started 9/18/2013, last night before I went to bed:
Life, there is always so much to be done. I can not even imagine a day when there isn't something that should be done. I like that actually. All of my life as a worker bee there was always more things that needed to be done than time. I liked that life. I loved my job. I didn't always like my job, but I always loved it. Being a regulator was never my idea of what I wanted to do while I was growing up. Judging people. I am terrible about that. I didn't want to do that. I preferred that to pest control. I am not a pest control kind of person. I am an agriculture person. I understood the authority given to me by state and federal law and precedent and I never took advantage of it. Instead, my whole career was about being fair. Not having a scape goat. Even, reasonable agreed upon, legally adopted regulations. I could do it. Especially since I was always involved in the education aspect of the job. Especially when I managed the certification program. I really loved my job then. The best year of my entire life was my last year of work for the department. The year that Tamara, the young woman who replaced me did my job and her job. I did as much as my brain was capable of during chemo. I threw up in the garbage can and showed up more then I was helpful. But I could see a change. A young energetic, intelligent woman took the initiative to ask how to do the reports. She was promoted. Other young woman working hard, working very hard and being treated as equals. Judged on their KSAs, not on their sex or color or anything but who was the better person for the job. That is a long way from when I started there. I was only one of the many woman who chipped away at the glass ceiling. I was lucky because I was there as the changes started to happen.
I guess I am reminiscing about what I have been a part of because the woman who made the biggest impact on the women's rights movement when I was a young and impressionable woman were on the morning news. And so I was busy this morning. I made fruit salad and then cheese eggs. The chickens are not laying many eggs, but enough for us to have eggs a couple of times a week. I went outside and worked on small projects. I planted my sacrificial garden. This is a lovely garden next to the main door of the barn right in front of the Brazilian flame vine. I have planted it faithfully every three months or so. It is always beautiful and just as it hits its prime the chickens would come up and scratch it all up. They would strip the leaves of whatever plant I had planted and then they would pull up whatever plant was left. They would scratch up anything green and tear it apart. That garden just brings out the aggressiveness in my wicked chickens. I would give up, they would finish it off and then we would start all over with me planting it again. Each time I put in a heavier arsenal of protection. the last one involved horse fencing and green plastic chicken wire. The plastic chicken wire is nice because it is not strong enough to hold a chicken which usually slows the chickens down. They like to flap up to the top of the fence and then jump down into the sacrificial garden. That way they can look before they leap. Chickens are not stupid. Well, the mower hit the fence and ripped it down, so the chickens took full advantage of the opening. Before I got home from England the chickens wiped out all of my hard work. All the plants I had planted, all the seeds I had planted and had come up wiped out. I never even got to see it. I know it bloomed. I know it was probably beautiful because of the residue of ripped apart plants dried and strew across the container.
So I planted cellousea and chrysanthemums with the two remaining rubeckias and the lemon basil that had some how survived the wicked chicken attack and had come back thick and lovely although deformed. The cellousia has red variegation on the leaves and then magenta flowers. The mums are a rosy pink with a yellow center. Very pretty compact and full of open flowers. I planted the same plants in the garden on the west side of the trailer. That garden that is still coming together it is in a bad spot in that it doesn't get watered. I have to go and take care of it, so when I am gone, it really suffers. So I have replanted it, mulched and watered it in real well. Then I went to the sacrificial garden, added in compost, another bucket of garden soil and the plants, then mulched. I had bought the mums, but I had grown from seeds the celousias. Isabelle had given me a couple of plants a few years ago and I am still enjoying them each September. The perfect end of summer flower, like the despicable Mexican sunflower. The only time this plant is worth anything is this time of year as they bloom. The rest of the time they are leggy, invasive weeds. I had barely mulched and turned around but their was a wicked chicken scratching in that garden. Aaaargh!!!!! So I cleaned some of my bamboo and stuck it in the ground around the sides and front of the sacrificial planter. Then I trimmed the grapes off the chicken coop. I had needed to do it, now I had something to use the vines with . I cut all the excess vines, grapes still hanging sweet and deep purple off the older canes, I used these cut canes to weave a fence around the sacrificial garden. At the top I put a loopy pattern and tomorrow I will finish the bottom and the try to weave a heart into the front of the garden. You can still see the plants and they have yet to start growing. I love mums in the fall. I have to have mums in my gardens in the fall. I love pansies in the winter, veggies in the spring, and impatiens in the summer.
