Tonight, my quiilting bee meets. I’m just about ready for them. I have some of my Halloween decorations up, and candy corn to put out as treats. There are candles to be lit, and dishes to ready for dessert.
I really need to cut out some pieces for a pumpkin applique that I started the last time we met. THEY would have finished it that night….and I’m still futzing around with it a month later. I love the look of applique, I just don’t like to do it, and all but one of this group are experts at applique! Just my luck.
The only problem is, I can’t keep my head up. I was working in the office until almost one o’clock last night, and now the need to catch up on my sleep is overwhelming. If I get up and move around, I bet I can catch my second wind.
Trip Notes, Part 2
Faces in trucks with neatly trimmed white beards. A LOT of guys in the rural area have decided that beards are “in,” and it seems a lot of them happen to have white hair! There were one or two I would have liked to stop and chat with! *G*
Trip Notes
As I traveled to my sister’s in Indiana, I had a portable tape recorder with me. When something caught my eye, I made note of it. The drive was interesting.
My Little View
This is the view of the herb garden on the North side of my home. I leaned out the window one day, early last May and snapped this with an instant camera.
The garden has been in place for about 15 years. The trees and shrubs to the west have been encroaching, and I cut some of them back this summer.
If you look carefully, you can see the tips of the fern fronds at the bottom right of the picture. The ferns fill the area where the back wall of the garage joins the house. The faint line from the right of the picture that runs across the bottom of the herb garden, is the path the chipmunks have worn through the grass to the bird feeder.
The front right corner of the garden has garlic chives, a chrysanthemum, regular chives (the pink blooms), oregano and winter savory. You can see day lilies in the bottom left of the garden. In the center box, a dame’s rocket is in bloom with more chives, and the rest of the area is waiting for basil, rosemary and several other herbs to be planted. The arbor holds a deep purple clematis that is just beginning to leaf out.
The veggie boxes are covered with plastic. I have a weed that I couldn’t kill off any other way, so I tried solar heat for the summer. We’ll see how things turn out next spring.
And all the way to the back is Dear Husband’s pride and joy, the Arr!! It’s a 32′ Bayfield cutter that is moored in Lake Michigan during the summer, and boards with us the rest of the year. Any time you can’t find DH…..check the boat!
I want to thank Stu for starting the “View” meme. I have wanted to post this picture all summer and he gave me the incentive to work with my stepson to get it scanned. If you have a view from your home that you would like to share why not join us? And thanks go to Blue Witch, too, for sharing Stu’s meme with us.
UPDATE: Stu’s meme is called the Skyline Project.
Home again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig
I’m home!
I had a wonderful weekend with my youngest sister and her family. They had a ton of stuff planned and we filtered through it and settled on one thing here, and another thing there, and it turned out to be a laid back visit that was still jam packed.
A Roving I Will Go
Well, actually, I won’t be roving….but making a trip to my youngest sister’s for the weekend. Roving would imply that I am going to wander. Even though I plan to take a new route, I still have a definite plan, and destination in mind.
Dear Husband and my mother and I will be making this same trip in mid October. I don’t usually make the trip more than twice a year, and sometimes just once. So, when Younger Sis asked me to visit, I had to think twice about it. The answer, of course, was…WHY NOT??
Tomorrow
Wednesday, September 22, is our wedding aniversary. We’ve been a couple for twenty years, and have been married fourteen of them. We plan to celebrate in a low key way. Our favorite restaurant is about thirty minutes east of us, and we’ll pack Mother into the car and head off to dinner. No dancing, no huge party, no gifts (at least, I don’t think there will be any gifts.)
Hmmmmmmm….I wonder if I should be looking for a gift tomorrow? What can you buy a man who has almost everything he wants other than a sixty foot sailboat? He can’t sail a 60 foot sailboat by himself….so that’s a moot point.
Happy Anniversary, Dear Husband! My gift to you tomorrow is not having to eat my cooking! *G* Have a great day, hon.
Audubon
I had to make a quick trip to the doc today. Sunday, my right eye developed a problem. Well…actually, it started with the skin around the outer corner of my eye. It felt abraded and stung if you touched it. By Monday morning, my eyelid was puffy. Now, the good thing about this was that it got me out of a visit to the dentist. She has a policy about colds, etc. If you’re coming down with something, you’re supposed to reschedule. So, I called, and they moved me to next week.
The doctor’s office was able to schedule me to see the newest member of the practice this morning, and she decided that I had a virus. I’m doing the two eye drops every two hours routine, and antibiotics for ten days. My eye is already feeling better. I was sure that it was an allergic reaction to something that flew into my face when I was weed eating on Sunday, but it seems the doc may have known better.
So, what does this have to do with Audubon? There weren’t many non-parenting magazines in the doctor’s office. I settled on the October issue of Audubon. I wish I could remember all I read. It was fascinating! I’ll have to see if there are still any issues at Borders.
Did you know that a resting hummingbird’s heart beats 250 times a minute? More astounding than that is the fact that when in flight their hearts beat up to 1200 times a minute! A group of volunteers are banding hummingbirds in the US. There are over 300 varieties of this species, but only 20 or so migrate up into the United States from Central America and Mexico. It seems that those birds return to the same gardens every summer. I can’t imagine the job of banding a hummingbird. I don’t think my hands would be gentle enough.
Habitat seems to be the subject that is on everyone’s minds. The hummingbirds are loosing the habitat they need as they migrate back and forth. They are having to depend on gardens and landscaping around homes to replace their natural habitat. The Florida panther is loosing it’s habitat, and there are now just 100 of them left. The raccoons here, have lost their habitat, and have adapted by trying to become house pets.
