They are in the neighborhood. They love sweet things. Juicy things. Soft things.
Like peaches.
Except for the first two pickings (My husband got about a dozen and I got about a dozen. Ms. Flippers got 2 and Stubble got none) - the CROWS got ALL OF THEM.
Dang black winged vermin!
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
And How Does Your Garden Grow?
So this was supposed to publish on June 14th...guess what didn't happen?
Very well, thank you. The silver bells and cockleshells are doing just fine and the pretty maid (Ms. Flippers) just hand pollinated the corn last night.
I have learned lots and lots about vegetable gardening lately, my previous attempts at raising veggies being the type that occurr in pots on decks and patios. Some of those were wildly successful, some not so much - like when a local wild animal got onto the deck and overturned pots of herbs (turned out all he really wanted was the cat nip)...or when I tried the much advertised Topsy-Turvy...
What I have learned, in general, is that it is all just one grand experiment. I have been reading mini-farming books and following several Extension Services (did you know that there is one land grant college in each state that is required to maintain an Extension Service and that this is all part of the USDA's education program?). Here is a summary of the knowledge that I have gleaned:
The plan next year, after figuring out what went well and what didn't is to amend the soil as needed and to plant at least half of the available garden - starting in September with the cool weather root vegetables... in the spring around March/April we will start the melons and such...
Here's to my Mom, daughter of the soil (well, a dairy farmer), who always had fresh green beans in her garden - and tomatoes that we could just pick and eat whenever we felt like it. Here's to Mom, from whom I inherited my love of dirty fingernails and my inability to keep garden gloves on when I'm weeding. Here's to my Mom who would be as excited over my drip irrigation system as I am.
As the Bearded One said last weekend when we were changing out irrigation heads and replacing drip tubing and I was as filthy and muddy as a kid in a puddle and had a grin to match, "You really love this, don't you?"
Ay-Yup!
Very well, thank you. The silver bells and cockleshells are doing just fine and the pretty maid (Ms. Flippers) just hand pollinated the corn last night.
I have learned lots and lots about vegetable gardening lately, my previous attempts at raising veggies being the type that occurr in pots on decks and patios. Some of those were wildly successful, some not so much - like when a local wild animal got onto the deck and overturned pots of herbs (turned out all he really wanted was the cat nip)...or when I tried the much advertised Topsy-Turvy...
What I have learned, in general, is that it is all just one grand experiment. I have been reading mini-farming books and following several Extension Services (did you know that there is one land grant college in each state that is required to maintain an Extension Service and that this is all part of the USDA's education program?). Here is a summary of the knowledge that I have gleaned:
- Don't start out big. That way lies disaster and/or insanity. We currently have about 5 rows of our total garden space under cultivation.
- Every individual environment is different from the acidity of the soil to the clay content to its water retention properties. This means that any given set of "soil additives" are not universal and although you can get information on what is known about "your general area" it won't apply to your own backyard. You need to TEST and EXPERIMENT and PRAY. I will be contacting my local extension service office (only about 5 miles away) to learn all about soil testing.
- A cucumber is not a cucumber is not a cucumber: As you can tell from the dizzying array of choices at Home Depot, there are many species of tomato from which you can choose. Guess What? Not all of them will do equally well in every yard. My reading instructed me to choose several varieties of each thing that I wanted to raise and plant them all to see which ones did best in my soil and which one(s) my family liked. With luck they will like at least one variety of each thing that grows.
- In my area I should be able to garden year round. We don't get hard frosts. Or maybe only one a year. On the plus side this means that I can use the garden space year round to raise broccoli. On the negative side it means that I can't grow my favorite apples that require over 100 days of freezing temperatures to blossom and produce fruit.
- Just because you can grow from heirloom seeds and save them and replant next year doesn't mean that they will be disease reisitant. Oh NO. Some of them will be very tasty but extremely delicate...
- Tell your husband NOT TO KILL THE LADYBUGS! Or the spiders.
The plan next year, after figuring out what went well and what didn't is to amend the soil as needed and to plant at least half of the available garden - starting in September with the cool weather root vegetables... in the spring around March/April we will start the melons and such...
