Rain

Since nobody reads blogs anymore, especially when they're kept up as seldom as this one has been, I guess I can just thought-stream about strange things.

It dawned on me the other day how much raw feeling humanity has had for rain; joy, fear, despair.  Just how much sheer time humanity has spent thinking about rain.

Early human communities worshipped the sun, knowing it was life-giving, but I think we worried about it less than we did about rain.  Food depended on both, but the sun was more predictable.  Rain, rain, too much, too little, too early, too late.  One crop flourishes, one withers, under the same timing and amount of rainfall.





Floods.   Parched earth.   Floods followed by parching.  Praying and begging for less rain.  Praying and begging for more.  Finding yourself watching a deluge with cold fear, and then a few months later, day after day of dryness, wishing and hoping for rain.  Give us life, don't take life away from us.  What can we do to bring the rain?  To stop the rain?  Prayers and cloud-seeding and human sacrifice to a god who seems angry enough to withhold rain.

It's used as a metaphor for scary, for stressful, for Bad days.  Rainy days, versus sunny days.

         Don't sorrow for sunshine, learn to dance in the rain!

Sunshine seems benevolent, its dangers known but controllable.  Its apparent less danger is only a seeming, but it seems more passive.  It's just There, whether clouds mask it or not.  Droughts are not thought of as its presence, they are the absence of the clouds and the rain.  The sun gets less blame.   Or God gets less blame for too much sun, than he gets for too little rain.  

Rain gives life, but it's capricious, scary, its ability to kill as obvious, and as unpredictable, as its healing and life-giving powers.

But both of them, the sun and the rain, give both.

 

Vice and virtue

My worst vice is anger.  Loud, obscene anger.

Second worst: ingratitude.

Best potting shed shot I have at the moment. From a rainstorm in May.
Rain has been rare enough to celebrate with photos.

This garden shed was one of my first loves in buying this house.  Turned out, it was roof-caved and rotted, and termite-destroyed, to the point that it was --not hyperbole-- held up only by its siding.

So it's in process of repair.  It's taking forever.  Everything has been shoved into the greenhouse potting-shed part, to let the workers work.  Their job is hard and brutal in this heat.  Whatever they need to do, they should do.

But if I had known it would be this big a job I would not have started any plants for this year.

My gratitude is way lower than it should be.  In a world of slipshod work and charlatans, we've found the best contractor and the best crew on earth.  We can afford it (at least, we can now that Larry has spent months doing the inside framing, by himself and saved probably $thousands).

Using the potting shed was doable until the insulation job, for which a few too many things got shoved into it, and the thousand pound, wheels-won't-roll-unless-powered-on mower took up too much space.  Insulation complete, I wrestled the thing back out, loudly damning it to fires of hell, because I wanted -- not needed, just wanted -- the much easier water source of the sink.

I am angry at this heat.  I am angry at having to get water that isn't scalding, to come out of hoses, angry at the highly temporary loss of sink access.  My anger at this lawnmower came close to getting it put out on the curb for anybody to take.

My virtue is, I guess, perseverance, because I decided it was my problem to solve, and I solved it.  I got it out.  No it does not really weigh a thousand pounds, but unwieldy and un-rollable as it was, it sure seemed to.  And I guess my sign is polite enough not to offend the crew, God, I hope, because they are working in hot, cramped conditions.

I could go into the subject of the gasket-blowing heat, tedium, AND gallons of wasted water in this drought, that are involved in using the outside hoses and hauling water for dozens of plants, but.....that's the Executive Summary.

Some self-discovery going on, too.  I have always thought I would make a great post-apocalyptic survivor, living off any grid, managing water and shelter and food like a Caroline Ingalls on steroids.  But if growing plants and accessing water is this hard for me now, when water comes right out of any faucet I turn.....that does not say anything good about what I thought would be my positive attitude in the face of hardship.

The endless indoor environment problem with Graymatter the Psychotic Cat is making my days difficult, and making indoors unpleasant, so some immature part of me feels entitled to have my way in my attempts to garden.

Right now, I kind of feel like I suk.

