Damage report

The wind died down early this morning,  its raining but only lightly, and the only damage was a tree limb half way down our driveway, which we cut up and moved out of the way. 
Most of NH is apparently powerless and there are crews coming this morning from Illinois to help out. I love these guys, they always seem to enjoy their work, and not much fazes them. 

Who I do feel sorry for are those people in NJ and NY who couldnt or wouldnt get out.  =(

Hurricane Sandy

Woke up around 3:30, heard the wind, and decided I'd had enough sleep for awhile.  Yep, whatever the edges of the hurricane are, they're here.  I don't know how the folks in the middle of this thing will like it, but right now we are having fairly heavy wind and rain, and we're not even pictured on the landfall area yet..  Nothing like a hurricane to get the yard picked up.  Great incentive, there.  Last thing I want to see is my garden rake whipping past the windows, or, heaven forfend, through the window.

This is a huge storm, and one of the many times I am so glad we don't live on beach front property.  And with the full moon pending,  there's a good chance that any beach front property will, at least temporarily, extend inland for quite a ways. 

Anyone out there in hurricane land,  get that car out from under the trees, the power lines, whatever.  No heroics, please. 

Double Dipping

Just got a notice from my bank that from this point on,  if I use my bank related(debit) card in a non-bank related ATM, I will be charged 2.50 per withdrawal.   Okay, I can live with that. However.  If I go to the ATM in the mall which is NOT my bank's related ATM they  tell me when I withdraw money from my account via their ATM I will be charged 2.50.  So a transaction using this card at that ATM could cost me $5 before I ever see any money at all.
You have got to love technology...

First Person Singular

When my mother-in-law died, she had prepared herself and everyone who knew her for the eventuality.  Part of what she did, as a sensible rock-solid good Christian woman, was make out a will, prepay her funeral expenses, (with strict instructions as to how and where and what) and write  her own obituary (leaving out the obvious 'to be filled in later" parts).

We have all seen obits that go on for columns, listing descendants to the ninth level of degree,  extolling the virtues of the deceased or ignoring them entirely to focus on what the writer wants to remember:  my favorite was obviously written by her granddaughter, about a woman who had had a long successful life in several fields, but all this girl could come up with was 'She loved her grandchildren and she loved to knit and crochet".

The other day I sat down and wrote my own.  Not sure what I'd say,  not sure where it would go.  As an exercise in summing up one's life in a few sentences, it was quite revealing, since it focuses you on what really matters to YOU, as it should be.  And it isnt grim at all.  Since it's written from the 3rd person POV, you're two removes from the thing, and somehow that makes it easier. 

(I wonder what would happen if someone's own obit was published,  in the First Person...??)

Leafmold

this is the second round 'container' of leafmold i've put together this year, first mowing/collecting the leaves and putting them in a double walled structure:  reinforcing wire (the stuff that makes such great tomato cages) and then a  liner of chicken wire (which for some reason I have yards and  yards of) to keep the leaves from blowing out the 6x6" openings in the reinforcing wire.  The whole thing is about 5' high, and i've wet it down twice, which means it should by now be cooking inside.  When spring comes, with any luck, I can remove the cage pieces and spread it out, making an at least partially decomposed bed of leaf mold to plant my potatoes in.  Good stuff.
I got the idea from here:  http://www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com/how-we-make-leaf-mold/, a wonderful site full of all kinds of cool things to do to and for and about a garden and other things as well. She also has a cook stove almost identical to mine, which is a plus in my book.

Color Perception

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=en


this is the sort of thing where you go in thinking, aha, Ive got this one knocked, and it turns out that you really didnt.  sigh.  It's also kind of addictive, once you start playing with it.

Roots

I first discovered the 'net in 1995;  purely by happenstance I clicked on something called "Excite" and found myself involved in a massive message board that I never did find the edges of;  there were sections for everything from politics to religion to literature to build-your-own,  and the day someone actually responded to a comment I made, I was hooked.   I don't think in the next year I watched TV for more than an hour a week.  And after that almost never. 
What appealed was the interactiveness of it, something that I think we all take for granted now;  and to watch TV after that was numbing.  Sit, stare, react, lather, rinse, repeat. 
And when I finally encountered a real debate I suddenly realized I had no idea how to react, how to respond, how to comment.  It had been probably 30 years since I had had a deep convo about anything, and suddenly here they were, all around me.

 I also encountered my first online sociopath, my first flame war (hello Harvey) my first friends (hello Harvey) and discovered the arts of diplomacy, debating, and role playing. 

I miss the structure they had then,  and the breadth.  Message boards became forums, and then splintered off into specialized arenas;  now we have a dozen or more kinds of ways to interact, from blogs to games to specialized forums to social networking.  I dont miss the flames, but I do miss the people.  Even the stinkers.