Here's to my Mom, daughter of the soil (well, a dairy farmer), who always had fresh green beans in her garden - and tomatoes that we could just pick and eat whenever we felt like it. Here's to Mom, from whom I inherited my love of dirty fingernails and my inability to keep garden gloves on when I'm weeding. Here's to my Mom who would be as excited over my drip irrigation system as I am.
As the Bearded One said last weekend when we were changing out irrigation heads and replacing drip tubing and I was as filthy and muddy as a kid in a puddle and had a grin to match, "You really love this, don't you?"
Ay-Yup!
Friday, June 8, 2012
Forgotten Treasures
Apparently, I have been writing (seriously) for a long time. How this could have slipped my mind is beyond me. I knew that there were many things out there that I had started but never finished. As far as I know, the only things that I have finished literary wise are three song lyrics (only one with an accompanying melody) and two NaNoWriMo challenges.
As I dug through boxes that my Mom had sent from back East to California long, long ago I found notebooks and folders and little pieces of paperclipped paper. Most had in them at least the rough draft of a first chapter. Some had only a first paragraph or a first sentence. One had only a name on a piece of scrap paper - but what a name: It is apparently the only female character in all of the writing that I have done who is not (at least initially) named "Sarah". What I was going to DO with her I have no idea, but at least she wasn't "Sarah". My mother's name wasn't Sarah, there really aren't any Sarah's in my family; maybe like Elwood P. Dowd, I always had such hopes for the name.
I consider these finds to be treasure of a sort. I surprise myself by how much I like what I have written. I wind up thinking: "Well, that was certainly written by a 24 year old, but it is a fun story." Or "What great characters! Instead of just following them through this little crisis in life, how much fun would it be to visit them 30 years later?" Or "Oh crap! I've started this same story three different times in slightly different ways - maybe that means that I'm supposed to actually finish it!"
I am currently in the process of moving all of my writing from scraps of paper to a USB device so that all of the dusty, yellowing sheets of paper don't completely disintegrate on me. Then I will do what mature adults do: back it up and put a copy in the fireproof safe. Because if I can lose all of this for 20 years by stuffing it into an old shoe box and stuffing THAT into the back of a dresser drawer and then "getting on with life", I could certainly lose my stories forever. Already it has become apparent that using the turquoise felt tip pen to write deathless prose was somewhat less than a success - readability wise.
Do I believe that I will ever finish these stories? Probably not the science fiction one that involves a version of the moonspinners of Greek legend, but I realize that I turned the main plotlines of it into a short story about my cat and fairies in the garden that was written for my great nephew..."Rufus and the Handmaidens of Time" (one of the finished NaNoWriMo projects).
Probably not the mystery about a library researcher in the days of InfoSearch Services (where college students were sent into the University stacks to copy chapters and articles and such for pay) - we all just google it now and nobody could relate to poor "Cassie" (original character name, "Sarah") these days.
But now I have hard evidence that all of my free time in earlier days was NOT spent shopping, watching TV or playing "Pong"...
so there, Stubble!
As I dug through boxes that my Mom had sent from back East to California long, long ago I found notebooks and folders and little pieces of paperclipped paper. Most had in them at least the rough draft of a first chapter. Some had only a first paragraph or a first sentence. One had only a name on a piece of scrap paper - but what a name: It is apparently the only female character in all of the writing that I have done who is not (at least initially) named "Sarah". What I was going to DO with her I have no idea, but at least she wasn't "Sarah". My mother's name wasn't Sarah, there really aren't any Sarah's in my family; maybe like Elwood P. Dowd, I always had such hopes for the name.
I consider these finds to be treasure of a sort. I surprise myself by how much I like what I have written. I wind up thinking: "Well, that was certainly written by a 24 year old, but it is a fun story." Or "What great characters! Instead of just following them through this little crisis in life, how much fun would it be to visit them 30 years later?" Or "Oh crap! I've started this same story three different times in slightly different ways - maybe that means that I'm supposed to actually finish it!"
