The Havens “Blue-(ish) Period”

It seems like the garden goes through color phases each year, starting yellow and transitioning to blue before bursting into the hot reds and oranges.  Of course, this falls into the category of “glittering generalities” that we were warned against severely during high school English essay production.  Needless to say, with my eclectic taste in flowers, there is never a time when there is only one color showing at The Havens.

Once I toyed with the idea of creating a “Moon Garden’” having been enticed toward the idea by a lavishly illustrated article in some gardening magazine or other.   But when I started trying to plan the thing, I realized that I am constitutionally unable to make a garden that only sports silvery foliage and white flowers.  Heck, I couldn’t even plan it without feeling the need for “just a touch of color.” (Afficionados of “The Bird Cage” will get that reference.)

Last year my method of dealing with my unruly wisteria vine (is there any other kind?) was to walk around the pergola with my pruning shears and whack back anything that dared to hang over the edge and intrude on my personal space.   Apparently this was just the treatment it needed, because this year it is absolutely stunning in bloom.

Getting this photograph illustrates a problem in The Havens yard vis-a-vis photography.   Frankly, this place would drive a professional photographer stark raving mad, since it is never properly prepped for a photo op.  Right now the area near the pergola is a construction zone as we work on the barbecue/wood fired bread oven area.   So my initial attempt at getting the glorious wisteria looked like this:

Even careful cropping cannot rescue this version.   However, it does add a note of realism to the image.

Another part of the yard that is very blue right now is the front.   The peonies are still only buds, so the pink that will become prominent soon is not evident.   Also, the redbud is finished blooming.   Instead, we have lots of wood hyacinths and veronica.

Okay, okay.  Yes, there is an iris in there.   I told you I couldn’t do monochrome!  Actually, that is a reblooming iris that shows up again in the fall.   I believe she deserves a closer look.

Actually, there is more than one iris out there, and in short order there will be many more.   Then the Blue Period will be only a memory.

But I digress.   The Stroll Garden has quite a lot of blue showing right now, especially the Scree Slope and Rain Garden areas.   The main blues here are the ajuga and veronica, but the foliage of the dianthus back there definitely falls into the blue category.

You really need to have a look at that bank of candytuft closer up.   It is really “on” right now.

The very last daffodils are still out there, but they will be gone soon.   This is a late blooming minature (she’s about 4 cm in diamter) called “Chiva”.

Cat owners will appreciate the fact that I got up from my computer chair for about 2 minutes to go look up “Chiva’s” name and when I got back Mallory had established herself in the chair and was studiously engaged in washing.   “I’ve been here all morning, what do you want?” was the look she directed at me when I sat down.   Not on her, mind  you, no matter how tempting it was.

Just behind “Chiva” you can see the blue of a stem of camassia, also referred to as quamash.   This is a plant the Midwest Native Americans used for food.   Since it is a native of the area, I have it liberally scattered all through the Stroll Garden.   Here it is setting off the Japanese kerria bush, which is in full not-blue bloom right now.

Here is a drift of it sharing space with the day lilies.

You will note evidence of the lack of photo op preparation here if you look closely at this shot.   It includes such various weeds as white violets, lady’s bedstraw, and henbit.   When I was shooting the Scree Slope for the veronica and candytuft, I pulled out a few errant wild lettuces before I took the picture.   But this area requires more attention than I was willing to devote before I made a blog post.

Actually, I am on my way there.   I started over by the swing and worked my way along under the pine trees, removing hen bit and wild oats for the most part.   I had to make a detour past my large clumps of miscanthus grass, which I neglected to burn off this spring, and remove all the old stalks and foliage that were suffocating the new growth.   While I was back in that corner I worked myself into an emotional tizzy as I weeded Mike’s grave.     What a gorgeous boy he was.

I still miss him.  I had a little blue period about him….  But I’m better now.   After all, I have Impy and Mallory now.  And they are wonderful cats too.

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Spring is here again

After a lot of fitful starts and stops, it appears that spring has finally come to the Ozarks.   We had a lot of swings in temperature last month, one day it would be in the 60s and then the next it would be freezing and snowing.

Through it all the crocuses carried on bravely.   I had daffodils that got snowed on and showed no ill effects.

In the interim I have started going to water aerobics on a regular basis.   When I first started, there were things I really couldn’t do, and I certainly could not keep up with the instructor.   Now I can keep up with her and my core has gotten strong enough that I can do the things that were impossible before.   And my love handles have shrunk.

I started out a little too fast and intense, and wound up being very sore.   After a few weeks, my dear husband commented that perhaps I ought to give myself a chance to get in shape.   “After all, you aren’t twenty five any more, it takes longer for your body to recover.”

