Cold finches, or “Gee whiz. It snowed.”

Make no mistake.   These pictures were all taken when it was averaging 13º F out.

This is what happens if you shovel your driveway early and often.

It helps that we are on a south slope.   Take a look across the street at our rental house.   Those young folks probably spent the weekend all cozy in bed.   No outdoor exercise for them.

Notice how convenient the cracks in the pavement are for these finches.   There are lots of seeds trapped there, that is where I throw the results of my deadheading in the fall.

Trust me, the driveway was busy with all sorts of birds all day long, gleaning and pecking and fluttering about.  They also enjoyed the seedheads on the black eyed susans in the front garden.

Turn around and walk past the espaliers and the vineyard to see the labyrinth pattern in the snow drifts.

If you rotate approximately 90 degrees to your right from the labyrinth view, you have a clear shot at the thistle seed feeder by the wood shed, where we just did all that pruning of mock orange.

That’s my dining room window in the back ground.   That is where I have the perfect view of these feeders:

There was sculptural stuff going on out in the back yard.

This is how the vegetable garden looked when I first tromped out there and dug out the gate.

I got the coldframes dug out.  After a certain amount of effort.

Please notice that my shovel head is completely buried in the snow as it leans against the tomato cages.

Ruby caught the side of her foot in the ice of a puddle last week and broke her toe nail.   That caught on the crusts of the drifts while she was tearing around out there yesterday, and so this morning I had to cut the broken toenail off and trim the ragged edge.   The quick bled a little so we wrapped it up with a sterile guaze pad.   Her foot is sore but it is much better now thank you.   Poor doggie.

Not a great deal of massage going on this week.   People seem to still be snowed in.   And there appears to be a little more on the way.   I’m trying to influence the weather patterns for weekend after this to give me clear sailing for my flight to Costa Rica.   Visualizing a nice cold sunny day with no appreciable winds.   However, I bow to the truth that it will still be winter when I am trying to leave.  So I’m just hoping for good stuff.

However, I do have a client coming this morning, she’s running a little late.

That’s okay.

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New Rock!

Oh, it was an exciting day at The Havens yesterday!

Not only did I discover a new use for my scanner, which pleases the collagist in me without the necessity for glue, but the mail was quite exciting.

Sometimes the mail is exciting because it contains an insurance billing, which always involves figures that cause angst in the breast of the home owner.   Of course, one has to also look for the blessing implied.  I mean, you own your home, right?   And the Insurance Corporation has deemed that it is valuable enough that it would cost you X number of thousands of dollars to replace it should that unspecified disaster strike, right?   And you actually have the money saved to cover the insurance, right?   Right?    RIGHT!!!

But yesterday the mail included a very interestingly soft and knobby package with exotic foreign stamps, stickers, customs declarations, the works.

And inside, there was a rock.  And the tiniest, cutest pot of eucalpytus honey I have ever laid eyes on.  (sorry, the honey didn’t make it into the photo)  And an envy inspiring card.

The rock was collected from the bottom of the Sydney Harbour, near Shelly Beach,  by Norwichrocks.   She informed me in the card that the nearby wobbegong shark probably wouldn’t miss it.   I had to Google wobbegong shark, which turns out to be a very cool animal indeed, and I invite you to copy my actions.

The rock is sitting by my computer, glittering at me gently.   It is a very nifty sandstone that has a lot of silica particles in it, so it is nicely shiny.  As soon as I have finished giving my client her massage this morning, I will walk it out into the labyrinth, where it is destined to live near the other rocks from Australia, one from the Great Sandy Desert, one from near Darwin.   Oh, I am blessed with rocks.   And friends.

I had some of the honey on my toast this morning, and it is delicious.   I could actually use about a gallon of the stuff, but I shall have to content myself with the sampling provided.   It will give me motivation to plan my next big trip to include Australia.

As will the card she sent.  The Superb Blue Wren.   I must see one in person.   I am green with envy.   I love our little house wrens, and the Carolina Wren is beautiful in her own foxy brown way.   But this little blue bird:   perfectly named.   Superb.

THANK YOU NORWICHROCKS!!!   You made my day.

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Faces

I try to visit Syncopated Eyeball on a regular basis.   She posts a rather wonderful photograph (or series of photographs) every day.   I was inspired by her post today to go around and capture a few of the faces that are found in rocks around The Havens.

This one is by my front door.   I was quite pleased when I found the “hat” rock for this fellow.

Right inside the front door on the plant shelves is this grinning visage.

This personage is in the labyrinth.   The rock that makes his ear came from North Carolina.

Some people find this face out in the day lily bed disturbingly like a snake.

This one isn’t a rock face, but a piece of drift wood that my mother in law collected on the coast of Northern California.   Seems like a very weatherbeaten cowboy in a hat to me.

That’s enough for now, I suppose.   I have some errands to run — looking for raspberries for the new raspberry bed.

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Labyrinth news

Well, I’m beat.

This is going to be short.  I know certain bloggers who are going to be quite relieved that they do not have to wade through my customary verbosity.

