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Does anyone else have that obnoxious orange rectangle at the bottom of the left sidebar?  Have you learned how to be rid of it? Have you looked into “the new Blogger”? As far as I can see, it is using a blog to make money. I remember this wave going round a few years ago, but a little less aggressive. I wasn’t stuck with the orange rectangle. We have too much orange as it is.

This is a grumpy blog. I’m close to done with re-threading my loom. I think back to my sister’s nimble fingers, threading a loom’s heddles so quickly, tying on the new warp at many times my rate. She doesn’t do this anymore, and bending over a loom is no easier for her than for me these days.

My complaint isn’t doing the job, but working through the jumble of a brain injury to complete this part of it. Interesting I can still push the proper treadles in the proper order, throw the shuttle and lay down neat row after neat row of work, yet have such a problem rearranging four threads in every sequence of eight across a warp of four hundred odd threads.

I don’t work well come afternoon, and I know that. I started the re-threading in an afternoon, and just quit after wasting an hour or two. I should have known better! I came back the next morning, and it was a struggle, but I got a bit done. The same the morning after, and so on, until two days ago, when I finally “saw” what I had to do, in my brain, and set up a little sequence I could deal with.

Shortly I was past half way done. Now I have worked down to the last eighty threads. I started up again after lunch, and reached those last eighty threads, only to be stopped again by my other accomplice, back pain. So, here I am in my therapeutic chair, waiting for two acetaminophens to take effect.

For, I am determined to finish before supper. Tomorrow I’m going to breakfast with friends, and then to the dentist. In short, tomorrow is shot, both time and pleasure. We’re going back to a restaurant I really enjoyed the first time, when I had an egg Benedict. There were so many Benedict variations on the menu I could not make a rational choice that morning, and settled on the first offering, a classic poached egg on English muffin, with Canadian bacon.

Yes, I hear my Canadian and British friends shuddering.  I love a Benedict egg above most breakfast offerings.  At the moment my back ache has eased enough for me to go back and probably finish my thread job. I will come back with the rest of the blog this evening.

So, it’s 6:45. I finished the threading, and even checked each bout for accuracy. Good to be done, and even better to be done and correct. It’s still a long haul, but the most painful part is over. I had supper, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and hobbled my back here to my Tempur-Pedic office chair.

For breakfast tomorrow I shall have a Florentine Egg Benedict. A poached egg on spinach and tomato, on an English muffin, topped with Hollandaise sauce. The Hollandaise has a real zing. I think I’ll have a side of bacon. Yum, yum.

I looked carefully, but there was no photographic interest in the warp in the heddles. Here instead, out the front door and over my shoulder.

I still know the way

The doorbell rang last night. I still was sitting at the table, empty plate to my left and coffee on the right. I'm engrossed with the book I'm currently reading, Bryon Stevenson, Just Mercy, and finished the paragraph before I went to the door.

David was there, football jersey scrunched up in his hand. Could I drive him to the game, please? I agreed, and he brought my trash cans in from the street in the time it took me to get keys, cane and sunglasses together.

David has been here in the park as long as I've been here. He showed up offering lawn mowing services way back then, and I told him I'd bought a lawn mower for Laura. He reminded me we have to weed wack the perimeter of our unit and shed, too, and he was available. I bought a weed wacker. You can't know too much.

We had a pleasant chat on the way to the high school. We were still in the park when David asked me a technical question about the car: how was the refrigerator holding up? I couldn't believe anyone who did not own a Dodge Caliber knew the glove box also was a refrigerator. I only figured it out by accident and close perusal of the owner's manual.

The young man is quite the car buff, and quizzed me exhaustively on every car I admitted to owning. In short order we pulled into the mayhem of a Friday night home game. David held up his jersey and we were waved through, to the reserved tailgate party area, also the team entrance.

Tonight I was startled by the noise of a weedwacker  around my unit. I went out, and was face to face with David and his weedwacker. I thanked him for his kindness, and asked after the game.

It was rained out. There was a substantial storm last night, and I did glance at the clock and wonder if the game was over. Then I went back to the book.

Done, done, and done

Yesterday friends Deb and Pam came by to liberate a shovel full of Aunt Laura's iris from the old garden, and go to lunch.Which we did.

Before they arrived I came very near the end of my second attempt to make a shirt. I finished it in the afternoon. My thyroid and I came to a satisfactory resolution of the job.

If I ever make it again, I probably won't trick it out with buttons. Otherwise it is a decent job, for fabric of a width intended for towels. There is plenty of the fabric left; I've just set it aside for the time being.