Of course, this elicited a bit of a grumble, but I had to acknowledge that I am staring sixty in the face, and June isn’t that far away.  So I cut back to three days a week, and I find that my body is much happier with me.  If things keep on this way, after next week I will start going four days a week and see how it goes.

I have been to Texas since we last were together here at The Havens.   I visited my older sister for a few days, took my quilt to her quilt guild to be admired (which it was).   I find I am quite the anachronism as pretty much everybody does their quilting by machine nowadays.   I chose to hand quilt the baby quilt so I could work powerful protective and loving energy into it.   I don’t think you get the same result with a machine.

While I was in San Antonio, I was escorted about to some of the numerous stores that sell quilt fabric there.  I felt much like a kid in a candy store with only five cents to spend, but I came home with a lot of beautiful stuff, including the rest of the fabrics I need for the next quilt I am going to make, which will be for Jesse and Lynette.   I have the strips cut out, but have not started sewing them together yet.   Soon.

Another thing that has happened is that young Mallory has gone blind.   Several trips to the vet and we discovered that the lesions she had were the symptom of a deterioration that appears to be congenital.   We believe she may be able to see large dark and light areas sketchily, although lately I doubt she even has that.    It hasn’t slowed her down much.   She still plays chase games with Impy and they wrestle.   He chirps at her so she can locate him, and he is very kind about now cheating in the games and sneaking away from where she last heard him.

Occasionally she gets confused as to where she is, but that is happening less and less.   She really gives us a dirty look if we leave the chairs out from the dining table and she runs into one.   Also, we have had to acquire a trash can with a lid for the kitchen as the heightened sensitivity of her sense of smell has led her astray in that direction.    She stole a chicken bone out of it the other day; I guess it just smelled too good to ignore.

So, the vegetable garden has seeds planted in it, but nothing is up yet.   No big surrprise there.   Soon.

So, I shall go off to give the latest massage and talk to you all later.

 

 

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Is it really 2013? Already?

I know that I may be pushing things a little bit, but the number of the year has me a little amazed, and it is NOT because we survived the Mayan New Year.   You see, dear readers, when June arrives this year, I will be 60 years old.   Almost twice as old as the woman in this picture, who happens to be my mother.   She is posing in front of the mountain which was a talisman for my father all his life, largely because it was the first mountain of the Rocky Mountain National Park that he climbed.   Mt. Meeker.   Where I will be in mid-July on pilgrimage with my brother to cast his ashes to the winds high atop this peak and allow him to become one with the place that was always his favorite in the world.

 

He certainly had experience enough to know that this was actually his favorite place.  Somewhere there is a map board that he created many years ago that had flags of countries he visited and worked in during his life stuck into the appropriate places.   It was impressive, actually.   Last time I counted there were well over 50 flags.

But I digress.   Here is another historic photo, taken the same year as the one of my mother above, by the same loving photographer.

 

This is me, of course, engaged in delicate exploration of the beach at La Jolla Shores.  Even then, at the tender age of six, I preferred to have my hands in the dirt rather than putting a utensil between me and the medium.

A lot has happened over the last few weeks.   My “Pet Contractor” finally went under our house to see what he could see.   What he saw was so alarming that he moved our job from “sometime soon” to “I’ll have guys there tomorrow,  I’m having lumber delivered to your place this afternoon.”   Yes, dear friends, the rot situation that had not been addressed because we couldn’t find someone who wanted to crawl around under our house to do the work and also because we had to deal with the downstairs neighbors before we really wanted someone doing that had progressed to a potential disaster.   One of the four beams that support the house was actually broken in two places.    Any engineer can tell you that the loss of 25% of the total weight support of a structure is bad news.

The good news is the other beams held, they have been sistered and the house has been shored back up and we are good to go.   So now we only have to replenish the savings account, which took a Huge Hit (see, a crew of six construction workers only costs around $800 per day and clear 2x10s 14 feet long carry an impressive price tag).  Fortunately, since my contractor is my “Pet Contractor” he was willing to accept payment in three portions so we never actually had to take money out of our IRAs, which is a good thing.    And it is gratifying to be able to walk through the dining room and not feel the floor sink beneath my feet.

The whole construction escapade was ruled a virtual hell on Earth by poor Impy, who has barely adjusted to the new turn his life has taken since my father died and we adopted Impy.   There were disembodied voices yelling from below, saws, hammers, creaks and groans as the house straightened back up, thumps, people walking across is lawn (horrors!).   There was nowhere to go where he could not hear, no place safe enough to hide.   I found him crouched on the bed, eyes as big as the full moon, ready to disappear into thin air if only it was possible.   Fortunately (for my bank account, too), his travails only lasted two days, and a kitty heart attack was narrowly averted.