While we consider blacktopping over huge parts of the world, maybe we need to listen to the world around us, and see what we will loose. I understand the concerns of loggers, and farmers, and construction crews, but we have an obligation to be good caretakers of the Earth. If we disregard Nature around us, we could kill off species that hold the keys to our future. We need to find ways to co-exist. Maybe the hummingbirds can lead the way.
Alright, everyone. Next spring I expect each of you to plant trumpet vine for the humming birds!
The Raccoons
I think every home must have a story that the inhabitants, if asked, would say was the most memorable thing about the house. In our case, it might be the raccoons.
Two…maybe three summers ago, I hired two handymen to do some outside work on the house. I needed to have the dormer over the front door repainted, and I wanted to have a gutter repaired.
Well, Dear Husband came home and found them at work, and I had to admit that I had hired some help. A few days later, it rained, and it became apparent that we now had a leak in the roof….perhaps in the location of where one of the men had been standing, and the gutter could still be improved.
DH went out to the front of the house, and ripped out the soffit, announcing that we would leave it open to determine where the leak was.
A year later, a lady raccoon found the open soffit, and discovered that she could make a nest between the brick wall and the drywall in my mother’s sitting room. That spring we could hear her babies calling for their dinner. When she scritched her fleas, her feet would thump against the walls. We could hear her run across the roof. Later that summer, we took up viewing posts in the dining room, and watched the acrobatics as she left the wall, and curled up onto the roof. She used the valleys of the roof as her personal highways, and taught her children to follow her.
I assume that she hibernated in the wall that winter. We talked about the need to lure her out and close the soffit. I probably talked about that a LOT as she chewed her way through the rigid insulation, and began pulling out yards of fiberglass insulation. Each morning I would look out the front door and find wads of it festooning the newly emerging perennials in the sidewalk garden.
Then, we realized we had TWO female raccoons….two PREGNANT raccoons.
DEAR HUSBAND….we NEED to CLOSE the SOFFIT! DH would nod his head in agreement.
So….the raccoons found their way into the attic. One night, I was sitting in the “green room.” That’s the area off the kitchen where we have shelves of plants, and it’s where we eat informal dinners. Over my head there was an incredible fight, with high pitched screaming and thuds. The raccoons were establishing pecking order, and territory. Evidently one took the corner over our closet, and one found a nook at the edge of the great room, and they must have divvied up the green room as a straightaway to the exit. Their choices were astonishing! They instinctively chose places where we couldn’t get to them.
A month or two later, we could hear the babies trying to scramble up the slope of the cathedral ceiling over the great room. Those little suckers were cute little balls of fur….but I wanted them OUT of my house!
Dear Husband heard about it regularly, as the raccoons pulled more and more insulation out of the house. It was a warm summer, and the attic is hot, despite the fan and the vents. Every now and then I’d catch the raccoons snoozing near the opening of the soffit……a foot hanging over the side, and gentle snoring competing with the bees.
So…last month, DH finally cut a temporary patch for the soffit. We were agreed that the babies were old enough now to survive outside. We felt it was necessary to give them adequate time to find another home before winter set in.
I know you wonder why I didn’t just call an exterminator. I did. Actually, I called a “trapper.” I didn’t want to kill these animals. Their habitat has been eaten up inexorably. Houses have marched across the fields and into the groves that were their home, and we had one of the few places left that seemed a refuge. I didn’t expect them to become our dependents. At any rate, the “trapper” wanted $50 to visit and scope out the situation. Then, he wanted $35 a piece for each raccoon he caught. AND…..he would have to kill them once he caught them. We figured there were nine of them. The money wasn’t the issue. Killing the babies was.
My soft-heartedness came to an end when we started hearing stories about how dangerous they were to both pets and human health. It was time for them to go.
It’s quiet above me tonight. The soffit will have to be opened so that insulation can be blown into the attic, and we’ll have to paint, and clean. I’m glad they are outside where they belong, but I miss them.
It was the right thing to do, if only to give Dear Husband a little peace.
Regrets?
Although my blog roll is on the small size, I read a fair number of blogs. I try to visit some of the blogs that my friends have listed on their blogrolls, now and then. There’s certainly a lot of variety out there.
I have political opinions, but I don’t care to have a political blog. While I have a sense of humor, the things that tickle me are not easily shared in a blog. The bloggers who I really envy are those who are able to share their personal thoughts and problems. I’d like the depth of discussion that might result, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of hanging my laundry out for all to see. And, it could be really upsetting to make my life public, and find out it’s trivial and uninteresting.
So, my blog has become more of a daily journal, a record of the repetative tasks that flow through my life. Even I find it dull some days.
I’d like to be able to spin a yarn like Scherezade, or write like one of a dozen authors. I’d like to have the diplomacy, empathy and wisdom of a person like Jimmy Carter, and the mature beauty of Sophia Loren. I’d like to understand economics, and philosopy, and be multilingual. I’d like to be as creative in problem solving as my husband, and as confident in crisis as my oldest sister. I’d like a large dose of determination from my youngest sister, I’d like to have gorgeous gardens that flow from one into another, and enhance the land, and I’d like to know, that when I pass away, I won’t be forgotten in a day.
Instead, my days are filled with weeding, bookkeeping, cleaning, meal preparation, and the running of errands. I’ve been waiting for a time when my obligations eased to allow me to fit other things into my life, but it seems that maybe I shouldn’t wait. Maybe the time I spend blogging should be put to use improving the quality of my life. Variety is the spice of life….and I need more spice.
A little allspice, anyone?