living room and an extra bed in the main room (which Wade immediately appropriated for spreading out his stuff). Very nice arrangement, as it meant he could rise at his customary 2gm and work without disturbing my sleep.

We didn't do much but grab desperately needed showers and walk around the corner to a small grocery store for snacks. Took a short walk into the park and had ham sandwiches for dinner.

NZ Trip: Ann Arbor to Chicago

2010-11-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

We left on the noon train, so as to keep the general stress level manageable...Jen rode down with us to take the car home so it wouldn't be sitting in the long term parking for three weeks. She will bring it to the station and park close so we can stumble off the midnight train and drive right home when our wonderful vacation is over.

Ann Arbor Train Station

Two suitcases, two backpacks, two computer bags...and a sack of snacks (more about its fate later).

The train left on time and we enjoyed the 4+ hour ride to Chicago. Saw lots of Autumn fields...

...and a couple old train stations still in their glory. This one is now a restaurant:

Also squinted through the dirty windows to make out a dozen sandhill cranes in fields or dried swamps by the train tracks. Did not get a picture of them, as the train is not so conducive to photography as I had hoped. Did get a rather artsy one of Chicago skyline as we neared town.

It was rush hour when we arrived at Union Station. Talk about trying to swim upstream against a torrent of people rushing to get trains home! By the time we had fought our way to the street with all our bags, I was pooped, so we opted for a cab instead of trying to walk the half mile to our hotel.

The Best Western at Grant Park was in its day pretty grand, but at only 7 stories it is dwarfed by the high rise buildings that line the rest of the waterfront area. It is across a park and the Metra tracks from the Museums, Shedd Aquarium and the marina that becomes Navy Pier. Perfect location for us to enjoy the hours before flying out to LAX the next evening.

The only hitch was that in leaving the taxi, I also left our snack bag. Yikes! I've never tried to travel without food before. And dinner was a bit of a problem. Most of the nearby eateries cater to breakfast and lunch only, and we thought the hotel restaurant might be pricey, so opted to walked a couple blocks down the street to The Firehouse. Very Loooooooong blocks when you are tired from lugging baggage. (We got really buff before the trip was done, LOL)

The evening was warm and mild and without wind, rare for Chicago waterfront in my experience, so the walk would have been very good except we were hungry and tired and the restaurant turned out to be VERY upscale. It's a genuine 19th or early 20th century firehouse, remodeled into dimly lighted steakhouse that has nothing on the menu under $40. Definitely not the sort of place for weary travelers in tennis shoes!

So we walked back to the hotel and found their restaurant empty, as it was Friday night and way past dinner hour. There were a cook, the owner and one overworked waitress who was supposed to act as hostess and bus tables in addition. But, the food when it came was outstanding! Basmati rice, thin perfectly cooked steak and lightly sauteed veggies still sweet and crunchy. Yum! Wade got the seafood fried rice -- a huge mound full of pastel bits of shrimp, fish and veggies. Delish.

Breakfast next morning was literally next door at YOLK! This trendy eatery is labeled the best breakfast in Chicago, and we concur! The menu is extensive and sumptious and your order comes on serving platters instead of plates. More than enough to share a single entree.

We went early on a Saturday morning and therefore didn't have a wait, but we noticed a long line forming as we left. Very popular place, and the prices were not as high as one would expect in the tourist section of town. Worth the money!

Then it was back to the hotel, pack up and check the big bags behind the front desk before heading out for the Shedd Aquarium. We could literally see this from our hotel room, along with the lake and parks. (See Wade's Flickr! stream for way more pix) On the way over, which was about 3 blocks, over the railroad tracks, through the park, under Lakeshore Drive, through another park -- discovered why adding weights to one's walking attire is recommended by the fitness gurus: makes the walk MUCH longer. We were wearing backpacks and carrying computers. Those things are heavy!

Shedd is wonderful, but huge. It is something to watch sharks the size of Volkswagons swim over your head (the tanks curve above us)...makes a big impression! Watched sea otters being fed and penguins being loved. Yes, really; three humans sitting in their enclosure and the birds lining up for hugs and scritches (Wade has pix) and literally elbowing one another out of the line if they could. Cool. Definitely a place to visit, but buy your tickets online before going; saves a Looooooong line waiting at the entrance to buy onsite.

After all that walking, and bit of lunch at the Aquarium cafe, we opt out of going next door to the museum, and mosey on back to get our bags and work out the route via Metra to get to O'Hare airport. That is a long hike, between trains, but starts only a couple blocks from hotel. Red train first, then change to blueline out, which saves not only time and traffic, but lots of money: $2.25 each instead of $29 for limo or $40 for taxi. Phew!

Next stop: LAX, long after my bedtime...

We're Leaving Tomorrow!

2010-10-21T16:57:00.000-07:00

'Nuff said!

New Zealand, here we come!

2010-10-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

It's official: we are going to have a vacation longer than 3 days! Naturally, since we never even took a honeymoon, we are pretty excited. However, it occurred to me that some of you may not be able to recognize us when we return from our adventures, jetlagged, sunburnt (hole in ozone down there, remember?) wrinkled and worn.

So, here is a pre-vacation picture:

To make it easier to keep you all updated, I'm going to use this blog as my trip diary, including pictures. Far cry from when we each used to carry spiral bound notebooks to journal our trips, and glue sticks to paste in postcards along the way, right?

And, of course, my trip Karma is in good shape, even though it has been several years since the last travel:

1) Within days of when the first flight reservations were made, Christchurch had a 7+ magnitude earthquake, the worst in 88 years. Most of the downtown beautiful old buildings fell down, and it will be years before all the infrastructure is repaired, BUT, only 3 people died.

2) A couple weeks later, what the weather channel called the largest storm on the planet swept across the Tasman Sea and took out the entire west coast of New Zealand. There were blizzards and deep snows and thousands of frozen lambs in the southern alps (it's spring there), and 4" of wet snow, trees down, power outages and chaos in the sub-tropical north. Although, I did look at those pix from near Auckland the next day and it didn't look like more than a normal, maybe even good, winter day in Michigan. But with palm trees.

3) As we were planning itinerary dates and modes of transport, we opted to use one of NZ's intercity bus companies...immediately after which decision, we discovered that one had crashed into a tree earlier this year.

4) And only a few days ago, the domestic airline we will be using had yet another successful (everyone walked away from it) emergency landing (the pilots are evidently getting pretty good at these after several) because the nose gear keep falling off -- or something.

Now, I hasten to remind all of you that this Karma thing never happens to me during the trip. It only frightens family members before I go anywhere. Like that time we spent several weeks touring by train and bus through Mexico and Central America, and right before we left there was all this hoohaw about drug cartel killings and the US closed the boarder for a couple days. Of course, we simply walked across at Calexico to the Mexicali train depot, with all the other pedestrian commuters...through a tunnel that didn't even have a guard posted to check ID.

Never saw any of the purported guerilla warfare in Chiapas or Guatemala, either. Did have the bus stopped once or twice during Easter week travel to check when crossing country boarders, but nobody ever asked us much. I guess we didn't look dangerous, and we certainly didn't look like rich gringos by that time!

Okay. Will endeavor to update this blog regularly. I'm taking my computer with me, and the digital camera, and our hotels promise internet access. Yeah, I know, but we'll see.

Um, About That View of the Water He Wanted....

2010-06-06T09:09:00.000-07:00

Well, that's what he added to his list of what to look for when we were getting ready to move out of our urban apartment complex. I found this lovely solar granny apartment on an organic farm, complete with woods and fields around us, chickens, goats, turkeys, dog, barn cats, small children, wildflowers and lots of songbirds. Just lovely, but no lake or stream really. Just woods standing in blackwater swamps. Those don't count, he said, resigned to his fate.

It rained last night. RAINED. Honest, the weather forcast was for cloudy with chance of showers, heavy at times, flooding possible in low areas. Not that different from most days, so we ignored it and went to bed.

This is what we found when we woke up this morning: back yard...

Poor little garden tractor trailer...

The southwest corner and the chard treading water as fast as they can...

Even the front yard plantings of onions & garlic flooded!

But so far the house and driveway have stayed out of the water... Of course, the drainage ditch running along the county road frontage is actually uphill from the property, and seems to drain the 40 acres of swamp/woods behind us more than our spaces. That swamp is presently feeding a clear stream diagonally across these 4 acres, mostly the back lawns, but also the west truck gardens, berries and a corner of the orchard. (Note to self: orchard chickens do not swim well, and complain bitterly about soggy ground.)

The six year old neighbor is delighted because all that water returning means he can spend the day paddling the canoe across it. Usually that is only for a couple weeks in spring when the ground has not unfrozen enough the absorb warm rains. Then the canoe gets put away for lake use fishing in August. Not this year!

We've had way more rain than usual, and it has often been hard rains, instead of the farmers' delightful drizzle. Last night it was 2" in about an hour and a half. And the ground was already saturated from rains we have been having every couple of days since February.

Maybe they should have ducks instead of chickens? And maybe grow rice instead of greens.....

New heights of needlework?

2010-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

Hats that keep both your head and your face warm... I don't know; seems kinda cute...

Tara Duff has these on Etsy http://www.etsy.com/listing/47868043/yellow-and-gray-striped-bearded-beanie?ref=v1_other_1

My New Ride

2010-05-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

Well, it's here, the touring trike I have been lusting after for many years:
This is a RoadRunner recumbent trike by Lightfoot Cycles, and is probably a bit big for me until I get back into shape, of course, but is still way smaller than the original one I wanted:
The Transporter is a working cycle, capable of moving refrigerators, hauling logs, and plenty of touring camp stuff -- none of which is any longer necessary for me, even in fantasy, LOL.

As you all know (having listened to my whining in the past) I have not been able to ride a bicycle since I broke that ankle in 2001, but it was not the leg that was the problem. It was the seating! I discovered in physical therapy that a recumbent works just fine for me, however.

Recumbent bikes and trikes have been around for a while, but many of them are designed for racing, so they are very low to the ground for speed and riders are almost prone to improve stability. Unfortunately, this makes for dangerous riding in places like Michigan, where people aren't used to dealing with a mix of cars and cycles. (Bike lanes, when they occur on city streets around here, are used by cars for passing!)

We live out on a two lane road without paved shoulders, in fact, often without any shoulder at all between pavement and ditch. So Lightfoot's frame design works best for me, since the seat puts me right at eye level with drivers in most cars. The shear size of their trikes also gives me more road presence than a bicycle would. I'm hoping that helps, but recently some local guy ran into the back of a fire engine with all it's lights on 'cause he didn't see it' -- so I'll still have to ride defensively.

There are some differences between a recumbent and an upright, as well as between two and three wheelers. One can't stand on the pedals to rest the back, tush, or cushion the shock of bad road surfaces. On the other hand, when one gets tired, there is already a nice place to sit!

Turning is very different, I find, because on a bike, I hardly ever turned the handle bars when riding, just leaned into the turn. A bike feels very solid and all one piece. The trike does require moving the handle bars, which feels very loose and separate from the rest of the vehicle, even wobbly until I got used to riding without leaning on them. I do lean into turns a bit, but right now can't go fast enough for tipping to be a problem, LOL.

Here's the calendar of accomplishments, so far:

Thursday a week: it arrives! Two hours to uncrate and put pieces together, adjust fit and take the first short ride (halfway down the driveway). Then across the lawn to put it up on the deck to cover it against the rain forcast.

Sunday (Took two days to recover from the workout and besides, it rained): rode it up and down the driveways out to the small barn and back across the lawn. The neighbor's children (6&4) rode their bikes in circles around me and thought I was pretty tame to be puffing and quitting so soon. But they had unfair advantage: they have been riding their bikes for a couple months! AND, riding across 60 feet of very soggy lawn is NOT easy.

Tuesday: small loop around the lawn and out to the mail box. More than enough. Put together draft verson of parking garage made of pvc piping draped with tarp. Learned that even protected on the deck, the wind and rain blew it down, as nothing was tightened up and water weighs a lot.

Thursday: driveway loop morning and evening, maybe half mile, total. Felt pretty good.

Friday: double loop, all the way out to the big barn, 2/3 mile. 4 yr old rode with me, but thought I was going too slowly. Finished the parking garage and moved it to the side of the house, off the deck. Tested out the theory that we could, indeed, fit a RoadRunner trike into a Honda CRV if we lowered car seats, trike seat and handle bars. Two of us can do it, not so much because of weight as to have both ends guided. Figured out that it is easier to park in its garage if we back it in, again because, unlike a bike, it doesn't move as one piece.

Saturday: Put it in the car, drove to a nearby flat subdivision at 8 am (on a 3-day weekend, nobody was up yet, no traffic, so we didn't frighten the neighbors) unloaded, reset seat and handle bars, and rode for about a mile and a quarter. Felt great. Spirit was willing to make another loop, but flesh said no. Passed a barn sale on the way home and stopped to see if they had any bikes (for him) but bought a bright, reflective vest for me. Matches yellow trike!

Goals for this summer:

- Explore the various nearby rails-to-trails and metropark rides.
- Increase distance (not to mention hill tolerance, which is about 4 inches at the moment) to at least 6 miles, which would allow for grocery shopping and banking about 3 miles from home. I've mapped out a backroads route to lessen traffic, but means most of the ride will be on graded, not paved, roads.
- In Fall, be able to make a ride to A&W in nearby town, which would be about 12 miles round trip. Because there are no low traffic back roads for this one, I must strong enough to handle traffic on a two-lane paved road without shoulders. Right now, that seems like a very big deal.

Over winter, which they DO here in the Midwest, trike will be in storage and I will use recumbent trainers at our local gym, with hopes of staying in shape enough that:

Goals for next summer:

- Regular errands on the trike instead of the car.
- Some short tours, multiple days, up to 100 miles. Fun to do around here, since most of the county is parks or conservation land, with campgrounds, B&Bs and many miles of bike trails.

So there it is. You are now my witnesses and support group. :D

She Said It...

2010-02-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

Deb Rivel, board member of The Alex Foundation, quoted in Dr. Pepperberg's book, Alex & Me:

"Alex taught me the meaning of oneness. What I learned from him also supported what I always have known to be true: that there is just one Creation, one Nature, one good, full, complete Idea, made up of individuals of all shapes and designs, all expressing their oneness with one God. We are not different because we look different, but we all reflect the eternal beauty and intelligence of one Creation in our own peculiar way. It's what makes up the whole -- this textured fabric of thought and existence -- and knowing Alex has underscored to me how much the same we really are."

Right on.

Pets...

2010-01-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

I have never been without pets for any length of time until I moved to Michigan -- a place that does Winter, thus requiring that said animal would live indoors 24/7.

We spent several years in student housing, which is nominally a 'no pet' environment. In practice this meant that people who had critters took great care that the dog, cat, bird, lizard, snake, turtle, etc., did not bother anyone else, and thus hazard landlord wrath.

Having been raised in the moderate climes of Southern California, I can't imagine being able to live year round with dogs or cats indoors with me. We always had yards and fields and woods for them to play in, and my cats clearly felt that their 'very important cat business' was mostly outdoors.

In Michigan, the only place I've lived that 'does' winter, having a cat or dog means a lot of extra work. When I was a kid, we had dogs who lived in the yard or barns. Ditto cats, although one barn cat moved into the house with us after her first meal. (It was leftover spaghetti.) Even she went outdoors to do her business, however, and trained us when to open said door or window for her.

Dogs, especially big dogs, need to be 'walked' several times a day in order to be healthy and to prevent them from eating your couch in frustrated boredom. Even if people have a yard, it won't be big enough and the weather clement enough for the dog to have ready access. And picking up dog poop is NOT my fav activity, TYVM!

Cats don't need to be walked -- and I've only known a handful that would even consider it -- but they do need exercise and a litter box. They need playtime and entertainment. And that litter box smells, even when 'cleaned.'

Part of my problem is exactly that: I'm extremely (according to my family) sensitive to odors. I can detect a rotting grape under a coffee table two houses down the street (also according to my family).

Dogs smell, even before they have discovered that lusciously decomposing roadkill with which to perfume themselves. Cats don't smell, if they aren't spraying, but shed fur a much as dogs do. And their litter smells. A lot.

Further, I have too much biology background to tolerate the idea of kissing my pets, especially on the mouth. Or of letting them slather me, like, while I'm eating. Part of that probably results from having a mother in the first group of nursing students who learned about germs, all those years ago... Why, she never let her kids barefoot until our teens, and then only at the beach!

But I love animals and have always had them in my life. The first ten years were spent on a farm with cows, rabbits (3000), turkeys, chickens, ducks, banties, geese, pigs, dogs, cats and guinea fowl.
Only the dogs and one cat were pets, but all had lives separate from the human habitation. Even when my family moved into town, we had chickens and dogs, cats and birds.
While in college, I even had a fling at fancy mice -- mostly culls from the bio department's attempt to breed a triple recessive, chocolate mouse. (They succeeded, but only my cat thought the results tasted anything like their name...)

Actually, I can't imagine living without other species also in my space. That said, I've reached the age when reality is forcing me to wonder if I could reliably care for them, whether plants, animals or -- ahem -- people. (Yes, teenagers are a separate species, but that's for another post. And besides, I don't have any of those anymore.)

See, here's the main problem: I'm obsessively committed to providing the very best care for my pets, and my definition of 'best' is rigorous. So I'm afraid I won't be able to live up to that standard, these days.

