Appropriate Attire

It is not often that a person can do more than just glance at the sun without risking damage to their eyesight. But this morning, I could.

When I left the house at 6 a.m. to walk and pick up trash, the sun was rising up through haze on the horizon, it was huge (as the moon also is as it rises) and was a brilliant orange, but damped so I could look right at it. It was glorious.

It reminded me so much of home. The city in Southern California where I was raised is about 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and often in the early evening fog would come in off the ocean, and as the sun set, it would become damped and easily viewed.

Well, the beautiful vision this morning only lasted a few minutes, because the sun rises quickly and moved through the haze and then gradually got too bright to look at.

Now, on these hot summer days, I knock around the house in a pair of Richard’s old boxer shorts, with the fly sewn shut, on top of my regular underwear. Cool and comfortable and eminently practical. We have some zone air conditioning in the part of the house where I work, and Richard has a unit in his office, but the central part of the house is not air conditioned and it gets hot as the day wears on.

So I’m galumphing along and spotted some trash. And as I looked down to grab it with the picker-upper, I happened to look down and realized I forgot to put my regular walking shorts on top of Richard’s old boxer shorts.

How embarrassing. Fortunately, there is not a whole lot of traffic on the highway at 6 a.m. Yeah, people are heading to work, but I figure people on the highway who saw me walking were going too fast to register that I was wearing men's underwear.

And even more fortunately I did not meet the two women who I regularly see walking on our frontage road on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I don’t always walk on our frontage road or cross the highway and walk on that frontage road, but if I do and they are also walking, then we pass each other coming and going. There is plenty of time to check each other out. One of the women always wears tight yoga pants and the other one always wears knee-length shorts and a blouse or t-shirt (see?).

Fortunately, this morning they had not started their walk, so I got away with it.

Wanted: Females

One of the first things we did when we move here was to try to grow our own vegetables. It was a hard row to hoe. The soil here is terrible, mostly heavy clay and rocks. So we spent a lot of time and effort trying to build it up by hauling in manure, sand, and compost and making raised beds.

I can remember one summer when we had worked so hard putting in an asparagus bed, and no sooner did we get it planted than a torrential rain caused the wet weather creek to leap its banks and everything was washed way.

Unfortunately for the garden, my husband never met a tree he didn’t love, and when one would sprout up in the wonderful soil I had worked so hard to prepare, he wouldn’t let me pull it up. So the cleared areas where I was trying to plant vegetables soon became very shaded and filled with tree roots, We gave up trying to grow in the ground.

We bought whiskey barrel halves and planted in them for a while, but that project came to an end when the crew hired by the electric company came and cleared the right of  way under the lines, which is where we had the whiskey barrels, and they bulldozed them all to smithereens.

The last time I attempted to grow squash, which was probably 15 years ago, the plants were invaded by these awful beetles, and then the few squash that started to develop rotted when they were about 2 inches long.

Now we have a few vegetables planted in 5-gallon pails. Jalapeno and bell peppers, tomatoes, and this year, we thought we would try again with squash.

We now have several really healthy looking plants in 5-gallon pails on our deck. 

Unfortunately, only 1 squash has developed. 

Richard did some searching and thought perhaps it was because we didn’t have enough insects around to pollinate the flowers. So he found a YouTube video on how to pollinate by hand.

When he went out to try it, he discovered that all of the flowers are male blossoms. There aren’t any female blossoms to pollinate with. Some flowers have both male and female parts, but not squash. We hope that some female blossoms will eventually appear.

Guess it takes two to tango, even for squash.

The Breakfast Club

They are waiting for me every morning.  Richard calls them “the breakfast club”. 

I like to think of these as Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter, one of whom is a baby born this year who has joined the grownups. In the front yard, another group waits for Richard, who usually feeds the birds on that side of the house.

They have become very tame. The other day one who was sitting near the front porch saw Richard going down steps and followed him around the side the house to where the feeding platform is in the front yard.

The rabbits here have a wide assortment of natural food to eat and are in no danger of starving. I think it is more like if you had to choose between a plate of carrot sticks and celery on the left and a bag of Doritos (or Cheetos, or Chex Mix, or… you get the idea) on the right.

In the meantime, it seems the cost of “everything” is going up and up. Last summer we stocked up on black oil sunflower seeds, at about $18 a sack, and wild bird seed. We still have plenty of wild bird seed but were coming to the bottom of the barrel of sunflower seeds and so I stopped by the feed store to pick up another 50-lb sack.

How much was the sunflower seeds? He wants to know.

$30 with tax.

$(#@%*!. Are you kidding me?

Nope.

We had a discussion about whether we are going to continue to feed birds (and rabbits) because of the increase in the cost and have decided we will. I guess we will buy 1 sack at a time and hope the price comes down. If what is happening with sunflower seeds follows the pattern of other commodities, I have a feeling that the price is not going to come down very much. The woman at the feed store says it's because people who stayed home during the pandemic started feeding birds and so sunflower seeds are in short supply.