If it blooms... they will come

The annual migration of the plants from outdoors to indoors ahead of the first frost was almost over. Two days ago, just two were left.


This bad boy was still sitting on the porch by the first back door because I had some trouble figuring out where to stick him. So I put Richard to work rearranging things so he could come indoors. The room with the best light is his old office, which has been converted into the pantry-study-exercise room-dormitory-kitty prison. It's rather crowded in there right now.

And this one was still on the deck by the second back door because I knew it was about to bloom. I didn't want bring it into the area where our son sleeps, which is where the plants have to go for winter hibernation, while it was blooming.


And it looks like I broke the promise on the previous post. For indeed here is a picture of poop. Bird poop.

Let's clean that up, shall we? There, all better now.

A few hours later, the blossom unfolded.

And its smell appeals to a certain type of insect.

And they began to arrive in droves. Attracted by the putrid smell emanting from the structures in the center of the bloom.


By yesterday afternoon, the flower had lost its allure and the flies had stopped coming, which was a good thing, because there was a frost warning last night and so it --and the fern -- needed to come inside. And I do believe that the baby bloom that is starting to form on the left there is going to be nipped in the bud.

One more conversation

Me: Can you download the pictures for me.

Richard: You are driving me crazy with this camera. You take pictures of everything.

Me: No I don’t.

Richard: You’d take pictures of poop if you could.

Me: No, I would not!!!

Richard (in a high falsetto voice): Oh look! There’s some poop. I’m gonna take a picture of it.

Me: I would not!!!

And that's the truth. I might take pictures of animal skeletons, but I won't take pictures of poop. I promise.

6 Quirks

I have been tagged by Pennsylvania Wild Woman to participate in 6 Quirks. She writes one of my favorite blogs. Here are the rules for this exercise in social intercourse:

1. Link the person who tagged you.
2. Mention the rules on your blog.
3. Reveal 6 of your quirks on your blog.
4. Tag 6 fellow bloggers.
5. Leave them a comment to let them know.

Here are my 6 Quirks:

1. As it happens, one of my quirks is that I have an independent streak and I have a history of not always playing well with others. So, I am just semi-participating in this exercise. I'll tell 6 Quirks about myself, but I am not tagging 6 other blogs (I am curious about a couple though). I don't mean to be snarky about it; that's just the way I am.

2. I love the taste of raw meat. However, I no longer sample raw meat before I cook it because of the danger of contamination from bacteria and parasites. On rare occasions, I will order sashimi in a Japanese restaurant.

3. I am obsessive about saving anything that might be useful "later." Especially food. When we cleaned out the freezer, we found two half-pint jars filled with mysterious brown slush that turned out to be frozen coffee. Richard uncovered a jar of frozen "juice" from canned tuna, salmon, and mackerel that I made him save for making fish chowder (which I did make, and it was delicious).

4. Sometimes when I am doing repetitive things, I count the motions; for example, how many cuts it takes to slice a potato, how many times I slide the carrot across the blade of the mandoline. How many steps I take to go from room to room, how many seconds it takes me to vacuum the living room.

5. I like to collect weird stuff. I have a skull collection. Richard made me throw most of them away, but I still have a few small ones. I have a collection of mummified animals. I have jars filled with pickled reptiles and embryos.

6. I am obsessive about being places on time.

I am tagging Just Me, Miss Paula in Stitches, and Caprice of Electic. I am curious to know how quirky these women are, but if they want to participate, that's up to them.

Metamorphosis: An off-the-wall conversation....

Richard: Dinner is going to be a little late.

Me: Do you want me to come in there and help?

Richard: No! NO!!! No, I do not.

Me: No? Are you sure? I could....

Richard: It gets me all messed up if you come in here and start messing around in the kitchen when I am trying to cook dinner. You just stay out and leave me alone.

Me: OK! OK!!!

Well, I found this exchange hilarious. I guess its because I am still not used to this sudden switch in our roles in the house.

Richard walks around the house shaking his head.... I am becoming your father, he says.