For instance, I personally make pet food from scratch. Presently, my pets consist of 7 rescued budgerigars (budgies) who are my Birdie Soap Opera. So, buying fresh seeds and making my own birdseed mix isn't too demanding. I also provide a variety of organic greens, veggies, wild grasses, maple and apple and willow branches, and birdie breads that I bake for them. They have flight time out of the cage every day. Some days for several hours, some for only a few minutes until somebirdy goes for the houseplants or the light boxes or the tall clock and everybirdy is then shooed back into the cage. They know the routine.

I used to prepare food for my cats, cooking it myself. Commercial pet foods, especially the cheap ones, rely on a lot of food stuffs that aren't healthy for cats. Marketing departments know, however, that most cats will eat just about anything if enough tuna juice is poured over it!

The fact that most inexpensive dry pet foods are corn based, and most of the protein is from 'animal byproducts' -- plus domestic cats are not by nature water drinkers but rely on their prey to supply both water and greens -- means that kibble just isn't a good choice. Those 'meat byproducts' are used to increase the protein content, even though the proteins are not exactly digestible or high quality, which is a bad enough thing. But worse, the source is not natural prey species... (Neither is a cow, of course, but muscle and organ beef is better than hooves and hide.)

Most shocking however: Did you ever wonder what happens to the unwanted dogs and cats that are killed every year by various animal control agencies? Yep, collected by companies who also collect dead and diseased cows, pigs, chickens, sheep and other protein sources. These 'meats' are processed and turned into 'meat by-products' that are used to make pet foods and animal feeds. That dead dairy cow is ultimately fed back to her sisters!

But that soapbox rant digresses from my current delemma...

I hesitate to even consider a dog because not only do I feel inadequately informed or inclined to train and socialize it, but also, I doubt that I even want to take it outside and walk it 3-5 times a day in winter weather. It might actually be good for me to get that much exercise, too, but please! And then to clean it up afterwards? And deal with the smell of wet dog?

No, probably won't happen as long as I am in Michigan.

Cats might, if I could provide them with a safe way to be a cat, indoors and out. I couldn't confine a cat to an apartment any more than I can clip my birds wings to make them flightless unbirds. But in this part of the world, it would be unsafe and uncomfortable to allow cats the run of the barns and woods and snow and coyotes. Besides which, cat doors would invite in a whole army of unwanted critters!

Both cats and dogs need mental stimulation, human interaction, and exercise. Dogs, especially, need friends of their own kind. Do I have multiple critters, or do I spend a good deal of time arranging play dates? I don't really want to encourage foraging in my cupboards, garbage cans and counters, but hunting for snacks is great entertainment and helps prevent obesity and depression, especially in cats.
There is another issue, as well. Providing a safe environment with plenty of food turns the reproductive switch to the ON position. Preventing that natural process results in unnatural stresses, not to mention expense.

There is a long list of reasons for labeling my current pets, the Birdy Soap Opera! "Twin Beaks, As the Bird Turns," has a cast driven to make baby birds, and I am preventing this from happening, so all that reproductive energy gets focused in other ways: chewing, squabbling over perches, chewing, searching for suitable nesting spaces outside the cage, arguing over those spots, chewing, competing for mates, chewing..........

At one point, I had almost an open door policy for unwanted Budgies, but I am no longer replacing those lost to old age and fatty liver disease. The Birdy Soap Opera cast is down to 7, all but one being 6 or 7 years old.

We are retired and have more time to spend with pets, or so I always believed it would be. But everything from chores to fun seems to take much longer than I'm sure I remember it used to when I was still young and virile..... So, I'm trying to decide if and what pet should be introduced to my current lifestyle when the Birdy Soap is finished.

Maybe I should just join the latest urban fad and get chickens......

(Which fad, BTW, is causing most humane societies great anxiety, as they have never been set up to deal with anything more than cats and dogs, usually. They don't have a place to house stray and unwanted chickens. Just as the aftermath of those cute Taco Bell commercials was a flood of unwanted and unmanageable chihuahuas, so they expect a similar flood of chickens!)

Let's see: do I want to get up and thaw frozen water dishes and feed hens at 6am, noon, and 6pm daily? Do I want to be washing chicken poop off my boots, gloves, eggs, etc.......Not to mention dealing with dogs, coyotes, squirrels, weasels, snakes, mice, rats, flies and other critters bent on having chicken (or chicken feed) for lunch?!

Nope. Guess not.

Maybe I'll cultivate friends with pets, and go enjoy them till I'm tired of it, and come home refreshed without having to do the chores.

Yeah. That's the ticket!

Much for which To Be Thankful

2009-11-26T14:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes poets get it, even when we normal mortals fail:

O weary hearts! O slumbering eyes!
O drooping souls, whose destinies
Are fraught with fear and pain,
Ye shall be loved again!

No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.

Responds, - as if with unseen wings,
An angel touched its quivering strings;
And whispers, in its song,
"Where hast thou stayed so long?"

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Endymion"

No one but some heart responds unto his own...

And sometimes, as in my case, more than one. I am SO lucky!

Happy Thanksgiving, Dear Ones!

Listen, God? We have to talk...

2009-11-16T04:32:00.000-08:00

I mean, I have questions (okay, some complaints about stuff for which I'd like some explanations, too) and what with menopause and all, figured I'd better make a list so I can remember them when I finally can ask them in person.

Now, these issues aren't really all that new; I've had many of them since I was a small child. Was raised to ask questions and find answers, and looking back, I'm pretty sure I wasn't exactly expelled from Sunday school, but the teachers were probably relieved when I stopped coming at about 5 years old.

See, I wasn't content to listen quietly to the Bible stories, color my picture and eat my cookie. I wanted to discuss the stories. I had questions! A four year old with questions that don't have nice concrete answers is a pain in the you-know-where.

So, failing Sunday school, and later turning to science and literature for answers that were equally unsatisfying or unforthcoming...I began collecting this list. It seemed reasonable and I thought likely to stay with me, but since some days I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast, perhaps recording them someplace other than my head is a good idea.

And I'm not talking about particularly abstruse theological, or even scientific questions, here. It is true that I have some of those, but so many other people also do that surely I'll be reminded. Right?

So, okay, even scientists can't figure out why the sky is dark at night, since all the laws of physics currently understood do not explain how that could happen -- at least, not without a lot of handwaving and magic numbers to fudge the equations.

No, I want answers to the important stuff. Like, why is it that your favorite dress, the one that fits perfectly and looks smashing, is the one that wears out the fastest? And that truly ugly mistake you picked up at Macy's sale ten years ago still fits and looks brand new.

Here's my list, not sorted by priority, yet:

1. Why is it that when children are too small to be much help they are intensely interested in chores, but when they are finally big enough to do them well, can't be bothered?

2. In the over all design of things, how come housekeeping has to be done every day? My main definition of Heaven is that once done, chores just stay done.

3. In farming, we hope for a good yield, but when it happens, the prices fall because everyone else also had a good year. What purpose is that in our lives?

4. If entropy is true, why does life consistently evolve into more and more complexity?

5. Or, in general, why are there so many paradoxes?

6. And don't get me started on menopause or the whole post will list questions, moans, whining and complaints!

7. Where does all that rubber go that wears off the tread on my tires?

8. Why design an entire creation so that the critters in it have to figure it all out by themselves, if there is a Plan? (This is a whine, really, about having to do homework and taking the test.)

9. How come when I plant my garden to have enough squash to share with the wildlife, said critters only attack the carrots & tomatoes & beans, and then my neighbors and family begin to pretend they aren't at home when they see me coming to their doors with bags in my hands?

10. Why can't I get my cat to sit for a decent portrait instead of contorting herself into poses of nether regions or turning her back whenever I get out the camera?

11. Okay, so I'm the ant who toiled and sacrificed in order have the wherewith all the survive the winter, and now some grasshopper who spent his time having fun and buying all those things I lived without, comes by and needs access to my stores. Or worse, his children need me and mine. What am I supposed to learn from that?

12. When I was young and virile and full of energy, I looked at the world and saw things I could fix so it would be better. Now I'm old, decrepit and tired, and just about all of the things I tried to fix are still broken. Every thing I built or completed has been torn down, allowed to fall down, or ignored by those for whom it was intended. As soon as I put down the load, it was just left lying on the ground, without anyone picking it up and carrying on. Don't give me a bad time about being grumpy!

13. Am I supposed to concentrate only upon relationships and spiritual endeavors, instead of material concerns? If so, who's going to wash the dishes and remember to pay the bills?

14. Okay, why are there bills? Diseases? Floods?

15. Why do humans refuse to learn from history? Why do institutions originally designed to utilize experience and history, allow, for instance, all those homes to be built on the Sacramento flood plain beneath Folsom Dam, which has been allowed to crumble into dangerous condition due to deferred maintenance? This appears to me to be a design flaw in the species!

16. And speaking of design flaws: why do cows walk like their feet are killing them? Horses, deer, dogs -- even elephants -- walk smoothly and gracefully; cows plod like they weigh tons and bought shoes too small.

17. Why did the salinity of the ocean increase gradually for millenia, and now seems to have reached equilibrium? Equilibrium with what?

18. Ices ages and hot dry spells seem to have alternated fairly regularly for most of the planet's history. We study this history as averages, but is the planet one whole living organism, whose time scale is just beyond an individual human's ability to sense it?

19. History as it has been collected shows that the human species is designed to work in groups in order to survive, yet regularly develops belief systems based on the notion of individual primacy and competition. Another design flaw? Humans must depend upon one another to grow, develop and be happy, but consistently deny those constraints in order to wander off in other directions.

2o. Why is it that the very foods that cause the most pain to my aging body are the ones that taste the best and are my favorites?

21. It is absolutely proven that there is no cure for death. Why are we still looking for one?

22. Why is fussing so much a part of me that even when things are going well in my life, I'll borrow other people's issues to worry about? And not even just people: I fuss when my MIL's potted plants are wilting from lack of water. Or when the neighbor's chickens want out of their coop to roam the farm yard looking for bugs. Or that the neighbor across the road has posted no parking signs, so that hunters must park their trucks teetering on the edge of a ditch big enough to swallow a school bus. These are deer hunters, who walk through the brush beside and behind where we live to reach 60+ acres of swampy woods. There is less than a foot of gravel beside the pavement and deep ditches mostly on both sides of our shoulderless country road. They get tickets if their trucks are too close to the pavement, and I worry that some of them park so far down the slope of the ditch that the next big truck that whizzes by will blow them over. And it would be far safer for them to park across on the side which does not have a ditch along this quarter mile stretch, if it weren't for the new no parking signs. Etc., etc.

23. Why IS the sky dark at night? "God divided the heavens and the earth and the day and the night," is no more vague an explanation than the magic constants inserted into the quantum equations presented in my physics class.

24. For that matter, why didn't my family refrain from tossing muddy book bags, not to mention dirty socks, on the dining room table -- even though I told them time and again why it was unsanitary, unsightly, and made me crazy? Ditto: wiping dirty shoes before walking into the house, hanging jackets in the closet directly in front of them instead of dropping them on the floor by the door, or throwing away the candy wrapper in the wastebasket by their elbow instead of just leaving it on the table, floor or couch? These are mysteries of life!

25. Why am I always the last one to realize I've just made a fool of myself? Like, why is it 40 years after the fact that I suddenly look up and see how ridiculous was some project or other over which I spent much time and energy? I suppose that's like asking why I have (had) red hair and freckles, but what was the point of that design decision?

No doubt I will continue to add to this list, but right now I need to shower and do some housekeeping. Plus learn new software because the old one that worked fine for me no longer runs on this new computer -- which, while I'm at it, was perfectly good, too, but being 6 years old was no longer able to keep up with all the new software and was no longer being serviced. Ditto my favorite software.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, summer is over, frosty mornings with ice mist as the sun comes up are here.

Three Quilts Complete...One to go...

2009-10-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

Was clearing out my sewing stash and found a hand pieced quilt top that my mother had made from scraps of cotton left over from our toddler play clothes.

The rabbit feed used to come in cotton print sacking, about 1 yard/50 pound bag. She used the cloth to make shirts for my Dad and cute little outfits for my brother and I.

What better project than to divide it four ways and make heirloom quilted snuggles for my grandkids! Uh-huh, hold that thought, but then do a fast reality check and discover that I no longer HAVE any toddler-sized grandkids!

I inherited that quilt top and carried it around with me for 20 some years, always intending to do something with it; it's about number one on my Bucket List.

Now I know why she didn't ever finish it. The white pieces were from old recycled sheets, and are full of tiny rust stains and other marks that she probably couldn't see while she was piecing it all together.

She made the squares while doing night duty obstetrics, sitting in a darkened room, waiting for babies to be born.

However, such blemishes aren't an issue if what we want is something the kids can use right away and not have to worry about 'saving' a priceless antique. It's been saved too long as it is. In fact, some of the fabric is pretty fragile.

So, I carefully unpicked a seam down the middle, dividing the top into 2 lengths 4x7 squares each. Since they live in California, heavy batting and backing aren't necessary. I didn't want to buy more fabric, but none of the rest of my stuff seemed to go with this colorway. Fortunately, Target was having sale on their fleece blankets ($10!) so I bought a couple of those and used that for backing.

Then I tacked it all together using button quilting. :) Since the buttons can be sewed on by machine, it really saves the old fingers. That old cotton sheeting is really tough as leather!

All is not complete, however, since I have 3 grandchildren and only 2 quilts done, so for the baby (who, I have it on reliable authority, is now big enough to ride all the rides at Disneyland!) I needed to whip up another blanket.

I had some fleece remnants that were soft and bright, so cut them into squares with pinking shears, pieced them, and floated them onto a bigger piece of fleece, folding over the extra to make edge binding:

Then I tacked it together with button quilting, too. The buttons are vintage, as well as the fabrics, being from my button box, which contains inherited items from two grandmothers, mother, sister and mother-in-laws.

[Note how the buttons cleverly conceal any misaligned corners on this stretchy fabric that might be seen, otherwise...]

So, these three little quilts finished some projects on my bucket list, were fun to do, and will be perfect for tweens, because they can wrap up for movies on the floor with them, take them on sleep overs, or sit out on the deck in the sunshine to read a book. Well, in my household, at least, they would never be allowed to use 'good' blankets for those activities, LOL.

Meanwhile, I have finished the 9-point star patches begun in the mid 1970s and pieced the quilt top together.

It just needs a backing and filler, because it is for me and I live where WINTER happens... Maybe I'll go back to Target and see if their cotton sheet blankets are still on sale. If I float the top on woven cotton, with one of my washable wool blankets sandwiched between, and tack it firmly with lots of buttons........

Movin On -- Ur Doin It Rite!

2009-10-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

A dear friend finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer a few months back, and had kept us all up to date with a blog.

Now his widow continues to share with her own blog. It's very moving, includes pix and some poetry that are her way of dealing with the grieving process. Susanne is a writer, and has put into words most beautifully what I -- and many others, I'm sure -- have experienced.

This poem today really hit the spot for me, and works for so many loved ones gone.

Stay or Now Go?

I rock in your chair, and lay in our bed
I sleep with your shirt on, your jacket nearby
I wander the rooms, touching the dreams
Of a beautiful life we once led

I hold in my hands the things you once touched
And ask do they stay or now go?
I hold in my hands the intimate wear
And ask do they stay or now go?
I hold in my hands the books you once read
And ask do they stay or now go?

Some things are easy, a moment of thought
Some things are hard, and wake me at night
Some things are…just things
Some have layers of memory
Some mean more to others, and less to me
Are these things you? Are they me?
Perhaps yes and yet no
And I ask do they stay or now go?

When you live in my heart in permanent estate
Do the things even matter? Do they stay or now go?
Does some of you linger on all of these things
How much do I hold, do I care?
Some day they’ll be dust, irrelevant, gone
It’s your life that must matter, not things

And yet, there is comfort, though bittersweet tears
When I touch what you touched, and wear what you wore
They do bring you close, help me feel you nearby
So, I’ll choose at least some of the things to now keep

~ Susanne Mariella Alexander, October 14, 2009

Oh, for Heaven's Sake!

2009-10-12T18:42:00.001-07:00

Under the heading of people who clearly have too much time on their hands...but isn't it cute, anyway?

Baby watermelons...not!

I mean, what's not to love?

But I'M not gonna make them!

2009-08-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

Stash getting out of hand?

Want/need some of that new yarn (fabric, patterns, rubber stamps, paints, clay) but can’t fit any more in until you use up what’s already there?

Are friends and family beginning to worry that you need an intervention?

Well, hey, pack up the extras and come on over to an end of summer stash party. Donate, trade, buy, sell – as you wish. Leftovers go home with you, or can be dropped in a charity box (to be consulted upon, but might be the PTO Thrift Shop, alternative high school, women’s shelter…?)

1-3pm Saturday, August 29

6751 Scio Church Road, A2 (1.2 miles west of Zeeb, on the left. We’re in the ‘granny’ apartment around back.)

Light refreshments, good company, lovely weather, Crafters’ time! (sorry, but this tiny house isn’t safe for very small children)

Oh, and drive in very carefully, as there are multiple small children, goats, dogs, cats, turkeys and chickens wandering the yard and driveways, LOL.

Almost Homemade Chicken Pot Pie...

2009-07-25T08:07:00.000-07:00

Yes, really. This is the not-quite-from-scratch, scratch version. Because, picky as I am, commercial foods have improved enough that I not only use them, but also, recommend them. [Gasp!]

I know what you are now thinking! "Quick, check the back of her neck; did she go up over Copper Hill last evening?" and also, probably, "Who is this posting on Mom's blog?" Rest easy. Maybe I'm mellowing with age???