Scooter is a better Person than I am, since lack of access to the potting shed affected him too, but he behaved better about it.....oh.  Wait.  He did poop on our bed.  This project has royally screwed up most of his yard access and joy in life.  He deserves happiness more than anybody I know, or at least as much as my poor hardworking spouse does.  Despite not liking myself much for how angry the shed-clearing made me, I can feel good that Scooter has now got access to his birdwatching corner again.

I don't know. It's all some kind of Opportunity For Growth.

Red, white. Blue.

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

I've complained a lot about living here.  As we slowly empty the house to move to a place that's, in many ways, the inland home of our dreams, here I am.  Getting sad.

I haven't forgotten the minuses of living here.  Development is stripping away woods in every direction. The bike bridge brings tourists dumping trash, killing wildlife.  Thieves and intruders have become frequent.  Even as I took these photos of beauty I don't want to give up, the highway noise ground on and on, with varying pitches and decibels, peaking with motorcycle roars.

But living here was a gift from my parents.  It enabled us to survive this decade.  Their love for us is in these walls.

And our love for wildlife permeates this little patch of wood.  Larry especially has grown and nurtured the trees and garden, kept it chemical free, made it a haven for more birds than I can name, bees, garden spiders, dragonflies, little bugs of unknown name.  We've brought highway-trapped turtles here at least 8 times.  We've relocated more raccoons than I can count, 6 in an 8-day period last year.  The loss of woods has them crowded and seeking food, and we can take them to a couple different huge preserves.

We may not see a lot of those guys in the inland suburbs, though we did have a possum a few weeks ago.  8~)

Happy Fourth!

Still, I love the new house more and more.  We take boxes and unload, water plants, eat lunch, hang out, and it gets harder to leave there, but the cats are still here at the Inlet (moving them is a big worry), and we still need to be here to wrap things up.

Moving out of this Inlet house does not necessarily mean losing it.  We own half of it and it can't be sold to some twit who will clearcut to get a better view, without our OK.  Neither my bro. nor I can quite settle on what to do with it, but Larry and I put so much into it, the bond is there.

I bond with homes.  They shelter me and become inhabitants of my heart.

It's getting bare.  And after all my complaints, I confess, the sight makes me sad.

The joy of our vine-covered cottage...

O yes, we love this house, but you HAVE to control those lovely vines.

Here you see what they do and why they need regular chopp-  pardon me,  regular pruning. They'll work right up under your siding and slowly ruin it.  Roof shingles as well.

The ice storm caused a lot of headaches -- more photos to come -- plus there's regular maintenance like this, and it's good, satisfying work.  I like nurturing this nifty little house.

Southern Ice

We got a sprinkling of snow on top of about an inch of solid ice, in these coastal parts, and that ice is heavy stuff.

OK, I'll just use the other stairs....

Ice about an inch thick on flat surfaces.

Cardinal picks his way down the road.

Dirt roads fared better than the asphalt, but by 11 AM when I had dressed in enough layers (it was 25 degrees f.) to go out, that highway in the background was pretty clear; only with lots of meltwater puddles, which will slick up again overnight.

Unlike our previous snowstorm, it won't be back up to 40 degrees f. by noon.  It won't get above freezing today, and the whole mess will refreeze tonight.  Tomorrow it will start melting away!

Control Issues. [R] language warning

I've always lived by the idea that we have some control.  Maybe not as much as we want, maybe over surprising things and not always over what we want to have it over, but that applying some wisdom increased our ability to control outcomes. 

There's the Serenity Prayer:  serenity to accept what I can't change but courage to change what I can, with wisdom to know the difference.  Maybe I interpreted that the way I wanted to, more than the way it ought to be interpreted.   And there's the Gandhi quote I repeat over and over:


But life for a few years now has sent disquieting messages that nothing is certain; that being an emotionally well-centered adult requires acceptance of that, and ability to enjoy life anyway.

I sit here in a comfortable house some people would sell their souls for, and I want to flee, and then hate myself for my ingratitude, which is kind of a useless pattern unless I go deeper into why I'm so tense and unhappy.

But the reason is the pervasive uncertainty of it.  A parade of funerals.  Storm vulnerability.  Exposure of this formerly out-in-the-boonies little dirt road to the outside world.

I'm very grudgingly revisiting a book I bought a year ago and have avoided reading : Comfortable with Uncertainty.  The fact that I bought it long ago indicates I dimly realized I needed to deal with the issue, but that's as far as I got.

