Day off

It’s been a hectic week at The Havens, and for the first time this year I am going to go floating.   I can’t believe it is almost June and I haven’t been on the river yet.   But the fall I took in January and the subsequent months of healing of my hip made the idea of getting into a canoe for any stretch of time an idea that held no prospect of pleasure for me.  That has finally changed, my nerves seem to be 95% healed.

Then, right about the time my body was starting to say I could go floating, through no fault of my own, my canoe got wrecked.  It is being repaired still, I think, I don’t really know.   But there will be a canoe available for me today.   I could go on and on about that whole situation, but I really don’t have a lot of time for this.

I pre-posted my t-shirt and photohunt posts, knowing that if I didn’t there woudn’t be posts at all.   I barely got on the internet at all the last couple of days.

So what have I been doing, you might ask?   We own a house (right across the street) which we rent out.   When it is occupied, it breaks even.   If it is empty, it is a money pit.  As I mentioned previously, our tenants left and we have been trying to get it ready to rent.   We have been doing this with a dearth of money so our savings account has been suffering greatly in the process.  There is an inspection process you have to go through with the city in order to legally install tenants in a unit, and one of their requirements (in addition to requiring that the unit have floors in it) is that there must be hot water available.  Once we got the propane tank refilled and the lines to the house pressure checked, that was when we discovered that sometime in the past the hot water tank had died.

We cleaned the carpets in the place without propane in the tank, so we were unaware of the problem with the hot water heater.   Once that process had been completed, I had a fairly busy massage week and besides Jim was dealing with the hot water tank issue so I didn’t feel any great compulsion to get my butt over there and finish the cleaning of the house.   Besides, he was still cleaning the residue of the chickens out of the basement.

Well, finally all that extraneous stuff was dealt with and the beginning of June loomed, the third month with no income to offset the mortgage payment.   My feelings of “eek” and the fact that Jim got down to work and listed the unit precipitated a massive campaign to finish making the place presentable.

So I have spent the last couple of days across the street, washing the walls and cleaning the bathrooms and mopping floors.   My arms are toast, the rest of my body exhausted.  Today I really should be finishing the patching and painting of the dings in the walls, but I’m going floating come hell or high water.

Besides, we showed it to a young man yesterday, and if his finacee agrees he wants to rent it.   So the dings in the wall must not be that big of a deal.

I have to finish making the coffee.  Ta ta for now.

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Photohunt: Memorial

The theme for the Photohunt today is “memorial.” I’m sure that we will see many, many war memorials from all sorts of countries in this day’s offerings.   I will never forget my visit to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and how incredibly powerful the experience of going there was:  walking down into the black marble lined wound in the earth, finding the boy’s name from our high school who died over there, noticing the offerings at the site, watching the other people there.  I cried for all the dead boys, immolated on the pyre of warfare.

My offering for this theme is a little more personal.   I have several graves here in my gardens of the Havens.   All of them are marked by some sort of memorial.

The first cat who died after we moved here was the perfect beauty, Cio-Cio-San, daughter of Tosca.  Here she is inspecting a tame rabbit I rescued from the woods.

Cio Cio was not much of a hunter.  Despite that, she was inveterate bird watcher, and her favorite place to watch birds from was lying under the bird bath on the patio of Jim’s parents’ house.   So, when she died of cancer it seemed appropriate to mark her grave with a bird bath.  This is Cio Cio’s bird bath, she is buried directly under it.

I like to imagine she enjoys watching the birds  that are constant visitors.

Another cat that is buried on the place is a street cat I rescued from the grounds of Tan-Tar-A when I worked at the spa there.   She was the last remnant of a family of kittens whose mother was hit by a car.   When I caught her and brought her home, she had been living in the pump room for the pool, which she accessed through a four inch drain pipe.  She subsisted by dumpster diving and was thoroughly traumatized by the pump maintenance guys, who regularly chased her out of her abode.   She was always a very skittish cat, but she had the loudest purr of any cat I ever knew.   When she first arrived at our house she was very shy, and every day she would find somewhere to hide in the house, and every evening when it was her dinner time we would play hide-and-seek until we found her, when we would gently bring her back to the little safe den we had created for her in the utility room and feed her.   Eventually she stopped hiding, but by that time she had earned the name Heidi.

She was a proponent of feng shui, there was a certain spot in the living room of this house that was “her” spot, it was where she wanted to sleep and even if there was no chair there, she would occupy that spot, a need we discovered at Christmas time when we re-arranged the furniture to accommodate the tree.  Uncomfortably in middle of the traffic pattern, she had to sleep in that spot despite the lack of any furniture there.   We took pity on her, and always made sure that she had an appropriate roosting spot at the place in the room that she needed to be.  She was a very lovely  dilute calico.

She did not have a very long life, I’m afraid her early stressful kittenhood with inadequate nutrition impacted her immune system.   One spring she contracted a virus and despite numerous trips to the vet, she died after a three day illness in our bed in the early hours of the morning, lovingly attended by both of us.  She always loved to sleep in the front garden and so that is where we buried her.   This is her grave marker.