Whatever, I love pastry, especially savory pastry -- and making pie crust from butter and flour is tedious by hand (and, as you know, I'm too cheap to buy a food processor, besides which, it takes longer to set up and clean up than to do the work by hand for only two old people).

I'm not a fan of any of the prepared pot pies in the supermarket, although Pepperidge Farm did have an acceptable one some years back. Alas, it's no longer available, and was mostly crust, anyway...but good crust! There is a local restaurant (Grand Traverse Pie Company) which makes crusts as good as mine, but they cost $6 per 6" pot pie! However, I have found that Pillsbury has a prepared (uncooked) pie pastry that works just fine and tastes good, too.

To prove my point that the following recipe is easy and fast enough to make on a day I wasn't really expecting company until they called in the middle of my gardening... I whipped this dinner up from what I had in the pantry and freezer, and it was quicker than trying to thaw a steak or pork chops, and cheaper than taking them out to a restaurant. And while it was cooking, I had time to spruce up the house, take a shower and pick flowers for the table!

Quick Home-made Chicken Pot Pie

Svs 8 old(er) folks as complete meal, or 4 younger adults with salad, or 2 teenaged boys (but only if you add appetizer & dessert & half of everything else in the refrigerator)

Notes: Takes about half an hour to make up and 45-60 minutes to bake. (Or you could make two smaller pies and freeze one before baking. Cooking time then on the fresh one will be a little less, and frozen one can be popped frozen into the oven for at least an hour. Pastry will not be quite so flaky, though similar to commercial take and bake frozen pies.)

You'll need:

4 strips bacon (I used Oscar Mayer, kind of fatty, thin slices -- good for making lots of bacon grease, plus very crispy when cooked)
butter
1/4 Cup flour
2 - 13 oz cans chicken breast in water (I used Sam's Club Member's Mark premium chunk)
liquid from canned chicken
water
1/2 of a 16 oz package frozen mixed vegetables (diced peas, green beans, corn, carrots) I used Kroger brand
1/2 of a 14 oz package frozen Kroger Recipe Starters (diced celery, onion & carrot)
1 pkg refrigerated Pillsbury pie crusts (2 crusts rolled out)
large saute pan
wire whisk
10-12" pie pan (I used glass, but tin or stainless steel will work. This is too heavy a pot pie for foil unless you set it on a cookie sheet to move it in and out of the oven. 10" pan will result in mounded filling that could boil over and make a mess, but looks pretty on the table. Larger pie pan will make a flatter, but less potentially messy, presentation.)

First, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. And take the pie crust out of the refrigerator to warm up a bit at room temperature while you make the pie filling.

Now, make the roux: Okay, this is just a pan gravy, but you are using bacon grease instead of roast chicken pan drippings. It's just the basic ratio of 1/4 cup fat to 1/4 cup flour to 2 cups liquid.

If you have already saved bacon grease from breakfast or whatever, you don't need to fry bacon. You can also substitute all butter and Hormel Bacon Bits, as the main flavor of the roux is going to come from the chicken broth out of the canned chicken, anyway. Oh, and if any of you just happen to have the rendered chicken fat on hand in your pantry, ready to make roux ... you are way ahead of me and up there with Julia Child, my dears!

Moving on for the rest of us...

1. Fry the bacon strips gently in the saute pan until crisp. Reserve (hide from other family members!) the bacon to crumble over the pie later. Measure the drippings to see how much butter to add to equal 1/4 cup, and return to the pan.

2. While bacon is crisping, open canned chicken and drain. Measure the liquid and add enough water to make 1.5 cups.

3. Place frozen veggies in microwave container with a half cup of reserved liquid and heat through (defrost and warm, don't cook). Drain into reserved liquid for the roux. This flavors the veggies of chicken, and the roux of the veggies, which allows this quick recipe to taste really made from scratch...

4. Over medium heat, add flour to the bacon drippings in the saute pan, and stir with a whisk until bubbly and slightly browned and without lumps. Couple minutes should be enough.

5. Pour in the liquid all at once, whisking briskly to mix well. Continue to whisk as the roux (gravy) thickens.

Now, mix the pot pie filling:

1. Gently add the chicken and vegetables to the roux (that's why I said large saute pan, but you could just toss it all into a big mixing bowl). Break up any very large chicken chunks, but not so much that it turns to mush. Bite sized pieces are appreciated by folks who are used to commercial pot pies that have only 1-2 bites of meat in them.

2. Crumble bacon pieces and sprinkle over the mixture.

To Assemble and bake the pie:

1. Carefully unwrap and unfurl one pie crust pastry and lay into the pie pan. If using the 12" pan, use your fingers to ease the crust up the sides to fit.

2. Pour the filling into the crust and mound it up in the middle if using the 10" pan. You can sprinkle the reserved bacon crumbles at this point, if you don't want to stir the filling too much before.

3. Spread the second crust on top and seal the edges well. Cut several slashes (chance to develop your artistic side) in the top to allow steam to escape and also to encourage any bubbling over to stay in the middle of the pie instead of running out the edge and onto the floor of the oven.

4. Bake at 350 degrees F in middle of oven for half and hour. Check doneness and if crust is turning brown too fast, add a foil shield. (Google it! I've never done it, myself, but some folks are picky about too brown crust on the edges...) Continue to bake another 15-30 minutes, depending upon several things (of course): type of pan, glass takes a bit less as it continues to cook after removing it from the oven; whether you use a baking stone (thanks, Celia, I love mine!) that helps cook the bottom crust and prevent sogginess, and also shortens cooking time.

5. Cool 15-20 minutes before serving -- otherwise you will serve lava temperature filling. It's good for leftovers, too, just not so flaky a pastry on reheating.

Et, voila!

Of course, if I have forgotten something, just let me know. :)

Love, MOM

PS, for the vegetarians? You can substitute coconut oil for the bacon fat and butter, increase the veggies, replace the water/broth with coconut milk, and leave out the chicken. This makes a wonderfully light (believe it or not) meal.

Think I'm there....

2009-04-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

26 SIGNS THAT YOU'VE ALREADY GROWN UP....pretty old as Internet viral goodies go. I got as far back as 2002 without finding an author, so whoever you are? Thanks for the giggle and groan!

1. Your potted plants stay alive. In my case, that is largely because over the years I have learned which plants will tolerate being forgotten, rarely being repotted, and just about never fertilized. There are a surprising number of this kind of plant out there.

2. Having sex in a twin-sized bed is absurd. Well, I have never tried to have coitus is such a spot, but snugging works. Sleeping, alas, does not. We once took a vacation on Mexican trains, which were then maintained by the government mainly for the poor. First class was 60 seats, for which they sold about 75 tickets and kids rode free, with two bathrooms, only one of which would be working when the train started out. Second class was essentially a cattle car. We went Pullman Class, which means you get to have your own compartment with two beds, a private (and working) toilet, a little leather bladed fan that works only when the train is in motion, and about a zillion wall switches. Instructions for all of it are on the wall in English, which would be no help to most Spanish speaking folks, but didn't matter since only two of them will likely work. Different ones in each compartment. Anyway, the point of this diversion was to describe the beds, typical pull down berths (the Mexican train cars those days were all 1920-40s US RR equipment, held together by thick layers of paint) and came with specific instructions, to wit: only one adult and two children, or two adults and one child, per berth. We decided the average Mexican rail passenger must be considerably smaller than we were!

3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge. Never did keep beer there. Did keep damp linen napkins and table clothes prior to ironing them. Dead Rats (a refrigerator cookie dough) and cloth covered bowls of friendship bread batter. Bag of tulip bulbs being cooled prior to planting. Oh. And the occasional petri dish of algae, or maybe a few body parts from dissection labs... Do you know, now I think on it, I never had much trouble with house guests snacking out of my fridge.

4. 6 am is when you get up, not when you go to sleep. Never an issue for me, as I was never a night owl. Only been awake all night on a few occasions: like when my son was born. And once when we spent the night in the airport at Tel Aviv, where they do not let you sleep.

5. You hear your favorite song on an elevator. Gasp! Don't you just hate that? Well, maybe if you can still remember all the words, it would be all right...........

6. You carry an umbrella. You watch the weather channel. Heh, some of the best shows on TV were on the Weather Channel, forget the weather! And generally, you can go for most of an hour before you are treated to a close up of murder being done.

7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of hookup and breakup. Not so sure of that. Ever hear of swinging 60s? Seems to make better tax sense to hookup as a senior citizen, these days. Not going there. Two husbands are enough! Definitely have no patience with live ins in looser arrangements, or even revolving doors. Of course, I still have one of those husbands, so it is not an issue. Yet.

8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 7. In whose world? I'm female. We don't get vacations! Get real, here: chores are everywhere. Only place you can be where you haven't any to speak of is a convalescent hospital...and I don't have the money for that! However, retirement has the bonus of being able to schedule when and how those chores get done...and being able to turn over and snuggle/doze off again when you wake up in the morning.

9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as 'dressed up.' Sure they do! And way more comfortable than heels and stockings, not to mention ties. Hey, remembering to put on some lipstick is serious dress up these days!

10. You're the one calling the police because those darn kids next door don't know how to turn down the stereo. Well, only because they can't figure out what to say to the 911 operator when Beethoven rocks the building from our place... What is more difficult to handle is those poor, deaf kids driving around with their car stereos cranked up enough to blow cows out of their lane. (Doesn't work on deer, alas. More on that another time.)

11. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you. Hmmmm. Shocking thing is that I am the oldest of my relatives still kicking. No, wait, I think there is one cousin still out there. None of my relatives told me that kind of joke, though there is some anecdotal evidence that I lacked the humor gene necessary to actually get the joke. My Dad used to tease me about how long it took me to get the point... But hey, is it my fault I didn't find out till college that his signature signoff as he went out the door, Hasta bananas, Buenos torpedos, wasn't Spanish?

12. You don't know what time Taco Bell closes anymore. True. I've switched to A&W. Or Steak'n'Shake. Hey, a hot date these days is a bacon double cheeseburger & fries, followed by a trip to the new library (in a rare and clever example of civic planning, it's a block down the street).

13. Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up. Former is true. Don't know about the latter, as we have not bought a new car. Last three have been used and we paid cash. (That should tell you right there how old we are!!)

14. You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonald's. Not applicable. No dog. No cat. Don't wanna be the one who has to walk them in what the weather around here is all year long. And have never lived with critters larger than a Budgie indoors with me 24/7. Not sure I could take the smell. When I did have cats and dogs, they lived mostly outdoors. I did not have to clean up their poop. I did, however, make their food from scratch. I still do for my birds.

15. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt. Hey, sitting on the couch for any length of time makes my back hurt! And my feet swell. And requires strange noises in order to hoist myself up therefrom...

16. You no longer take naps from noon to 6 pm. Never did. Didn't need to stay awake late at night.

17. Dinner and a movie = the whole date instead of the beginning of one. Yep! Definitely a hot date = steak done just exactly right by dear husband, a good movie in front of the wood stove, a snuggle and some snickering (never mind the groaning when trying to get up to stagger off to bedtime). Now, if we leave home for said date, it would most likely be the afore-mentioned double bacon cheeseburger and visit to one of 17 local libraries...

18. MTV News is no longer your primary source for information. Sorry. Guess I never was that young.

19. You go to the drugstore for Ibuprofen and antacids, not condoms and pregnancy test kits. Boy, guess I was never young enough for those, either! I'm beginning to feel too old for this test.

20. A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer 'pretty good stuff.' Not applicable. Never drank wine. However, in other areas, this is very much true. For instance, not just any candy or soft drink will do, these days.

21. You actually eat breakfast foods at breakfast time. Nope. Not sure that I ever did after high school. Rather have leftover pizza, or steak, or chicken, than cereal. Nowadays, it is usually homemade soups, which require no thinking to pour into a bowl and nuke in the microwave. Add a home made roll or toasted bread, and there's a meal that required few working brain cells to prepare. Fixing eggs would be far too hazardous before the blood sugar is up!

22. Grocery lists are longer than macaroni & cheese, diet Pepsi and Ding Dongs. True. But Mac & cheese was never there, nor the Ding Dongs, by the time I was old enough to be making the list.

23. "I just can't drink the way I used to" replaces "I'm never going to drink that much again." Not applicable. But "Why did I think I could work on my taxes for 6 hours straight" and "What was I thinking, digging the sumac out of the garden; I'm not 20 any more!" are common exclamations. (The noises necessary to help sit or rise again from a chair do not count as exclamations. They are tools.)

24. Over 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work. Define work... I never played games until I retired. Cross my heart. Now we are beginning a business in the virtual world, Second Life. Some people still think SL is a game, so, um, is it work if it makes a living? Scarier still: is it taxable income if it never leaves the virtual environment?

25. You don't drink at home to save money before going to a bar. Never did. But I do sometimes snack before going out to dinner with family or friends, as their taste in restaurants runs to slightly more expensive places than A&W....

26. You read this entire list looking for one sign that doesn't apply to you. True. And even the ones whose specifics didn't apply, had applicable issues at heart. Sigh.

Guess I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to be now that I'm grown up.

But, surely, if I put it off long enough, won't I be able to get out of it??

Blast from the Past?

2009-04-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I cleaned the oven. For the first time in ... decades.

No, really, apart from wiping down the shelves and door window, I have not cleaned an oven in over 30 years. We built our house in 1976, including a self-cleaning oven of the 'continuous' sort -- which meant you didn't have to use oven cleansers or the fume inducing self-clean cycle. Just keep the window clean. Then, we moved to Michigan, first to apartment with gas oven, then to apartment with brand new self-cleaning (which again, I never initiated, not being able to handle the fumes of super heated oven coating).

So having to get down on my knees and try to remember even how to go about reaching all the parts was a challenge. Found a nice, non-smelly oven cleaner (Easy Off low odor) that really does the job! And on a cold oven, so not even any hot oven fumes. Looks pretty good for a 40 year old piece of equipment, if I do say so myself...
Of course, I'm 'toast' today. This morning was so stiff I could barely move, and complaining and whiny with pain and sheer exhaustion. Couldn't figure it out. Then remembered all that time clambering into the innards, on my hands and knees, no less!

Well, no wonder I'm stiff and cranky, LOL. But maybe this will help loosen me up? Hope so, since we are continuing to live here, and I will probably need to clean it in the future..... Sigh.

Every day I'm finding new reasons to justify hiring housekeepers. Never could understand the need when I was younger....

Meanwhile, it is Spring! See? Enid's Jack-in-the-Pulpit spikes coming up:
And those little green leaves? Those are wild geranium, which I rescued from muddy tracter track and stuck in the basket with the Jacks. Next to bloom after the Spring Beauties and rue anemone, it will keep blooming for a couple months -- sometimes all the way into Fall in the garden. They last the longest of the spring wildflowers.

Are we happy Winter is behind us??*

*Obviously a rhetorical question.

Did You know...

2009-04-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

...that a woman opened the new age of communication in 1844?

Me, either. Seems that Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and his good friend, Henry L. Ellsworth (son of Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth) had been trying since 1838 to get a $30,000 grant from congress to finance a trial telegraph line between Washington DC and Baltimore .

The bill eventually passed but not until the last five minutes of the 1843-44 session. Talk about a cliff hanger! Guess they didn't have money to invest in a good lobbyist...

Henry's seventeen year old daughter, Annie Ellsworth Smith, carried the news to Professor Morse the next morning, and he promised that she would send the first message. Imagine her dilemma! Her mother suggested the words from the Psalm, "What hath God wrought?" and history was made on May 23rd, in 1844.

"What hath God wrought? Well, he wrought a lot...in 1844!"*

* from the parody, 1844, by Chris Ruhe (? Can't find my copy of the words from 1967 or thereabouts. Anybody?)

Perspective is Everything...

2008-08-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

Had a small collision with reality this past weekend...

I was cleaning out the basement storage unit of our erstwhile apartment and came upon a couple little yellow bags of rock salt that DH has on hand to winterize the cars. Thinking that we were definitely going to need some this winter, since our new place out in the country is without maintenance staff all set to clear the walks and porch before we get up, I decided to add them to my pile of things to go.

Oof! I made it most of the 50 feet to the base of the stairs, then had to set one down and carry them one at a time the last few feet.

Talk about wimpy, decrepit old ladies! I couldn't even carry a couple 10 pound bags of salt!

I left them at the base of the stairs and went slowly up to our third floor apartment, completely spent and feeling hot and tired and sort of depressed. After a half hour of sitting with a glass of ice water and kibitzing my husband as he was packing his stuff, I went back down to get my MIL (who lives in a first floor apartment) and head on out to the 'ranch' so to speak. DH would follow later, having packed his car...

I left the many empty boxes and trash at the top of the basement stairs for DH to take out to the dumpster (it was just too far to walk any more that day) but I decided he would probably forget the two bags of salt I had told him were still at the bottom of said stairs. So, I went downstairs and brought them up, one bag at a time, one step at a time...lift bag, lift other bag, step up, lift bag, lift other bag, step up, etc.

Finally, I get to the top of three short flights (4 + 7 + 4) and then -- THEN! -- I take a good look at the little bags and discover:
All of a sudden I don't feel so wimpy any more.

I mean: ME, aged 60 something, carried not one, but TWO 25 pound bags -- at the same time! -- across a basement...

Heh. From that angle, I'm pretty hot stuff.

Still.

I Can't Make This Stuff Up!

2008-07-20T16:48:00.001-07:00

Okay, maybe I read too many journals, but I remember when this study was first reported. Now it has made it to the general media...