About once a year we see swaths of road-bank grass on either side of our house, and saplings just inside the woods, brown and wither in an obviously unnatural manner.

It also shows up all over the county, and there was no doubt that the county was poisoning the vegetation, for reasons unknown - I figured it was cheaper than mowing the shoulder.
 
It wasn't quite the reason, but I was close. The other day we caught the county employee spraying nauseatingly day-glow-purple-colored poison along the edge of our woods, and he insisted it was required to keep limbs from interfering with the power lines. Never mind that no limbs are anywhere near the lines.  The worst ice storm on earth wouldn't bring any of those limbs into contact with the lines.  Never mind sending a crew to cut limbs instead -- too expensive.  It's standard county policy; spray poison within X-distance of the lines. The groundwater or marsh runoff be damned.

Not a great photo - but last year's poisoning shows in the brown patch and dead saplings. THIS year's, sprayed the day before the photo, is just starting to yellow out - see  foreground, and background just behind the discarded drink cup.

The bypass highway is one block over from our street, and the traffic noise has always been there, but the neighborhood used to be left alone when it was not a destination to anywhere.  Then the bike bridge brought SUV after SUV of tourists, blocking the road (It's just dirt!  It can't be a road!), dumping trash.  Our neighborhood is theirs to do with as they please.

Take the green snake.

Here comes the bad language. And no, that "damned" in the paragraph a bit above was Jane Austen-esque compared to my feelings about some other things.

In the brush next to our driveway, there lived, past tense, a small green snake.  One morning about 3(?) weeks ago, I came out and it lay dead at the side of the dirt road, its head cleanly chopped off.  Not run over by a car, not attacked by an animal.  Neatly cut by a man-made implement, and left to rot in the sun.

Some total and complete fucked in the head tourist came into OUR neighborhood, decided to walk/jog/bike down our little country lane, did not approve of the little country wildlife on our little country lane, and had the arrogance to decide the snake was not entitled to live.

I understand snake fear.  I understand quick reaction that can't take time to look at head shape -- venomous snakes have distinctive heads -- and I'd have understood if this snake were at all sizable, or had any kind of scary markings.  Some harmless snakes look similar to venomous ones unless you know the markings.

But WHO on this godforsaken planet is LEFT that doesn't know small plain green snakes are harmless?  Who doesn't know that they eat little pests and certainly hurt nobody?  Jerknuts tourists from concrete jungles?

Am I supposed to feel sorry for the daily lives of those property-rights-challenged touristas, and not begrudge them this brief vacation in a place with country lanes whose wild residents are so unfamiliar?

I don't feel sorry for them and I do begrudge them.  They can go to goddam zoos, where the wildlife is protected from them behind walls, and they could realize it's, duh, not their neighborhood or their place to make any bloodydamn decisions here, and they could learn some basic kind of response to new experiences, like, say, leave it alone if it's not affecting your life or wellbeing.  There is no way that this Touron felt threatened or trapped.  The snake was not invading the moron's space.  There was plenty of space to avoid the snake, which lay at the SIDE of a wide road going in two directions.   Even massive ignorance doesn't make killing it, rather than dashing off, logical.

Why couldn't I have caught them at it?  I know, best I didn't.  It would have been unpleasant.

My reaction is awfully big, considering the fact that the species isn't in jeopardy and there are are plenty more little green snakes living large all around the area.  I feel like it's not just another wildlife anecdote, and it's not just another lamentation about how this quiet little street that used to be nowhere anybody would walk to, now is violated by trash and crass stupidity and now, thefts, over and over. 

Someone has broken into our basement again.  Our ground floor linen closet holds only some old bedspreads and a black-and-white screen gameboy.  They were terribly disappointed.  I'd like to disappoint them further with a cartilage-popping kick to the knee.

Someone else has stolen some small hockable items of cherished sentimental, more than monetary, value from inside the house.  Family obligations have sent us off on several short trips in the past few months, and we still think that the people to whom we needed to give access while we were gone would never do this.  We're saddened, angered and baffled because no answer makes sense, except that someone left the door unlocked, but it adds to the bafflement and the uncertainty.