Evening Bark

Just before sunset I was out doing a bit of garden work and noticed how quiet it was;  suddenly there was a chorus of coyotes in the small woods beyond the garden,  and another to the north of us.  It went on for quite a while, and then a third group joined in.  It reminded me of what I call the 'evening bark' that dogs practice, passing whatever messages they have along from one to the next.  This was, I expect, a territorial thing last night letting each of the other groups know where everyone was.

As long as I know where the cats are,  I can relax and enjoy the concert.

yo, earthquake

Not a major deal, perhaps, but the first one we've felt in maybe thirty years;  in California they don't even look up from their dinner,  but here it's major,  a bit exciting (I said "wow" a few times), no one gets hurt, and you have something to put in the memory book.  And you get to put in a "did you feel it" notation on the USGS map--one by one, people in most of the surrounding towns responded, like hands being raised in class.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usb000d75b#summary

switching hair

https://twitter.com/conz/status/256585873561378817/photo/1

Leaving me Speechless dept.

Cuddledown, the pillow/bedding catalog, is putting their pillows on sale.  One, which they highly recommend as a "bridal gift"  is list priced at $3,999.  That's the small one, Heirloom Silk Eiderdown.  Now, this opens the door to the obvious question:  ONE?  Divorces have happened  over less.  Who gets possession?  If there's a divorce, who gets custody?  Can you grant visiting rights to a pillow?  I'll bet NO one has a pillow fight with these things, nope.
Then again, it's a great way to sell two of them, sort of like bonded cats;  you just can't go home with one, and frankly if you're that rich,  you can easily spring for two.  Perhaps with rights of survivorship tacked on...

http://www.cuddledown.com/product/heirloom-silk-eiderdown-pillow-stomach.do?from=ac

Links to things

Nearly a year ago Ancestry.com took the SSDI off the public airways in here and put it behind a paywall.  You can no longer look up when Aunt Susan died,  or any other relative, unless you belong to Ancestry.com and for a fee will be allowed to look up your ancestors.
This has left me and a lot of other people scrambling to find something reasonably equivalent. I have found a few that work, although not as cleanly or as efficiently as the original SSDI:

https://www.familysearch.org/
http://ssdmf.info/

http://cyndislist.com/

And lord alone knows how long ago Babelfish became a place you had to belong to to use,  and now I see the future in 'upgrading' which always means pay more to get more. 

Soon enough I  suspect Google and/or Bing (which is what I use now)  will start putting out watered down versions of their search engines,  with the fancy high speed versions behind that paywall too. 

sometimes...

          all the squashy cushions in the sunlight in the window

                                           

and all the sheepskins in the world

and that huge "just for me" pillow in  the front hall, just doesn't cut it

when all a guy really wants is a bit of shade and a carton that's been properly seasoned in the rain

Opinionations (2)

1. Distrubing:  that parents are now so invested in their children's lives and trust them so little that they justify (and are encouraged to do so) parental snooping into the private places of a kid's life.  Not just 8 year olds, but any 'child' of any age that lives under their roof.  Backpacks, books (shake the pages),  letters, email, twitter and facebook pages,  anything and everything that their teen aged kids might touch is examined and considered.   I read one woman's comments about how she snoops on Facebook and if she sees any kind of activity she doesn't approve of, she confronts her daughter with it.   If kids are anything like we were,  after a few turns around the dining room table over this,  they shut down, go underground, get clever.  Put up a dummy facebook page to satisfy mom, (and the 'mom" part gets me too.  What ever happened to 'mothers"?) and then go off and do what they were going to do anyway.  Having been through this kind of scrutiny (although mine was limited to letters being read,  friends' parents being grilled,  and diaries being examined) myself, I can well understand that feeling of violation.  

Parents,  by being that paranoid, most effectively shut down any communication between them and the kids. Sad.  I was traveling 'underground' by the time I was fifteen, and learned to stay there, emotionally, mentally, when it came to personal difficulties. To this day I don't know how many letters of mine (in AND out) my mother read, destroyed, or saved for future reference.  I burnt the diary.  To this day I have been unable to keep another one.

2. Had the car inspected yesterday,  and while I was waiting for the (yay) good news, I was grazing a woman's magazine.  In it was a chirpy article about how to 'motivate' your kids for going back to school and one of the things suggested was to make sure they kept up with their 'household chores" such as keeping their rooms clean, and 'taking out the trash" based on the premise that a child who regularly takes out the garbage (and this was actually stated) as part of his chores will be a better, more responsible adult.  ExCUSE me?

Any kid with a bit of brain knows he gets the icky jobs around the house because he's the only one who can be bullied into doing stuff no one else wants to do. Chores?  I never had chores,  but I had enough to do helping out, and taking out trash belonged to whomever was in  front of it at the time.  Asked my husband, and he said the same thing.  He never had "chores" that only he  did, and we both grew up to be reasonably responsible adults. 