It seems that there is a one-celled parasite that specializes in rat brains. Only place it can live happily, it seems, and it reproduces there like mad -- asexually.

The only place where this parasite -- remember? It's one-celled -- can have sex, is in cat stomachs.

So, what happens is that when the parasite population in the rat's brain gets large enough, the rat's behavior towards predators -- specifically, cats -- changes dramatically. Not only does the rat not run from cats, it may run towards cats!

Are you following the implications here? A one-celled organism, when its population gets large enough, changes basic survival behavior of a multi-celled organism...

That's just freaky!

Rats aren't that different, physiologically, from us humans. No, really. That's why rats are used extensively in physiology research.

So, if that sort of thing can happen to rats, can it happen to me? Or you? (There are already some studies that suggest this particular organism does, in fact, cause some strange behaviors when it infects humans. See link below.)

Consider sneezes: they do spread cold germs pretty effectively......and they aren't generally considered a voluntary response, meaning we don't sneeze when we decide to do it...

Or how about sexually transmitted diseases? They are spread by promiscuous sexual activity, which in most cultures' lore is considered immoral even though it may in practice be common. Current preventive education even gives notion that promiscuity causes STDs.

What if an infection of genital herpes virus, for instance, when it reaches sufficient numbers in its host, actually influences behavior that will result in transmission of the disease cells? Will it soon be an acceptable excuse to wail: "It wasn't my fault. I couldn't help myself. Must have been the herpes.....?"

This is National Public Radio report which set off this blog. And the article that set them off.

And the link to an in depth article on Toxoplasmosis on the Emerging Infectious Diseases site .

See?

Just because you are paranoid about bugs eating your brain...

...doesn't mean they aren't.

Your only recourse is to develop strong supportive relationships, a whole network of family and friends you can trust when they tell you something. The more eyes and ears and perspectives you can rely upon, the healthier you will be.

Because it is clear that one person, looking from inside the envelope, really can't see the 'big' picture.

But we can get by, with a little help from our friends!

Some Thoughts on Fashion

2008-06-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

(see more funny dog pictures)

As you may well remember from how I embarrassed you all in your teen years, my sense of fashion is not always in line with the current trends...

What you may not know is that I actually tried a lot of that female stuff -- make up, shaving legs, hair curlers (in my case to straighten out the curl), wigs -- and it just wasn't for me. Mainly, it took way too much time morning and evening to deal with make up and hair styles that my hair just wasn't designed to be.

Alas, in the 1960's my hair was way too curly to tease and paste into beehive hair sculpture. Then in the 1970s, when long straight locks partly covering the face (ala Veronica Lake of old movies) were all the thing, I couldn't do that, either. And forget the smooth, gleaming pageboy style: mine was too curly!

On my twentieth birthday, I actually went into a department store to the make up counter and took all their advice and bought a bunch of stuff, which I tried diligently to use. But that only lasted about two weeks.

At that time, I was in college studying for a biology degree, which meant I had lots of 3 hr science labs, and was in class from 8am to 6pm four days a week. Plus half days Fridays and Saturdays. There was just no time in my schedule for regular meals, let alone make up! If I hadn't been living at home, where Mom fed me a decent dinner every night, I don't know what would have happened to me.

I know that you girls were sort of shocked about my not shaving my legs, but back when I would have learned how to do so, we had pretty lousy equipment, which meant hours of work every week, and pain -- plus, there was the issue that as a field biologist out in fields a lot, it pays to be able to feel what's crawling up your pants leg before it bites you! Without hair on your legs, you can't feel 'em.

Eventually, I looked up from my books and microscope long enough to notice women's lib and other liberating ideologies and realized that shaving body parts (which is very extreme these days, compared to back then) is sort of kinky.

I mean, the desired effect seems to be that a woman should look like she is prepubescent -- that is, like an 8 year old. Except that she must have big boobs, so the image would be lactating child. How weird is that?!

And it turns out that I have very sensitive skin, in addition to being too busy and too lazy to invest the hour or two every day to applying and removing all that paint. And by my 30's I was also allergic to most perfumes.

So, I have been spared much labor and expense, LOL.

I did, in my 40s, actually get my ears pierced. Most painful experience of my life, bar none (including childbirth, because that only lasts a few hours). It took six weeks before I was pain free, and the first couple nights I couldn't even sleep for the throbbing ears. I can't imagine what it would have been like if I had actually developed an infection! And to think, I was assured by everyone that it either didn't hurt at all, or would only sting a bit for a few days. Hah!

For about a dozen years I wore lovely ear rings, but once I quit working, I felt no need to put on jewelry, and mostly forgot about the holes in my ears. And even if I did want to start wearing jewelry again, there is the memory of all that pain to deter me from trying to reopen the holes...

The current fashion of punching holes in other parts of the body does not entice me. Too much clinical biology, I guess, to want to encourage infection (which I see very often in young people who either didn't do the piercing correctly, or fail to maintain a good standard of cleanliness).

The comedian George Carlin says it well (from his book, Brain Droppings): "...the piercing movement is off to a good start, and I like the idea behind it: self-esteem through self-mutilation. I've always said, when in doubt, punch a hole in yourself."

Perhaps good self-esteem and personal hygiene go hand in hand, and many of the folks most pierced show other evidence of very poor self-esteem...but I'm only going by what I see on the street. What is amazing to me is that this generation of teens has people in it who are into the clothing options from MY teen years! Hippy, flower child, goth, beatnik, etc. The only changes they seem to have made is to make it a bit more extreme than my parents would have allowed, and to add electronics.

But maybe kids in Ann Arbor are from wealthier families than my friends and I were, LOL. Not only did our parents have say over what we wore, they also refused to buy all the coolest fashions for us. We were deprived of expensive clothing and shoes that we would just outgrow in 3 months -- and, we were required to take care of the clothes we did have!

And grunge was not tolerated, unless we were painting the barn or cleaning out the basement. Your family had a community standing that must be maintained, and one inflexable rule was that children must not give anyone cause to think they or their family, were "shif'less and no 'count."

Perhaps things have changed. Then again, maybe not. Much of the muttering I do sounds a LOT like what I heard my parents and grandparents growling, back in the day...

Maybe I'm just caught up in the generation gap, just like my parents were, just like their parents, and their parents, and theirs...

Second Thoughts on Second Life (followed by thirds & more, no doubt)

2008-06-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Well, I have now had some time to familiarize myself with the medium, the machinery and the process of developing a new 'sense of self' -- which means learning to fit into a self image that cannot be the same as what I see in the mirror each morning. No small task, at my age! (But I do love the hair!! And the swirling dresses...)

Because, it seems to me, having struggled to feel even slightly comfortable moving arms and legs that are not attached to me in real life, that really, whether the body is in Second Life or first life, it is just another avatar.

And as far as our brains can see and figure it out, life is ALL Second Life. We are who we think we are, and whether we act in the real world or a simulation, the brain/mind thinks it is the same.

Case in point: dancing. I do not know how to tango, and have never had the chance to learn in real life. It may even be impossible for me physically to do so at this late a date.

But I regularly go dancing in Second Life with my husband, in lovely dresses, great hair, and with a skill and grace not matched in the real world.

When we finish, as far as I can tell, my brain (and my heart) thinks we really went dancing! True, I'm not as tired, and my feet don't hurt as much as they surely would, if I had been wearing such silly high heels, but I feel wonderful!

And we are not limited to going to a dance hall or party. We can go some place lovely and private -- and not practical for dancing in real life -- such as the beach at midnight....

This phenomenon makes me wonder how many other activities and learning could transfer in the same fashion. (Considering the popular notion that the 'game' is supported largely by cybersex, one could worry some!)

It can be particularly valuable, I think, for shy people to practice social skills. How about a place to try out public speaking, hone our political/sales pitches, try out a new fashion statement? Living out one's fantasy life is surely the most popular activity in Second Life, and not everyone has always wanted to be a madam and run a brothel, LOL.

And, of course, it is immensely popular with folks who are physically, socially or emotionally limited in real life. Hey, you can walk, run, dance, hold leadership positions in a group or business, and even fly in Second Life! You can be six feet tall and a hunk -- or a windup doll, troll, elf, fairy, knight, dragon, robot -- or even a piece of furniture!

You can fly a plane, sail a boat, drive a train, lead a dance group, open up your own coffee shop, even make a nice income in real life designing and selling clothing or furniture used in Second Life.

The most exciting aspect for me at the moment (apart from playing dress up in lovely clothes and hair, of course) is the shear variety of humanity available for interaction. At any one time, there are upwards of 50,000 people on line in Second Life. These people speak lots of languages, are different ages and backgrounds and nationalities, but they gather in interest groups, some of which overlap with mine.

Dancing, chatting, making music, taking in a concert, listening to a speaker, exploring a new park, building a house, (going shopping!), giving a poetry reading...the activities are endless (and not all about sex). Lawyers and psychiatrists have office hours. Self help groups convene. Yoga, Tai chi and other religious and meditative activities are available, often in special gardens or buildings designed for them. All of this 24 hours a day (barring computer and internet glitches, of course).

So, if you are fan of New Orleans jazz, for instance, you can get together at a jam in the French Quarter, without having to travel or pay much attention to time of day. You can talk to a Dane, a South African, a street musician from NOLA, and you have expanded your horizons tremendously.

That is just SO cool!

Granted, I do not hang out or visit most of what's happening in Second Life. I am not interested in everything that goes on. But then, I'm not interested in most of what many people do in Real Life, either. Hey, I don't even watch TV -- let alone race cars, write new computer code and scripts, go hunting, run for congress, go to bars or rock concerts, run a bar or organize rock concerts, climb mountains, jump out of planes, or engage in sex with strangers!

But I do love to go dancing with my honey out on Cape Cod SL....

Waiting for the Teapot

2008-04-10T07:44:00.001-07:00

What are teapots, you say? And why would one want to watch for them?

Well, that is an understandable question, seeing how young you are :) But honest, computers did not always multi-task, or work in background mode, or process as quickly as new games machines do today. And the screensaver would come on many times while you waited, unable to do anything else.

So many happy hours have I spent, in the 'Good Ol' Days,' while waiting for DOS engines to complete whatever task I had asked some piece of software to do...

See: I'm old. Way old in computer terms, since I began with Timex Sinclair that had a whopping 2k of memory and attached to my black and white TV... Worked my way up through Tandy 2000 to DOS 2.

Then I switched to Macs when we went overseas. Then back to DOS (5 by this time) when we returned. Made a semi-disastrous move to DOS 6, then Windows 3, 3.1, 3.11. (I skipped Windows 95 entirely, although some clients did use it, badly.) Other computers in the family ran 98, NT, 2000, me (by which you can see that games were never the reason or function for the computers, LOL.)

Once I did some OCR scanning of county documents (100s of pages) that took roughly a minute and a half per page to scan and 5 more minutes to run character recognition and save as text in Windows 3.11 -- which left me to spend hours every day for a week watching Microsoft's 3D pipes screensaver....

I saw lots of teapots then. It was cool!

I loved my pipes. They were beautiful, they were fascinating and relaxing, and helped deal with the very natural inclination to hurl the computer out the window.

These were PCs, remember, not MACs. MACs did not get mistreated, because they rarely abused their users. That may change, now that Apple has started incorporating PC stuff. :(

Believe me, Pipes was the ONLY thing I regretted about moving back to MACs several years ago!

And now? Now, thanks to my brother the computer guru, I have a PC specifically designed to run Second Life (because my current MAC is still running OS 9 and OS X.2.8 since I refuse to upgrade to an Mac/PC mule)...

This generic box runs fast, has AMD instead of Intel chips inside, does NOT have the neon lights and chrome typical of 'games' machines, and uses Windows XP (because, he says, Vista is too new to have the bugs worked out enough to run games well).

AND IT HAS PIPES!!! Oh, the joy, the joy!

Of course, it rarely ever takes long enough doing something for the pipes to come on, unless I'm watching a video on YouTube, or reading some long blog post... Sigh.

And now I have heard that it might not even HAVE the teapots any longer!

What insanity is this? Some stupid notion that, for security reasons, all the little undocumented code (referred to as Easter eggs) had to be removed. Snort. Like software manufacturers are going to take out all their back doors!

Not very likely, even if we could tell -- but they probably have removed our little harmless, entertaining teapots!

Rats!

But no; wait. There are rumors that the teapots may still be there in Windows XP. Nobody who reports this on the Web has actually seen one themselves, of course.

But hope doth spring eternal....

Okay, If You're Tired of Knitting....

2008-02-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

...there are other things to do with yarn, LOL.

Today's edition of the Skull a Day Blog, for instance... And every one of the creations, about one every day, is different! Take the tour and see for yourselves

Sigh. When do these people get any chores done? Surely that much creativity must take up the whole day!

Life Goes On...

2008-01-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

No posts this past couple weeks...thought I was dealing just fine with the illness of a family member, trying to be helpful to someone who gave every indication of not wanting that help, and juggling tasks in regular life to help her mother deal with the whole distressing business.

And Thursday night she died, pretty much as I was expecting although there was some denial on the part of just about all family members, which meant we were up until midnight and after. Followed by all day Friday trying to sort out what to do next, since she had not made any plans or provisions...

Without a Will, trust, insurance -- or even any willingness to discuss much about what she wanted for funeral or financial arrangements -- means that family are up the creek!

Actually, having had some experience in the past few years with estate follow through, I thought I had remained calm and steady..... But today I am just exhausted. And all that has been arranged so far is the mortuary!

More Extreme Knitting...

2008-01-16T04:17:00.000-08:00

What can I say? This may be a 'movement'........ Meanwhile, Etsy has a lot of other neat stuff on her blog/page.

Hey, this excuse works for me!

2007-12-22T17:49:00.000-08:00

moar funny pictures

Okay.

Want.

Sigh.

Retirement Planning...

2007-12-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

I'm coming to realize that probably the main reason I never actively engaged in financial planning was that I never really believed that I would need to retire. (Another strong reason is a total lack of trust in financial institutions -- no doubt inherited from my parents, who had lost their innocence about banks and insurance during the Great Depression.)

I've always believed that I could continue to sell my skills (which, admittedly, are mostly mental, not physical) for as long as I needed to. It never occurred to me that people retired because they had to, because they just couldn't do the work any longer.

This is a very shocking realization! But the truth pops up to remind me daily that I am no longer in my twenties, and I can't keep the pace that I'm sure I remember I once could. (Of course, the memory is going, too, so I could be wrong about that.)(My sentiments, exactly. I don't care if it's good for me; I didn't sign up for it!)

My life has changed so much that when I take out the albums and study the record of family life therein, I actually wonder, "Who was that woman!?"

Followed by the corollary, "Who am I now?"

It is a shock to look in the mirror and see a stranger -- moreover, a stranger I never expected to be. And learning how to be mortal at this late a date is proving a challenge, LOL.

So, how am I to go about planning for retirement, when that means I will probably not be doing much of anything I have done before. Since I am less physically and mentally fit than I had planned, and probably not going to stop that deterioration, what am I going to be doing?

In short, what am I going to be when I grow up?

Do I change careers yet again? Do I consider retraining? Do I upgrade the computer and move into the 21st Century? Do I move to Mexico, or some other retirement community, where the cost of living matches my Social Security check? (That's assuming I believe in SS, which I don't and never have had any trust would be there for me. Alas, current events are supporting my paranoia...)
Truthfully, the old eagerness for new places and new ideas and new learning just isn't there. I have no enthusiasm for reentering the love/hate relationship of learning new computer software (or I'd upgrade to Ubuntu and open source).

This reluctance may not be entirely my fault, or the result of aging. It used to be that change happened far more slowly, and there was time to get used to the idea. I could actually become proficient in a software application before it went to the next version!

The world actually may be moving too rapidly for me to follow any longer. And seems to be going directions I don't much like, for that matter. I'm just hanging on by my fingernails!

It does not help my ego that I grew up hearing these very complaints from my parents and all their siblings as they reached the age I am now.

The trick for me, daily, is to resist turning into a crochety old woman, complaining and whining about some decline from the Good Old Days... This is a challenge, too, seeing as that is exactly how I remember my aunts and uncles! I have role models to fight off.

I need to remember...
This is only the Fall of my life...

Not the Winter...

I can still rise up anew, and perhaps like the butterfly, I don't have to plan the details, but simply go with the flow.

And trust the process!

Make a Snowflake...

2007-12-15T06:16:00.000-08:00

This is SO cool! (smile) Paper cutting for the 'Net...

Thanks to Nancy for pointing us to it...

Click on the icon, takes you to the site. Click on create a snowflake and play. Or click on the little white dots falling gently to see what others have created.

Allow for the possibility that you won't get the chores done immediately this morning.......

You are not broken...

2007-12-07T16:52:00.001-08:00

(Bad hair day??)

In my frustration with mental and physical constraints on my activities of late, I may have overlooked a critical aspect of this life, which is learning how to define myself by who I am, instead of what I do.

When I'm busy doing a zillion things, I feel competent and useful -- and thus lovable. When I am sidelined (by comparison to past experience) I can start doubting my worthiness.

Religion teaches us that God created us imperfect, and loved us anyway. Believing that is a challenge, but my husband said something recently that has really helped me.

He reminded me of the piano that used to sit on a makeshift stage in the dining room at LouHelen Baha'i School in Michigan, USA. Family retreat sessions there often included a sort of amateur night performance on one of the evenings, and the kids were especially encouraged to share their talents.

In those days, the piano was not regularly tuned, and so could sound pretty bad for any child presenting his recital piece. On this particular evening, several small children had proved it was really out -- until an older music student headed for Juilliard in a few days sat down to play.

