....so I will not say a lot about it, but make it a brief Public Service Announcement. I bought this thing a year ago and couldn't muster the courage to try it, so it occurs to me that others may have the same misgivings.
I was sure that it would cause a burning sensation like the ones I got as a kid, when swimming pool water went up my nose. I hate that a lot but, much worse, I thought it would resemble the sensation of drowning. No way. Pass.
I had to be miserable enough to give in and try it, and o! I found out I'd been wrong. So wrong. Using a neti pot feels wonderful. It needs repeating at intervals over the day, but it feels so good that I don't mind. Maybe it will shorten this cold/allergy/whatever is attacking me.
We had two problems. One was that Very Hairy Cat, otherwise known as Downyflake, tore open the underside of the box spring (a misnomer - they rarely, if ever, put springs in them anymore) to crawl up into. After living over the years with several cats who discovered this, I'm pretty sure that it's a favorite cat-thing to do. We tried to block access with a messy and dust-collecting little village of boxes which, obviously, didn't even work.
The other, more superficial problem was that the ugly bare box spring showed. (Last photo, inset.) We gave up the bed skirts, for both access and cat-related reasons, long ago. Neither our light summer blanket nor the heavier winter comforter dangles down far enough to cover it.
I honestly don't know whether I read this idea someplace, or made it up myself. But it occurred to me that:
nice sheets over the box springs would disguise their upholstery, and ...
putting those nice sheets over the undersides of the box springs -- i.e., sheeting them upside down -- would block Downy from his little cave.
So we did, after as much fur removal by hand and vacuum-cleaner as we could manage. This should work on any size bed. I individually sheeted each of the 2 twin beds we have pushed together to make a king-size, and used plain ones of a generic color to blend with the linens and the room, but there are plenty of ways to use the idea with anything, from K-mart's cheapest to designer patterns. Here, there's not much point in trying to make it look all HGTV-y since the stored items under the bed are still exposed. It looks good to me. This is a hard-working living space.
The snow didn't harm the broccoli plants, but that didn't amaze me. They'd thrived through lots of nights at 5-10 degrees below freezing, 'teens-to-20's f.
What surprised me was that we're still getting below-freezing nights most of the time, and ... sink me, if there aren't florets starting! Now. Buds have appeared in three of the plants. The biggest one is pictured below, sharpened for clarity.
And I now own a book called Vegetable Gardening in Florida. This isn't Florida but advice that general books give for normal places just doesn't work in our coastal-SC summer heat. I don't yet know if it will solve any of my problems but I can already say that, if i'd read it first, these buds wouldn't have surprised me at all.
All right, two long sleeve shirts are a couple increments heavier than "shirtsleeves." But this is a strange snow "storm".
At 6:45 PM, I went outside to lock up the car. A few raindrops had fallen on the walkway.
I was not uncomfortably cold, even as I was dressed, in a double layer of longsleeve shirts, and sweatpants. No coat. I dawdled, petted a grumpy Scooter The Cat, who flopped onto the damp driveway and rolled to Cute me into letting him in. I apologized to him for not bringing out the key to his downstairs foyer.
If I could be that comfortable without a coat, I figured that any snow we got would be late-night, after the temp dropped.
At 7:00 PM Larry looked out and said, "It's snowing."
The car was already coated.
We both ran for our cameras. And I discovered something totally cool. Last year's snow flurries barely showed up in pictures, but night photography makes all the difference -- the flash captures the flakes in midair!
But this is decidedly strange. I was out there, again, coatless, snapping snowfall pix. My hands got cold but i was otherwise not too uncomfortable, even hanging out on the porch for a photography session.
Check out the snow layer that built up on the car in only 15 minutes! If it rains later, it will all wash away, but the radar sure looks like more is coming. This might be interesting.
Breaking news : J. D. Salinger has died at age 91.
His somewhat controversial life is not terribly interesting to me. It hasn't spoiled Catcher in the Rye, which remains one of my all-time favorite books. Whatever his character flaws, a jerk can write a very good, touching book. This is my copy, acquired in hardcover for durability, and with each of the three days over which the story takes place marked on the bottom page edges. (It's something I do when the days, or other calendar increments, over which a story takes place interest me. On my copy of Gone with the Wind, I can flip right to a particular year - 1866? 1871? Quick and easy.)
I was no English major. I've analyzed a little poetry and very few novels and have more of a plays-by-ear than a reads-music approach to interpreting a book, but the author of this article made me grind my teeth when he parroted the requisite "Americans are so shallow" explanation for Catcher in the Rye's popularity:
Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up.
Am I just literature-illiterate, or is this absolute bull?
Holden Caulfield does not idealize childhood one bit, much less want to stay in its powerless state. He hates bull, not adults or adulthood per se.