Well, mostly.

It's raining I can stop now

Garden Stuff

This time of year I begin to watch the sky for signs of impending rain,  since most of my energy at this point is going into Garden Repairs which were sadly neglected this summer.  I do not mow grass or weed or dig holes in 90+ heat.  The weeds, however, have no such constraints.  

One bonus from not-weeding and not-mulching and not-mowing is that all the weeds eventually set seed,  and the birds right now are having a field day with the bounty.  Our six resident wild turkeys visit the side lawn daily,  swurrrping up the seed heads and scavenging the ground for what got missed.  The small birds, busy on migration plans, are in the garden constantly, doing the same thing. So what I neglected to do this summer has had side benefits. 

And when you let weeds grow sometimes really interesting plants crop up; nothing I might want to save forever as a plant, but still interesting in itself.  And while it's probably advisable to get 'em when they're young in the spring,  if you do happen to miss out on the thrill of pulling nine bajillion tiny grass sprouts mingled with the lavender and woodruff plants,  eventually you will have saved yourself countless hours by letting the strongest kill off the weakest, develop a nice single root system, and then pull the entire plant in one sweep. 

I was also inundated with tomato seedlings that must have come from the  last year's compost, dozens of them, all over the potato patch.  I left a few, just to see what would happen, and it seems they got along with the potatoes extremely well (same family, well why not) even though purists insist there is a different soil need for each;  having started late, they developed fruit late, and while most of them had to be pulled after the potatoes were taken,  a few had put out an amazing amount of green fruit.  Hundreds of tomatoes.  The last plant I pulled up had been in direct contact with the dirt, instead of being trailed up a wire cage, and it had taken root all along the main stem.  At a guess Id say even though you lose a few tomatoes to nibblers,  the plant itself is compensated by the extra nourishment it gets from the extra roots;  and I wonder if a plant left to sprawl like that on good mulched dirt might not produce a much higher yield per plant. 

And now it's raining, I can stop for awhile, and think about what follows.

Leafy Green

Island

It was the goal in the center
of everyone's summer;
you sat on a rock in the sun
thinking, I could do that now
and all at once there you were
with your toes in the water, wading out.
The air tingled in your nose
as you struck out past the dropoff,
further out than you had ever been;

the lake bottom disappeared beneath you
and where the water a moment ago was filled
with sunbacked shadows now it was
dark, cold, a glimpse of what infinity
must look like. You saw hints of drowned stumps
impossibly far down, tried to ignore
the voices calling you back--
the only thing that gave you
courage was one strong voice saying, "Let her try,
for Christ's sake!"
                                and when you clambered
onto that far piney bank winded, arms aching,
you suddenly understood
what halfway there really meant

Pondering

This is the only country in the world  that I can think of where anyone can be or become an American.  It's a way of life, not a nationality, and that may be it's greatest strength;  in any other country you can become a citizen, but never a nationality. 
I can get German or Greek or French citizenship, but I will never become German or Greek or French, just by having citizenship papers. When I identify myself as to origins, I never say "American' I say "half French Canadian, part Dutch, part Irish".   Even our first citizens, the Native Americans, define themselves by tribe, or nation. 

To my mind, that's pretty cool.

______________________________________________



I wonder why people are so surprised when the bottom falls out of the ecomonic laundry basket.  It happens every thirty years or so,  in a boom-and-bust fashion, and has been doing so for a very long time.  You would think by now we'd know enough to be prepared for it,  or at least not be surprised when it happens again. 

I feel like a chipmunk, scurry scurry...

Proof, if you will, that even though Japanese Knotweed is a viciously invasive species here (and just about everywhere, apparently), it is also beloved in the fall by bees, wasps, and now Monarchs. 

Watchin' you. 


Add to that 700 jonquil bulbs dug and sorted (they will be going to new homes in a few days),  and the almost 40 pounds of potatoes I dug last night, and Im gettin' tired.   Trouble with potatoes,  once you start
digging, it's so hard to stop. Oh, you think, just one more hill oh golly look at those arent they wonderful, let's see what's in here...and there's only six hills left, might as well finish them up...

Elephant Graveyards

Several years ago when we were having a great influx of Monarchs,  I found a collection of wings,  buried or left behind in the woodpile, all in one place.  It reminded me of elephants who, when they are about to die, head for a kind of dying ground, away from the others.
In this instance it seems that several butterflies had reached the end of their living, and all chose this one place to die.  I wondered then at the strength of those delicate wings, since the bodies had long disappeared but the wings were unfaded, in some cases almost perfect.

Today, digging up jonquil bulbs I found another batch of wings arranged in much the same fashion, under a butterfly bush.  at least five or six sets, all grouped in one small area.  What strength in those wings, to last even longer than a day...