Gradations
Saturday February 27th 2021, 11:22 pm
Filed under: Garden

One to five and a half inches. Three were started at the same time, the littlest later and popped up last week.

So I celebrated by planting some of my sister’s Lebanon White squash seeds she sent me, a variety I know absolutely nothing about other than that she likes them, and some zucchini, along with a pepper that one of my friends reacted to the idea last year with, Oh, that’s cool!

And another with, Then what’s the point?

Heatless Habaneros: all of the flavor, none of the pain. Last time I tried they were plantless seeds and a moot point. This time I have those rooting-hormone plugs on my side. The seeds are a year older, but so were the butternut squash and four out of six of those came up.

I still have another two dozen kernels from the exquisite Anya apricots, if anyone else would like to try growing a few; my plan is to go to the post office Monday and after that wait to go out again till after the vaccines we’ll be eligible for in two weeks. Plunk’em in a plug. Get your head start now.



Stone house, Lynne Stone
Friday February 26th 2021, 11:07 pm
Filed under: Life

Anne was right on that last house: it *is* an elevator! Now with photos of a bit of the upstairs, too, to make more sense of the place and with total art world speak to describe how it came to be.

Meantime, here’s someone I’d definitely want to take textile art classes from. Look at those flowers: she made them. With embroidery thread. Bottlebrush plants took her 20 years’ work to get just right, but it helped her figure out what she needed to know to go much faster with the process. Her work is in a museum, as well it should be. Gorgeous.



Butter emails
Thursday February 25th 2021, 11:01 pm
Filed under: Food,History,Politics

The question on everyone’s minds, clearly, is this: does your butter still spread on your bread?

Who expected an outcome of the pandemic to be, and I quote, rubbery butter?

Who knew that farmers fed their cows palm oil? But apparently they do, and in Canada it has become an issue.

Since everybody’s home quarantining, more people are baking, and they’re using more butter than normal, and the farmers needed to step up production to meet the demand.

So they increased the palm oil in the animals’ feed, (bbcnews link) which apparently does work at upping the fat content in their milk.

Making the resulting lipids not traditionally soft at room temperature anymore.

The farmers, after saying, hey, the US and the UK do this too and it’s not new made clear their intention towards us consumers: Let them eat cake.



Astronaut helmets
Wednesday February 24th 2021, 10:40 pm
Filed under: Family

The message: ‘What do you think?’

I clicked.

I guffawed. They even used NASA in some of the poses. I think the space enthusiast has been watching too many Mars Rover segments (with good reason, given that his old team wrote some of the early software.)

‘It would make it hard to get a decent haircut,’ I typed back for him to read when he had a moment in his workday.

I later pointed out that within a week of when such a thing could get here, the 1C segment of the population is supposed to be able to get our first shots in this area.

Oh. (I saw in his face the lovely thought growing that all this pandemic stuff could really, actually, finally end…) That’s right.

Spaceman Spiff, over it and out.



Home sweet –whoops!
Tuesday February 23rd 2021, 10:37 pm
Filed under: Life

Houses again.

Tell me: how is this up to code? You take something out of the dishwasher, you step towards the table to set it, and you’re falling backwards down the stairs.The condition of the wall down there implies you wouldn’t be the first.

Or picture #30 in this one, because don’t we all need space in the garage of our 1.84M house for an almost-new supersized backhoe? With room left over for your tools, bicycles, and a leather couch!

And now! Drumroll. For when your inner unicorn needs its sparkle polished. This one. Michelle calls it a cross between an office and a YMCA. I noted the Ikea-imitating bed in the 7.77M house, the only sign that the thing actually has the bedrooms it says it does.

That figurine knife holder seems to be auditioning for Shakespeare’s, “Et tu, Brute?” line. While the fat chicken smirks.

We debated whether picture 16 was a bathroom or an elevator. Maybe both?

I can’t help but notice that the property tax is estimated at $7260/month and the rental value at $1802/month. I’m just not sure that that works out.