Mike and Smokey are the boys that were the loves of our lives for the past ten years and beyond.   I have posted many times about both of them, so I will not attempt to give you any ideas about what they were like.  Feel free to search the archives for tales of them.  I often compared their relationship to that of a Mafia Capo (that would be Smokey) and his Made Man (which would be Mike).  Suffice it to say that after the proper hierarchy was established they became inseperable.

It only seemed right that when they died, they be buried together.   Even though Mike died several years before Smokey did, I knew that they would be sharing space out in my garden, and that I planned for that eventuality.   The stepping stone is one my mother made several years ago.   Mike is buried under the flat stone in the left rear, and Smokey is under the stone just to the right of his.

The stone near the day lily marks the resting place of a great horned owl that I found by the side of the road where it had been hit by a passing semi truck as it flew low over the interstate, no doubt hunting for mice.

And so I conclude my memorial post.

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T-shirt Friday — a little history

Three years ago I got a broad fork for my birthday, and I made a post about it:  How it performs, how much I like it, etc.

Now, while I was being photographed, I had on a tie-dyed t-shirt that I had made myself at a session at one of my friends’ place.  That was a truly fun day.   I like doing tie-dye, almost as much as I like wearing it.

This post serves a dual purpose.   It features a tie-dye t-shirt that I made myself, but in addition it serves as a sort of watermark for the last year’s focus on getting my weight down to the level I enjoyed during my collegiate days.  I have nine pounds to go to reach my goal.

First, the picture that Jim took of my back in 2007, one week after my birthday, as I demonstrated my new broad fork.

And now, a photo taken two weeks before my next birthday as I pose with my broad fork.   In the above picture I was actually working with it, this shot was a set up.   For the record, the shoes that I have on in the above picture died a terrible death by mud during the ensuing summer.   The shoes I am wearing in the following picture are my favorite ones!   Also, the shorts I have on in the two pictures are the same garment.   I find it amazing that I have not destroyed these garments in the intervening three years.

Like the colors in the t-shirt, I have faded to 80% of my former self.

Physically, not mentally.   Mentally I am still 110%.

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Newbies

There are a few new members of the Scree Garden, which I often refer to as the Sedum garden.   I don’t do this just so I can confuse people, believe me.   I think it is because I haven’t really “named” that area of the property yet.

Anyway, I succumbed to the blandishments of the Hen-and-Chicks Man at the Baker Creek Planting Festival, and came home with several new plants.   This one is particularly charming, and I was told that not only is it winter hardy, it will keep blooming all summer.   I certainly hope so.   This is Talium calycinum:

I also got a couple more Hen and Chicks, Sempervivens.  This one is called “Gazelle.”

The other one is called “Lilac Time.” It came with a volunteer “side order” of another variety called “Super Bowl”, which I already have elsewhere.   No matter.   They look quite happy together.

I have a new robin nest in the front.  They busily built their home last week, studiously ignoring the traffic of clients in and out of the house.  Now they are edgily sitting, she is in the process of laying her eggs now.   They don’t yell at us the way the ones out by the pond, who have chicks right now, but there is definitely suspicion of our motives in evidence.

The brown thrasher chicks are doing well.   This image was captured a couple of nights ago when one of them landed on the fence to survey the domain, and was joined by one of the rock doves for a few moments.

The whole area is really looking good.   I have been going out on a daily basis trying to capture the evening light, with varying degrees of success.   I keep telling myself that one of these mornings I will get up before dawn and get some great shots with the dawn light.   Of course, that means I actually have to get out of bed, and so far I have not been successful at achieving that state at an early enough time for the actual photo shoot.   Professional photographers must be made of sterner stuff that I am!   Or they actually set their alarm clocks and go to bed at a reasonable hour.   That could also be the case.   Anyway, this is the rain garden area a couple of evenings ago.

Out in the pond, there are toad tadpoles.  They are about a quarter of an inch long now, double the size they were yesterday, and busily eating algae.  I just took this shot, that is the reflection of my fingers up in the right corner.    This tadpole is one of literally hundreds swimming about.  

When they first hatched, I was afraid the fish would eat them, but I guess pretty soon they will be way too big for my little gold fish to swallow.  At the rate they are growing, that could be tomorrow.

Life burgeons here at The Havens.

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Summer storm

Jim was mowing the lawn, I was picking peas, we were both sort of listening to the thunder rumble off in the distance.

All of a sudden, the monsoon arrived.

There was lots of wind, from all directions.   There was hail, but not enough to damage anything.   It was coming down so hard it overwhelmed the downspouts and the gutters overflowed.  The hostas didn’t mind.   Check out the rain on the window screen.   That doesn’t happen that often around here.

Usually the wind is from the west during storms like this.   The rain garden filled up.   See how the paths are awash?

I took that picture from the back bedroom window.

We received 1.5 inches of rain (3.8 cm) in one half hour.   It was pretty exciting around here.

Now we won’t have to worry about watering our seed beds today.  No more lawn mowing either.   Guess we can find something to do with the time that just got freed up (nudge nudge wink wink).

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