He certainly thinks children haven't learned phoniness yet, but I see no indication that he thinks staying a child is the solution to anything.
The title of the book -- hello? -- is about his wanting to protect children.
A. That means they need protecting. Not from growing up, but from the things that can happen to them as children. They don't know enough to avoid running off of cliffs.
B. He wants to be their protector. That's not the role of a child.
Holden doesn't want to take the growing-up out of life's process. He wants to take the phoniness out of being a grownup.
I know this article's author isn't the only one. I've heard it before, the interpretation of Catcher in the Rye as some kind of hymn to the Peter Pan syndrome. I couldn't tell you where; I never paid much attention, but somehow, today, it seemed too stupid and galled me. I'll cheerfully ream any idiocy in American culture, but loving this book is, to me, one example of readers having good taste, even if there are far too many examples of their having bad taste.
The rest of you are welcome to stay out there in the wild. Enjoy the next Arctic Blast. Frankly, I can do better.
I've found a lovely warm garage. They didn't even notice me moving in.
They even run a space heater in the little foyer that opens into it, but the bourgeois cat who lives here needs it more than I do. I just hunker down out here in the garage itself, among all these boxes and pieces of furniture, and nobody knows I'm here. Seriously, they have NO idea how long I've been in residence. I tolerate the cat, who's a grouch but who is the reason for the endless supply of fresh water and Vibrant Maturity [tm], so I don't quibble.
That Vibrant Maturity is good stuff, man.
The people who run this place are dolts. There's nothing subtle about them. As usual, they've turned out the lights, and clunked back upstairs, making it abundantly clear that they're out of here for the night, and they even put out an extra bowl of food. So now I can just sashay out and help myse--
I almost never catch good action shots, so this is a rarity. Zooming, as usual, fuzzes out the image somewhat, but it was still cool to catch these guys in flight.
There's a new TV show that I am not allowed to watch. OK, not really, but whenever a promo for it comes on, Larry says firmly, "You can't watch that," and I whine appropriately: "You never let me have any fun."
Howe and Howe Tech is about these two guys who build heavy duty vehicles, and Larry is afraid that I might learn too much from it. A working tank, in my hands, would be ... trouble.
But not really for the reason he thinks. Sure, it would be tempting to ... to not have to yield to certain other drivers out there. You know what I mean. The ones in the towering SUV's, careening around you while on the cell phone, who endanger your life. The idiots who cut you off, or take your parking space or who, on a little narrow road, come so close to center to turn left that they block the road so no one can turn in. A tank would be real handy at times, and the temptation would be hard to resist.
This footage ...
has run a bazillion times on Discovery, but the first time I saw it, I was far too enamored of it, and he's never forgotten that.
But I am actually lucid at times and know that avoiding points on my driver license is a good thing. I got my reward yesterday, when the Dreaded Day arrived -- a trip to the DMV to renew my license, an event that not only means I'm older, but means we've lived back here in SC for nearly ten years(!).
I have a clean driving record. I walked in, passed the eye test, and walked out with my license and its requisite mug shot in my hand, within minutes. And it's good for ten years! The Badly Behaved drivers were put through much less pleasant protocols.
So, really, I wouldn't use the tank to crush other vehicles.
No, I would use it to plow a line straight through the landscape from here to Charlotte, NC.
Charlotte is my hometown, and is no longer the pleasant small-ish city I grew up in, so I don't really want to spend a lot of time there. But I do have relatives, relatives I actually like a lot, and friends, and Borders Books, which is nowhere closer, so I'd like to get there maybe just a little more.
But the utter absurdity is that, even though Myrtle Beach is a MAJOR destination for the residents of this now-big city, there's no direct route. The drive is a misery of three-digit bleak highways.
To get there from here -- and these are the major routes anyone takes, I am not even including the local twists and turns that apply to the specific addresses at the start and finish -- you take:
501 to 76 to 52 to 52/401 to 34 (for only about 1 minute) to 151 which becomes 601 to 74 which goes through several towns, becoming Independence Boulevard (traffic, strip mall nightmare) at some point to ... here's a choice of major arteries (495, 51, 16, others)
The 501, 151/601, and 74 legs are ENDLESS.
The only good part is the halfway point. It's a big, wonderful farmstand/store called McLeod Farms, which has a cafe, picnic tables, and a nice little store full of great produce and delectable baked goods. It makes the drive bearable. Just.
But we drove it 3 times this past year, and I tell ya, if I had a tank, I'd flatten a nice straight route from here to some point on 74 that easily connects to a decent road.
And whatever criminal charges I incurred, they probably wouldn't involve disobeying rules of the road, because there ain't no roads. Not yet anyway. Once I got out of jail, I'd still have my license! OK, maybe not. But I'm not sure it wouldn't be worth it anyway.