Mallory, on the other hand, remained supremely unconcerned about the whole thing, at least until the construction worker came into the house with his level to make sure that the floors were being jacked up to even status and not beyond.   Then she felt it was important to supervise his activities.  I was not able to get the camera going fast enough to catch Mallory with her head down between him and his level, watching the  little bubble and exuding the attitude “Are you sure you are doing this right?”  The expression on his face was classic.

Well, I’m looking forward to the next year, when we will start replacing carpets with something more amenable to being clean.   I’m sure that the lack of traction will change the way Impy and Mallory play.   While I am looking forward to the new flooring, I am NOT looking foward to moving all the furniture which includes huge bookcases full of books and an entire stereo set up including every sort of component from phonograph up to and including the BluRay player.    I’m not sure how many cords there are behind that particular piece of furniture, but I do know it hasn’t been moved since we moved in here in 1996, so I imagine there is an impressive collection of dust to go along with the cords.

I really need to get busy and take down the Christmas tree.  It would be horrible to have just fixed all the underpinnings of the house at great expense only to burn it down accidentally.

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Surprise, surprise, surprise!

I wonder if any of you are familiar with the character Gomer Pyle.   He was a naive marine recruit from Mayberry, N.C. (of the Andy Griffith show fame) who was a constant thorn in the side of his drill sergeant.   This was actually one of the shows I watched when I was a young thang, and when you read the title of this post you have to hear it with a Southern twang.

Anyway, you are probably surprised to have two posts in one day.   I have had a couple of surprises this morning.

The first was an inevitable progression.   Mallory and Impy have been playing together, chasing each other up and down the hall and batting at each other from opposite sides of the cat tree.   So I suppose I shouldn’t have been very surprised to see this this morning.

I suppose that now that I have embarrassed them by posting actual evidence of their relationship on line that they won’t sleep together for another month.

The other surprise came when I was out digging in nutrients in the garden in preparation for planting more of my winter cover crop, also sometimes called green manure.   The place I was working was the bed where I grew sweet potatoes, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that I had missed some of them in the initial harvest.  I have this vision of sweet potatoes scrunching themselves down and saying “Not me!”

Now, honestly.   I can understand how I missed tubers that were this size:

I can even rationalize a few escaping my vigilance when they have reached this proportion:

But for the LIFE of me, I cannot grasp how these monsters escaped me:

 

COME ON!  That one is TEN inches long.

As it was, the pile I brought into the house from the second harvest was pretty good sized.

These guys sustained a lot of damage, so I’ll be grating them up for the sweet potato slaw which is my planned contribution to the party potluck on Saturday.   That and the carrot cake which Jim has requested for a birthday cake.

Okay.   Now really, I’m done.   Really.

 

 

 

 

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Wandering farther afield

I’m pretty sure that most of us are far too young to remember the Perils of Pauline, a movie serial circa 1933 that involved the adventures of an intrepid young lady named Pauline.  I don’t remember this, but my mother does, and she used to mention this series rather fondly.

Mother was not that old in 1933, but I imagine that the Perils of Pauline circulated around for several years after the first iteration.  It wasn’t like that had that many movies back then.  Anyway, apocryphal or not, my mother used to tell us that she would save the nickel that her mother gave her every day for the trolley fare to get to school by walking instead.   Then on Saturday she would have enough money to go to the movie theater and see the next episode of the Perils of Pauline.

Imagine.   There was a trolley that she could ride to school on, and it only cost a nickel.   There was no school bus to pick the kids up!  They were expected to walk, ride their bikes or take the public transit.    My, my, my!   How did they survive to adulthood and reproduce themselves?

We are planning on a vacation to California in the fairly near future; going to get our Pacific Ocean fix, finally.   One of my friends said she was willing to look after Ruby while we were gone, and in order for Ruby to have met this person’s dog and be familiar with her place before the actual babysitting, we thought we should get together a few times at her place.   So on Friday, after I had done my morning chores and practiced Qi Gong with my buddy, I loaded up Ruby and got on the Interstate to go see Rena.

We hadn’t gotten very far, only a few miles outside of town, when all of a sudden my truck began to act like a stubborn mule, jinking and pulling to the right, and thumping alarmingly, dragging its heels (so to speak).   “Oh hell,” I thought to myself.   “I have had a blowout.”   I applied my attention to getting the recalcitrant vehicle safely to the edge of the pavement and out of the way of traffic, and sat there for a moment, feeling the high winds of the passing semi trucks buffet my little pickup truck as I allowed my heart rate to slow a trifle.

I watched the traffic behind me through my rear view mirror, and when there was a break I descended from my steed and went back to assess the right rear tire.