I am reading on face book about how so many of my friends have started decorating for fall. They are decorating their mantels, doors, bathrooms. It sounds lovely. Spiced candles and fall colors, everyone is ready for the change of season. I am not. I love this time of year. The time at the end of summer where the weather wants to change, but hasn't. It acts some days like it is fall, but summer jumps right back in. Today was one of those days As morning dawned the temperatures stalled and may even dropped for a short time as the front first started to move through The blue skies clouded over and silver clouds moving quickly over head. Around 4:00 pm we had a lovely sun shower The sun was shining but the sky was filled with rain as delicate as mist. I stood in the door of the barn and looked out into the yard with the sun shining and the air glimmered with the rain. sigh.
I had never weaved a fence before and it was pretty easy to keep figuring out better ways to weave and before long I had reached a height I thought was adequate so I made a looping pattern on the top. It was easy enough to figure out how to do it and it finished off the top nicely. I was so proud of myself. My brain handled it with little anxiety and enjoyed the stretching of my brain as I figured out each step. I will take a picture tomorrow when I finish the bottom to show you. It is small and simple, but for a first attempt I am proud of my effort.
I enjoyed it so much. I weeded and trimmed and dug and planted and worked in the garden. I wore out the battery on the weed whacker taking down the absolute worst of the grass. Tomorrow I need to cut the old pear tree down and let the sucker that is doing so much better and has more branches and is the healthier become the main tree. I need to get my apples and roses planted and the final garden plan drawn up. So much to do, but I am trying to do each thing one step at a time. And then I just stop during the day, like during the sun shower and just look around me. I realize I am right where I need to be, right where I want to be. Whatever I do today is enough. I loved the weaving, back and forth around the bamboo standing upright. Simple.
I came in and made a dish with rice and chicken, chicken sausage, peppers, onions, mushrooms, garlic and olive oil. Mostly leftovers with a few new surprises thrown together. yum. A simple life with things to do, and things got done. Maybe the same, maybe not always. But I was happy with what I had learned and had accomplished. All of it needed to be done. Yet there is so much more on the to do list. Another day, another day. Bug worked on the boat getting it ready to take to the marina to store. It will be nice to be able to ride one of the Harley's down to take the boat out. It will also be nice to have the carport back. Our lives quietly busy on things that important to each of us............his boat, my garden. happy happy happy.
I love working in the garden and I love using resources grown here on the property. The bamboo, the grape vines, herbs, sweet potatoes, grapes, all kinds of vegetation that manages to survive and be harvested when I am actually here. I love travelling, but I also love gardening, crocheting/knitting, reading books, cooking and taking care of my family and noticing it Is that normal? Is it normal at my age to be thinking so much about death and learning to live for the moment. A very dear and precious one has stage one lung cancer, or had stage one lung cancer. I am not sure. I know she has had surgery, and is not responding well after it and I know that they have talked about chemo. I also know that as tiny and frail this dear one appears she loves her husband with a fierceness that will carry her through. She is tiny in size but her heart and kindness is huge, sometimes that is most important, I have found.
It is so odd to have been told I would die years ago now, what two? three? four? and to have been open about it and to not die. And now another dear precious one dealing with this challenge it just shakes me. I don't know how else to put it. I want to run to her and see her. I want to know that she is okay. I know she is struggling with being in a hospital, and I am anxious to see her, because I do not want to see her smaller. I think we will go to see her in the next day or so. I need to see her. I need for her to remember she will feel better once she gets past this. I want her to feel confident that she can do this. I feel so out of control. In some ways that is good, but in other ways it is disconcerting. I am trying to enjoy the feeling of peace and freedom not having the weight of responsibility wearing down on me. To just be where I need to be. I am still not good about calling or returning calls. I am trying, but I am quiet now.
To be able to walk around the property and find little projects that once completed looks so nice. To have the time to look around. To watch the caterpillars grow fat and crawl off to change our world, to see the clusters of butterflies of all shapes, sizes and colors as they fly up from their old world into the sky. Each day is filled with new butterflies, some familiar, others not noticed before because they probably feed on the weeds I have left this year while I was travelling. It really is magical. I bought two more passion vines, lavender lady, one of my very favorites. A smaller variety with lovely purple flowers, more red then blue, fine petals leaning backwards. Beautiful in a small area or a pot. I also bought on the two for one sale a Purple Passion passion vine. I think I have also had this one, but I will have to wait until it blooms to see which one it is. I love passion vines. When I lived on Pine Island I had 20 different varieties in the yard. I had curtains of passion vines, sometimes vines intermingling so that when they bloomed it was beautiful. Hanging across between Australian pines intermixed with bougainvillea. It was pretty breath taking a couple of times a year. I was happy then too. So I am happy to have passion vines again for this new garden.