The difference in sound was stunning! You couldn't tell it was the same instrument.

The point being that a skilled musician can make beautiful music even with a poor instrument.

So when I was moping that I had become a mostly useless tool in my old age, or at very best, a considerably dulled or broken one -- my lovely husband said,

"You are not broken if God can still make music with you. If you can add a little more love to the world -- if you can increase the gladness in the hearts of those around you -- you can still move the world."

I hope that when you are feeling tired, frustrated, overwhelmed and inadequate for the task, you will remember that God can work miracles with any tool, if only that tool is at hand. Be there, align yourself with the Greater Good, and you will be useful, too.

It's a promise.

One of my fav blogs....LOLCats

2007-11-27T17:33:00.000-08:00

moar funny pictures

What's on the Needles at the moment...

2007-11-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

I knit. A lot. With needles, on machines, looms and frames.

But mostly, of late, on needles -- or round looms when I'm in a hurry. In fact, hats and scarves make up so fast on round looms that it probably takes longer for me to blog about them (take the pix, process them for on screen, put them up, write the text, arrange them artfully, etc., etc.) than to actually finish the project!

And I do like using the looms for very bulky yarns, such as Lion brand chenille Thick & Quick.
Really plays to my need for 'quick fixes,' LOL.

However, (because some members of my family feel that my activity might be getting out of hand) I decided to take some pix of works in progress (WIP) that are currently littering my living room around the glide rocker. I'm not listing the ones in the bedroom, on my crafts table, in my purse, in the car, or in the woven hamper that sits behind the glide rocker.... (That's too many pix!)

First, a very plain, garter stitch scarf, in Lion chenille Thick & Quick.Good for meetings, bus stops, doctor's offices, any waiting time, as I don't have to actually look at what I'm doing very much. It has been finished since I took this pic.

A baby blanket in basket weave stitch, using a thick luscious chenille which I bought in bulk on eBay. It came without tags, but could be Lion brand.

The Besotted Scarf. Not working so well in Jiffy, because the Xs don't show between the Os. Darn. May end up frogging it and doing something else with this yummy, bulky, soft yarn. The pattern was intended for worsted weight wool...

A magic scarf, on needles, in Lion FunFur. Doesn't knit up nearly as fast as the large round Knifty Knitter loom pattern, and I don't know if it will be as magic. It has more stitches...

A laptop bag working in corn stitch -- a variety of afghan crochet using double pointed afghan hook sold as CrochetKnit and KnitCrochet, depending upon brand. The yarns were from a yard sale bag of tagless wool skeins that I think were meant for rug hooking. Sturdy, slightly harsh wool, which may felt up nicely. Or not. Either way, it will make good padding for a new MacBook.... Worked flat, folded and sewn.

A dish rag, with squirrel picture, Sugar'n Cream 100% cotton worsted weight yarn. Dish rags are new to me, but am I hooked! They work up very fast, in less than 2 hours -- if my hands would allow working cotton that long at one sitting. Cotton has no 'give' in it, so makes hands hurt. It is endlessly entertaining watching the pattern emerge. And when knitting a mystery knitalong (KAL), you are searching each row to see if you can figure out what the design is going to be. Much fun!

Two dish cloths at once, with the instructions for each cloth on the same row. Don't try to figure it out in your head! Just do it, and then it makes sense, LOL. So far, one of them has two flowers and the legs of what might be letters. The other has one flower and the letters E N D. The way the KAL works is that about 10 rows of knitting instructions are posted each day, so you can knit along...

The beginnings of yet another DoRag. These little roll-brim hats in mohair/acrylic fingering yarns go fast, are knit flat on large needles, sewn up, and have a cute little tail on top that you tie in a knot. I've made a bunch, using up odd bits of skeins left over from my sister's stash. (That means the yarn is more than 20 years old!)

The pattern is from a book of easy knit projects for teens, which, naturally I can't remember at the moment. Looks too lacy and insubstantial to be warm, but boy, are they hot! 87 yo MIL uses hers to keep her head warm at night.

Oh my, I'm sleepy! It is past my bedtime, but Blogger is a bit slow tonight. Probably everyone in the world is online, seeing as it is Thanksgiving's Eve eve. No school tomorrow and most people are leaving town. Whole 'Net is slow...

Thoughts on Second Life...

2007-11-20T12:34:00.001-08:00

Well, of course, those of us who have passed the climacteric are already in our third life -- 1)childhood, 2) childrearing, 3) maturity (er, hopefully)...

I finally went to see what all the talk was about Second Life, which is a multiuser online game setting that has 30,000 folks and more playing at any one time.

[For those of you unfamiliar with multiuser, real time gaming: Second Life provides a venue driven and designed by the participants, for the purpose of living out their fantasies -- to one extent or another. That can seem to some of us like a chance to get a bit out of hand, perhaps, but it's probably a lot safer than acting out in Real Life, LOL. What is particularly exciting about this kind of game is that thousands of people can interact in many ways that would not be available to them in RL. To see a video presentation go to this page, and click on 'video'...]

Friends, relatives and online correspondents have been chatting up SL for a long time. (3 years in the computer world being practically an eon) I went and took a look at the beta release several years back, but opted out largely because it cost a monthly fee in the beginning. Now, of course, my MAC is too old to run it; but one of our younger PCs will play. And, it is now FREE for basic playing.

One of the attractions for people who have talked to me is the freedom to wander about and strike up conversations with anyone who looks interesting. (By moving the cursor over their avatar, personal profile info is available, such as screen name, age, interests, etc.)

Many people do not feel safe, for whatever reasons, to just wander into a crowd in real life and just start talking. Particularly if the person they are considering talking to happens to be dressed as a giant purple-striped white tiger! Or a Goth queen. Or a tatoo-covered giant in black leather and chains. Or even a gauzy green fairy, complete with wand that shoots sparkles...

Or simpler, yet -- how many would be willing to stroll about in a strange neighborhood or landscape, just looking at the view? Or walk into someone else's house, garden or shop, just to see how it was designed. (In Second Life, if the owner/creator didn't want you to, it would be private and you wouldn't be able to, as I understand it.)

No, it appears to me that SL has indeed taken on a life of its own, growing hourly as business, politicians, religions and educational institutions begin to set up shop. (Linden Labs, the source, presently has 30,000 servers, and still experiences periods when too many users want to be there and it slows things down or crashes altogether.)

What is the point of all that computer power?

Say you had always wanted to be a pointy eared waif of a female, who could dress in veils and maybe even have wings? Design your avatar and think up a name and away you go.

Always wanted to open a coffee shop where poets could hang out, maybe have jazz concerts on a few nights a week? Design it and they will come: the customers, the poets, the musicians...

Real life musicians, poets, and speakers of all kinds (as well as wannabes who are practicing their skills) are visiting and/or setting up shop in SL. Real money is changing hands, here, in such large amounts that it boggles the mind (millions of US dollars a day). Politicians will no doubt frequent the place, as the election draws nearer, and there has already been one debate, at least.

However, while I can see the potential attractions, especially for trying out new behaviors, learning new things, interacting with lots of new people who might live across the planet -- and, of course, the potential for negative stuff, as well, is no different from any other medium --

For me, Second Life just doesn't click. Yet. I have been trying to figure out why for a couple days, and this is what I think so far:

Firstly, maybe I don't need a second life for socializing. I mean, I already wander about and talk to anyone who looks interesting, LOL. It never occurs to me that I shouldn't stop to admire someone's lovely garden, or interesting house. Or beautifully tricked out old Dream Machine (motorcycle) in the mall parking lot! Or even the puppy who is walking his person through my neighborhood.

Perhaps I'm not exactly in the norm...? I don't know, except that I do remember seriously embarrassing my teenage children (you know who you were) in several past episodes...

Like that time outside a restaurant where two great big gorgeous red motorcycles were parked in shining fingerprintless perfection. One of them had a yellow rubber ducky stuck in the chrome spokes of its front wheel. Well, you know I hung about and asked the middle-aged biker dude what that was about!

The other problem I have with the game is that its graphics, however superb and steadily improving they are, still aren't as detailed as real life. I end up feeling sensory deprived. Not only are the incredibly complex levels of natural substance missing, but the density of information is only about 1-2% what it would be standing on the beach in RL.

Here's a screen shot Uploaded to Flickr! on November 17, 2007, by Andromega:It is stunningly beautiful, one of the best I've seen, but not yet the norm.

And here's another outstanding one, Uploaded to Flickr! on November 20, 2007, by Wildstar Beaumont

But here is real life -- a gate to the Matthaei Botanic Garden on a sunny, summer day:

Or, how about this Christmas amaryllis, smiling on all comers?

Apparently, I use a lot of different senses to collect information about the world around me, especially when having a conversation. The SL avatars have improved tremendously, but they still can't show the level of emotion and non-verbal cues that make me feel comfortable.

So, I guess my heart isn't broken that my old (4 years) MAC doesn't handle the game. By the time I upgrade, I bet Second Life will be even more mind boggling in its growth, in its technology, and in its community.

Meanwhile, it is rainy day, 20 degrees warmer than yesterday, full of fresh scents and cool mists and the last of the leaves falling off the trees and painting the lawns and streets in yellows and reds and oranges and four kinds of rusty browns...

I'm gonna go for a walk around the neighborhood and talk to people who are out doing the same thing, or else raking leaves on their tree lawns!

Rethinking yesterday...

2007-11-14T04:34:00.000-08:00

Much of my stress and distress about looking back at my life, the decisions I made or didn't, the goals I achieved and didn't, not to mention how all material things change and otherwise laugh at our attempts to make them permanent -- comes from perspective, I think.

Well, it's an epiphany I had this morning during prayers and meditation... That maybe I'm looking to the wrong things for evidence of success.

My husband's blog has an article today that really hits home:

Thoughts on the View from 'Over the Hill'

2007-11-11T06:56:00.000-08:00

I've been putting together my will and testament lately. The will portion is done, essentially, being concerned with just the material things, and therefore pretty straightforward.

But I'm finding the testament to be challenging. I'm stressing over what have I to testify, after all these years I have lived, so far.

(Wipe those smiles off your faces! Your time is coming. Soon.)

It is never a comfortable thing to feel one's life might have been spent largely in vain -- but there you are. It has taken me this long to wonder about how successful I have been at whatever it was I figured life was about!

Not that the things I've done were the issue -- no matter that I thought they were -- though there are, of course, some that I regret. It is more that my motivations need to be examined. And -- perish the thought! -- may have been faulty...

Good deeds -- or bad ones, for that matter -- are colored by why we do them. At this point in my life, I'm questioning this issue much more than ever before.

Never let it be said that I am a quick study...
Perhaps menopause provides (forces?!) time for reflection. It's very hard on the ego to realize that all that deep thinking I thought I was doing, wasn't. That maybe I wasn't such hot stuff as I believed? (Or worse, that everybody else knew it before I did!)

"Time makes all men poets," some famous person, whose name escapes me, said. If poets are people who help the rest of us see what hardly anyone else had noticed (or admitted to), then I can see the pundit's point. Because I've had lots of time recently, since I can no longer fill my days doing a million things at once. This can be a major problem for someone who has evidently defined herself by what she was doing...

The truth is that I have never been much for poetry. Stuff never made any sense to me.

Until lately?

Not that I have developed 'eyes to see,' or anything so profound as that -- but lately some poets seem to be speaking to me directly. "Killing me softly, with his song," to quote Joanie Mitchell.

Baha'u'llah, 19th century Prophet of the Baha'i Faith, said that, "True loss is for a man to live his life in ignorance of his true self."

Looking back, it seems to me that I have spent a good deal of time and energy trying NOT to see my true self. Which is very hard on the ego, since I think -- thought -- I was so well developed and knowledgeable...

But denial takes energy. And even for redheaded supermoms, the energy eventually wanes... "We are not pleased," to quote queen Victoria. (Wasn't she also a redhead??)

True, I've spent much time and energy trying to be good -- or, at least, do good -- but looking back forces me to wonder at my reasons. And whether those reasons are worthy. Not always a very comfortable contemplation.

Why is it important to me that I do good, for instance? Well, on those occasions, of course, when I have managed it!

Did a good deed happen as the natural consequence of being good? Or because I wanted the world (and specific people) to think me good?

Was my intent to please God -- or some more temporal authority -- or did I actually have loftier goals? (And does it matter? I mean, this self contemplation thing might just be avoiding the chores this morning...)

Maybe not even saints are completely free to be good for goodness' sake. Maybe we are all still being and doing good mostly to please someone else. Certainly, that is how as children we learn to be and do everything. What does a two year old know of tooth decay and street traffic and how disorder in one's life causes depression?? They have parents for that.

No, the desire to please, the need to be loved, may eventually transmute into habits that are good and good for us -- at least as parents we hope this for our kids. But it looks to me that as adults, much of what we do may still be based on old habits of thinking and doing. We can hope these are beneficial, but we haven't actually thought them out.

How much of that basis is still just hoping that our parents will love us? Or, for the religious, that God will love us? Having been raised by humans does pretty well train us that to be loved, we must be "good," however that is locally defined.

True religion teaches that we are already loved by our Creator, and the purpose of being good is found elsewhere. (False religion teaches us that we have to do things to please God and receive the reward of being loved.)

So, if we are loved, in all our imperfections, then why worry about being/doing better?

Maybe because we remember -- and grow -- better if we discover truth for ourselves? From my own experience, that is certainly true! I never paid much attention to 'The Oldies' giving me advice...I mean, they were OLD!

And should I expect you, my children, to listen to me? Even if I put it in writing that you will have to read at least once, after I am gone from this temporal life.

I love you all --
the one I birthed,

those acquired by marriage,

the fosters, and the many others in looser arrangements --

all those who have come to me over the course of my life.

I want you to have lofty goals, to succeed, to be healthy and happy. There are things I managed to learn (mostly the hard way) -- stuff about how it works, stuff that I can see and that maybe you don't -- that I'd like to share.

The question I now have is about how much I can guide, how much power I might have to help or dissuade from errors, or even to point out road signs. Not only where I might prevent some pain --

But also whether prevention is either necessary or good. It is a mystery.

What if, like me, people have to fall in order to believe the advice to watch where they are stepping?

There! See how easy it is for me to get off topic? So much less threatening to worry about someone else than to examine myself further.

Nope. This blog is supposed to be about me and about helping me see where I am right now (which requires some looking back to see where I've been).

That I might help or entertain others in the process is not supposed to be the focus.

But how many of my posts reflect "me" avoidance? Surfing the Web for neat stuff is more fun! Further, sharing current events and family history is probably way more interesting to you kids than my ruminations about self discovery.

I am hoping, however, that some of you must surely be more self aware than I have been all of my life. Perhaps my experience will save you some time...

Or maybe only give you some insight into why I might have done some of those things you thought peculiar!

Admit it! There have been times when you wondered what I could have been thinking.
And I don't mean just when you were teens and found your parents deeply embarrassing.

(Although, looking at the picture albums, I really did justify that sometimes... Who was that woman, anyway?! Like me and the friendly (library) gopher snake here...or me and mini skirts there.)

That's what I need to figure out in order to finish my will and testament. The testament being where one gets to say a bunch of things nobody wanted to listen to while one was alive...LOL.

A testament is a way of bridging generations, of making certain that nothing is left unsaid. Like explaining one's successes and failures, one's goals and the progress made on them. Being sure to tell loved ones that they are loved, were always loved, (or not) and specifically why.

Especially why. I was so busy surviving day to day with a dying husband and an unfinished house and two businesses and 5 kids under 16, that I missed a lot of your teens. I didn't tell each one of you just why you are so special, and how proud I am of you.

Or what a bounty it was to have you in my life.

Before I can write a successful testament, I need to go back and really look at that life. Explaining to you all is helping me to figure it out.

You can skip the ramblings and just look at the pix if you want.

Done. Well sort of, mostly. Maybe...

2007-11-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

The display house at Matthaei Botanic Gardens has been closed for most of the summer, replacing the roof and temperature control systems and mechanicals. The promise was for September 1st reopening, then October 1st, and finally November 1st.
We survived the wait with many acres of spring wildflowers and summer annual and perennial plantings.

Only the tropical and temperate zones are open, but it is clear that even those areas are still in process of renewal and refurbishing. Doesn't look like this at the moment:
This 50 year old green house has both permanent and rotating displays (fed from several other succession areas). Some of the trees are -- were -- at the roof. It is the mainstay of our 'natural' exposure when the weather is inclement, or we aren't feeling up for the hike around the miles of gardens and paths.
(Like this meadow at the edge of a Michigan wildflower planting in an open woods, which is a quarter mile walk from the road.)

The weather being definitely Fall yesterday, complete with cold wind and rain/snow showers (meaning only in the air) MIL and I went to check out the greenhouse project. There was some anxiety over what state we would find the permanent plantings.

She hates to weed or prune living things -- which is largely why her urban acre plus in the middle of Cleveland suburb is all gone to woods:
This is the front yard. When they bought the property 50 some years ago, it had one little oak tree, a couple rose bushes and two spindly cherry trees...

And this Pennsylvania farm of nearly the same age is no longer farmable, LOL.

Much cheered to discover that the $5 entrance fee has been rolled back to 1968 price of $3 (even tho MIL doesn't have to pay because she has reciprocal access due to being member of several botanic garden associations) we soon found our worries were mostly for naught. Having the extra couple months has allowed for much regrowth from the extensive pruning away from the work areas. The new ceiling includes roll back shade cloth, which effectively lowers it several feet. There will need to be a lot more regular pruning to keep the trees from interfering with the mechanicals.