The LAST thing I ever thought I'd blog about in January was a crop I planted in June.
A couple of our summer crops turned out well, but neither my carrots (all leaf and practically no root) nor my broccoli gave us any eatin'. The broccoli nearly died and even when I put it into its box planter, it never thrived. By the end of the heat season, the leaves had dried up and crumbled away leaving skeletal stems just kind of sitting there in the dirt.
But they were technically alive, and I had nothing better to do with the planter for the winter than leave them in it. Didn't weed, didn't water. Pretty much paid no attention to the plants at all.
In the cooling of autumn, they began to leaf out and perk up again. Hoo-boy. Still, I thought the hard freeze would be their death knell.
I knew broccoli was a cruciferous veggie, making it a cousin to the ornamental cabbages that like cold temperatures and that people put in their gardens for the icy months. But I had no idea just how close the broccoli and cabbage cold tolerance kinship really was!
Here they are - photo taken today. Hale and hearty, after two solid weeks of nights in the 'teens and 'twenties fahrenheit. No flowers, but the leaves seem perfectly happy. Just wow!
(Hmmm... OK, this picture is enormous! I'm still learning the new computer's photo program.)
The top 2 pictures are pretty self-explanatory. That middle photo is very like one I posted about a year ago. The last one shows thin sheets of ice suspended in the grass at the high tide mark, where the ebbing tide left them.
I'm in computer transition, and will be using a mac pretty soon. Possibly, hopefully, yall won't hear me whine and snarl about it as much as i have whined and snarled about WinDuhs. Hey, I'll have computer sound again!! Till then, I'm trying to wrap up and back up some of the stuff on this WinDuhs Vizta thing, which will stay active for some projects.
I'm also trying to get back into some gentle exercise for my aging joints. The weather is showing me just how much limbering up I need to do.
I've tried not to complain about our Arctic Blast, which is their term for it, not my Southern Wimp term for it, honest, but despite the fact that most of my readers are coping with much much colder temperatures, I'm giving in now, and saying that I am REAL ready for this bloody cold phase to end.
As you can see above, the suffering here is not great. The fire is so delightful. But houses here are not winterized well for this kind of extended cold. My joints are not winterized well either.
So I've moved a stack of books and a new crochet project (I keep making mufflers. No big, complicated, or long term projects. Just mufflers.) to the couch by the fireplace, where I add hot tea or cocoa, and wait for this blasted Blast to be over.
November and December are duck-hunting season. We wake at dawn each morning, to the sound of gunfire. It takes place out at the far end of the inlet, but resonates. It's not a likable way to wake up.
Our end of the inlet provides a nice escape for the ducks. Hunters aren't allowed anywhere near here. So these hooded mergansers congregate practically in our back yard.
...for the express purpose of not having to tie ribbons on your Christmas packages.
"Well, dern! Out of ribbon. Gotta use stick-on bows."
Another thing I have a bad attitude about is wrapping packages. Tying pretty, neat, evenly-looped, well-placed, creative, color-coordinated bows on packages is a pain. Whoever invented the stick-on bow is my personal hero/heroine.
And remember how, in days long past, the ribbon would come with nice little dividers between each color, so you didn't end up with this tangled mess? No more. A plain cardboard cylinder costs the manufacturer much less and they pass those savings right on over to us consum-- Ha ha! Sorry. Couldn't say that with a straight face.
Extricating a length from this birds' nest only makes using it to gift-wrap even more of a pain. This roll of multiple ribbon colors has been around for several years because I avoid using it.
Meanwhile, last year, Larry wanted to revive his childhood Christmas tradition of making chains out of construction paper. So we did, and we doubled it this year. And I, who really really doesn't much like craft work, find it the most soothing, delightful activity. Last year that took me by surprise, a very lovely surprise.
It inspired me to keep going and make more construction paper chains to hang on the tree. I hesitated, though, because we use the old-style colored lights and they get hot.
And then the ribbon caught my eye. The ribbon isn't totally fireproof of course, but it is a LOT sturdier, less dry and brittle, more heat-resistant. We never plug in the tree lights unless we're around, and abso-LUTE-ly never leave them on when we aren't home, and I could feel OK about using this to make chains. Lots of our ornaments are string, yarn, wood, and other homemades.
So I put on some music and started chain-making.
This is my kind of craftwork. There is no pattern. There is no planning ahead. There is no measuring. I chop pieces randomly. I cut big loops, I cut small loops. I add them to the chain randomly. I rely on the law of averages to distribute the sizes and colors of the rings, and I don't care at all if I use a color twice in a row, and then don't use it again for quite awhile.