I think we are going out in the boat tomorrow, weather permitting, hopefully the next day I can finish turning over the garden, seeing if there are any more potatoes hidden there and putting in the first of the fall plantings. woo hoo. Saturday is Bug's birthday. I got nothing. I need to run out to the store and pick up a few things, but so far the time has not come up. it will have to tomorrow or Friday. If we stay home I am thinking of mahi and then running by the new seafood market look into shrimp and what else looks wonderful. I can at least make him a wonderful dinner. maybe.
Sending good wishes and lots of love to my precious one in TMH. I am thinking of my friends a lot lately. Sending love and good wishes. Give me a call. I have actually been catching some calls today. I am happy here behind the fence, in my yard, in my gardens. with Bug and the dogs, cats, chickens and fish.
All of us intertwining with the plants to make this place that shimmers on a summer afternoon.
Today I finished the woven fence. I put a woven heart on the front and it was so much fun learning how to do all of this. I worked around the yard this morning finishing projects I had started yesterday and enjoyed the coolness in the air. It was fall. I am not saying that it will not continue to be hot and act like summer again. But today, it was amazing. I stepped out the back door and it was cold. Well, anything below 70 is cold to me.
We took a ride on the red Harley and the weather was amazing. We rode past a place we were looking at, but a bid has been put down on it, and the house was bigger then we really want. So there was no decision to make. We rode down to the St. Mark's River and sat and watched the full moon tide start its run out. We have never seen the tide this high, it was pretty cool.
Here is the little woven fence I made around the sacrificial garden. Tomorrow we will take the boat down to Shield's marina and hopefully leave it there. Then Saturday is Bug's birthday.
Life is busy
and happy
and so very full
Life, there is always so much to be done. I can not even imagine a day when there isn't something that should be done. I like that actually. All of my life as a worker bee there was always more things that needed to be done than time. I liked that life. I loved my job. I didn't always like my job, but I always loved it. Being a regulator was never my idea of what I wanted to do while I was growing up. Judging people. I am terrible about that. I didn't want to do that. I preferred that to pest control. I am not a pest control kind of person. I am an agriculture person. I understood the authority given to me by state and federal law and precedent and I never took advantage of it. Instead, my whole career was about being fair. Not having a scape goat. Even, reasonable agreed upon, legally adopted regulations. I could do it. Especially since I was always involved in the education aspect of the job. Especially when I managed the certification program. I really loved my job then. The best year of my entire life was my last year of work for the department. The year that Tamara, the young woman who replaced me did my job and her job. I did as much as my brain was capable of during chemo. I threw up in the garbage can and showed up more then I was helpful. But I could see a change. A young energetic, intelligent woman took the initiative to ask how to do the reports. She was promoted. Other young woman working hard, working very hard and being treated as equals. Judged on their KSAs, not on their sex or color or anything but who was the better person for the job. That is a long way from when I started there. I was only one of the many woman who chipped away at the glass ceiling. I was lucky because I was there as the changes started to happen.
I guess I am reminiscing about what I have been a part of because the woman who made the biggest impact on the women's rights movement when I was a young and impressionable woman were on the morning news. And so I was busy this morning. I made fruit salad and then cheese eggs. The chickens are not laying many eggs, but enough for us to have eggs a couple of times a week. I went outside and worked on small projects. I planted my sacrificial garden. This is a lovely garden next to the main door of the barn right in front of the Brazilian flame vine. I have planted it faithfully every three months or so. It is always beautiful and just as it hits its prime the chickens would come up and scratch it all up. They would strip the leaves of whatever plant I had planted and then they would pull up whatever plant was left. They would scratch up anything green and tear it apart. That garden just brings out the aggressiveness in my wicked chickens. I would give up, they would finish it off and then we would start all over with me planting it again. Each time I put in a heavier arsenal of protection. the last one involved horse fencing and green plastic chicken wire. The plastic chicken wire is nice because it is not strong enough to hold a chicken which usually slows the chickens down. They like to flap up to the top of the fence and then jump down into the sacrificial garden. That way they can look before they leap. Chickens are not stupid. Well, the mower hit the fence and ripped it down, so the chickens took full advantage of the opening. Before I got home from England the chickens wiped out all of my hard work. All the plants I had planted, all the seeds I had planted and had come up wiped out. I never even got to see it. I know it bloomed. I know it was probably beautiful because of the residue of ripped apart plants dried and strew across the container.