It looks like the loquat trees will recover, but not fruit for a while, which is probably okay, since Michiganders don't know what they are! The Zapotas and some of the larger palms are gone completely. Not to mention several enormous Euphorbs in the desert section. They will be missed! Guess the loss is more noticeable there than in the tropical and temperate zone plantings...

The orchid display is just starting, and the chrysanthemums were in full swing:
A cascading mum (more than 4 feet of cascade!). The sign explains that staff and volunteers work all summer to train these plants into this shape. The thick woody stems make it look years old!

Ditto the bonsai mum. Apparently, this is a great plant to start with if one is interested in learning the art. You can see your results in a single summer.

Do not lose heart! This is one of their 'instant' gardens. All these mums were grown in pots in the succession houses and carefully arranged together for the show.

There were so many varieties and colors! Here's a close up:

In the temperate house there is a dripping fern wall above a sunken pool inhabited by some koi who are seriously filling it! They have grown considerably since we saw them last. These are the two biggest ones, about 27 inches!
There are 4 others almost as big in this 10x4x3 foot puddle...none the worse for all the construction over their heads.

And there is more work to do and plants to grow and regrow. We will not be bored this winter, as there will be progress to observe every week.

It is so nice to have such a garden show to visit when one's own plantings are sleeping over the winter! And even with gas prices rising, it is way cheaper than going to a movie...probably healthier, too.

Too Good Not to Share...

2007-10-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

My friend Kathy, in New Zealand, forwarded this gem to me this morning.

Made my day.

Beauty of Math!

1 x 8 + 1 = 9
12 x 8 + 2 = 98
123 x 8 + 3 = 987
1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876
12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765
123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654
1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543
12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432
123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321

1 x 9 + 2 = 11
12 x 9 + 3 = 111
123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
123456 x 9 + 7 = 1111111
1234567 x 9 + 8 = 11111111
12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
123456789 x 9 +10= 1111111111

9 x 9 + 7 = 88
98 x 9 + 6 = 888
987 x 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 x 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 x 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 x 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 x 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 x 9 + 0 = 888888888

Brilliant, isn't it?

And look at this symmetry:

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111=12345678987654321

Now, take a look at this...

101%

From a strictly mathematical viewpoint:

What Equals 100%?

What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?

Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?

We have all been in situations where someone wants you to
GIVE OVER 100%.

How about ACHIEVING 101%?

What equals 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help

answer these questions:

If:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Are represented as:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

If:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R- K

8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

And:

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E

11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But:

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E

1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

THEN, look how far the love of God will take you:

L-O-V-E-O-F-G-O-D

12+15+22+5+15+6+7+15+4 = 101%

Therefore, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that:

While Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will
get you there, It's the Love of God that will put you over the top!

More on carrying the craft a bit too far....

2007-10-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

Here is the story behind it, and complete instructions -- for anyone who might just NEED to be making knitted pimento olives......we won't mention any names.

Or, perhaps your cell phone or iPod
needs a cozy sweater....

So, seriously, when do these peeps have the TIME to come up with this stuff?? It's all I can do to find time here and there in the day to knit a few rows on a scarf or a hat or dish cloth...

Of course, it could be my problem is that I gave up TV back in April, so I have no boob tube time for knitting... That's 6 hours a day for the average American (not that I ever managed to get that many, but maybe 2 hours a couple days a week.)

And all the kids are out of the house, so no knitting at PTA, little league, school assemblies, doctor's appointment waiting rooms...

Sheesh! I'm deprived of prime knitting time!

More stuff I found on YouTube, or...

2007-10-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

...how I spend the morning after bunging my shoulder because I was too lazy to move that chair so I could put the heavy box under the table.......... Some of us (name withheld to protect the guilty) have a long, mostly flat learning curve!

Meanwhile, it did give me an excuse to cruise the Web while the machines did my wash.

This link is to Pachelbel's canon in D interpetted on ancient oriental instruments. Hiphop background is added as a voice over. Quite different.

This link, however, goes to an ambitious group of young people who took Pachelbel's canon in D,

interpetted it for ancient oriental instruments,

and then added hiphop dancers, beatbox and DJ.

Stunning. Unbelievably complex -- how many hours it must have taken to shoot it!

And beautiful.

We Had Fun with Rubber Stamps...

2007-10-19T15:26:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, went over to a friend's house to make these gift tins full of cute little cards. Cheryl is a Stampin' Up demonstrator (you can see some of her sample projects on her web page) and has several classes, demonstrations and parties each week. We are talking serious about her business, here, but always full of fun and great ideas.

This particular session was on making a decorative tin to hold a series of little sentiment cards: get well, thanks, congrats, etc. In a matter of a couple hours, we ladies made them all.

The ladies ranged in age from capital 'O' to about second grade...
and most of us had played with rubber stamps before, but none of us had ever used Mod Podge or tried to decorate a tin box. Fortunately, Cheryl had made all the color selections for us to choose from, had precut the papers and ribbon
and provided several completed samples for us to use as models.We used a corner rounder punch to make the papers fit the top of the tins, used Mod Podge to glue them down, and to glue ribbon around the edge of the lid and another narrow piece of paper around the bottom edge. Then covered all with another coat of the decopoge stuff that really looks like thick white glue. It dries clear and makes a good sealer to protect the papers.

While the tins were drying, (which they did very quickly) we selected, stamped, colored, and glued together our cardlets with which to fill the tins. This actually took me much longer than assembling the tin, as I had to choose which colors and which stamps I wanted, as well as what colors I wanted to paint them (We used watercolor pens). Decisions always bog me down!

And voila!
I think I will make a few more to fill with other things...

Maybe this knitting stuff is getting out of hand...?

2007-10-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

I mean: I'm just wondering, here...
One of these nifty little cozies to prevent your snack from getting bruises in your pocket or back pack was $12.00. Then the NY Times ran an article and the demand jumped so much, she's raised her prices to $18.50.

Each. (Does not come with the apple.)

Yeah. I missed out on the pet rock, too.

Not the 'O' word again...!

2007-10-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

So, okay, I have been on a fitness gig, trying all summer to get back into shape after two years of being practically an invalid (when compared to previous lifestyle).

Fitness -- as in being able to come up the stairs (4 short flights from the parking lot) without feeling like I'm on the edge of 'the big one.' As in being able to walk a couple miles and still be able to do other things besides sit in a chair and knit so I can ignore being exhausted.

As in being able to exercise AND do the wash or go grocery shopping on the same day...

Nothing has worked. I am able to do maybe two things in a day, instead of only one, but I just can't seem to break the glass ceiling, plateau, or whatever it is that is keeping me down. I don't like this feeling that I can't even keep up with my 87 yo MIL!

So I went to a personal trainer Wednesday last. Actually, I didn't realize that was what she was; I thought I was going to be fitted with one of these exercise balls:
My cranio-sacral and massage therapist suggested I go there when I mentioned that I was considering getting one of those balls to 'strengthen my core,' only I didn't know how to tell which size I needed. (I am also not very clear on what my 'core' is, but if I could look like this girl the picture once again......)

Well, Ann-Margaret is one of these small, terribly energetic women (who also happens to be a power lifter) with boundless enthusiasm and conviction that the Egoscue system works.

She is so encouraging and convincing, that we spent about 2-1/2 hours altogether, measuring and analyzing my strengths and what areas needed work.

It was surprising to see how far out of alignment my arms and legs were, but I could certainly testify to how much effort it was to do anything, even walk! And how my knees were beginning to bother me, not to mention the ankle which I broke a few years back. And that my feet now hurt so much from 3 months of walking at least a mile a day, that getting up from a chair or out of bed in the morning hurts like blazes until they loosen up.

So much for the benefits of walking!

Anyway, she won't let me have an exercise ball until I get things back in balance. She gave me a series of deceptively gentle exercises, most of which are done lying down and which take about 20 minutes to do (mostly because it takes me a while to get up and down and find my glasses between reps to read which one comes next, etc.).
I'm to do them every day for the next two weeks...

I am now at that point in an exercise program where I wonder if I will live that long.

Ooo-ooo, I've been tagged! (Thanks, Marvin)

2007-08-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

Things You May or May Not Know About Me

A) Jobs I have had in my life:

Caring for a neighbor's chickens
Fast food sous-chef in a chicken place
Proctor for college exams
Office manager for architect
Psych services counselor in the California prison system
Counselor, adult learning skills, college level
Assorted temp office
Office manager, landscape architects

B) Movies I would watch over and over:

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Joseph
Sahara
Evolution
Down Periscope
Riverdance

C) Places I have lived:

California
Solomon Islands
New Mexico
Michigan

D) TV Shows that I watch:

None. We turned it off in April 2007. Haven't missed it.
News comes from NPR and 6 newspapers in 3 languages, online.

E) Some places I have been:

Most of the USA
Some of Canada
Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua
Airport stopovers in Hawaii, Figi, Paris, NY and Belize don't count
Israel

F) People who e-mail me (regularly):

Spammers warning me that my bank/eBay/PayPal account is closing unless I instantly tell them all my personal information.
Spammers selling me fake watches, mortgages and pharma.
Spammers offering enhancements of sexual organs I do not possess.
Spammers talking about who knows what, because it is in Chinese. (Chinese? Why not Russian or Norwegian??)
Spammers claiming to be classmates sending me an eCard. I remember my classmates, and they wouldn't be sending me anonymous eCards. Of course, seeing as I have made absolutely no effort to keep in touch with any of them over the years, it is possible that they no longer remember either my name or their own...we are all of us OLD, don't you know?
Overstock.com, whose unsubscribe button does not work and neither do emails. I will never, ever go to that site again. I never bid or bought anything!
eBay, but I asked for those notices. Hoping I'll strike it rich one of these days...
A handful of dear friends, and occasionally, one of the children.

G) Four of my favorite foods:

Fresh fruit
Home made pies
Home made soups
Fresh bread (bakery or home made)
Tomatoes hot off the vine in my garden

H) Places I would rather be right now:

None. It's summer. I love Spring, Summer and Fall in Ann Arbor.
In winter: just about anywhere south of here that might have sunshine!
There's been talk of retiring to somewhere else...but specifics aren't in evidence. New Zealand has been mentioned, also Solomon Islands (out towards Gizo), Hawaii and Saba (Netherlands Antilles). None are likely to happen anytime soon, because of all those boxes of papers that must be culled before leaving, LOL. Besides which, I notice they are all islands, and what with global warming melting the ice caps and raising ocean levels...I might have to learn to tread water! DH points out that those are also mostly volcanic islands....

I) Things I am looking forward to this year:

Having space to spread out my stuff for the first time in 12 years of marriage. No more camping out of boxes!
Having more time to work on my newsletter, blog and other writing projects, including two YA novels.
Pulling out my knitting machines, and relearning after 12 years in storage -- or not. Could be, I'll just sell them on eBay.
Getting back in shape and losing some fat I put on after moving to Midwest. Doing winter for the first time in 50 years, combined with menopause, appears to be a very broadening experience...

Great ways to waste time on YouTube...

2007-07-08T15:30:00.002-07:00

Don't be afraid, now. This is good stuff, not scary, but maybe not safe for work, only because you need the sound, and everybody in the office will be over wondering what's so cool in your cube.....

The arts are fully represented on YouTube -- even some arts with which you might not be familiar:

Nora, the piano playing cat. She even does duets, so you should visit her web page, too. We aren't talking stomping on the keys, here. Nora really plays, and she has good position/posture, too, LOL. Her sequel is even better.

Dance, anyone? How about dance with props -- er, tools? -- well, it is dance, in typical YouTube off the wall fashion.

Step dancers (but not Irish). Watch the chairs carefully...

A video of what happens when you go on eBay at 2 in the morning because your hot flashes woke you up just enough that you weren't fully awake, but you couldn't get back to sleep...(Not that I would have personal experience with this) set to Weird Al's "eBay" parody.

Another video to Weird Al's "eBay" this done by a couple kids whose native language may not be English, but they are just too funny! This sort of fun with the 'arts' is what YouTube does very well...

A beatbox flautist...

This guy, another beatboxer, at the French national championships. Who knew this rap specialty had international competitions??

A sociology study turned into a music video: Free hugs .

And a Murat, who changes forever your stereotype of a mime.

Now, I'm not sure whether you consider the library, and reference librarians, to be part of the arts...but Ms Dewey most certainly in not your ordinary computer reference...

And to close, from our fav blog of LOLcatz

How to Build Community...

2007-04-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

Today a friend (thanks, Margie!) showed me a copy of a poster, which had obviously been copied numerous times -- and as soon as I read it, I wanted a copy, too!

When I went on line to see if I could find the source -- because anyone who could put something this neat together deserves the credit -- but struck out. This appears to have been such a popular notion, and copied so much by just about everyone who saw it, that the source is too obscure for my Net skills to dig up.

Possibly, you have already seen these instructions...but I will list them anyway:

HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY

Turn off your TV
Leave your house
Know your neighbors
Greet people
Look up when you're walking
Sit on your stoop
Plant flowers
Use your library
Play together
Buy from local merchants
Share what you have
Help a lost dog
Take children to the park
Honor elders
Support neighborhood schools
Fix it even if you didn't break it
Have pot lucks
Garden together
Pick up litter
Read stories aloud
Dance in the street
Talk to the mail carrier
Listen to the birds
Put up a swing
Help carry something heavy
Barter for your goods
Start a traditions
Ask a question
Hire young people for odd jobs
Organize a block party
Bake extra and share
Ask for help when you need it
Open your shades
Sing together
Share your skills
Take back the night
Turn up the music
Turn down the music
Listen before you react to anger
Mediate a conflict
Seek to understand
Learn from new and uncomfortable angles
Know that no one is silent though many are not heard
Work to change this

What I did find when searching the Web was an explanation of what one community did with the ideas, but I can't tell if they are the souce:

Vancouver and "How To Build Community"

Our “How to Build Community” poster is a resource for tens of thousands of people looking for ways to feel connected with their neighbors.

The lack of community many of us feel was evident to Eileen Mosca at a Vancouver city hall meeting. Well, Eileen decided to do something about it.

She contacted SCW with her idea, a guerrilla postering campaign in Vancouver! She began the process of organizing 150 volunteers to take 20 posters and a corner of the city each. It wasn’t long before she had well over her initial goal of people with at least 4,000 posters to paste.

The postering project itself became a community-building activity! Elementary students, senior groups, doctors, longshoremen, government workers, people from all walks of life volunteered to help.

Did their effort have a positive effect? To quote the mastermind of the project, Eileen Mosca: Because such things can’t be quantified I guess we will never really know. But you can be sure the posters touched people, made them think and perhaps made them decide to look up when they are walking…sing together…learn from new and uncomfortable angles…talk to the mail carrier… and maybe even dance in the streets.

Pretty cool, right?

More Stashbusting -- Sewing

2007-04-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

There was a time, not so long ago, when I did a great deal of sewing. I made all my own clothes, except bras after the first one, (everyone should make one, of course, to prove some obscure point, I suppose) plus shirts for my husband and assorted kinds of clothing for the children. Then there were household goods, such as curtains, pillows, blankets, slip covers, window quilts, and on...

No more. My poor sewing machine has been so neglected of late that it had to go in for a tune up because Viking machines are meant to be workhorses, used every day practically, or they freeze up. Sad.

But since I merely make occasional repairs, anymore, or sometimes a new wallet or purse -- and that isn't likely to happen much in the future -- some of the sewing stash needs to find new homes, too.

For instance, I have used Lutterloh's excellent pattern making system for more than 20 years, and before that, Patterns Unlimited, which was the US version (or rip off) of it. I wore out the first issues of both and have more recent replacements, hardly used:

Patterns Unlimited is poorer quality printing, and all the tools are of paper, but this 1979 set I just bought on eBay does not appear to have been used. The models are separate from the pattern parts (unlike Lutterloh, which has the patterns piece templates on the back side of the model). There are 200 patterns, plus another 50 with model and pieces on same sheet, plus a special edition of 50 more patterns that are a mix of women's, children's and mens. There are three 1980 fashion booklets of about 20 or so mixed patterns each. Also, the main binder has many pages of sewing, pattern making, and general information on how to use the system.

There are seven supplements to the 1986 edition of the Lutterloh system: #189-193, plus a special edition #20 for children:

A boot box full of threads, most from the last 20 years: mostly cotton poly...

Zippers! These span several generations, all types and sizes...

Stashbusting -- Progress!

2007-04-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

So, okay, I have too much yarn -- meaning I can't buy any more yummy stuff until I make use of what I already have, some of which I have been carrying around with me for many years!

And this winter I have made some progress. Here are a few things I have knitted and crocheted (minus the several scarves and baby blankets that went for Christmas/Ayyam-i-Ha presents to family):

Baby and toddler blankets,

More blankets, and a washrag (that's what a clever knitter calls a swatch knit to test a new pattern...)

Some baby and doll hats (the latter being what happens when gauge doesn't come out big enough for babies. Who knew babies had such BIG heads?)

A couple crocheted bags...

A super soft and warm capelet in Christmas colors...

And last but not least (especially as I have about 7 other projects currently on the needles)...

A silver gator (yummy!) two scarves, and a shawl to go over that little black dress...or, pink strapless prom dress?

Speaking of Where I've Been in My Life.....

2007-04-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's fun to see where I've been in the US, and where I have left to go (although, I'm not real enthusiastic about New York City):

create your own visited states map

Stashbusting -- Rubber Stamps

2007-04-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

I love my rubber stamps, but there's a limit to how many I can hoard. (Especially if I want to buy more....)