My father began doing many of my mom's jobs in the years after he retired. Maybe because he didn't have enough to keep him busy, and then his knees deteriorated and he was no longer able to do the more physically demanding jobs outside. His ability to cook and clean and do the laundry has really helped during my mom's long convalescence from spinal surgery.

The difference is that Richard is not crippled by arthritic knees. There were subtle signs of the transformation when he took over doing the dishes about, oh, a year ago. Then in June he stepped up to the plate and began cooking, doing the laundry, and feeding the birds when I was stuck on the couch.

I am no longer stuck on the couch, however. I keep waiting for him to hand it all back to me, but much to my surprise, he is still doing the cooking and the laundry, and he feeds the birds. He seems to like being a househusband --- he’s very good at it too.

Happy anniversary to this blog...

My first post on this blog was 4 years ago today. I normally don’t go back and reread what I have written, but I did look at some of those earlier posts to get a feel for what I was writing about then. I see that I have a tendency to repeat myself. Toward the end of November 2004, I wrote about my neighbor Tony and his dog Chance when he brought us some deer meat.

...I was so touched by his kindness and generosity. I thought Tony was a rather scary guy when he and his girlfriend first moved in. He is big, he has tattoos, he is missing teeth, he rode a Harley (until he had to sell it to pay for cancer treatment), he looks mean; but, like his huge American bulldog (who is a sweetheart and I’ll write about her eventually), he has a heart of gold.

I did eventually write about Chance, earlier this month in fact.

On October 22, 2004, I told how Richard...

...found a cockroach last night and fed it to the spider that has spun a web close to the light by the closet. It has been there all summer, waiting patiently for a fly or moth to come to the light and get snared. He or she seemed very appreciate of the food...

and in a few days there will be another post about spiders.

The seed that later germinated into this blog is found in this rather grubby journal.

Now, I have sporadically written in journals since my high school and college days in the 1960s. Back then I usually only wrote when I was upset or angry, so it isn’t very helpful for me to go back and read these old journals. All it does is bring back memories of bad things I had forgotten. I don't write in them very much these days. If I am upset about something now, I try to offer it up to God and let it go.


This particular journal doesn’t contain too many of the details of daily life because the pages are not lined. I have a hard enough time writing legibly when there are lines, and when there aren’t lines, well it really is a mess. So, instead I have mainly used it note bits and pieces of information that might be useful on occasion, or to keep track of stuff of interest.

In 1993 and 1994, I monitored the warts that were growing on my hands, just out of curiosity to see how they waxed and waned.


I have had an ongoing problem with warts since the late 1960s. I have scars on my hands from warts that were removed. I later learned that warts usually go away by themselves. At the moment, I am wart free.

I taped down a map the dentist drew on how to get to the wonderful restaurant he recommended at the Rockbridge Trout Farm so I wouldn't lose it. We did have dinner there (mine was Trout Almandine). It was delicious.

If ideas for a blog topic pop into my head, I write them down before I forget. Sometimes I actually do write about them on the blog, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I can read what I have written, sometimes it takes a minute to figure it out. I was going to complain about items "made in China," but I changed my mind....

If I come across a sentence or phrase in a book that I find witty or clever or profound, I write that down too.

I've also taped down funny things I've seen in the newspaper, such as this advertisement for puppies with an amusing, obviously unintentional mistake. One might wonder what the father might have been if he wasn't also a dog. They probably meant to say father is also a purebred dog.

A picture of a hairstyle I particularly liked. She happens to be our representative in Congress.

I also found a note that I wrote on January 1 1994:

Richard accuses me of not being “productive...”

...because I am always reading books...

...or playing Zentris...

Zentris was an incredibly addictive game. I would start a game and look up and find 2 hours had passed. I remember reading a study that showed that many women were playing Zentris as a stress reliever.

...and the house is messy. He has a point. So I must endeavor to be more balanced. Brenda said in a letter that I should write about my life “experiences.” So I think I will start to write a book. We’ll just see what happens.