I am currently in the process of moving all of my writing from scraps of paper to a USB device so that all of the dusty, yellowing sheets of paper don't completely disintegrate on me. Then I will do what mature adults do: back it up and put a copy in the fireproof safe. Because if I can lose all of this for 20 years by stuffing it into an old shoe box and stuffing THAT into the back of a dresser drawer and then "getting on with life", I could certainly lose my stories forever. Already it has become apparent that using the turquoise felt tip pen to write deathless prose was somewhat less than a success - readability wise.
Do I believe that I will ever finish these stories? Probably not the science fiction one that involves a version of the moonspinners of Greek legend, but I realize that I turned the main plotlines of it into a short story about my cat and fairies in the garden that was written for my great nephew..."Rufus and the Handmaidens of Time" (one of the finished NaNoWriMo projects).
Probably not the mystery about a library researcher in the days of InfoSearch Services (where college students were sent into the University stacks to copy chapters and articles and such for pay) - we all just google it now and nobody could relate to poor "Cassie" (original character name, "Sarah") these days.
But now I have hard evidence that all of my free time in earlier days was NOT spent shopping, watching TV or playing "Pong"...
so there, Stubble!
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Precious Things
We first knew something was wrong when we opened her top dresser drawer and found it full of newspaper bags. All carefully folded into 1" squares and neatly stacked.
My Mother in Law was a hoarder before there was a reality TV show for it. The Bearded One thought nothing of it for a long time because he had always lived that way - with a Mom who paid the bills and then put them aside for further action (in their original envelopes with check numbers and notes written on them).
When I first knew him and went to visit his family, the house was cluttered but as I knew that my Mom was not normal (in a cleaning sense) I didn't think anything of it either. After all, a cousin trying to comfort me over the state of my apartment had said, "You know that you shouldn't feel bad - you lived with someone that it is impossible to live up to." And I eventually came to accept the fact that not everybody lived in a home that looked like you had a live in maid and ate every night like you had a cook on staff...My Mother: The original "Wonder Woman"!
When we visited my MIL after having a child we noticed that the "stuff" had multiplied. Every surface was piled with papers. There were stacks of things in corners. There were stacks of things under chairs. There was a path from the living room to the kitchen. A path from the bedroom to the bathroom.
I joke a lot about hoarding with respect to my family's life and we DO keep a lot of "stuff" but my late mother-in-law was a full on worthy-of-intervention-hoarder. She has been gone for a number of years now, and at the time she passed, we didn't have a clinical term for what she did to her surroundings and her belongings. As The Bearded One cleaned up her effects he found:
It is so sad when everything in your life becomes so "precious" that at the end there is nothing much of value left.
My Mother in Law was a hoarder before there was a reality TV show for it. The Bearded One thought nothing of it for a long time because he had always lived that way - with a Mom who paid the bills and then put them aside for further action (in their original envelopes with check numbers and notes written on them).
When I first knew him and went to visit his family, the house was cluttered but as I knew that my Mom was not normal (in a cleaning sense) I didn't think anything of it either. After all, a cousin trying to comfort me over the state of my apartment had said, "You know that you shouldn't feel bad - you lived with someone that it is impossible to live up to." And I eventually came to accept the fact that not everybody lived in a home that looked like you had a live in maid and ate every night like you had a cook on staff...My Mother: The original "Wonder Woman"!
When we visited my MIL after having a child we noticed that the "stuff" had multiplied. Every surface was piled with papers. There were stacks of things in corners. There were stacks of things under chairs. There was a path from the living room to the kitchen. A path from the bedroom to the bathroom.
I joke a lot about hoarding with respect to my family's life and we DO keep a lot of "stuff" but my late mother-in-law was a full on worthy-of-intervention-hoarder. She has been gone for a number of years now, and at the time she passed, we didn't have a clinical term for what she did to her surroundings and her belongings. As The Bearded One cleaned up her effects he found:
- An entire bedroom closet full of paper towel and toilet paper
- 12 medium sized moving boxes of unworn clothing - still with tags and/or in original wrappers
- Paper bags full of chipped dishes (formerly good china) and mismatched silverware
- BOXES full of financial records - back to the 1950's
- Boxes and old suitcases full of family photos ( the people in which could no longer be identified because there was no longer anyone alive to do so).
- Envelopes FULL of old postage stamps that were put away unused when postage increased. The oldest was an entire roll of 8 cent stamps featuring Dwight Eisenhower. I won't be purchasing stamps for years!
