Impending Doom, Things in Bloom

Ah, the storms are on the way.  The chicken houses across the road smell HORRIBLE, the wind is whipping around that stench, can't even breathe out there today. I plugged my nose and ran for the mail.  UGH. Nasty, nasty, nasty.  It smells like yeast mixed with the poop.  The first batch were grown and gone in 6 weeks and he took 2 weeks off between.  They come get them just after midnight and rev and back up the trucks once every 30 seconds, it's LOUD, took 2 nights and is yet another shining example of what a HUGE shithead the guy is.  It's not enough to befoul (literally) the very air we breathe, he's got to throw in noisy nights as well.

The wind is up and everything is whipping around.  The huge pine that looms over the bedroom is scraping along the roof when the wind hits just right.  It's not straight on, it's swirly.  It poured for about 15 seconds and managed to get the whole porch wet, so it must be raining sideways!

It's Groundhog Day, so I fed the cats and moved some firewood.  The traditional GD activities.  Later, I will walk on the treadmill because it keeps raining and then sunning outside and I don't want to go for a walk and end up in Oz.  

This is the type of weather that gets me hyped up for about half an hour, then I just want to sleep. Or...maybe that's the crash because it's 2 in the afternoon and I've only had a protein bar and about 20 sugar snap peas all day.  I'm eating jerky now, that should totally fix it.  No, wait.  Okay, now I am all better.  We made Julilanne taters with cheese.  1 box or the dehydrated kind weighs 4 ounces and has 4 servings, which is good, but it takes too long to cook to make it good for backpacking.  

These are the things in bloom/being green in the yard, February 2, 2016

Kuma is very against having his photo taken.

We have been eating this (spiderwort) and dandelion and of course sorrel.
Love some greens this time of year, I CRAVE them, I started buying spinach in big bundles so I can have it every single day, I just throw it in soup or eat it raw or toss it in a pan with some butter and wilt it to go on anything else I happen to be eating. I figure there's something I need in there, the way my tummy yells for greeeeeens. 

Summer Day 33: Morning Glory

I am pretty sure the reason I really liked Epic was the scene with the morning glories at the beginning.  They are by far my favorite flower.

I have spent the last month or so tinkering with the tendrils that started poking their heads out and helping them grow up and around the posts on the porch and now they are starting to reach out toward the middle.  Only the white ones are blooming yet, it's that way everywhere we have been.  I am hoping my plans last year to relocate some of the blue and purple to the yard worked.  I don't know much about things like that.  I get lots of comments on the 4 o'clocks in the yard-which I did not plant and don't do anything to.  They have managed to cross breed between the white and pink to make a variegated bloom that gets older women very excited.  Every fall I send out little baggies of seeds to at least 2 different people who want that variety. 

Anyway, here is the progress!

My favorite spot!

 From the movie:

so...pretty...
Makes me want to shrink down and walk around.  Except the cats would totally kill me and toss me around and then Nia would come roll on my carcass.

AWESOME!  Leafmen warriors who ride hummingbirds!

 

There's this character, Nim Galuu, who is voiced by Steven Tyler (yes that one)
They SAY he's a glow worm, but I can clearly see he's a freakishly HUGE water bear.

eeep!  My favorite flower AND my favorite microscopic creature in the SAME MOVIE!  Score!

Don't read anything about the movie, just go see it.  It's not an intellectual thriller, but the art...wow!

Summer Day Fourteen: So...Green...

 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Kat had a lapse and forgot how to get in the yard.

 It's been raining and then being misty and then raining and there's days of it forecast to come.  July 4th was a bust, we did not even leave the house, though the locals shot off lots of noisy things and we had a three dog night per usual.

Japanese beetles are eating my roses, I have been putting different things on them to try to kill them.  That's been fun.  The most effective thing has been picking them off and dropping them in a jar.

 The rain, here at least, has been light and long, no flooding or anything drastic, just LOTS of rain.  And more on the way.  It's so green and lush outside, it hurts your eyes to look too long.

Summer Day Five: Saving a Hive

I don't want to talk about my morning, but this afternoon, I went into crazy person mode and scrubbed the bathrooms, did all the laundry, swept, mopped and mowed.  Then I showered and after that changed out all the bedding and got going on on getting that washed.

We mapped out the yard and left a big swath of clover in bloom for the bees, we will mow that next week and leave another section to grow and so on.  When I came in with my haul of blackberries, I had to step carefully to avoid stepping on bees!  yay! 

The butterfly bush is full on blooming and my roses are putting on their third show of the year.  I am happy to be able to provide so much foraging for the wild bees.

Puppy Fort! 

Surprise 4 o'clocks.  There are only 6 in bloom this afternoon.

Rose of Sharon, one of the 2 most useless plants.  The other being a crepe Myrtle. 
Sorry if your name is Sharon or Myrtle, your mom should have tried harder. 
Not that I have any room to talk, my name is awful and was last popular back in 1942.
I thought it came to pass in the days of Ahasarus.  Which is my favorite joke, but no one ever gets it.

Soon my very favorite flower will be in bloom and will keep me company until the frosts!

Cloverfield!
Seriously, who thought that made a good monster movie title?

Weekend

We started the weekend hanging out at Amanda's house on Friday, then meeting back up with her that evening to exchange kids for the weekend.  She got Ben, we got Rho.  Below, the kids are looking at the above clouds after we finished dinner.

The entire weekend, in fact most of last week, centered around the above muttlet.  She's started leaving the yard-every time she's out.  Even if we are out there with her.  She just goes through the fence.  So I bought smaller fencing and put that up, nearly killing myself in the process via a few dozen small cuts, some of which bled like I had been stabbed in an artery and scared me quite a bit.  I have blisters, gashed palms, bruised hands and the self-portrait of my leg and butt below show a tiny percentage of the mysterious bites/rash that cropped up on my lower torso after standing in brush trying to zip tie new fence to old fence.  And this is not including the new un-photographed spate of poison oak on both feet and ankles.