A few things have changed since then. Brenda died. I think she would have liked this blog. I haven’t played Zentris in years. The house isn’t quite as messy as it was; for example, instead of leaving my clothes from the night before laying on the floor, I have learned to pick them up in the morning. I still read books, but it takes me a little longer now to finish one.

As it turned out I did not start writing a book about my life experiences then, but I did eventually start writing this blog... 4 years later.

One that got away.... and one that didn’t

I forgot my camera when we went to Springfield the other day and missed the opportunity for a really beautiful photograph. The Ozark hills are low and rolling, the skin of the earth here is rumpled like a blanket on a messy bed. We came over a hill and could see the road ahead dipping down into a shallow valley that was filled with early morning fog and emerging as it went up the hill on the other side. It was breathtaking.

Another missed opportunity occurred while I was sitting on the Group W bench (that's the bench at the front of the Walmart store, and yes, we were back in Walmart... again) waiting for Richard. Some Amish came in, among them was an older woman, most likely the grandma, with a young boy in the shopping cart. He was maybe 3 or 4 years old, wearing traditional Amish clothes – a blue shirt, dark pants, suspenders, and the straw hat – a miniature version of the men in the group, except he didn't have a beard of course.

He was beautiful. I doubt I would have gotten a picture of him, though. A paparazzi I am not, and so I would have asked permission, and grandma most likely would have refused.

But on the whole, it was probably a good thing I did not have the camera. Whenever we go anywhere, Richard drives and I read to him. During the first 40 miles or so of the trip, I was occupied with reading the last bit of the book we have been working on for some time. Then I watched the scenery, and it seemed that just about every couple of miles we passed the mushed body of some small animal, mostly armadillo, possum, raccoon, and skunk; and an occasional dog or cat.

Seeing all of those dead animals fit right in with the Carl Hiaasen book, Double Whammy, I had just finished reading to Richard as we drove along. I might have been tempted to start taking pictures. No, Double Whammy is not specifically about roadkill; rather, it a wickedly funny book that takes on professional bass fisherman and crooked TV preachers. But one of the central characters of Double Whammy is Skink, who prowls the highways looking for roadkill.

Skink appears in nearly all of Hiaasen's books, sometimes it's a cameo appearance and sometimes he is right in the thick of things. He is introduced in an earlier book as the Governor of Florida. He tries valiantly to stop the rape of the state by land speculators, developers, and corporate agriculture, and others of their ilk, but is thwarted at every turn by corrupt politicians who enjoy the bribes they receive. Eventually, Skink has a nervous breakdown, runs away from the Governor's office, and vanishes into what is left of the Everglades to live as a hermit. He doesn't like seeing things go to waste, and he eats a lot of roadkill.

Skink has lots of adventures in which things happen to other people. In Double Whammy, Skink takes a nap under a freeway overpass, and is severely beaten by some young thugs. His eye is damaged, and it has to be removed.

But he doesn't replace it

with a regular prosthetic eye, such as one of these;



instead, he uses an eyeball from a stuffed owl. This causes quite a stir when he is recruited to be healed on the crooked preacher's TV show and takes his sunglasses off while on camera. But I digress.

Roadkill. Of course, roads don’t kill animals, cars kill animals. Whoops, let’s make that people driving cars kill animals. Most people don't deliberately run down animals that are trying to cross the road. Most people. I have in fact killed some animals in my car. But not on purpose. On the way to town last Spring I ran over a squirrel. It had passed safely, but just before it got to the other side, it turned around and ran right back in front of me. Thump-thump, bump. That was it. I cried, even though I don’t like squirrels. On our driveway I have run over a chipmunk, a shrew, frogs, and a turtle. It looked too much like a rock in the road. That just about killed me. It was a female and I could see eggs in the mess of what was left of her. So not only did I wipe her out, I wiped out a future generation of turtles as well. I cried about that one, too.

Some cruel people deliberately target animals they see on the road–especially turtles and snakes. Some people are seriously injured or even die when they loose control of their cars in an attempt to avoid hitting an animal.