- Letters written to her by The Bearded One's Dad when they were courting and lived in different states
- Congratulatory telegrams that they had received on their wedding day
- the cake topper from their wedding cake, carefully wrapped in tissue
- The Bearded One's first pair of shoes - bronzed
- Old high school and college transcripts that gave the lie to everything she had told The Bearded One about her own academic career
- Professionally taken portraits of The Bearded One and his mother, each holding a cat - looking cross-eyed and/or goofy (the people, not the cats)
- Lovingly wrapped coffee mugs, ashtrays, memory books, knick knacks, what nots, and dust catchers - all featuring owls in some form
- TRUNKS of sheet music dating back into the 1920's that had belonged to The Bearded One's Dad (a professional musician) - the majority of it disintegrating and moldy
- Cases of recordings made by The Bearded One's Dad and his students
- Hand written sheet music given to The Bearded One's Dad - with copyrights and publishing information gleefully written in
- Personally inscribed photos of the Dad's former students who had "made it big"
- A folded flag - having been used in a burial at sea way back in WW I - the name of the deceased having been lost in time
It is so sad when everything in your life becomes so "precious" that at the end there is nothing much of value left.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
...and everything in its place
The Bearded One hit an impasse 2 weeks ago. Organizing the garage had become an endless maze of moving boxes and piles. Shifting steadily about on the concrete floor, the boxes did not decrease in number, neither did the tools magically appear on shelves and in drawers.
The garage cabinets were 6" less deep than the old ones rendering all of his storage bins useless. Not only were they 6" less deep, the shelves were not nearly as adjustable height-wise and the cabinets themselves were a full foot shorter than what he was used to. And this was a real problem. Every time I needed a screw driver or a pliers I was referred to one of the cardboard boxes languishing on the garage floor: "In one of THOSE," he intoned sadly, shaking his bent head.
He had begun muttering about pegboard and even though what was on his "list" for the weekend was bathtub caulk and kitchen veneer, it was decided that the pegboard needed to come first.
Two trips to Home Depot later (we were short of 75 pound drywall anchors), two unsightly 2x4s had been removed and were awaiting disposal at the "hands" of the sawsall, the sprinkler timer had been moved 1 foot to the left, and pegboard was on the walls. ANOTHER trip to Home Depot ensued when it was determined that the insulated staples with which the electrical cords attached to the sprinkler control would be controlled were nowhere to be found.
Pegboard installation complete, it became evident that we had the wrong kind of "pegboard storage devices" and yet another trip to Home Depot was undertaken. Luckily, Home Depot is only 3 miles from the house and we returned in short order with hooks and brackets and baskets and other implements of storage and organization.
At this point, as The Bearded One had expected, boxes rapidlly emptied and were broken down and the garage began to take on a "lived in but well organized" look.
At the bottom of the last milk crate we found the box of insulated staples.
A Place For Everything...
The garage cabinets were 6" less deep than the old ones rendering all of his storage bins useless. Not only were they 6" less deep, the shelves were not nearly as adjustable height-wise and the cabinets themselves were a full foot shorter than what he was used to. And this was a real problem. Every time I needed a screw driver or a pliers I was referred to one of the cardboard boxes languishing on the garage floor: "In one of THOSE," he intoned sadly, shaking his bent head.
He had begun muttering about pegboard and even though what was on his "list" for the weekend was bathtub caulk and kitchen veneer, it was decided that the pegboard needed to come first.
Two trips to Home Depot later (we were short of 75 pound drywall anchors), two unsightly 2x4s had been removed and were awaiting disposal at the "hands" of the sawsall, the sprinkler timer had been moved 1 foot to the left, and pegboard was on the walls. ANOTHER trip to Home Depot ensued when it was determined that the insulated staples with which the electrical cords attached to the sprinkler control would be controlled were nowhere to be found.
Pegboard installation complete, it became evident that we had the wrong kind of "pegboard storage devices" and yet another trip to Home Depot was undertaken. Luckily, Home Depot is only 3 miles from the house and we returned in short order with hooks and brackets and baskets and other implements of storage and organization.