The AI couldn’t get the math right
Monday February 22nd 2021, 11:15 pm
Filed under: Garden,Knit

The leaves are getting bigger.

Four inches. Curious. At 1/4″ a day if it keeps that up it would be six feet tall by the time it drops its leaves for the winter.

Except that it would be pruned and shaped before that point and all the side branching will take up energy, too. Still. It’s feeling pretty good right now, watching it take off like this.

That one apricot seedling I kept last year possibly got overwatered and stopped growing and I’m waiting to see if it will leaf out at all this year, so it feels all the better to have a vigorous, healthy plant. Last year I gave away the vigorous one, thinking I’d have a more dwarf variant because the other grew slower.

Until it didn’t at all.

Meantime, someone tried to teach a machine how to write knitting patterns. “And it even began to give its patterns names, including Spinches Bottom Up, Squig Dyity, and Owls Punch.”

Interweave warned its readers, Don’t swatch this at home.



When everything is new
Sunday February 21st 2021, 9:55 pm
Filed under: Family,Garden

I’ve been trying to take progress pictures from the same angle and against that narrow line on the basket where the wood end sticks out like a belt loop between the apricot seedlings. The taller one is now 3 3/4″.

Not bad for something planted January 11; last year it took till April just for them to sprout. Which is why I’m so taken with the plugs infused with rooting hormone that I tried this year–I’m getting a two month head start on my future fruit bearing while hoping that ends up cutting off a year of waiting to see how they’ll turn out.

Meantime, Lillian wanted to know what happened to that white snow stuff and where did this water come from.



Snow days
Saturday February 20th 2021, 11:43 pm
Filed under: History,Life

Things I learned:

If you have a defibrillator, do not put an iPhone 12 in your chest pocket–its magnet is strong enough to turn it off.

If you go camping in the out yonder in Alaska in the winter, take a flashlight with you and look down in the outhouse because you don’t want to be bitten by a bear when you sit. (She’s okay.)

But the best story was the woman who was delivering groceries to a couple in Texas but her car slid down their hilly driveway and got stuck in their flower bed. There were just no spare tow trucks out there.

She got taken in by the couple whom she’d delivered to, offering her heat and power and a safe place to stay, whereas it turned out her own apartment had none of those things and no water. They tried to help with her car but had no snow shovels.

So they took her in as if she were their own, just as they would want someone to do for their own grown daughters. For five days.

I mentioned that one to my husband and he told me his sister in Ft. Worth had taken people in, too. Power, water, warmth, and safety. Because she can. So you do.



And I want to see my grandkids climbing the trees to pick the fruit
Friday February 19th 2021, 10:28 pm
Filed under: Family,Garden

Anya+? apricot seedlings Thursday, and the earliest and so far most vigorous one on the left there again on Friday 24 hours later.

One of my kids asked me about a year ago why I was so caught up in watching my fruit trees grow and I told him, I raised each of you for eighteen years and then I needed something else to nurture and watch grow and develop across a timespan like that.

He hadn’t ever thought of it that way before but yeah, he could definitely see that.



Burnt bridge
Thursday February 18th 2021, 11:38 pm
Filed under: Life

Here, let me distract you from the rest of this post with a picture of the August Pride peach that is still somehow blooming despite two days of rain since it started to.

My old audiologist told me a year and a half ago that he was going to be retiring and selling his practice, by way of explaining the new guys working with him; they would be taking over then.

The younger guy is a total sweetheart. I wondered if he was out of grad school yet, he looked so young.

The one maybe ten years older sexually harassed the receptionist with me sitting there in the waiting area perfectly capable of seeing what he was doing. The expression on her face was, Get away from me with that.

It wasn’t long after that that she quit.

And then we had this year of pandemic.

I got a call yesterday from a voice I didn’t recognize. It was not the young guy.

I was coming in for a hearing test appointment, he told me, and he was making sure this was a good time.

(???!) I have no appointment… (I did not say, I had a hearing test last week at the medical clinic while they were ruling out a brain tumor. But I knew I had had absolutely no contact with this office since before I got sick with presumed Covid last February.)

