An elderly friend moving into assisted living last year gave me her old amaryllis bulb that had come covered in decorative dried moss, telling me I’d be able to get it to bloom again. I can only imagine how it was for her to give up her garden and I hope to bring her flowers from it to brighten up her new place.

I left the moss in the pot with an eye towards spring.

It has been discovered, as I knew it would be. And so the Chestnut-Backed chickadee announces it
 is nesting season as she builds a new home of her own. 

Hey, tell Parker: there’s a new kind of digger!

There were a few tomato pots where the seedlings simply vanished.

And then… I found a tomato seedling, couldn’t be anything but, planted quite nicely in an amaryllis pot  a few feet away.

Can squirrels really carry such a tender thing gently enough? Their digging ability can never be doubted, I mean, there’s a lizard species that depends on them to get past the hardpack. Look Ma, no teeth! Who knew. The thing looked quite happy there.

I scooped it out anyway and put it back where it wouldn’t compete with my bulb.

And there was a safflower sprout via my birdfeeder a dozen feet away growing in another tomato pot, the little farmer. Okay, out you go.

On the peregrine falcon front: it’s supposed to be a few more days before fledging, but one of the females turned and bumped her brother off the low ledge today when he hadn’t even made the hop-and-flight yet to the upper one to see the world in that direction for the first time. (Here’s his more antsy brother in a video from sunrise this morning.) He didn’t fly really but gently coasted, landing straight below the 18th floor nestbox. Safe!

And so Glenn Stewart, the biologist in charge, drove an hour from UC Santa Cruz, got the baby-in-the-box from wildlife services, went up on the roof and put the little guy up there where his parents would keep feeding him as he got the hang of this flying thing. Glenn wasn’t about to rappell a floor down City Hall to the box with the parents going for his head like he does during banding, the eyas just needed a little more time where humans couldn’t reach it.

Clara and Fernando didn’t even react with more than a glance to the familiar face that stayed further away this time. Oh, it’s you. Carry on.

(p.s. And on a happy for her, sad for us note, Nathania is devoting herself fulltime to her yoga business and letting the others carry on at Purlescence.  She will be much missed.)

No stem cells were harmed (nor found) in the making of this picture.

Meantime, Janice  (Rav link) posted on FB that she had started her tomatoes a tad late,  but hey–and now she had way more seedlings than she could use. It seemed a shame to dump all that potential into the compost heap, did anyone want them?

A day later, nobody had taken her up on it so I said sure.

She dropped them by on Saturday, whereupon I learned a new use for the produce clamshells that are too shallow for my fruit trees–what a great idea!

Saturday and Sunday evenings were busy for us but tonight I finally had some no-UV time at home.

Last year I started my own tomatoes from seed, too, and dutifully thinned them down to one per pot but totally picked the wrong individuals: the sorriest one never got above 10″ high no matter how I tried to coax the darn thing. Big Boy my foot.

And that is why I bought Costco tomato plants a month ago and got them in the ground with bird netting rather than planning on hauling pots inside away from the squirrels once they set fruit. You need the outside heat for sweetness anyway. I wanted real homegrown tomatoes at last!

Tonight with easily 50 seedlings wanting to grow up, as the sun rapidly faded while I was trying to decide mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest plant of all, I hedged my bets and put two per pot in some of the pots. We’ll see how that goes as they grow and show themselves and I get more ruthless, but still: I filled sixteen pots. With two more seedlings plunked in the ground behind the Costco ones that have already set fruit (good luck, guys) because, well, the more the merrier.

Let me grow these up just a bit and then, or now if you want, if you’re local and you’d like an heirloom tomato plant let me know. Seems I have a few extra.

The tomatoes were untouched and the cinnamon seems to be, too.

And the 52″ bird netting pop-up tent arrived at the store and we picked it up this evening. We’re a bit too tired and it’s too dark to set it up tonight, but we have it, along with a monster bag of potting soil for the seedlings that are coming.

And best of all I heard back from Janet’s (the UCSF researcher’s) mom about her cap. She loves it. I had said that if it turned out to be too big, wet it down and put it in the dryer for two minutes. It was, she did, and she says now it’s perfect.

And who knew–she’s a knitter! I wish her all the best on her journey forward however it may go.

I now know what an amaryllis stalk looks like after being mowed down by a hawk in pursuit of a finch: bent hard but still holding on tight. Stretched to its limit but not broken. There was no way to straighten it up and have it remain connected so I just let it be.

Within two hours after I first saw it this morning the two buds at the top of the stalk had moved and were no longer prostrate, and by the time the sun set they were pointed straight up. The light came from thataway now and they could not be stopped from reaching for it.