Yeah, we're looking into ways to take back some control over this.  We can do more about the house than we can about the Nature Lovers. No locks will keep away the poison or the trash dumping or the wildlife abuse.

Eventually yall will realize that I am not being funny when I say I am not a nice person. I dream of painful justice.  I also feel like it's been a long time since I posted anything joyful or positive.  Anger is a natural response to most of this and I don't want to beat myself too badly about it, but I do feel spiritually off-kilter in my loathing for so many fellow human beings.

You see dead animals on roads all the time, and I always hate it, but the death of that one little snake just tore it for me.  We feel we have so little control over our home and lives anymore, and it's just the precise illustration of that.

OK, so, Gandhi's quote.  It's about leaving results in other, or Other, hands, but not about saying we can't make a difference.  In our tiny little ways, we help the birds and the garden spiders and an occasional turtle or lizard, and we take some cans to the food bank, and maybe I only need to believe we have power to make an actual difference.  Unless we're given something else to do, these must be what we're meant to do.

And of course, somewhere inside, I have the fantasy that there's a Shangri-La we could get to where there are no natural threats like fires or storms, and no jerks, and I'll never get teed off again and can sit and sip tea in blissful serenity.  I know it's rot, but my knowledge is intellectual, not heartfelt.

I'm not sure I can let go of the need to have some power. The idea that I really have no control over anything disturbs me, so I'm sitting in a comfortable house with air conditioning and a refrigerator stocked with food, and swearing anyway, because I'm starting the grieving process for the idea of Control now.

I may be through the Denial phase but I'm probably gonna be stuck in Bargaining for awhile, mixed with Anger and gloom, before I get to acceptance.  I might not ever get there.  It's not lookin' good.

In which we discover that we're supposed to clean our birdfeeders

I don't just mean knock out the old crud, or even hose the feeder out periodically.

I mean, really clean them. With a 1/9 bleach-to-water ratio : one part bleach, to 9 parts water.
Every month.

Is this one of those things that everybody knows about except me?  I expect not.  So here's what we learned today, and if my readers decide to clean their feeders, even at somewhat less frequent intervals, it's bound to be beneficial.

Today we stopped at our storage unit and a little finch was standing there in the drive.  The car driving by didn't inspire him to fly away, so as Larry went to check the unit, I said I'd walk back down the alley and check on the bird.

I made Bird a little nervous but no matter how close I got, he didn't bolt, which worried me.  Then I noticed his eye.  I carefully picked him up and he stood calmly on my palm, then transferred himself to my index finger and perched.  Now I could see both eyes, badly infected.  He couldn't see at all, and had gotten trapped here in this tunnel of steel buildings and concrete.

I walked back down to the car  -- most of the way down that concrete drive you see behind me -- with the bird perched tamely on my finger.  And we tried to decide what to do.  The bird got tired of all this and flew away, but in blind random spirals, and landed on the other side of the building where he hopped in desperate circles until we picked him up again, and drove him a couple miles down to the local vet that specializes in wild rescues.  As Downy's friend Mojo would say, they are Sooperheroes.

It is utterly cool to have no Boss docking us for getting back late from break time.  Tourist season is on in full and Larry had a tedious driving job while I sat with my fingers forming a little cage to keep the little guy from taking off inside the car.

Back home, Larry did the research.  This bird had conjunctivitis.

There are undoubtedly many places they can contract this disease, but one source of it is unclean bird feeders, which can harbor the bacteria.  As we'd just seen, an otherwise healthy bird can die without the use of its sight.

It had never occurred to us to actually bleach-out the feeders, ever, much less every month.

What we're thinking about doing is getting a second feeder for each station, so we can switch them out without leaving the station unsupplied for a couple days.

We've even found that they take awhile to accept a new feeder placed in the same spot as one it replaced, and, though I'm guessing, I figured the new store smell had to weather off.   So even at one-tenth strength, wild birds might reject the bleach smell and it probably needs to be thoroughly soaked away after the germs have been soaked away.

Not exactly in tune*

Rainbow 2008

There are ways in which my brain doesn't quite work the way other peoples' do.