We left the garden with the intended plunder, and more. Snuggled in among the wild overgrowth, many colchicum blossoms. One of us had a shovel and one of us had an extra bag and one of us would like some bulbs to plant.

I've decided to go ahead with planting a pot of bulbs. We are zone six, more or less, and the bulbs I want are hardy to zone 3. My pots are completely immobile. 

They are situated to hold the poles with hooks that hold my hanging baskets. The poles are secured to the deck uprights. Each pot weighs at least seventy five pounds.

Short of a tornado, nothing will move. I do subscribe to "better safe than sorry", so I shall fashion snug winter jackets of burlap. Perhaps I'll sit out in the sunshine and stuff them with straw. Or not.

At lunch that afternoon, an invitation was extended to participate in another artist open house. It's time to get back to something I'm good at. There is no line at my door for shirts, but there is a small clamor for towels.

The open house is in November, so that is my target. I must re-thread the loom, at which I am slower than ever. And rewind a lot of bobbins, and put a big towel warp on the beam and pull it through the heddles and reed. And tie it up. You know. All the tedious prep work.

But first I have an appointment to have my hair cut. Until we meet again, when I will have far less hair. And this picture was two weeks ago. My hair is irritating now. Not good.

Bulbs in a pot

    

What with packing, moving, unpacking, assembling the new house, plants had little planning and a very late start here. The ever present mandevilla could do no wrong, but how to spruce up the rest of the cement foundation of my deck.

Lacking any garden worthy area of land, I coveted large clay pots with shiny finishes. Four of them to arrange strategically around the deck. The cost, at two to three hundred dollars, per pot was prohibitive, and the idea was set aside, until I discovered resin pots. 

They looked very like the shiny pottery pots I wanted, though weightless.

I had so many left overs stones, so much left over soil, I had no ballast shortage. I bought the resin pots and added some clearance shelf plants that would fill up space. It was very satisfactory for this summer.

For next summer I would like flowers I really enjoy. First I would like the opinion of wiser gardeners than I. The flowers all grow from bulbs, and all the bulbs will be planted in a resin pot.

The resin planters are 16” in diameter and 14” tall. They have an 8” base, in case that’s important. The walls are half an inch thick and the planters hold eight gallons of soil.

At eight inches I would plant allium, iris and lilies. At seven inches, white narcissi’s, only. Then at five inches, snowdrops, crocus and anemone.

For what it’s worth, the frost line here is four inches. Since the pots are exposed to freezing from the walls in, I think frost line is moot. I probably must think of how I will protect the pot exterior from the cold, but I can do that.

Any advice? All advice welcome. And opinions. I seldom bite back.

In the meantime, "summer's almost gone, winter's coming on". Soon I will be taking apart the hanging baskets and clearing out my resin pots. Time to make a plan!

Back at it

I spent much of the month of August---asleep!  I wasn’t tired, I was soporific.  Sometime during the day I would stagger to my bed, or risk sinking where I was. Or, wake with a snap from reading the paper or a news report on the computer, stagger to bed and sleep two to three hours. 

Medical sleuth that I am, I deduced my thyroid was crapping out again. My next appointment with my endocrinologist was scheduled for the last day of September.  The day after Labor Day I called for the next available appointment. It was the next afternoon. I took it.

I generally go to this appointment with lab work done and new thyroid readings on record. But this was a “damn the torpedoes” situation in my estimation. I left with lab work authorization in hand, and had it done yesterday morning. The results were in my email yesterday evening, and yes, another instance of thyroid crapping out.

A new script goes to the drug store today, I’ll get it tomorrow, and start working back to normality.

What gets accomplished in a day with three hour naps? Precious little.

To remind myself I have a life, not to mention I like to eat, I kept up three meals a day. That may not have been the best plan; there were several less than palatable meals. No pictures were taken.

I loaded the dishwasher. I took out the trash. I fed the cat. God forbid I forget the cat! His room is on the opposite end of the house from mine.  The instant I turn to leave my bedroom, he’s on the move. Tail up, head glancing back to be sure I’m following, little legs moving thump, thump, thump, thump, one, two, three, four.

If the bottom of the food bowl shows, I am warned by a heart wrenching howl before we reach the room. He doesn’t care if the water is half gone, or if there is an extra poo littering his box. Just let the food dwindle, and he raises an alarm.

I watered the flowers.

I did not clean the house, although I did hire a service recommended to me. Two nice women cleaned my 860 square feet in less than thirty minutes. Sadly, the owner did not lower her minimum charge, and that in spite of ruining a day by appearing two hours late. “Oh, I forgot to call you!”  As soon as they left, I went in for the nap.