Tap. Tap. This thing on? The resident geek spent quite a bit of time stamping out the bug in the program and I’m trying again. Apparently there was an automatic platform update that got snatched back to a new-improved version almost immediately but we were stuck with the bad one and it did not want to let go peacefully.

HEY! Dad! (Photo taken Monday before I flew home.) There you are!

Okay, let’s try to link. How about to the pomegranate farmer I met at a festival whose products taste like the best fresh pomegranate you ever tasted, not that horrifically bitter stuff like most of the commercial juices.

Well now. So we do have our linking back. (Testing some more: unlink from the fruit spread page. Yup. Now go to Skylake’s home page that says free shipping through Monday, link up again–and it works. There you go.)

Okay, let’s try uploading the amaryllis picture.

Yes!

Okay, folks, we are back in business here.

The Dancing Queen amaryllis, it blooms yet again. I think I’ve had this bulb about ten years now.

My mom reports that her recovery from her knee replacement surgery is going quite well. But then she is one patient for whom they never had to worry whether she would let pain get in the way of doing her range-of-motion exercises so scar tissue won’t set in and limit her later: if it needs to be done, my mom gets it done. There are walks waiting to be taken and flowers to see!

This amaryllis is dedicated to the people in Boston. It’s supposed to have a good two feet of stem, but due to its exposure to red virus last year, wasn’t able to grow one. It refused to let that stop it from offering the blooming it was meant to give to the world.

Meantime, they caught the guy (and I’m sure that story will be updated by morning). He was arrested today and accused of sending ricin-laced and threatening letters: the President was sent one, as were five members of Congress, some of them hand-delivered, and what looked like a bomb was left at a Senate building entrance; thousands of staffers were locked down.

Those Congressmen’s peers still voted to make it so that, should this man get out of jail, on bail or for time served, he then can have access to any gun of any capacity he should so choose without submitting to a background check against his mental or criminal state. The Senate wasn’t even willing to say to Heller with you. (Paging Scalia.)

Wow.

But I thank those those worked so hard at identifying and stopping this guy so fast and I pray for all the other investigators needing the help, as well as for the wounded and those tending to them.

Of whom there are now more. My heart goes out to everybody in the town of West, Texas tonight.

Last week Nina gave me a box she’d been meaning to get over to me for months.

Inside was an amaryllis bulb–not the pink and white one pictured there, but one that had sent up a shoot that bloomed red in the dark, then another stalk that didn’t open and that stayed ghostly white.

And then. A third (!) stalk. It had not yet shriveled. It had a foursome of white leaf tips pointing up next to it.

Now, amaryllis buds are begun in the bulb before the next year’s season, so this one came from a superb grower for it to have had three sets: one is normal for your average Christmas-gift kit, two from a bigger bulb is wonderful, and three is the best your average nursery will have.

The bulb was still alive. The case over the buds inside had opened, just like the first stalk, but like the second there was no color.

Just four tiny white flower buds, open to the world in the darkness, waiting, sure that light and water must be out there somewhere.

I planted it. I watered it. I put it in the window.

That was Thursday. The tiny leaf tips poking out have tripled in length and gone from white to barely green yesterday to deep green and red by this afternoon. The first flower started to open this morning–and by afternoon and to my surprise, its vivid red had a white-to-green center. Had I not been running errands I probably could have watched the color flow in in slow motion. Glorious!

The other three buds have already doubled in length and started coloring up.

Sometimes you just have to get a good thing started and then, as they say, it takes on a life of its own.

(Speaking of which. For those who want to advocate on behalf of Milk Pail, you can write to Mountain View City Council via the left column, six down, here. )

The hawks haven’t (as far as I know) flown through any of the amaryllis stalks. Yet. The hummingbird did check them out but didn’t stay long.

The Malabrigo yarn in Solis: I finally finished it.

Oh wait, I realized, no I didn’t–those stretches of stockinette in the lace? The castoff curled there. Tink x 324, do k2tog, yo across and purl back and the only reason I didn’t do that in the first place is I didn’t think I had enough yarn. I did. Done! It is drying, and I can’t wait.

And that was going to be the whole post, till I went into the kitchen and saw the leftover toasted skinned hazelnuts in the fridge.

My usual peanut butter cookie recipe is one I discovered in an old hand-me-down cookbook given me in New Hampshire 25 years ago: one cup peanut butter, one cup sugar, one egg. (The Skippy type works best, the natural, not so much.) Great for celiacs. I do occasionally add a tbl of flour for a little bit of extra crispness at the edges, but it’s not necessary. 350, 8-10 min. That’s it.

What if…

So I buttered the cookie sheet. One cup hazelnuts into the Cuisinart. I let that run a long time, trying to get hazelnut butter, not meal, then added 2/3 c sugar, 1/4 c. cocoa, hmm… about 2 tbl butter, how ’bout a little more in there, possibly three, wasn’t measuring… 1 tbl flour just because, and 1 (extra large) egg. Trying to put teaspoonfuls of batter down, it was like sticky silly putty but soon settled down and behaved–ie, it held to itself rather than me after being on the cookie sheet a minute or so.