A lot of deer are killed crossing the highway. Nobody deliberately targets a deer. Deer can do serious damage to a car, but I doubt that this deer did much damage to the car that hit it; it’s fairly small. This is not the first small deer to get hit crossing the road by our house. Like the fictional Skink, we ate some roadkill once ourselves. Some years ago, before the highway was expanded and we had direct access to road, I pulled out and saw a fawn that had just been hit by a car. I stopped, put it in the back of the car, and brought it back to the house. And we ate it, and it was good.


This deer was killed earlier in the summer. Richard started smelling it decomposing shortly after I was confined to the couch. I suspect only a few vultures and crows and possibly some smaller scavengers ate this deer. This sad pile of bones is all that is left.

Cuttin' up...

Our son Nathaniel (he's on the left) has a friend, Tim, who has started a business selling firewood to earn a little extra income. A lot of wood is left behind after the big logging companies are finished cutting in an area; for instance, they just take the middle parts and leave the tops behind. Nathaniel sometimes helps Tim on the weekends and after work, and Tim is teaching Nathaniel how to cut wood (how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood -- we had a woodchuck living in the barn for a while, as a matter of fact) and how to safely use a chain saw (makes me nervous!).

We lost a tree in the hurricane, so we told Tim he could come and cut it up for firewood and sell it if he wanted to.
So he arrived with his flat bed truck. And sharpened up his saw.

And he and our son went at it.
They cut the logs to the standard length and began piling them up.

He's got this neat machine that splits the logs.




so no one has to stand there flailing away with a splitting maul.

And this is some of the detail of the dragon tattoo on our son's arm that is visible in the video. It has nothing to do with cutting up a dead tree but I think it is really beautiful.

And somebody will stay a bit warmer this winter.

Trying not to think too much...

My take on scripture is that as Christians we are supposed to “seek first the kingdom of God...” and basically not get too involved in the things of this world, and that includes politics, and what Brad and Angelina are up to, and who is wearing what at the Emmys, and why should we care about the Emmys anyway? And for a funny (but long) take on the Emmys, visit Little Red Boat.

At any rate, I think there is a good reason why we are told to be “in the world but not of the world.” You get to paying too much attention to politics and gasoline prices, and how much it is going to cost to buy propane this winter, and why grapefruits are almost $1 each, and all that stuff, and pretty soon you are feeling angry and frustrated and impotent, and it can make you a little crazy. In the movie Network, the great actor Peter Finch played a news personality who got mad and went a little crazy. During a broadcast he told people to get mad, open their window, and yell.



That wouldn't do much good here. Nobody would hear me. I try to keep sane by not paying too much attention.

And I do a fairly decent job of not paying attention most of the time...




...which explains why I wasn’t too aware of what was going on with Wall Street debacle when it first happened. I was too busy working and thinking about other stuff. In fact, when I heard the first news report about it, I thought they were talking about the crash that started the Depression in the 1930s.

But I am paying attention now.




In fact, I suspect all of us will be paying attention for a long time to come.

And paying....

And paying......

Boy, are we ever going to pay.

No point in me ranting on about what has gone wrong with capitalism and Wall Street and the bailout. Joe Bageant has done a pretty good of ranting about it in The Really Hard-to-Swallow Truth About the Bailout,
and has said it better than I ever could (note, he also uses some words and phrases that I would not use, just ignore them).

And now that I have that out of my system....

A funny thing happened on the way to the car

Our businesses generate a lot of paper, so we occasionally have an outing to MV, one of the nearby towns, to take it to recycling and buy business supplies at Walmart.

We have to drive 16 miles (one way) to do this because the people who were running our town once upon a time were not very visionary. Walmart wanted to build a store here, but the town fathers (one of whom was a mother) said no because they wanted to protect the local business owners. That was was an admirable--but dumb--decision, because it didn't stop Walmart from approaching MV, which was happy to accept. So, not only did our town loose a few local businesses, as the town fathers predicted, it also lost the revenue that Walmart would have generated. A few years ago when Dollar General Store wanted to build a store in town, the people who had taken over from the Old Guard were at least smart enough to say yes.