So I planted cellousea and chrysanthemums with the two remaining rubeckias and the lemon basil that had some how survived the wicked chicken attack and had come back thick and lovely although deformed. The cellousia has red variegation on the leaves and then magenta flowers. The mums are a rosy pink with a yellow center. Very pretty compact and full of open flowers. I planted the same plants in the garden on the west side of the trailer. That garden that is still coming together it is in a bad spot in that it doesn't get watered. I have to go and take care of it, so when I am gone, it really suffers. So I have replanted it, mulched and watered it in real well. Then I went to the sacrificial garden, added in compost, another bucket of garden soil and the plants, then mulched. I had bought the mums, but I had grown from seeds the celousias. Isabelle had given me a couple of plants a few years ago and I am still enjoying them each September. The perfect end of summer flower, like the despicable Mexican sunflower. The only time this plant is worth anything is this time of year as they bloom. The rest of the time they are leggy, invasive weeds. I had barely mulched and turned around but their was a wicked chicken scratching in that garden. Aaaargh!!!!! So I cleaned some of my bamboo and stuck it in the ground around the sides and front of the sacrificial planter. Then I trimmed the grapes off the chicken coop. I had needed to do it, now I had something to use the vines with . I cut all the excess vines, grapes still hanging sweet and deep purple off the older canes, I used these cut canes to weave a fence around the sacrificial garden. At the top I put a loopy pattern and tomorrow I will finish the bottom and the try to weave a heart into the front of the garden. You can still see the plants and they have yet to start growing. I love mums in the fall. I have to have mums in my gardens in the fall. I love pansies in the winter, veggies in the spring, and impatiens in the summer.
I am reading on face book about how so many of my friends have started decorating for fall. They are decorating their mantels, doors, bathrooms. It sounds lovely. Spiced candles and fall colors, everyone is ready for the change of season. I am not. I love this time of year. The time at the end of summer where the weather wants to change, but hasn't. It acts some days like it is fall, but summer jumps right back in. Today was one of those days As morning dawned the temperatures stalled and may even dropped for a short time as the front first started to move through The blue skies clouded over and silver clouds moving quickly over head. Around 4:00 pm we had a lovely sun shower The sun was shining but the sky was filled with rain as delicate as mist. I stood in the door of the barn and looked out into the yard with the sun shining and the air glimmered with the rain. sigh.
I had never weaved a fence before and it was pretty easy to keep figuring out better ways to weave and before long I had reached a height I thought was adequate so I made a looping pattern on the top. It was easy enough to figure out how to do it and it finished off the top nicely. I was so proud of myself. My brain handled it with little anxiety and enjoyed the stretching of my brain as I figured out each step. I will take a picture tomorrow when I finish the bottom to show you. It is small and simple, but for a first attempt I am proud of my effort.
I enjoyed it so much. I weeded and trimmed and dug and planted and worked in the garden. I wore out the battery on the weed whacker taking down the absolute worst of the grass. Tomorrow I need to cut the old pear tree down and let the sucker that is doing so much better and has more branches and is the healthier become the main tree. I need to get my apples and roses planted and the final garden plan drawn up. So much to do, but I am trying to do each thing one step at a time. And then I just stop during the day, like during the sun shower and just look around me. I realize I am right where I need to be, right where I want to be. Whatever I do today is enough. I loved the weaving, back and forth around the bamboo standing upright. Simple.
I came in and made a dish with rice and chicken, chicken sausage, peppers, onions, mushrooms, garlic and olive oil. Mostly leftovers with a few new surprises thrown together. yum. A simple life with things to do, and things got done. Maybe the same, maybe not always. But I was happy with what I had learned and had accomplished. All of it needed to be done. Yet there is so much more on the to do list. Another day, another day. Bug worked on the boat getting it ready to take to the marina to store. It will be nice to be able to ride one of the Harley's down to take the boat out. It will also be nice to have the carport back. Our lives quietly busy on things that important to each of us............his boat, my garden. happy happy happy.