Which I figured out when I found some extra dark chocolate chips and pushed a half dozen into each cookie. Eight minutes at 350 again did the job, and there you go: the best cookie recipe I have ever come up with.

Toasting and skinning hazelnuts is a pain, but I totally just got over that.

(Ed. to add, if you prefer yours sweeter, go for the full cup of sugar.)

A few months ago, someone recommended a mail-order nursery to me. They were selling jumbo amaryllis bulbs? Those are hard to come by, and they grow and bloom forever in my experience–cool!

I have no idea if it was a one-person, one-family, or one-big-corporation business. But it is safe to say we were not a good fit.

I just wanted them to send me what we’d paid for.  Whether it was intentional or not, they did a bait-and-switch repeatedly. I got smaller bulbs of the wrong variety, and on the second try smaller again but also with root damage and a highly-infectious red virus that a reputable dealer would never knowingly sell.  My emails kept being answered by the same person, who was  supposedly helpful (but that promised third shipment never happened) and finally shrill.

They brought it to an end Thursday on terms I feel quite favorable to them.

It is safe to say I was annoyed.

I walked into church today, saw the fresh flowers, and suddenly caught myself in a flash of feeling peeved all over again. Oh come ON, Alison–let it go.

Our friend Jim, a gifted artist who has toured worldwide, started playing that beautiful pipe organ.

A prayer was offered.

And I found myself sitting at last in that woman’s chair, whoever she was, in front of her computer, trying perhaps to get those people in shipping with marginal reading or attention skills to fill a simple order the way it came in.

Or who knows what the deal was. But I knew this: she was a child of God. I will never know her–but He does, and that should be enough for me. And as He forgave me, how could I hold anything against her, or whoever there…? I found myself saying an inner prayer for them all.

Eh. I got some amaryllis bulbs. They’ll bloom.  And that is enough.

But just to help me hold onto that thought, I’ll be at church next week too.

Paying it forward on that little rose plant…

Richard gave me amaryllis bulbs back in December, and today, the first one was close to blooming: five blossoms showing, the color just beginning to come in.

We have a friend who is just one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, who was asking me questions about a year ago about Crohn’s disease; turned out she had just been given that diagnosis and was trying to take it all in. She’s a widow, about retirement age, a lot older than most people get it and with her beloved gone, it made me keenly aware of how lucky I am. I was I think the one person she knew who had it too.

We happen to know she loves amaryllises like I do. So I called and asked if we could drop by tonight.

A few minutes later, she was on the sidewalk with her small dog, watching us pull up.

She was so delighted. “What color is it?” as she held the pot. The streetlights weren’t telling.

“Pink and white, it’s an Appleblossom.”

“Oh, my favorite!”

That bulb was big enough there ought to be a second stalk showing up any time to continue the show. There is nothing like watching something grow as you care for it, and amaryllises do such a spectacular job of responding to a simple daily glass of water.

Happy Valentine’s!

And to Katy’s beloved late husband: that was for you, too. Your Katy is just the best. But you knew that.

(One more Parker birthday photo.)

John stayed healthy, no sign of my germs, for which we thank the heavens. And so it’s safe for him to pack to go give his grandparents a two-day hug before heading back to school. (Staying at his aunt’s just to be sure.)

Tonight I got a chance to talk a bit with him and one of his friends whom I hadn’t seen since probably their high school graduation five years ago, and it intrigued me how important it felt: there is nothing in the world like a little face time to make someone feel like, no matter how few the moments of time scattered over however long, we are forever important to one another and that’s just simply the way it is.  A good lesson for a young man. Heck, me, too.

Michelle’s already back to class.

It’s going to be too quiet. I’ll get busy with planting some new jumbo (they’ll be huge!) amaryllis bulbs, Richard’s Christmas gift, and when I inquired of (company deleted later) what they wanted me to do with the wrong ones they sent me they told me to consider them a gift: the ones that were supposed to be in that box are now going into a new one on its way.

They grow and they blossom and they never stay quite the same.

I finally got to listen to what Lynn was referring to re Brother Uchtdorf’s address.

He said we are all known and remembered to God, and offered the metaphor of the forget-me-not flower, his favorite: it is not tall, it is not as showy and splashy as some, it is a quiet little flower, down to earth, blooming quietly away at the job it does best. Five petals, plainspoken but with a beautiful color.

Cool.

(Favorite old pictures of my own favorite flowers, showy and grandstanding and all.)

Happy Fourth of July!  My amaryllis is trying for the fireworks effect.