Funnybone

We have an email friend whom we met on a cruise.   Nice old fellow, who loves to forward funny stuff.   I think he doesn’t have enough to do, he spends a lot of time on the interwebs.   Sometimes he sends collections of wonderful photos.   The other day he sent us some funnies.

I guess it depends on your funny bone, some aren’t as funny as others.

I liked:   I was taught to respect my elders but it is getting harder to find one.

Also:  God created man before woman so man would have time to think of the answer to her first question.

Then this one made me laugh, but made my mother not laugh:

A man and a woman are in bed, lights out.    The woman asks:   “Honey, do I please you in bed?”   The man, no dummy, replies, “Or course you do, dear.”   She thinks a minute, then asks, “So what is it that pleases you?”   “Oh, lots of things, honey.   I especially like that thing you do with your mouth.”   “That thing I do with my mouth?”  she asks, puzzled.   “Yes.  You know, where you stop talking and go to sleep…”  This made me laugh because for some reason, lying down in bed and turning the lights off often makes me think of something that we wanted to talk about…

Then my particular favorite:

Answering machine message,

“I am not available right now,

but thank you for caring enough to call.

I am making some changes in my life.

Please leave a message after the beep.

If I do not return your call,

you are one of the changes.”

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The ants go marching

“So, how much do organic potatoes cost, anyway?”   I asked my darling husband last night.

“Oh, about $4 for a five pound bag,” he replied.

“Well, I think that maybe growing potatoes is just a waste of my time and effort.”

Dear reader, you might ask what prompted this exchange.

When I was a youngun we used to sing a song very similar to the “99 Bottles of Beer” song that had words that said “The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah…”  It was a rousing tune, and a lot of fun for a six year old to sing in the back of the car when you are traveling across country.  Not so much fun for the parents to listen to, but fun to sing.

I submit that the words should be amended to say “The ants go marching one by one, oh no! oh no!”   Because if your ants are marching one by one, they will soon be marching in their millions, especially if they find something good to eat.

A few short weeks ago, my potato patch looked like this.

Granted, that picture is of the potato patch from last year, but this year’s patch looked just has happy and healthy.    Shortly after they blossomed, the potato plants swooned, for no particular reason that I could see.   They were not blighted, there were no potato beetles.   They just didn’t look very happy.

Soon, they looked very unhappy indeed

Having decided that we probably should cut our losses and dig what potatoes there were, last night, having been stood up by my massage client of the evening, I went out and addressed the situation.

This what I discovered.

Lets just see a close up of that, shall we?

No wonder that the poor plants were swooning.   Something had systematically eaten all the phloem and xylem of the plants, girdling them.   And someone was obviously enjoying the potatoes that the plants had been making, too.   Look at all the holes in that spud.

Who, one might ask, would be doing all that damage?   Well (if the title of the post has not already given it away), take a look at what I discovered when I broke the perforated potato open.

Yep, those are ants, marching one by one by one by thousands.   I mean, how many ants does it take to do that sort of damage?   Let me tell you, there was not a single potato in that patch that had not been attacked by ants.   Some of them had been harmed more than others, but ALL of them had damage.

I contemplated the storage problem this had produced, as all the harvest now had to be washed and cooked and frozen.   Potatoes full of holes don’t keep worth a damn, I can tell you.

Well, as luck would have it, after I had mourned my potato harvest, I attacked the crab grass that was attacking the edge of the raised bed.    We have put carpet remnants around the edge in a vain attempt to control the weeds near the raised beds.    So, as I was pulling at the grass,which had put its roots through the carpet, and was crawling along the edges of it seeking the water it knew was in the garden, I happened to flip back the carpet scrap.

It was the New Orleans of ant cities, a Tokyo perhaps,  inhabited in its millions.   Life was good in the ant universe; with all those potatoes to eat, reproduction was underway on an industrial scale.

I decided that a tsunami, or perhaps a storm surge was in order.    Watch out!  The levees have broken….

Okay, I’m not a very good Buddhist.   I systematically flooded the entire municipality of Ant, several times.   Gleefully I watched the inhabitants scrambling to safety on the escarpments above the town, and cruelly I sprayed them down into the flood.

I admit to a certain joy in the destruction.    As I was casually using my trowel to rearrange the dirt, the ants sent out their minions to stop me.

Pathetic things.  They are not fire ants, their jaws are so tiny that they can’t find a place to pinch me.   Well, except on the soft skin around my knees, where I have lots of tiny wrinkles left over from my weight loss.

I brushed them away casually.   Then I started thinking about what the ants might be thinking.   Was I some sort of Goliath, destroying their Lilliput?   Images of the Godzilla movies ran through my mind.   Were the ant generals down in their bunkers making plans on how to stop my ravages?

A mosquito whined near my ear.   I checked.   It was not being piloted by an ant, nor was it armed with tiny heat seeking ant missiles.   There were no bombs slung beneath it.

Whew.

I decided perhaps the heat had gotten to me, and I should go in and see about the beer situation.

********************************

An exhaustive search of my organic gardening books and the interwebs has taught me that I need to make a tea from Jim’s cigar stubs to spray on the plants, or possibly I should be spreading diatomaceous earth about liberally, or on the other hand I should be using coffee grounds to discourage the hymenoptera.   Then there is the boric acid/sugar or borax/sugar organic poison route.