I only had one massage scheduled today, so of course I spent a lot of time out working in the yard.   But before I did that I met one of my better friends, the gal who house sits for us when we are gone, over at her storage unit.   She is an older lady on a fixed income.   Utilities have gotten more expensive, as has food, and so she has had to curtail some of her expenses to make ends meet.   So her storage locker is being cleaned out so she can let it go.

I am the beneficiary of this.   Way back in the dear dead days beyond recall she was associated with a paleontology department in Florida that was excavating a fossil whale skeleton out of a local quarry.   While engaged in that job, they also came across literally thousands of fossil shells, some of which she also excavated, toted home, cleaned and identified.  For the past 15 years the collection has been residing in the storage locker, and she decided that it would be cool if they lived in amongst the gravel mulch in my rock garden instead.   I concurred.   The “Master Collection”, which has the best specimens, all properly identified and labelled, is going to the Discovery Center in St. Louis.   I got the “dross.”   (Well, and some totally cool things that aren’t outside.)

I think it looks terribly cool.

From there, the Stroll Garden looks like this today:

She gave me some really cool fossils which are IN the house; I will report on them at another time.

What really took the poop out of me was the rest of the day.   I have been digging daffodils around the place, as I mentioned previously.  I added to that collection yesterday, and shortly after that I addressed the labyrinth project and started digging the bulbs in.   I realized that I probably had enough bulbs dug to finish the project, so I was hot to get it completed.   As it turned out, I did not have quite enough bulbs in hand to actually finish the job, but I went out to the outer rings which I had planted in years previous, and dug enough bulbs out of there to finish the job.

And so the project of  completely outlining the pattern of the labyrinth in daffodil bulbs is complete.   So next year the whole labyrinth will look like this:

I planted right around 1000 bulbs, all transplanted from clumps in my gardens that needed thinning.   I started the project in 2002.  The first year I did not even complete the outer circle.   (I worked from the outside in.)

BUT IT IS ALL DONE NOW!!!!

We had freshly picked asparagus, lightly steamed, for dinner tonight.  Mmmm.

Now, I need a bath and then I am going to walk the labyrinth by the young waxing moon.

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Musings

I have a little notebook that I take with me most places I go.   It is small enough to put in a pocket, and I have a short stubby pencil that fits in it.   That way, when I hear something really funny or think of something wise, I can write it down and not lose my inspiration.

This is a really great idea, except for the fact that often when I get back to the notebook, I have NO IDEA what it was that was so great about the statement I recorded.   So, in order to amuse and confound you, here are a few of the gleanings from my notebook, with a few short thoughts regarding them.

“Never trust a cook with clean pot holders.”  This is pretty clear.  If they aren’t stained and burned, they aren’t being used.   The corollary to this is “A clean stove is a sign of a household who eats out too much.”   Either that, or there is an obsessive compulsive living there.   Neither of those corollaries are true in this house.

“The secrecy of our job prevents us from knowing what we are doing.”   I think this was inspired by a discussion that Jim and Jay were having about FBI and CIA operations, but I’m not sure.   Memories of those discussions are usually clouded with smoke and alcohol.

“How the labyrinth rocks connect me to people and places.”   Once someone asked me how I could remember where all my labyrinth rocks came from.    The short answer is, I review them regularly.   The long answer is, every rock in the inner circle is precious to me, either I collected it or someone who A. loved me, B. respected me, or C. “got” the importance of the project took the trouble to send it to me.   How can I forget the kindness of strangers and loved ones?   When I trim the inner circle, I review the rocks as I work.  Actually, the truth is that some of them I have to think very hard to remember where they came from, because there are so many now.   I have started taking photos of them with labels before I take them to the labyrinth.

“Traveling far:  changing river drainages”  This thought came to me as I was driving up to the Fort for a doctor’s appointment.   Almost every time I get onto I-44 for any distance, I think about the fact that the Interstate system in this country was largely built on the routes discovered by ancient people traveling on foot.   The genesis of I-44 began back when Tenochtitlan was the center of trade in what is now Mexico, and Kahokia was a huge city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.   Traders walking from one city to the other established the route which I-44 now follows.   Not surprising that people walking with loaded packs would find the easiest route from one spot to another.

Anyway, the idea of moving from one watershed to another seemed like a good hallmark for what constitutes traveling “far.”   Nowadays, we think nothing of hopping on an airplane in St. Louis and fully expect to arrive in San Francisco six hours later, a trek that 150 years ago took over a year and frequently resulted in the loss of your wife, children, or your own life.  We routinely complain about having to spend 20 hours in an airplane so we can get to Australia from the US.  How long did that take on a sailing ship, especially if you had to go around the Horn through the Straights of Magellan?    Anyway there is a reason why we have all these tiny little hamlets scattered around Missouri about 15 to 20 miles apart.   That was about as far as you wanted to take a horse or a wagon in a day.   With the advent of paved highways and internal combustion engines, many of these tiny towns are simply ghost towns:   Ira, Knob Noster, Falcon, Competition, Halfway, Tunas, Plad, Roach all come to mind.

And who names a town Roach anyway?

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