At this point, as The Bearded One had expected, boxes rapidlly emptied and were broken down and the garage began to take on a "lived in but well organized" look.
At the bottom of the last milk crate we found the box of insulated staples.
A Place For Everything...
Thursday, May 24, 2012
They're Not Going to Like You Anyway...
Middle school and high school were hard. Not academically, but socially. I wanted to be accepted, but I picked the exact wrong people to want to be accepted by...the "popular" people. One of the popular students was G who did it by being the stooge. Always willing to be the butt of jokes, willing to poke fun at himself in a painful way, he was one of them. And at the time, I was jealous. Now I wonder why I could have been so stupid - equating popularity, even at the expense of humiliation, with something desirable.
The best piece of advice that I ever gave to Stubble (other than, "change your underwear regularly") was, "Don't waste your time. Find people you like, who like you, and concentrate on them."
Trying to fit in, I did things that I am not particularly proud of 40 years later. What I didn't realize at the time was that the acceptance was a shifting thing..even for those who were a part of it. It varied from year to year, depending on such things as whether or not your dad had been promoted (bad), your grades (good was bad), or your boyfriend/girlfriend. It took me years (until right now, as I write this) to feel sorry for the girl who was one week a member in good standing of the popular crowd; but after being dumped by her boyfriend of two years, was suddenly 'out of favor'.
It was all based on whim and happenstance and fed by a sense on power on one side and of wistful longing on the other.
And it was enormously destructive.
The best piece of advice that I ever gave to Stubble (other than, "change your underwear regularly") was, "Don't waste your time. Find people you like, who like you, and concentrate on them."
Trying to fit in, I did things that I am not particularly proud of 40 years later. What I didn't realize at the time was that the acceptance was a shifting thing..even for those who were a part of it. It varied from year to year, depending on such things as whether or not your dad had been promoted (bad), your grades (good was bad), or your boyfriend/girlfriend. It took me years (until right now, as I write this) to feel sorry for the girl who was one week a member in good standing of the popular crowd; but after being dumped by her boyfriend of two years, was suddenly 'out of favor'.
It was all based on whim and happenstance and fed by a sense on power on one side and of wistful longing on the other.
And it was enormously destructive.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Applying Pressure
Teachers have historically had a lot of latitude in testing and grading. I am not referring to standardized, government mandated tests but the ones that they personally control. Some of them preferr to test a lot, others little.
When I was just a wee college student, it was fashionable to allow the class to have a hand in determining the course testing schedule. We would generally be allowed to vote on it (the instructor reserving the right to exercise a veto). Final only? Mid Term and Final? Three Hourlies and a Final (non-cumulative)?
In one class we actually chose one test a week - it was a summer term and it meant "no studying over the weekend" if we did a test every Friday. It made the weeks fairly intense, but it turned out to be a wonderful system. The instructor didn't want to grade over the weekend so after a review and a 45-60 minute test we would exchange papers, grade them, discuss them, and then turn them in for entry in the grade book. Immediate feedback - everyone in the class wound up doing very well. Nice.
Now, how about an instructor who does hourly tests, assigns graded homework and does pop quizzes. His Final Exam is 80% of the grade - all the rest of the work only comprising 20% of the grade....seems like a real dismissal of the majority of the effort that is put forward in his class...
but maybe that is just me.
When I was just a wee college student, it was fashionable to allow the class to have a hand in determining the course testing schedule. We would generally be allowed to vote on it (the instructor reserving the right to exercise a veto). Final only? Mid Term and Final? Three Hourlies and a Final (non-cumulative)?
In one class we actually chose one test a week - it was a summer term and it meant "no studying over the weekend" if we did a test every Friday. It made the weeks fairly intense, but it turned out to be a wonderful system. The instructor didn't want to grade over the weekend so after a review and a 45-60 minute test we would exchange papers, grade them, discuss them, and then turn them in for entry in the grade book. Immediate feedback - everyone in the class wound up doing very well. Nice.
Now, how about an instructor who does hourly tests, assigns graded homework and does pop quizzes. His Final Exam is 80% of the grade - all the rest of the work only comprising 20% of the grade....seems like a real dismissal of the majority of the effort that is put forward in his class...
but maybe that is just me.
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