Category: critters

Back Forty, coffee pot posts, Coronavirus Chronicles, critters

Good Friday

Laurie

I did a search for Good Friday on my blog looking for this photo and boy, have I had a lot of “good” Fridays!

I always think of Mama on Good Friday. That was usually the day that she planted her garden, and she had a big one that she planted until she hit her late 80s and began having serious spinal pain. This was taken in 2009, when she was 84. Of course I miss her, and would love nothing more in this world than to be able to talk with her right now. She would be 96. I usually visited her on Easter weekend.

This whole thing has been pretty weird for me in that I haven’t reacted to it the way I would have expected. Instead of freaking out I still feel very numb. It shows in the way that I am not very interested in doing anything that requires much critical thinking. I feel lazy and tired and my allergies are bugging the shit out of me, so I got some Allegra D at the pharmacy drive thru yesterday and I hope that will get me back outside gardening again. Right now all I want to do, and I mean badly, almost irresistibly, is to stay in my bedroom and play games on my Kindle.

On Monday, I am going back to my office (I hear that only a couple of people are ever in the building) and get my office chair, my ergonomic keyboard, and maybe the student files. If we end up having to work from home much longer I’m going to be hurting pretty bad, beyond what ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and heat/ice packs can take care of. I have to start stretching or yoga and get out of the house to exercise and walk.

And I am sick, so sick, of email and videos. I think that I will unsubscribe to every email newsletter that I can.

Also tired of salad already, but I hate to waste my homegrown lettuce from the UNCG garden plot. It looks like it is about to bolt with the up and down temperatures. It was in the mid 80s several times in the last week or so. Today it is 49 degrees at 12:30 p.m. I must have watered my squash seedlings too much. I have the hardest time with over watering. I swore that I would change that this year, but they look so dry to me! However, when I pulled out the sad little dying seedlings I could feel that the soil was probably too moist. The tromboncino squash are the only ones that died, so I still have some redemption time. The tomato, pepper, and calendula seedlings are growing so slowly under the grow light.

Radish, lettuce (new crop), parsley and carrot seeds are coming up on the front steps.

Last night when we went to the pharmacy we also got Greek take-out from Mythos Grill. You order on the phone and they bring it to your car window in the parking lot. Boy, it was good!

Finishing up another scrap yarn washcloth on the rigid heddle loom. I was doing this on the front porch before the pollen storm. Hope to get back out there again.

Diego had his post-surgery check-up on Tuesday. They have definitely ramped up the Co-vid safety procedures since his surgery 17 days ago. Now I read this morning that cats are definitely contracting and getting lung damage from Co-vid 19, so they are doing vaccine trials on them. This actually broke me and made me cry this morning. Anyway, he is allowed to eat dry food again, which the vet hopes will break loose those remaining stitches. If not, next week she will put him under briefly and take the stitches out.

My sister and brother-in-law updated their will and asked me to be executor and take care of their cats if they both die, just as I asked her to do when we made our will. I cannot imagine her cats and my cats getting along, so we all have to survive.

Whew.

Here I thought that I would write about losing the trip to Ireland today but I don’t think I can do that yet. I will try to write about it later this weekend. I think that I will have a processing day today, since I am not working. I really want to make some collages and books, and yes, make masks, but I am stuck.

I hope that all is well with my readers out there. I’m sorry if I am not commenting on blogs right now. I can’t seem to do much of that these days, but I do believe that things will get better.

Back Forty, Coronavirus Chronicles, critters, Upcycling, weaving

Mindless weaving

Laurie

This morning I got up at the usual time to feed the cats. They are insufferable now that they are getting canned food. Odd, because they would not touch it for a very long time. I guess it is a texture thing, because Pablocito turns his nose up at the formerly loved dry food that I have ground up with a blender in case Diego decides that is what he wants.

Then I went back to bed, slept hard, and when I awoke I was shocked to see that it was afternoon. I guess I needed it.

I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies or videos – I don’t know why. It just doesn’t appeal to me after an hour at most. Reading books is much more my thing. It’s been that way since I was a child. I don’t remember ever not being able to read – according to my family I shocked them as a toddler when I picked up a newspaper and started reading out loud to them. When the library bookmobile came to my little community every two weeks, the librarians had a hard time stocking enough books for me that I had not read. I would finish my stack within a week. So I read the World Book encyclopedia and the classics we had at home over and over again. I especially loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. My mother easily got me to whitewash our fence by referencing Tom Sawyer.

You’d think that I’d be smarter, but I guess I burned out a lot of those brain cells from age 15 to 40, when I was self-medicating for anxiety and depression.