For one thing, I have no evidence that those great exercise endorphins I hear rumors about actually exist.  I am an unrepentant Aendorphist.  Or maybe an Agnostendorphist.  No matter how hard I work out, run, whatever, I never get any rush of endorphin euphoria, even a mild one that scores more as "kinda nice," so I strongly suspect that exercise endorphins are a myth, like Santa, that They use to get us to be Good. Which is probably why I'm so out of shape.  But that's another problem.

This one is the healing powers of nature.  I don't get that either.

Instamatic shot, 1971

Which might be kind of odd for a forest-primevil lover, which I am.  Cities are great for brief visits to partake of concerts and stores but I have a perpetual kind of low-grade tension in them and my readiness to get away appears in a few days.  I crave our finding a piece of property far away from all noise not produced by nature.


Our semi-annual nerve-frazzling, brain-grinding biker rally may be why I'm thinking about this.

But anyway, that's different from finding nature healing.  Or, I guess it is. When my life has been in bad shape, I have never found that the woods or the ocean or the gardens or anything makes me feel at all more empowered, hopeful, or at peace.  I read about others who go through a bad life-passage, and who take to the woods or the desert and find it healing in some way.  I like it out there with the trees and water, but feel just as lousy.

Instamatic, 1972

The closest I've ever come to having a nature experience that made me feel any better-centered, or that notched my mood up a hair, was by the ocean on a dark night.  I haven't walked by the ocean at night in many years. We don't live all that close, and you kind of need to be in walking distance since the whole driving/parking thing makes this particular experience horribly ordinary.  But when I have midnight-beach-walked in the past, usually on a vacation with a beachfront rental, the Atlantic Ocean at night was wonderfully overwhelming.

35mm basic camera, 1981

By day, I can easily perceive the build and crash of breakers, many yards away out there, as being .... well, as being many yards away out there.  But in the dark, the surge feels threatening and kind of adrenalin-rush overwhelming, and feels that way over and over, no matter how many times I experience it.

Safe on shore, I see this black featureless horizon, swelling up and roaring at me, building so tall that it doesn't seem possible that it won't engulf the sand and me with it.  The black wall rises and I have to fight the urge to hold my breath, and then it topples and crashes and is gone while I just can't quite make my mind believe such a massive rushing entity has simply dissipated.  That is the only force of nature that has ever helped me, and I'm not sure why.  It's Huge and makes my life feel comfortably trivial, but no other natural landscape, equally immense or majestic, can produce the feeling.  Maybe the sense of being in danger is the key component.  Maybe that works sort of like a drug to overwhelm any other anxiety I've got going on.

Brookgreen Gardens Live Oak, May 2012

So I do have a type of nature experience that helps me, but the difference is that it doesn't make me feel better in a way I can keep.  It's for the moment.  Not only is whatever was bothering me still bothering me, but I feel no forward movement.  Nature gives me only a brief break, but there's nothing wrong with that.

--
* My post title refers to this cool poem.

BTDT

My feeling about New Year's Eve has long been "Been there done that."  Never liked it.   I'd attend parties more as an obligation, or as a way to not feel isolated and pathetic. Many New Year's Eves I spent watching TV and washing my hair.

One notable exception was a year in which I'd undergone a break-up in the fall. That year (1991?  Not even sure!), I forced myself to go to a dance, and, what's more, I decided I could not leave the dance until I had danced with 7 guys. Any adult male counted, but I had to stay until 7 different men had filled spots in my mental dance card. I did it. It took until 2AM, but that also was a good thing. Getting home too early seemed only marginally better than staying home altogether.

I really am just as susceptible as anyone, to the symbolic "fresh new year" thing, though I'd be more inclined to say that the year turns at the solstice.  I've weakly made resolutions, then quit making real ones and made spoof ones, and now I skip it.  Every day is a chance to do my best and some days I do and some days I don't.  That's not likely to change.

I'm blessed with a spouse who's not into New Year's Eve either and we spend a quiet evening. We have to stay awake because the Traditional New Year Phone Calls come in from the kids and sometimes other kin, so going to bed only to be jarred awake by the phone is worse than the tiredness.

I also took some last-day-of-the-year photos today, so here are a few photos of the environs this afternoon:

Camellias starting to bloom

It's camellia season --  they will be loaded with blooms in a couple weeks.