The other reason we have to go to MV is that just about the time the new crew of people running things were saying yes to Dollar General Store, they scrapped our booming recycling program. Huh? What? Yep, they canceled recycling. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

And no, I am not a big fan of Walmart. I have lots of opinions about Walmart that I will keep to myself for the time being. But, one thing that we have discovered recently is that Walmart is not always cheaper. One of the items on the list was $1.50 more at Walmart than it was in town. But that's not what I started to write about (the lure of the rabbit is too much to resist sometimes)

As we left Walmart, two older teenaged boys were walking toward us; heck, maybe they were in their 20s, I can't tell any more. When I saw them I was reminded of Germaine Greer's book about menopause. I had picked it up at a yard sale for .25 cents and skimmed through it. I didn't read the whole thing because I don't particularly like her, but she had a few points to make, one being that women of a certain age become invisible to younger men. Most women in their mid-50s and early 60s, unless they are stunningly beautiful or noticeable in some other way, really are off the radar of these younger men as far as sexuality is concerned. And this is right and proper. After all, even though we may have sexuality oozing out our pores, we are not potential breeders and are probably close to age of their mothers and even (gasp) grandmothers.

I was thinking about this idea of being invisible as we walked along and the boys passed, and I watched them not watch me--I mean, their eyes didn't even flicker in my direction, which is not surprising because I am most definitely not stunningly beautiful. I am a frumpy middle-aged woman. At that very moment--and I am not kidding here or making this up--we heard a wolf whistle coming from the parking lot. And I laughed to myself.

Well that's perfect timing, I thought, but whoever it is that is whistling cannot possibly be whistling at me.



Well OK, well maybe it wasn't as funny as this movie, but it seemed funny at the time, for a while at least... At any rate,

I didn't bother to turn my head to look, but Richard did. And he sees this guy in a truck waiving his arm out the window.

It was Lynn, and he had whistled at Richard. We walked over. Lynn teased us. We laughed. It was hilarious.

But the hilarity was dampened a little. He told us he was waiting for a call to tell him that a prescription for his wife had been called into the pharmacy at WalMart.
Judy is very sick with a cold. Even a simple cold can be very serious for her because she can no longer cough, and I don't think she can "blow her nose" either. She has to be suctioned.

And then it got even more serious. The day totally stopped being funny. Several years ago Lynn was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. They harvested a bunch of stem cells. He went through chemotherapy and had a stem cell transplant. His hair grew back, and the cancer went into remission. Then the cancer came back. He went through another round of chemotherapy and another stem cell transplant. His hair grew back, and the cancer went into remission.

Lynn told us he got some bad news this week. The cancer is coming back, and there are no more stem cells in reserve.

Lord, have mercy.

I get a new widget... and an award

Step right up folks! Now available!! Get your very own virtual reality insect widget!!! Jazz up your iGoogle home page. Impress your friends. Each one is unique, comes and goes as it pleases. Endless source of visual entertainment. Each one is so lifelike, you'll think its real!!!

This extra special addition to my iGoogle home page suddenly popped up just as I was about to do a Google search. And unlike the other widgets that I have arranged on my iGoogle page, this one didn't stay in one spot; it began wandering around. But I didn't find this widget on Google. Nosiree. It found me. This was no virtual reality insect. This was the real deal. It flew in the back door and past my head, right by my ear, sounding like a B52 bomber, and homed in on my monitor. And just about as quickly, I helped it out the back door (in a glass jar and still alive).
And my blog has been given an award. I feel very honored that Miss Paula has mentioned my blog on her blog. As I have already mentioned several times (even recently) our respective families have been friends for years, but it has been a long time since I have visited with Paula in person. I think the last time was in 1985 when my sister got married and we were both in her wedding. As we were waiting for the ceremony to start, Paula was complaining that she wasn't feeling very good. She later found out why: she was pregnant.

Her dad and my father were fishing buddies. Her dad, Gene Rogers, is in the middle holding one of her children, as a matter of fact. Paula has two gifts that I don't have, one is the hand-eye coordination to do fine embroidery work and the other is the patience...

Thanks Paula.