Right, we’re making you one and this day this time and does that work for you.

I answered, There is this pandemic going on and we are so close to the vaccines. I’m not coming in before then.

His voice escalated from officious to angry. He blustered. We fully protect our patients…we wear masks…

(Well yes because you’d get fined $500 in this county if you didn’t and I know that as well as you. I didn’t say that.)

It had to have been that guy. I bet he remembered that day just as well as I did and what he’d printed out on the office’s printer and waved close in the receptionist’s face while invading her personal space and that whole little scene and likely the look on my face, the only patient in the waiting room, as he made her flinch. He knew who I was.

I knew who he was.

They have years of my records so I didn’t burn any bridges.

But he had already, and just did again.

My old audiologist used to have an office near here, which is when I met him, but he moved it years ago to have a shorter commute and for me it’s been a real hike across bad traffic to get there. I’ve been wanting to make an appointment with a much closer one for some time so I can get started: they can ask for those records and I can get some new aids. Or at the very least replace the chipped ear mold that has been causing me grief for lo these too many months.

Three weeks till that first shot–if all goes as announced.

While all I can do is to shake my head that man, what a way to kill your business and you can’t blame the virus for it, either. But it was his choice.



Apricoquadruplets
Wednesday February 17th 2021, 11:27 pm
Filed under: Garden

There’s the picture from my old slow iPhone. They like this being in the sun stuff–the one that’s only halfway out of the sides of the kernel is already green down in there. They’ll grow faster later in the warmth of the spring, but meantime, they’ve got a two month head start over last year’s attempts.



Bring on the supersoaker
Tuesday February 16th 2021, 11:52 pm
Filed under: Garden

Signs of summer Alphonsos to come.

I seem to have interrupted a bird that thought that tree a great place to set up a nest–which has never happened before, and I had wondered if they didn’t like the smell of the latex in the sap or something? Or more likely that of the Sunbubble. The squirrels didn’t, so far anyway, which makes it all the better a place for a baby bird to be hidden away in. A cat or a hawk would have a hard time harassing them and our songbirds need all such spaces they can get.

The third apricot cotyledon uncurved its head today and stretched out its new leaves as if to proclaim, Tadaah! Tomorrow the fourth will finish emerging from its seed.

I put them out under the awning during the day for a little extra sunlight. Not too much yet. Just enough.

The desert cottontail put in the first appearance all winter. Rats. I’d hoped it was gone. My baby trees are going to have to be kept up high for awhile.



He will be three in this quote forever
Monday February 15th 2021, 8:29 pm
Filed under: Family

FaceTime with cheerful grandkids this evening.

Mathias: “What color am I turning your hair today, Mommy?”



February 14th
Sunday February 14th 2021, 11:32 pm
Filed under: Family,Food

Chocolate cupcakes by Michelle and my first-ever bingewatching: the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. I know, right? Where have I been. It was great.

And chocolate hearts from the Heart Attack at the door yesterday.



Snowabunga!
Saturday February 13th 2021, 11:11 pm
Filed under: Family

There has been snow up north. Our little Alaskan was ecstatic, his little sister, who was too young when they left there to remember it…not entirely sure about this mobile cold as he tossed some up in the air. But he was having so much fun so it must be cool, right?

I asked the kids how many inches of the stuff they got and the answer was, oh, about half a Lillian.

The grandma next door brought the kids cake pops.

Lillian went straight for the chocolate side.

Also: our doorbell rang this afternoon. I opened it just in time to see what I was pretty sure was a girl I know from church running as fast as she could to where a car was parked out of the line of sight of the door, so having seen what she’d just done I ran out too and blew a kiss their way (I don’t think they saw it as she was getting in) and waved and yelled, Thank you!

They definitely saw that: hands waved back, front seat and back.

I brought the bag of goodies inside but I’m leaving the door like that through tomorrow.

I bet it totally put a smile on the face of the Amazon driver who stopped by shortly thereafter.