Swallowtail and lilies

This fellow was busy with a cone flower recently.

And these lilies at the post office are ignoring the drought

Big sunflower Monday

Sunny is maturing.  Her scrawny, scrappy self probably will have seeds in a month.  I’m plotting how I can get a picture of chickadees hanging off the blossom, picking out seeds.

In news from Cousin Camp 61, there are four grandchildren here for the next two weeks.  Emily and Laura, who live here now, and Francis and Caroline.   I dropped off Laura, Francis and Caroline for Ranger Camp this morning. 

Upwards of a hundred boys and girls spilled from cars, and the counselors checked them in with equanimity.  Only my head was spinning as the efficient staff sorted them into groups.

I quizzed the day campers when I picked them up.  They hiked three to four miles today, and, according to Francis, had a very skimpy lunch of two grilled cheese sandwiches “and some other stuff.”  Tomorrow they are exploring a stream, and need to take their wellies.

Back at home I spent the rest of the day filling out the school registration packets for Emily and Laura, while Emily did all the trim work on her room.  I have one set of forms left to complete, but Emily finished, and clean up and move in can start tomorrow.

Girls at work

If I sit down early for the evening news I watch Home and Garden TV while I knit my sock and wait for the local news.  Young couples looking for homes and trendy apartments often remark disdainfully, “It’s so eighties!”  I smile.  That’s our house, it probably will stay that way.

Except Emily’s new room.  She picked the downstairs bedroom that she shared with Bekka when they lived here eleven years ago.  When Shelly and the children moved back to Lake County, it was a guest room for a while, but then storage snuck in.  Even the bed disappeared.  When the clear out started this week I idly slid a fingernail in a seam of the grass cloth that went up in 1988.  In total sheep as a lamb mode, I lifted a little more and stripped the entire sheet from floor to ceiling

.

Two girls spent much of the week scraping the grass cloth’s lining sheet off the walls.  That was the brutal task.  I woke up one morning at six, to the smell of eggs and scraping.  “Oh, Tom burned his eggs and is scraping the pan,” I told myself before going back to sleep.  Two hours later I really woke up; there were eggs for the early risers and Laura had been scraping walls since breakfast.  Laura has a vested interest in this room, too.  She and Emily currently share an upstairs bedroom.  When this room is done, they each will have a room.  As I heard her tell her friend, “We each will have our own closet!”

The old paper was scraped off the walls.

The paste was washed off.

Patched and sanded.

Finally.  This room will glow.  Yellow ceiling and two walls.  Two walls pumpkin.  Uncle Tom painted the ceiling and two walls; grandma painted two walls and Emily is doing all the cutting and trim.  Looking good.  I bet we’ll be shopping for new blinds tonight and moving her in tomorrow.

Sunny sunflower Monday

'Nuff said.

It lasted until last Saturday

My daughter Beth may be horrified by this math, but she’s driven a vehicle upwards of thirty years.  She’s owned Grumbelly, the VW bus, a little red Dodge Colt, a red pickup, a red Dodge Neon, and a Subaru wagon.  If you discount Grumbelly and the pickup, both of which she had for a couple of years, but for very different reasons, she’s pretty easy on cars.  Especially as none of these came to her new.  Excepting possibly the truck, which had to go.  When you are young and have a lot of friends, and own a truck, you too frequently are pressed into moving your friends from one housing situation to another.  

Grumbelly and the Subaru were not red.  All the cars had standard transmissions in common.    The little red Dodge Colt she learned on was a stick.  Mine.  She backed it right into a tree first time out.  In fact, I turned all driving lessons over to my brother.  When I finally got into a car with her, she was a good driver.  She gives me all the credit.

I believe the little red Neon gave way to the Subaru right around the new millennium.  Beth bought the restaurant/wine bar about then, and the Neon not only was past any legal limit of miles, its trunk was mighty inconvenient for loading and unloading cases of wine.

First came a growing restaurant and catering business, then love, then marriage, and then Beth and Bill with the baby carriage.  Dad’s Toyota looked really nice in the drive way, but Mom’s Subaru was the day-in, day-out go to.  Hauling restaurant supplies.  Taking kids to and from school every day.  Family vacations.  It was the epitome of the family car.  Crayon on the seats.  Drink stains on the floor.  Stickers on every square inch of the back seat windows.  Not “Baby on Board.”  We’re talking smiley faces, Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Square Bob.  All those gooberie little circles and squares that are distributed to children.  I confess to passing along a few myself, and am amazed at the forbearance of the parents.  I could not have tolerated that mess all over my back seat windows.

Beth failed her Subaru recently.  At its regular check up, her trusty mechanic said she was around 190,000 miles;  time for a new, preventative maintenance, timing belt.  OK, next oil change, said the busy mom, restaurant owner and caterer.  And on a lovely Saturday morning, loaded with a wedding reception in the next county, the Subaru died of terminal timing belt failure.  Fortunately the rest of her crew was following her, redistributed the contents, and pulled off the wedding reception without missing a beat, while her trusty mechanic sent a tow truck and took Subaru to the garage.

What to do?  A new standard transmission Subaru was out of the pricing question, and owners of older standard transmission Subaru’s don’t turn them in often.  Then she found one and sent me a link to the  picture at the dealer.  What did I think? 

 I advised her to go for it; there was just one sticker in the window. 

She told me Caroline was disappointed; she had wondered how long some of her favorite stickers would last.  “Until last Saturday, Caroline.”