It's embarrassing to see how many there are in the storage boxes. I love them dearly and can think of all sorts of neat stuff to do with them whenever the urge to purge strikes.

But, realistically? Some of them just aren't being used. They need to go to a loving home that will make full use of their potential.

Or, at very least, they will go into someone else's stash -- preferably someone who isn't living with me!

The following stamps are mostly Stampin' Up, with a few whose origins are mysterious. All are in excellent condition, some never used, all mounted on wood blocks.

* Frame & words, (frame is Stampin' Up 1995, but I don't know what the words are),

* Three little dinosaurs want to play (looks like they have been played with a lot, but are still good for more fun)

* Some loose small stamps that wandered by one day and joined the stash,

* Two-Step Stampin' Fresh Flowers set, (Stampin' Up 2004)

* Words by Wanda set (Stampin' Up 2003),

* Two- Step Stampin' Fanciful Favorites set (Stampin' Up 2001),

* Seasonal Images set (Stampin' Up 1998) mounted but never used,

* A Light Heart set (Stampin' Up 2006),

Stashbusting - Scrapbooking 2

2007-04-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

Spring cleaning time: that stash is just two cumbersome, and let's face it: I can't live long enough to use it all! (Probably only certain superfemmes might be able to...like Karen!)

So, here's what is going to leave my cupboards:

* Peel and stick alphabet diecuts,

* Embellisments you trim and attach manually (not self-adhesive),

* Words and sayings stickies, plus some bubble stickies of words,

* Self-adhesive edgings, plus some words,

* Assorted larger, laser-cut, embellisments (5-10")

* 27 sheets of 12x12 inch album paper,

* Marvy watercolor markers, opened, but never used (2 months old),

* a rotary cutter with smooth and deckle blades (never used), plus a Xyron tape adhesive dispensor (needs refill)

Stashbusting -- Scrapbooking 1

2007-04-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

It's Spring cleaning time...and my stash of creative project supplies is more than ready for sorting, purging and storing!

Before putting up a whole bunch of auctions on eBay, I'm giving you, dear family and friends, first choice of the goodies. Offers of cash, creative bartering, or negotiations for birthday/graduation gifts will be considered....

Among those things that I'm finally admitting I probably won't get around to using are two Barbara Walton scrapbook kits, including album, papers, stick-on alphabets and embellishments, and page protectors.

This small one also comes with an idea book...

The larger one also has rub-on sayings and embellisments, a choice of fancy initials to slip into the front cover, a sheet of Fresh Cuts Easter cutouts, and two partially used sheets of die cut words and tags...

These are brand new, ready to go (except for where I included a couple partially used embellishment pages) and without funny smells, pet hair or molds.

Spring is Coming!

2007-03-19T05:35:00.000-07:00

...although it can be a little difficult to tell, especially since today the weather is barely at freezing and producing snow/sleet/rain mix for the morning commute.

However last Sunday a week ago was just a lovely promise of spring day, sunshine gentle breezes and about 50 degrees. MIL had the excellent notion of checking out the displays inside Matthaei Botanic Gardens greenhouse.

Since it was the first truly warm day around here, we had to brave irritated geese littering the landscape because their nesting pond (just in front of the parking lot for the buildings) hadn't defrosted yet. There were more couples than there are nesting spots, so 'discussions' of possession were heated, and sometimes the outraged pairs will actually stand in the parking lot and accost cars. Maybe they think they are calling upon higher powers to oust the intruding geese?

This pond is about an acre, mostly in cattail swamp, with some goose nests so old that they are built up like swan platforms (maybe that's what they originally were, but have been used by geese the 11 years I've been watching) and pretty inviolate, once the pond melts. Each nesting pair seems to have 3-5 'helpers' who stand guard, and takes sides disputing territory right now! Can be earsplitting.

That day, they did not run at the cars or us, and we made it indoors unscathed. The warm weather made us wish to wander the trails, but they were ankle deep in smushy mud from the thaw of about 6" of wet snow we'd had three days before. We relied on the green and blooms in the display house to add spring color to the day. Very nurturing!

Here are a few samples:

In the tropical room the orchid display was almost done, but these fairy orchids had VERY long fronds... Camera was supposed to focus on them, not the sausage tree fruit hanging in the background!

Some of the enthusiastic tulips (and a cabbage or two) at the entrance

Spring planting in the temperate climate room

Amaryllis in the temperate room, with sun shining through...

A velvet throat...

Part of an instant garden display in the temperate room.

In addition to many acres of woods, streams, meadows and bogs, the botanic gardens have about 2 acres of glass succession houses from which they can pull assorted potted flowering plants and set them close together so that it looks like all these plants were always growing together.

You can't see the pots, and until you figure out the deception, the heart just drops out of your gardening dreams, thinking there's no way you could ever achieve such a crush of beauty.

Now, I have to admit that both of us did momentarily wish for such a situation, where we had four green houses to feed lovelies into one display house....but we recovered quickly from that delusion. We figured up how many volunteers actually staff this place and decided we didn't want to work quite that hard, LOL.

Happy spring!

Moving On...

2007-01-28T14:38:00.000-08:00

I left my house in 1995, when I moved to the Midwest. Of course, I thought I'd be back soon...

My son, you are now living in that house ... but it's not the house I remember so fondly. It's not MY house any longer.

I loved my little house! I loved the yard and the shake roof and the flower-covered mound to the west, and the vacant lot next door.

I loved that beautiful old pine tree in the unpaved Women's Club parking lot behind -- that pine which dates from my Uncle James' first job at age 15. He was hired by the founder of the town to water the acres of Cambria pines planted on the Heights for windbreaks against the blowing sand...

I loved the view of the Rock and the Bay down the hill, too. And the way the setting sun would turn the office walls softly orange and rosy in summer, and the way I could open the doors to the green house and heat up the house on a sunny winter day.

Most of all, I loved the people who lived in that house with me.

But most all those things I loved are no longer there (and neither am I).

The view is blocked by the condos across the street, the empty lot is no more. Even the shakes are gone, with the freeway daisys and the Hyssop crabapple at the office door, and the raspberries on the kitchen fence.

Neighborhood cats may still come to play in the yard, but I bet the gophers are all gone. The snails? Well, I think I can live without them!

And, not least, the people I loved then are not the center of my life anymore.

Some famous writer claimed, "You can't go home again"...and is right. Not that home, at least.

My little house in Morro is no more. It can't ever be what I remember again. But it is NOT dead and gone.

It needs a new life, a face lift, a remodel. It's time to let it move on and grow, not sit there sadly remembering a past which can't be rebuilt -- even if we could remember the way it really was!

Add a bedroom, or two -- redo the kitchen and baths. Put down new flooring or fence the yard for the kids. Make this a new home.

Not the home it used to be, not my home, but the home it can become.

Your place.

Not mine.

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition."
-- Samuel Johnson

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-11-23T15:55:00.000-08:00

I love Thanksgiving best of the secular holidays...

This was the day I remember most from my childhood, because Thanksgiving dinner was the only time -- apart from funerals -- that my mother's extended family celebrated together. For my brother and I, isolated as we were until we moved into town proper, it was a time to play with other children, our cousins.

When I was very small, the family dinner was held in Nana's little house that she shared with my mother's youngest sister, Noma. Noma worked as a bookkeeper to support them both, and never married. She was a career woman long before that was acceptable behavior, unless, of course, one lived with one's mother... But even then, there was some talk. Small town.

As my three cousins, my brother and I grew larger -- and Uncle Nedum retired and brought my mother's eldest sister Ethel back to the area -- the meal had to be served outside in the garage in order to fit us all around the table.

The garage was a wooden shed with no windows, so the doors would have to be propped open to supplement the weak bulb hanging by a string overhead. Old carpets were spread on the dirt floor, and the dining table and two card tables brought out.

With chairs for all of us, there was literally no room for anyone to get up once they sat down! We kids could not, therefore, leave the table early and play tag out in the yard. Just as well, because we'd have kicked up dust from the sandy soil.

By the time I was about 10, there would be around the table: Nana, Noma, Mother & Dad and my brother Aaron & I, Mother's sister Ethel and her husband Nedum, Mother's elder brother Cecil and his wife Lily, Mother's younger brother James and his wife Alma and their three children - Malene, Bolivar & Bud.

There is a funny story about how Bud got his name, but I wouldn't bet on its accuracy, given the family penchant for practical joking. My Uncle James was cantankerous and his wife long-suffering, according to his female siblings. I remember him as being very fond of teasing them in ways that they always seemed to fall for.

So when Alma was pregnant with the third child and asked him what name he liked for this one, he is reported to have growled ungraciously, "Just call 'em Bud, for all I care!" And so she did.

I cannot personally vouch for the truth of this story, since cousin Bud is only about 2 years younger than I. However, since James and Alma were married for well over 50 years before she died -- without having committed the homicide other ladies in the family seemed to feel might be justified -- I'll assume they had an understanding not shared by his siblings.

Besides, this is exactly the sort of outrageous story that Uncle James would tell in company, just to tease his mother and sisters!

These get togethers were held at Nana's house, a tiny asphalt shingled cottage sitting on one corner of what had been the original family holding -- one whole city block. When Grampa died in his early 40s and left her with 5 kids and no income, Nana gradually sold off parcels until only the last corner remained.

She made ends meet by cooking for the fishermen, and anyone else in need of good home cooking, at 25 cents a meal. My mother told stories of serving supper (dinner was midday on weekends), and washing up as fast as possible so they could all go over to the theater across the street for Saturday nights dances.

For the young people, these dances would go until about dawn, when she and her sisters would rush home to cook and serve breakfast. After cleaning up from that, Mother would often take a long walk on the beach with a girl friend or her sister Noma -- since it was Sunday, a day of rest. Often this little walk would stretch from Morro Rock up to the Standard Oil pier in Cayucos...about six miles, not counting that it was a good half mile to the Rock from Nana's house.

Of course, the food holds center stage in my memories, but playing tag and hide and go seek with my cousins was important, too. Nowadays, I think listening to the grownups talk about their families and share stories from the past is most interesting.

Those stories were always exciting to me, since we kids were never told anything children didn't need to know...and then when we were adults, nobody explained anything because they assumed we knew, I guess. It can be very frustrating for us nosies who thrive on family minutia, especially since there is no one left to ask!

Sometimes the stories were pretty funny. Uncle Frank stories were my favorite. I'll write about him tomorrow...

Meanwhile, here is a family portrait taken with the first 4 of 7 children:
Left to right: Cecil, Mary, Dorothy, Ethel, Charles, Helen. James, Noma and Charles Castle were born after this picture was taken. Charles Castle died as a toddler, and Dorothy (my mother) always wondered what he died of, as no autopsy was done. She thought that was one of the reasons she went into medicine.

Another may have been that Helen, with whom she was very close, died of Spanish flu in early 1919. Everyone got sick, except my mother, who was about 13, and she took care of them all. Her father never regained full vitality, and died a couple years later of 'heart failure.'

There is a page on line with some family photos...mostly of Morro Bay, with a brief outline of the family line. It's missing some information I know I have somewhere. Marie McKennon did an extensive search on the Stocking side, back in the 1950s, 3 pages single spaced type! According to her notes, Stockings came to this country from England on the next boat after the Mayflower! Thereafter, the males seemed to alternate between army and church.

To see some more great old photos of Morro Bay...

Why Wasn't Science Class Like This?

2006-11-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

Remember colloid suspensions way back in chemistry class? (Relax; this is a rhetorical question, Dear Ones.)

Well, I do, and being a cook, I already know that cornstarch is seriously weird stuff...but these guys carry it way farther. And some others folks have discovered more ways to fool around in chem lab, as well.

Don't you love YouTube?

Universality or merely commonality?

2006-11-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Just finished Nora Ephron's latest book, I Feel Bad about My Neck.

Okay, maybe I was just too filled with anticipation, but really, I did expect more from someone whose plays have always managed to pull the most amazing insights out of the most mundane of human activities.

When Harry Met Sally, for instance. There are no wild chase scenes, no murders, no edge of the seat suspense, nor is a metropolis reduced to rubble in this movie.

I Feel Bad about My Neck is a series of essays on how she is dealing with aging and other unmentionables, and I am expecting if not revelations, at least a new and refreshing take thereon.

The book was okay, gave me a few tired smiles and a couple nervous giggles, but essentially not much different from what I already know. Hey, I've already said a lot it, myself!

Instead of panning the book for being decidedly not new (or getting an ego boost thinking I must be pretty hot stuff if I already knew what such a famous writer had to say on the subject) I think I'll concentrate on something much more interesting:

Like, maybe the reason many of us in a certain age group have heard before -- many times! -- everything Ms. Ephron had to say is proof that we (at least my half of the species) are very much more alike than social divisions would have us believe.

Perhaps our personal responses to menopause and aging in general are a demonstration of a basic cultural commonality, if not universality of feelings.

In many parts of the world, it is still a very good and respected thing to get old. Elders are revered, or at least have respect and a role and responsibility to the whole. Their input is included in all areas of endeavor and decision making. Or so anthropologists assure us...

Not so in the recent history of the US. Perhaps as a result of 400 years of exploring, expansion and nation-building that reduced extended family and enhanced the notion of rugged individualism, our prevalent culture does not value aging. We do not grow up respecting the knowledge of our elders or anticipating our own.

Not news, you say? Well, that's my point, exactly!

So, what are we going to do about this state of affairs? [Okay, what are you all going to do about it? I'm already there, never listened well when your ages, and am much inclined to spend my remaining time engaged in having more fun that trying to fix the world. Been there, done that, now I'm retired.]

Of course, that's what the pause in menopause is all about -- taking some time out to reconsider goals, evaluate progress, analyze resources, (complain about assorted indignities that I had always figured would not be visited upon me, of all people, since as a redhead, I wouldn't age like normal folks), and share my newfound insights with all and sundry who need to know what's coming.

Welcome to menopause, Ms. Ephron...you have, as usual, nailed the common man --er-- woman!

Book reviews...

2006-10-31T12:32:00.000-08:00

You know, I'm fast becoming curmudgeonly over what comprises the best seller lists. Though, of course, I never intended to turn into the crotchety old women I grew up with, either!

But there you are: I'm finding daily dozens, if not legions, of big and little assaults on my equanimity -- and I no longer seem to have the energy to brush them off. Menopause?

Anyway, came across a comment in an old Miss Read book, Village Diary, which expresses my frustration with new books quite well:

"I am heartily sick of books...all termed 'powerful by their reviewers (and in future I shall steer clear of any with this label) which give the suffering reader a detailed account of the bodily functions of their main characters. If the author has such a paucity of ideas that he must pad out his 300 pages with reiterated comments on his hero's digestive, alimentary and productive systems I am sorry for him; but I don't see why he should be encouraged.

"To have a heroine who does nothing but climb, regularly every thirty pages, from one bed into another is, to my mind, not only inartisitc. It is worse. It is tedious."

Add in a nasty predilection for detailed gore and violence, and there you have my complaints. Sometimes, if the story is actually good enough, I can wade through the garbage to get to the ending. This is most often the case with an author like Clive Cussler, who can present engaging characters and a tricky plot, but litters the landscape with bodies.

Add inanity, stupidity, ignorance and canned laughter, and you will have television! Even those handful of programs I might like to watch require me to suffer large doses of unnecessary detail. I do not, for instance, need to see 3 excruciatingly long minutes of someone being strangled to death. Nor even 30 seconds!

And spending my evening in the mind of a serial killer, or visiting the empty and wasted lifestyles perported to be 'friends,' 'housewives,' or 'modern single females,' just doesn't do it for me. I do NOT want to believe that most entertainment television portrays reality. How horrible if people actually had to live those ways!

It really does take much more work to write a good story, so perhaps that is the problem. Since word processors came on the scene, it is possible for many more folks than have the talent and commitment to the work involved to become writers. They have to fill the pages with something.

I've been wondering recently whether the startling intensity of violent activity, noise and emotion portrayed in entertainments isn't the result of a generalized numbing response to uncomfortable reality. In order to exist in a moribund society, one has to shut it out. And then, in order to feel alive, much more in required to stimulate the senses.

Sort of like having to turn up the stereo volume in order to hear it through the earplugs....

Researchers are telling us that the average child in this country spends 6 or more hours per day watching TV, and by age 7 or 8, has seen several hundred murders, many of them in gruesome detail. They will have viewed unnumbered instances of violence, often disguised as humor, demeaning women, men, children, morality, government, family, and good sense. The only adults they see portrayed are ridiculous or villainous. TV presents a world in which they can have no chance at all, because against such odds, only superheroes can survive -- and they are just little kids. They don't have a hope.

What better reason than that to shut out the world?

What's a Calamity?

2006-10-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

One of my current goals is to complete my photo albums...that is, at least label all those pictures! It is taking way longer than I expected, because I get drawn into the memories, and then I write them down, too.

Adding text to the photo albums is time consuming, but lots more fun than doing housekeeping chores! However, it in turn has led to musing about ways to convey to somebody else (principally you guys, dearest children and grandchildren) some of the things I have learned in living this long.

Not that I for one minute think those pearls of wisdom are unique to me. Every generation has its favorite thinkers and philosophers, which any reading across generations will show are all saying about the same things.

Perhaps we each have to learn on our own (and some of us are more recalcitrant that others), so our 'discoveries' are only new personally. Don't worry; I don't expect you all to be any more impressed than I was at your age!

(Well, actually, since I think you are all pretty great stuff, maybe I do expect a bit more from you than I ever produced!)