I love working in the garden and I love using resources grown here on the property. The bamboo, the grape vines, herbs, sweet potatoes, grapes, all kinds of vegetation that manages to survive and be harvested when I am actually here. I love travelling, but I also love gardening, crocheting/knitting, reading books, cooking and taking care of my family and noticing it Is that normal? Is it normal at my age to be thinking so much about death and learning to live for the moment. A very dear and precious one has stage one lung cancer, or had stage one lung cancer. I am not sure. I know she has had surgery, and is not responding well after it and I know that they have talked about chemo. I also know that as tiny and frail this dear one appears she loves her husband with a fierceness that will carry her through. She is tiny in size but her heart and kindness is huge, sometimes that is most important, I have found.
It is so odd to have been told I would die years ago now, what two? three? four? and to have been open about it and to not die. And now another dear precious one dealing with this challenge it just shakes me. I don't know how else to put it. I want to run to her and see her. I want to know that she is okay. I know she is struggling with being in a hospital, and I am anxious to see her, because I do not want to see her smaller. I think we will go to see her in the next day or so. I need to see her. I need for her to remember she will feel better once she gets past this. I want her to feel confident that she can do this. I feel so out of control. In some ways that is good, but in other ways it is disconcerting. I am trying to enjoy the feeling of peace and freedom not having the weight of responsibility wearing down on me. To just be where I need to be. I am still not good about calling or returning calls. I am trying, but I am quiet now.
To be able to walk around the property and find little projects that once completed looks so nice. To have the time to look around. To watch the caterpillars grow fat and crawl off to change our world, to see the clusters of butterflies of all shapes, sizes and colors as they fly up from their old world into the sky. Each day is filled with new butterflies, some familiar, others not noticed before because they probably feed on the weeds I have left this year while I was travelling. It really is magical. I bought two more passion vines, lavender lady, one of my very favorites. A smaller variety with lovely purple flowers, more red then blue, fine petals leaning backwards. Beautiful in a small area or a pot. I also bought on the two for one sale a Purple Passion passion vine. I think I have also had this one, but I will have to wait until it blooms to see which one it is. I love passion vines. When I lived on Pine Island I had 20 different varieties in the yard. I had curtains of passion vines, sometimes vines intermingling so that when they bloomed it was beautiful. Hanging across between Australian pines intermixed with bougainvillea. It was pretty breath taking a couple of times a year. I was happy then too. So I am happy to have passion vines again for this new garden.
I think we are going out in the boat tomorrow, weather permitting, hopefully the next day I can finish turning over the garden, seeing if there are any more potatoes hidden there and putting in the first of the fall plantings. woo hoo. Saturday is Bug's birthday. I got nothing. I need to run out to the store and pick up a few things, but so far the time has not come up. it will have to tomorrow or Friday. If we stay home I am thinking of mahi and then running by the new seafood market look into shrimp and what else looks wonderful. I can at least make him a wonderful dinner. maybe.
Sending good wishes and lots of love to my precious one in TMH. I am thinking of my friends a lot lately. Sending love and good wishes. Give me a call. I have actually been catching some calls today. I am happy here behind the fence, in my yard, in my gardens. with Bug and the dogs, cats, chickens and fish.
All of us intertwining with the plants to make this place that shimmers on a summer afternoon.
Today I finished the woven fence. I put a woven heart on the front and it was so much fun learning how to do all of this. I worked around the yard this morning finishing projects I had started yesterday and enjoyed the coolness in the air. It was fall. I am not saying that it will not continue to be hot and act like summer again. But today, it was amazing. I stepped out the back door and it was cold. Well, anything below 70 is cold to me.
We took a ride on the red Harley and the weather was amazing. We rode past a place we were looking at, but a bid has been put down on it, and the house was bigger then we really want. So there was no decision to make. We rode down to the St. Mark's River and sat and watched the full moon tide start its run out. We have never seen the tide this high, it was pretty cool.
Here is the little woven fence I made around the sacrificial garden. Tomorrow we will take the boat down to Shield's marina and hopefully leave it there. Then Saturday is Bug's birthday.
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| Dutchman's Pipe |
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| Confederate Rose just opened up. It will turn deep rose pink by the afternoon. See the Katydid inside the flower |
Life is busy
and happy
and so very full
I love that little fence~ hope it works.
ReplyDeleteMy vision is so poor I can not ead your blog very well....is there any chance you could change the type to black fronm blue. It would help a lot.
Sending good vibes your way.
Love, Lo