Tiny garden spider babies recently hatched

We fear for these baby garden spiders.  They hatched too soon, but their mom laid the egg sac awfully early and the extended warm weather brought them out.  Even at 16x zoom with camera braced against the porch wall, the photo isn't too clear, but there they are. 

And they're fascinating.  In the picture below, you see this same bunch -- top-center -- with the egg sac that they left, back there in the corner above the door.  They move in a group and are actually not on the ceiling but suspended just underneath it in a group web.

Baby spiders in cluster - top center

Wild grape vines, finished for the year

Annual autumn sea oat wash-in

Every fall,  the sea oats die back and lots of them float in on the tide and get stranded.  I was delighted that this picture really shows the way they get suspended on top of the vegetation.  I'd tried many times to capture that with other cameras!

Scooter accompanied me on my photo shoot.  He makes a nice closing shot.  Happy flip of the calendar, everybody!

An anecdotal weather ... thingamajig

I often have insomnia which cuts the center out of my night, and last night was one of those. I was up at 3AM, net surfing, drinking a protein shake, reading, wandering, tripping over cats who always think "The hooman finally gets it!  This is prime activity time!"

So there was my weather widget up in the corner of my google page.  It told me that the current temperature was 70 degrees (f).

That widget has been wacko before. It can pull the wrong data for a location.

I've also blogged about how hot it can get year round here in coastal SC.

But....but....!!  [sputter sputter] ....I never.....

Not at 3 AM.  Not in the middle of the night the day before Thanksgiving.  I went to weather dot com and got the US map and was so amazed that I took a screenshot.  Zoom it and you can see the time of night,  "3:15 EST"  at the bottom of the map.

This is just creepy.  When the temp does not fall below 70 degrees at night, that's in, like, July/Aug, when we're having 90s during the day.

We've got a holiday and guests coming in tonight and I can't give any kind of time to research right now, but I did a cursory search for record night temperatures in SC.  I can't say that this doesn't happen regularly.  I coulda' missed it.

Unfortunately, nobody cares about records on the warmest nights, only the coldest.  They love to tell you how hot it got on a particular day and how low it dropped at night, but the dilemma of how to research "how low it did NOT drop" is something I can't devote time to today!

Just know that even for hot and muggy SC, where we get odd shorts-weather days in every month of the year .... 70 degrees f, deep in the night, on 11-23,  crossed the line into being kinda disturbing.

OK, the zoom is mindblowing

My new camera offers  - it says on the case -  a "4x optical zoom."  That's one reason I picked it over another similar PowerShot that had only the same 3.5 zoom that my old one had.

So I'm standing around taking outdoor pictures a couple days ago.....

.... and I noticed people out in the marsh oystering, which they do at low tide.  I thought I'd see if the 4x got enough detail to show what's going on out there.  I hit the zoom lever and it crept up to 4x, then hesitated.  Before I could think to let go of the lever, it started up again and kept zooming until the display told me it was giving me 16x.

I.  am.  in.  awe.
Here's another one.  From this:

To:

My happiness level with the new PowerShot is increasing.  A lot.

My little love and I

 I love it. I'm keeping it.

My beloved camera is what I'm talking about.  My dear 2004 Canon PowerShot.  Heavy as a hand grenade, took great pictures in its prime.  It's having trouble now.  Every shoot has more unusable shots.

In each shoot, more turn out like this.

So I had to get another camera, and I went with another PowerShot since I liked the last one so much.  Below are a few from the first batch of photos. 

Good, because I could get a photo when I tried to get a photo.  Not good, in that I'm not happy with them.  I was hoping the old Canon would last until I could get a true upgrade, but it wasn't meant to be.

Still, taking pictures is fun again.

The first photo, of course, had to be of The Boss.

Oysters in the creek at low tide.  This one's OK.

Gone to seed

Fun book!

If you have to go away...I'll leave your shoes beside the bed.

Several of these were taken at Dad's house.

About 4:30 PM, sun sinking, golden fall marsh and flag on 11-11.  This is the only one that turned out as nice as I'd hoped.

The grocery store didn't charge me for either of these 2 little potted mums, since they were nearly dead.  One has succumbed but the other is reviving.

And maybe I'll gain mastery over the settings on this camera and get sharper images.  If all else fails, I can read the manual!