When all was said and done, she now simply uses the new, smaller spacing as foot holds to climb up and over the fence.  Short of electrocution or razor wire, I am unsure how to keep her in the fence and have simply opted to wait for her disappearance.  At least I have some warning this time.  And, this is my last dog, I won't be going through this again.

don't panic, it's no more than my bathing suit shows

Jake and Rhoen, this amused me for some reason, him walking around and her perched up there with a toy dragon.

The weekend went well, Saturday we mowed and worked on the fence, that night we watched Hansel and Gretel:Witchhunters, which was okay, but I really thought they used the F-word too much, it was almost forced in there and awkward.  It didn't need to happen is all I am saying, it added nothing to the story. 

Then we watched Beautiful Creatures, which I got mainly to annoy Jake, but it turned out to be surprisingly good (as we were expecting a Twilight-type plot and the girls were well prepared to egg it on) and I found myself going from irritated with the way-the-heck overdone 'Suuh-thern' accents to being a little smitten with everyone involved.  Kind of like True Blood to be honest, and speaking of True Blood, I had no idea Ryan Kwanten was Australian, though now that I know it's astonishing how Australian he looks.

Sunday, it rained and in the afternoon, Matt took Chan to buy a ukulele, which I was told at first was around $25 for an entry-level uke, then it was $70 for the better quality that would hold up longer and we were going in halvesies and then they came home and it was more than twice that and no halvesies to be seen!  I can't complain much, she never asks for anything and she's had it less than a day and has worked non stop on chords, I imagine her fingertips are going to look like mine by tomorrow.

In between providing my puppy with some mental stimulation via a VERY expensive wrap-around climbing wall, I read.  I read the final Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead Ever After by Charlaine Harris.  I read Niceville by Carsten Stroud, which is to be the first in a series I have no doubt.  I read The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell, I tried reading The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis and could never sink into it and gave up after the first 100 pages.  I also read 50 Hikes on the Cumberland Plateau and Off the Beaten Path in Georgia.

I loved the way the Sookie novels ended, I was satisfied, even happy with it all.  It was pretty well how I wanted things to go, but I know many of my friends read the series and I don't want to blow the ending, just say, 'Yippee!' because I like the man she ends up with.  If I got to pick anyone from the series, it would have been him. *sigh*

Niceville is creepy, I spent most of the book having no clue what was going on, I imagine the next book will back fill some of the local legends and explain what the heck happened.  It was a ghost/revenge/abduction/murder/Native American lore/time travel/spy/Southern Gothic story with some elements of WTF added in. 

The Death of Bees was really good, I read it in about 3 hours.  It starts off with young 2 sisters burying their parents in the backyard.  The narration switches between the sisters Marnie and Nelly and their neighbor, Lennie. It is a single story book, those are kind of hard to find these days.  Seems like everyone is doing a series.

And that's it.  This week is looking pretty laid back here at home.  At work, Matt's job is being restructured with a new boss and some 'streamlining' and more than a few fired people.  I am not going to think about that, he's not worried and so I won't be either.  I do feel bad for the people losing their jobs, but from what I understand, they are dead weight and the company is trying to stay afloat.  You can't work in an ever-changing business and refuse to learn anything new or change your own self.  The last time they had a round of lay-offs, things improved, so I hope that is what will happen this time as well.

Round the House

Happy to say, we are knocking some stuff off the list!  I got the carpets cleaned, got Chan in an art class, signed myself up for a few things as well.  I have Jake's birthday mapped out if not exactly planned and Friday Matt got under the house and added the support columns under the living room floor.  It feels SO different in there!   Yesterday we cut and painted the wood to replace the overhang over the porch.  Today we-meaning Matt-pulled out half the rotten wood on half of the roof and got about 2/3 of it replaced.  I am hoping for dry weather until next weekend!

We had three major things to fix on the house-the roof, the living room floor and the bathroom floor.  So that's one finished another well underway and the bathroom floor will not take very long.  Suzette said everything takes five times longer than you plan, so I am planning it to take an hour.  I think that was her mistake on the house they are building.  She did not plan it to take a couple weeks, she was thinking long-term to begin with.

We also burned loads of downed limbs and clippings from the various bushes around the house, Jake chopped privet-ever an ongoing issue here-and we had a fire going most of Friday afternoon and all of Saturday and Sunday.

 

I wanted to get a few pictures of Charlie, but he's not a sit and smile kinda guy.  So I had to run ahead and snap him coming to catch up.  He has energy and then some...

 

I hope he will work out, it's iffy for him at the moment, I don't know if he's settling in and showing his 'true' self or what, but he is INSANE.  If he were human, I would take him in to a drug detox center-I'd be that sure he was tweaking, he's on 10 ALL THE TIME.

 Jessie is not happy with the new doggie.  She will play with him at times and let's him eat-which is a huge thing-but she is ready for him to go away already.  I can't blame her...

.

I am still your favorite, right Daddy?

Kuma just watches the whole thing from across the yard.
Don't worry boy, you are not going anywhere!

 I took several shots of the heart-shaped hole in the trunk as it burned then could not figure which I liked the very best.  So here they all are.  haha

 Once we have the house 'fixed', meaning our list checked off, we want to build a patio and an outdoor kitchen and I want the chimenea to look like this trunk!

I am taking before shots, I will post the progress as we go!

Don't hold your breath for an invitation to the patio warming, I am guessing it will be another year before we are done with the house.  Oh, wait, the Suzette Prophecy.  I mean, it will be barely 2 months before the house is done.  Yes.