You really can't look at over 100 years of family pictures without noticing how they seem to record a long list of calamities, large and small. From crying toddlers who have just had the dog eat their ice cream cone, to dates of death on the backs of old baby pictures. Uncles/cousins/fathers/fiances who went to war, and those didn't come back. Whole decades of pictures that stop too soon with notes like: motorcycle accident, cholera, and mule kicked, not to mention fire, flood and earthquake.

It's just one thing after another -- the epitome of the old saw, "Life is what happens while you were busy planning something else."

But how did these people keep going, some of them, no matter what? If every family history is a litany of troubles along with the triumphs, what made the difference? Why do some folks crumble under the burden of life's ills, and others can't be stopped by anything?

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and the United States was thrust into what became known as the Great Depression, some people who lost money jumped out of windows and killed themselves. Others hunkered down and dug in and kept going -- and kept their families and friends going -- until things got better.

I have an uncle, born just before 1900, who worked and slaved to build a house for his bride and a little garage next door to repair those newfangled automobiles that everyone was talking about. Took him years of hard work, and one of the first mortgages ever issued in his small town. Going into debt was frowned upon in his family -- a man shouldn't buy anything he couldn't afford to pay cash for -- so he had a doubly heavy burden.

He openned for business in 1929, just before the depression, and he lost everything before it was even paid for. Never tried again, lived the next 50 years doing odd jobs and working for others, steadfastly refusing ever to try again. Perhaps, having lost hope, he could never go against his family rules and borrow again -- and he never saved for a new project because the Depression had wiped out everyone's trust in savings banks.

And then there was my mother, his younger sister. She married the fellow she'd grown up with, the son of her father's best friend. It was expected, never mind that she really wanted to go further in school, and she did everything she could trying to be a good wife and mother.

Her first baby died at only a few weeks old, not an uncommon tragedy early in the 20th century. While pregnant with her second, her husband left her for another woman; and two months after my half-sister was born, the stock market crashed and began the Great Depression. Divorce was just about unheard of, and in that tiny town, Mother's was the first.

My mother paid for the divorce, gave her baby to her sister to foster for a few years, fought her way into nursing school against her mother's wishes, and succeeded against family, society and day to day events. She wanted to be a doctor, but nursing was the closest to medicine that women were allowed in those days.

So how do we define catastrophe? These two people were both dealt terrible blows by the same calamity that turned a generation of people's lives upside down. Both of them lost everything they had worked for, and suffered emotionally and financially. Their own family disapproved of their choices, their mother was unforgiving and unsympathetic of goals so far outside the cultural norm. Uncle Cecil capitulated, in his way; Mother kept fighting for what she wanted.

How is it that two people visited by the same calamity will fair differently -- disaster for one and momentary inconvenience for the other?

It is apparently not a new question, seeing as religion has spent a great deal of time addressing the issue of calamity, and how the faithful should respond to the changes and chances of life. And religion has been around a lot longer than I have!

I may have mentioned that I don't listen to advice well?? And that I could be just a little -- um -- hardheaded, too??

So, okay, I'm finally getting a handle on this, so bear with me. Feel free to roll your eyes if you already know it...

I'm a Bahá'í, which means I 'got religion,' and have been for more than 40 years. But, no matter how many times I have heard the message, it only now that the import is making it into my consciousness:

The purpose of this material creation, and our life in it, is to develope character. To learn who we are and grow skilled in the virtues -- stuff like honesty, truthfulness, trustworthiness, compassion, kindness, purity and love.

One needs these virtues, this character, because we are immortal beings, associated for a short time with a material body, and we need them for the rest of eternity, for the rest of our lives. Even as a fetus in the womb must develope limbs and senses he doesn't need there, in order to be able to function effectively after birth -- so do we need to grow spiritually in this life to prepare for the next.

And here's where calamity comes in: it's semantics. Catastrophe is what happens, calamity is how we define it. And we decide how we are going to define it and how we intend to respond to it. Thus, obstacles for some are stepping stones for others.

We decide. We assign meaning to events. We are in control.

Looked at in this way, tests and difficulties become milestones in our development. Even as we take examinations in school, endure qualifying trials in sports, and collect awards and degrees to mark progress towards those goals, we can use life's less attractive surprises in the same way.

And just like those calculus tests, character tests just keep coming back, over and over, until we master the virtues inherent in passing them.

(Guess how I know that patience is one virtue I need to work on more???)

Miguel Mouse: a lesson in communication...

2006-10-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

There once was un ratoncito, a little mouse, who was hiding in his little hole in the living room.

He was very frustrated, because he knew where there was some queso, some cheese. But, he could hear the "miao" of el gato, the cat.

This was no ratoncito estupido, because he knew that gatos eat ratoncitos. So he waited until he heard, "Woof, woof," and he knew it was el perro, the dog.

He knew that perros scare away gatos, and also that perros don't eat ratoncitos.

So, he walked out and saw: no perro, pero el gato!

And el gato gulped him up and said: "Que bueno ser bilinge! How great to be bilingual!"

Heaven's Sake Revisited...

2006-09-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Knitting innards not withstanding, you can't beat this project for time killing: An English Garden in stitches.

"Thursday, September 21, 2006: Friends thought Jane Bolsover was spinning them a yarn when she unveiled her plan – to knit a life-sized English garden.

But here it is, accurate right down to the flowers and insects, even the worms and carrots in the vegetable patch.

The project has been painstakingly completed by more than 300 contributors, including a group of gay men knitting in Brighton, and a 12-year-old boy in Sussex, who spent six months making the pond and waterfall.

Ms Bolsover, 46, of Dorking, Surrey, estimates her team made 4million individual stitches, knitting together 80km (50 miles) of wool.

'I'm one of the world's worst knitters so it has been a strange project for me,' she admitted.

And the 4.5m by 3m (15ft by 10ft) garden, on display in Exeter, Devon, is not finished yet.

'Anyone can come along and add to it as long as what they do is hand-knitted,' she said."

Oh, for heaven's sake!

2006-09-19T16:44:00.000-07:00

These people have WAY too much time on their hands.... Or perhaps I should title this, "When Good Stitchers Go Wrong."
The site above claims this is a picture of a crocheted and anatomically correct human brain.

And they are not alone in their -- um -- artwork:
A fellow posting as Arrmatie did this one of the human digestive tract last year. It's pretty accurate, and the stitches are just amazing...but, really?

And then there is Patricia Waller, a german artist whose creations are just way beyond the medium...
Be sure to scroll all the way down the gallery page because it just gets weirder as you go. [Probably SFO, but not safe for kiddies, maybe...]

These folks fit my definition of true creativity as finding new ways to use familiar media -- and succeeding!

And to think: I just make hats and scarves and baby blankets....

Some quotes from recent reading...

2006-09-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

From the little book, Today I will Nourish My Inner Martyr: Affirmations for Cynics, by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells........

"Regardless of what other people say, my tendency to overreact and lose all perspective makes me a theatrically interesting person."

"There is no room in my life for my inner child."

"My family, friends, and associates could save me a lot of precious time by accepting the reality that I'm always right."

To which my personal corollary is that we could all live and work in perfect unity if they'd all just do it my way!

From Laffirmations: 1001 ways to add humor to your life and work, by Joel Goodman......

"There ain't much fun in medicine, but there's a heck of a lot of medicine in fun." -- Josh Billings

"He deserves paradise who makes his companions laugh." -- The Qur'án

"A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs -- jolted by every pebble in the road." -- Henry Ward Beecher

"Humor is the great thing, the saving thing, after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place." -- Mark Twain

From The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff.......

"When you discard arrogance, complexity and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike and mysterious secret...Life is Fun."

Quick, did anybody notice that gaff?

2006-09-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

In the area of 'things that would never happen to me' ....

Imagine: mother-in-law comes to dinner Monday night and brightly inquires as to what romantic things we did to celebrate our eleventh wedding anniversary the past Saturday.

Not only did we fail to have some neat answers ready...we had BOTH totally blipped the date!

I think I remember bringing up the subject several weeks before, when hubby was armpit deep in exams, term papers and project at work. He asked me to remind him in a couple days, when he was less distracted. Whole thing went completely out of my head!

It is VERY fortunate that both of us dropped this ball, of course, or it could have caused serious sitcom repercussions. To be honest, HE had a really good excuse, what with working full time and going to school to finish his Masters in public health...not to mention being daddy and husband and good neighbor, etc., etc.

I, on the other hand, have long shouldered the names & dates details in this partnership (he has to do the hard stuff, like go to work for somebody else every day) -- plus I naturally pay attention to stuff like that, and I'm good at it.

Or so I have always flattered myself. My how the mighty have fallen!

We were both properly shocked about having missed such an opportunity to celebrate our marriage, so we set out a plan for the next weekend. This originally included Detroit Zoo, picnic, romantic getaway bed and breakfast, dinner and choir performance....

Not all of that happened, but we had a perfectly lovely time by ourselves, chatting, taking pictures, eating and napping. (Well, consider: us oldies doing 4+ miles of walking around a zoo! What would you expect?)

The chance to just enjoy each other's company, uninterrupted and guilt free, was wonderful! I just love it when I can have his attention focused on me.

And now we are all energized for the next time, because forgetting an anniversary was a real wake-up call that we hadn't been paying the needed attention to our marriage.

It is so easy to get busy and just take stuff for granted -- like each other, like the marriage relationship, like making specific times just for us to be a couple.

We can forget how much we like each other, how much fun it is to spend time together on something other than chores! And how very interesting a conversation can be when it doesn't have to be sandwiched between shower and commute, or consist entirely of responsiblities.

I mean, what's the point of being married, if all you ever do together is chores, and the only conversation is administrative (or annoyed)? Isn't that what happens when we over book everything except the most important parts of life?

One thing I have been forced to learn in the past year and a half of having to cut back just about everything I've always been busy doing: what counts is mostly spiritual, intangible and is often about communication. With each other. With our inner selves. With God.

What you say to each other first thing in the morning and last thing at night is way more important than checking off all the items on today's to do list. Especially if that's about the only time you see each other!

And given the unpredictable nature of menopausal emotions, (I just hate this never knowing what will bring on crabbiness or tears!) what I have found critical to how the rest of my day will go is this: 15-30 minutes of prayer, reading and meditation before I get out of bed in the morning.

At night, before bed, I spend some time going over how the day went, and reminding myself of both where I succeeded and where I didn't quite make it, with the resolve to make better efforts tomorrow. Some days do go better than others.......

I need this attitude adjustment in order to keep things in perspective. Maybe I always needed it, but never knew until the hormones started fluctuating wildly. Maybe it isn't such news to everyone else when I am out to lunch. (!!)

Or, maybe I really was much more perfect before the hair color went.

Whatever, I have certainly finally learned that orienting spiritually at the beginning and end of the day makes me a much happier person.

Garden Critters

2006-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I think gardening is basically a masochistic pursuit. This frame of mind typically occurs while dealing with the latest assault from Nature's battalions intent upon sharing the rewards of my labors.

I mean, some days I truly wonder what these animals did for a living before people came along and provided attics for starlings, bats and racoons. Or telephone poles for hawks to check out the roadside grasses for mice; or garbage dumpsters for just about everything! Not to mention nice neat rows of edibles -- flowers, fruits and veggies all in one convenient place...

Being from the West Coast, for instance, I had never seen a Japanese beetle except in pictures. So I was totally unprepared for the orgy of these creatures' lives.

Observe:

Hibiscus flowered mallow before beetles

Same two days after beetles arrive, en masse

Thousands of beetles, crushed together like kids in a mosh pit, or puppies in a basket, were so heavy that the four and five foot stalks were bent double under the weight.

I looked closely, being over 21 and formerly a biologist, and let me tell you: it was just shocking! Shocking! For a total of 5 days, Ann Arbor was sin city for these creatures. It was eat, sleep and have sex. And maybe not much of the sleeping part.

Good news is: the carnage was short-lived and only certain kinds of flowers got eaten. Turns out Japanese beetles are picky eaters, not the insatiable monsters I had been lead to believe. They liked roses and mallows best, and a few dahlias, but not any of the native plants like foxglove, morning glory, Joe Pye weed, brown-eyed susans, echinacia, golden rod, ironweed, asters or sunflowers.

Now that the sedums have begun to bloom, we are seeing just swarms of honey bees, five or six kinds of bumble bees (well, the giant ones are carpenter bees, really) and untold numbers of bee flies. Watching them is just fascinating. They ignore me, but never bump into me, even when I'm crouched right over them trying to get a picture.

And then there are these guys:

I don't know what they were doing camped here on these milkweed pods. They weren't eating the plant that I could see, just hanging out.

Since the weather has cooled off (even without frost) all the biting bugs have disappeared early this year. Whee! Taking a walk at sunset is just lovely now that I don't have to give blood.

Here's one last critter observed on my walks:

My garden...

2006-09-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

Okay, let's be honest, here: my garden consists of four self-watering planter boxes and assorted pots of house plants that are allowed out for the summer.

[Note: self-watering means that they flood the plants after a rain hereablouts, because rains are short but intense. Probably a better idea out there in semi-desert California.]

The houseplants LOVE being outside on my northfacing deck, three stories up. So much so, that they really seem to dislike having to come back indoors to fight for space in the northfacing window, or my west facing bedroom window that is blocked by the neighboring building. Just not enough light for the size those plants have attained living happily all summer outside.

For a few days right after I bring them in, I'll wake up each morning to one or more pots on the floor, obviously elbowed off the shelf by stronger ones...

Last year I discovered another spot that some of them really like: the top of the fire stairs on the south side of the building. Nobody much uses these stairs, which are fronted with a glass wall that looks out over the courtyard, because the north side stairs and doors face the parking lot. They get some light all day long because the stairwell lights come on at night, and the stairs have some heat to prevent freezing, and there are no bugs or critters. Houseplant heaven.

The fire marshall didn't like it, however, nor the chairs we put on the landings so that some of us old folks (not mentioning any names, but when we moved in here, we were the youngest people by 30 years) would have a rest stop when needed.

I don't know if I will be allowed to put plants there this winter, but I'm gonna go with the adage that it's easier to appologize if needed, than to risk an automatic "NO" that might not be necessary.

One thing I have learned is that there is just not enough to do in tending a garden this small. By that I mean: if one uses gardening to work off steam (and thus prevent even well-deserved homocide) one needs more than a total of 15 minutes of weed pulling or bug stomping. At least, I do, LOL.

But I'm not sure I could keep up with a whole yard right now, anyway, so I'm happy with my space. Being up three floors does cut down on the varmints...except for the occasional tree squirrel (but I trimmed the magnolia to make things more difficult for him).

The real annoyance is the chipmonk, who is very cute, but really a pain because he keeps trying to dig tunnels in the pots. This exposes the roots and spills potting soil. Even that would be tolerable, since it isn't every day. But the last straw was stealing my cherry tomatoes, just as they were ripening...and I had been waiting so eagerly for so long, too!

To add salt to my wounds, he often gets interrupted and leaves half eaten ones lying around, wasted. Plus, he PEELS them first, and leaves the skins!

One year I did try that snazzy sounding upside-down hanging basket, which did keep the varmints at bay. Alas, the tomatoes weren't all that happy about it either.

Really, it can be unwise to peruse garden catalogues in March... This year I ordered the varmint deterent sprays and bird mesh. I sprayed the tomato vines and the edges of the deck and the soil around my bulbs. The mesh went around the railing.

Right. They were just about as successful as the upside down tomato planter.

I have some hanging baskets each year, too. Begonias and some other flowering annuals, and the small vining petunias. Very pretty, once I get used to the idea that one buys in Spring and throws away in Fall.

You'd think such a basket would be entirely free of Nature's invaders (because I don't mind sharing with humming birds) but, no. House finches (what we called linnets in California) prize hanging baskets to build nests in, out of the rain and away from hawks and squirrels. Nothing deters crows or starlings, but that's another issue.

Want a heart stopping experience? Look up from the computer just as a huge black bird flaps onto the porch looking for eggs to steal. Crows up close are BIG!

Birdie heart attacks occur when a hawk hits the sliding glass door by accident when dive bombing one of the dove fledgelings... (My parakeets have their cage up against the glass doors to the deck, so they have a view. We're not spoiled, nosiree!)

The problem with choosing a nesting spot in a hanging basket is that the finches really don't like getting wet, and I won't let the plants die. They usually leave before any eggs get laid.

Not so the mourning doves. They didn't believe me when I told them there just wasn't enough space for two doves in the same pot with vigorous begonias. They kept coming back and breaking the plants.

So I went to the craft store and bought them a basket and decorated it with fake plants.

This basket is plenty big, and I even put in some shredded paper. They moved right in and raised two nests of babies this summer!

Although, going back over the cost, it probably would have been cheaper just to keep replacing the pots of begonias...

Neat Stuff I Found on the Web Today

2006-09-07T17:04:00.000-07:00

You know how long it used to take when using the dictionary, because you could get caught up in just perusing a bunch of other interesting words besides the one you started with?

Well, so can the Internet use up a LOT of my time in the same way!

Today I discovered a blog called Neatorama, kept by someone who wastes even more time than I surfing about for interesting things, and then helpfully posts them all in one place so the rest of us can save time by just spending an hour looking at these recommendations...

For instance: Chris Natrop, a cut paper artist who does WAY more than just make lace doilies...

Or how about Adam Stennett, who makes paintings so detailed that they look like photographs?

If you have ANY time left for chores after visiting these sites, then you are a much more disciplined person than I!