I assessed the lug nuts, which were rusted in place, and looked at the spare tire, which was suspended under the truck by some arcane device whose operation I was not familiar with.  I realized that I was not going to be capable of just changing the tire myself, assuming that the spare tire had any air in it….  I kicked myself about a little, remembering my father’s dictum that one should be familiar with the boring details of the vehicle one is driving so one can deal with minor difficulties such as changing a tire.

After I beat myself up a bit, I assessed the rest of the situation.  No cell phone with me.  I had left it at home since it had no minutes left on it.   No water.   No hat.   No air conditioning in the vehicle.    I was about 4 miles from town, I judged, and from there it was another 3 miles of street to get home.   I figured I could walk 7 miles, no problem.

So I put the leash on Ruby, locked the truck, grabbed my purse and strode away from the freeway to the frontage road and proceeded to walk towards town.

Ruby thought this was the most stupid walk we had ever taken.    It wasn’t interesting at all, since she had to stay on the leash due to traffic considerations.    I wanted her to heel properly, but she insisted on walking almost directly behind me and to the right, basically walking the white line that delineates the shoulder.    It took me a while, but after observing her, I realized she was trying to walk in my shadow, to maximize the shade available.

This was pretty difficult to accomplish, since it was just after noon and my shadow was not very big.    It was hot, too, about 94º,  and the pavement was radiating at us.   After we had walked a couple of miles, there was a big farm pond down at the bottom of a hill to our left, so I took her down there and she had a nice cool off, swimming about in the clean water.   Afterwards, we continued our promenade.

I had already ascertained that no one was willing to pick up an older woman hitchhiking with a dog, and after the dog became wet they were even less inclined.    I have to admit I overestimated my stamina, and Ruby was certainly suffering from the heat.   We had covered about half the distance home, and  I knew it was going to be an ordeal to walk the whole way, so when we got to a local geothermal heating purveyor, I stopped in and asked to borrow their phone.   The lady looked askance, but charitably allowed my my one phone call.   I was able to get through to a friend, and she came and gave me a lift home.

When Jim got home, he immediately wanted to know where the truck was.    So I told him.   We unloaded the groceries, and were going to share a beer before going to deal with the situation, but I hadn’t even finished putting away the canned goods when he called around the corner,  ”We had better get out there and get that tire changed right now.   There’s a line of storms coming.”

We hastened to the location where the truck was still patiently waiting.   At this point I realized my decision to not to try to change the tire was the correct one.  He had to use considerable force to free the lug nuts, and once they were off it took a lot of beating and hammering and prying, none of which I would have known where or how to do, to convince the wheel to release its death grip on the axle.   Apparently driving on the rim, even for a short distance, does some things to the trim of the wheel that are not necessarily good for it.

At any rate, we got the tire changed, there was air in the spare (not much, but enough to take us the four short miles to the nearest gas station).  We proceeded on our merry way home, and we were almost there when the storm hit.  It had a monsoon like intensity, with winds gusting to 70 mph (according to the weather service).  No hail where we were, thank goodness.    We got home, went in the house and started thinking about dinner.

The tornado sirens went off.   We corralled the cats and put them into containers for taking them to the tornado shelter.   Impy got the actual cat carrier, and Mallory was none too pleased to be unceremoniously bundled into one of our canvas duffle bags for the transfer.   Ruby was happy to be on her leash, we grabbed my purse, the jewelry box, the best dragons and headed out to the storm shelter to wait out the situation.

The tornado did some damage west of town but petered out before it got to the city.   We went back in the house and threw together some Leftover Soup from the contents of the refrigerator.

As we were sitting down to eat, Jim commented, “This has been pretty much a ‘Perils of Pauline’ afternoon for you, hasn’t it?”

I ruefully concurred, adding that I didn’t need another day like that for a while.

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In other news, I harvested my sweet potatoes.  Not a bad haul for 7 plants.

I went and spent a small amount of money and repopulated the whiskey barrels.

The fall hostas have recovered from their July sunburn, and are blooming furiously.

So are the sedums.

The local library finally obtained a copy of Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies”, which I read with great enjoyment.   Then I went and acquired the first novel, “Wolf Hall”, and enjoyed that too.  I am awaiting with interest the final book  of the trilogy.   Meanwhile, I have become rather fascinated with the Virgin Queen, and am racing through a comprehensive biography of Elizabeth I.

Now, I really must get on with my day.   It is far from perilous today, a nice crisp end of summer sort of day without a cloud in the sky, and I have green manure to plant in the vegetable garden and the salad garden bed to prepare.  I also think I shall do something about mulching the front, which I have been giving short shrift to the last couple of years in favor of the Stroll Garden.

The day lilies out there are performing the plant version of being tied to the railroad track with the train coming around the curve, and I think I should rescue them.

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