I believe I shall be doing all of the above.  Beginning today.

And perhaps I shall create a judicious flood now and again too.

Too bad, ants.   You should have stuck to eating the grass seeds and storing up the tiny seeds produced by the spurge, so that I could have more spurge sprouting in the pathways to weed out.

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Emergency travel

Gonna be off line for a while I think, I don’t know how well I will be able to connect.

I am off to Connecticut to be at my brother’s side.   His wife, who has been dealing with a metastacized breast cancer that attacked her liver has been on a down hill slide for a while.   Now she is dying and he needs support.

So we are exercising the credit card….

Talk to you later

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Pollinators’ delight

The Havens has become quite the pollinators’ delight.   Now that we have three colonies of honeybees living on the place, there aren’t many places you can look without seeing them at work.

This is a bouquet I picked just Tuesday morning, walking around the place and selecting things that were all fresh and new.   I took this up to the hospital to keep my mother company while she recovers from the knee replacement surgery she had Monday.

Beginning from the bottom of the bouquet and proceeding clockwise, we have clematis, skullcap, hosta, coreopsis (2 kinds), yarrow, purple bachelor’s buttons, lavender, great reed, coral bells, bluebells, white asiatic lily, butterfly weed.

Out on the lavender bed yesterday there was a zebra swallowtail disporting itself and hugely enjoying the nectar from the blooms.

Notice its very long swallow tails.   This butterfly was hard to capture due to its very peripatetic nature.   This next shot captures the red eyes at the base of the outer lower wings.   In this shot, a cabbage worm butterfly flits through the frame.

I spoke of the lamb’s ears the other day.   The honey bees have moved on to the butterfly weed, but the native bumblebees are still busy at the lamb’s ears.

This is why it is called lamb’s ears.  It truly is just as soft as it looks in the picture.

Here is one of the many shots I got the other day of the butterfly weed playing cafe to the honeybees.

The broadiae is blooming right now.   It isn’t very popular with the pollinators, but it seems like a little piece of sky broke off and fell to the ground.   I love it.

Not all my poppies are red.   Here is a pink one, volunteering in the herb garden, floating above one of the asiatic lilies that is going crazy right now.

That’s not all that is going on around The Havens, but it certainly gives you a good idea of what is happening.

 

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Andrew Nowell Smith — February 22, 1925 – May 6, 2012

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

My father died last night.  We kept vigil as he drew his last breaths.  The poem above is one he chose several years ago to be read at his memorial service.

He loved to hike and backpack.  The year he was 17, he and some of his buddies went hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and that was the beginning of his love affair with that area.   In 1960, we moved to Colorado and from that time on we spent many many days hiking and camping in that area as he showed us the mountains we loved.   We climbed Longs Peak, Meeker, Mt. Ida, Chief’s Head, the Twin Sisters, and many many more.    We walked across the Grand Canyon and back, explored Zion and Bryce Canyons, spent weeks in Canyonlands, visited Arches National Monument and hiked to every arch.   These are just a few of the expeditions we went on.

Our parents loaded us up in a truck with a camper my dad built for it and hauled us all the way across the country on a summer-long trip when my dad went to an antenna conference in Maine.   We visited almost every historical site on the East Coast on that trip, not to mention many of the National Parks and Monuments that are in the Northern tier of states.

Daddy travelled a lot when I was young, because he designed and tested VLF antennas for the Navy.   The one in Exmouth Australia, on the Northwest Cape, he designed and when it was built spent several months trouble shooting.   He also was responsible for the design of the one installed in Norway.   There are lots more, but when I was a kid he used to travel all over the world to the VLF antenna stations the Navy operated for the purposes of communicating with submarines.

He loved airplanes, and could remember the hoopla surrounding Lindbergh’s grand tour around the country after his triumphant return from the trip across the Atlantic.   He wanted to live to see what would be done to celebrate the 100th anniversary of that event.  He constructed dozens of model airplanes, some from kits and some from the plans, carving the pieces.   He constructed an ultralight aircraft and used to fly it around the Niangua River area on calm mornings.   In his hangar at this exact second are the wings and tail structure of another airplane he was constructing:  a flyable ultralight 85% scale model of the Albatross D3 WWI flying machine.

On his eightieth  birthday we threw a surprise party for him.   My brother came from Connecticut and my older sister from Texas.   He had no idea they were doing this.   We had a family dinner party for him at our house and gave him a Day Clock.   It was grand.

In 2008 my brother and his wife joined my Dad and me in Colorado for a backpacking vacation.   This was taken on that trip.

He was never the most easy person to get along with, being stubborn and opinionated.   He would shout you down if you engaged in an argument with him, and he “knew” he was always right.   Nevertheless, I believe he loved us very much.

When he and my mother conceived children (always planned, by the way), they committed to providing us with a college degree when the time came.   They began saving for these commitments the day we were born, and so I went to college on a full scholarship courtesy of my parents’ frugality and commitment to higher education.   For this I will always be grateful.

His decline in his last illness was swift and inevitable.   I know he is visiting with his old climbing buddies right this minute, and it makes me happy to know this even though I will miss my daddy very much.

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