Anyway, I need something to do with my hands while watching TV and I haven’t been feeling the love for what I normally do, which was stitch or crochet. Last night I suddenly realized what I could do with all these cotton warps that are going to go to waste when I cut my abandoned project off the loom. I set my “new” rigid heddle loom on a table in front of the TV that I had warped for a Saori style workshop and started weaving washcloths and dishcloths.

I got through two episodes of “Better Call Saul!” My favorite show.

Sandy keeps recommending shows to me, but he really loves horror and war movies. I can’t go there, too prone to nightmares. I guess I will finish “Star Trek: Picard,” then subscribe to HBO again so I can watch Westworld’s new season.

We are enjoying front porch sitting and listening to the family next door with their five year old son. He is so smart and so cute. They play charades on their porch every evening.

Tromboncino squash seeds started coming up today.

Squirrels were digging in my planters on the wall next to the steps so I stuck plastic forks and jagged pieces of plastic that I cut from a sour cream container. I don’t mind sharing some with the critters, but there aren’t any nuts buried there, gang.

Diego is doing okay. He follows me from room to room. Anyone who thinks all cats are aloof never met my spoiled kitties. I had laid off the pain injections but I might give him one when he is asleep.

collage, Coronavirus Chronicles, critters

Week one working from home – check

Laurie

Although, honestly, I am surprised that it is Thursday. Feels like Tuesday. I guess that is because I haven’t had a lot of work to do. I have cooked a lot more, and Diego had major dental surgery on Tuesday so needs feline nursing care. I’ve done it so much by now with Squirt, Jazz, Theo, Guido, and Lucy that it feels pretty easy.

I decided that doing more than one online workshop at a time is too much for my monkey mind, and I’ve spent most of my time reading and playing games and cat nursing. Not great, but it has kept me from freaking out. Tying the new warp onto the loom a couple of inches at a time is good activity too. I can listen to music or audio but still be able to concentrate just enough to make sure those weaver’s knots will hold under pressure. I chose the workshop that Crystal Neubauer is doing live on Facebook for now, because it is closest to what I’m already doing with collage, and I love her work and her book, The Art of Expressive Collage. Most importantly, she and I share the same kind of art philosophy.

Here is a photo of the 5-minute collage I did in her live workshop yesterday (it might have taken 6 or 7 minutes, shhh). I’m going to try to do a few more tonight. I’ve also been slapping some gesso on junk mail pages so that is the background underneath.

Art journaling. Well. I don’t know. A lot of my favorite pens are dried out so I ordered some more from Jet Pens today. Maybe that will motivate me to write more. I received my PVA glue from Amazon yesterday, so I’m good for a while with that. We have LOTS of other supplies.

Diego is recovering well. I can’t imagine the kind of pain he must have been in, and I regret that I waited as long as I did to get him scheduled for the dental appointment. He had terrible abscesses and rot. Six teeth removed and a bone graft. The surgery took twice as long as expected. It makes me wonder what Pablocito’s mouth is like.

I am giving him opioid pain injections three times a day and he got his final oral medication this morning. Fortunately they were able to give him a long lasting antibiotic injection the day of the surgery. I would have hated to struggle with him to get oral meds down a mouth full of sutures. Luckily he is eating just fine and not throwing it up. I have to get to the store to pick up more canned cat food. They hate the prescription canned cat food I ordered from Chewy. Of course they loved it until I ordered a whole case of it. I have tried to stretch it out by putting it under the sensitive stomach canned food I bought from PetSmart. They love that, and if I can get them going, they will continue to eat the food on the bottom.

Guilford County is on a stay-at-home order from tomorrow at 5 until April 15. It seems like you can go out to do anything that is necessary so it’s not an onerous restriction. We are trying to limit ourselves to our house and yard. I tried out the online shopping and curbside service that volunteers are doing at Deep Root Market on Tuesday. It works pretty well. Any glitches were because I was feeling frantic about Diego that day and couldn’t think straight.

It means that I will be working from home for a very long time. I don’t like it as much as I thought I might. The Internet here is so slow. The laptop is not ergonomic like my office is set up.

It’s been chilly and rainy for the last few days, so no yard work. The weekend forecast is beautiful, so I will get out and plant peas, etc. Some of the hot pepper mix seedlings are coming up under the grow light. I love the surprise of these pepper mixes.

I have a Zoom meeting at 11 so signing off here. New world and all that.

critters, whatever

Looking ahead

Laurie

I haven’t been able to find this critter since I took this photo and I hope that it is literally hanging out in a chrysalis somewhere nearby. I believe this is a Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar.

Next week should be part bliss and part anxiety as Sandy and I are taking the week off. We’ll do a little bit of nearby traveling and other than that it will be an art staycation for me. We plan to go to Elkin, about a hour’s drive west, for the Tapestry Weavers South retreat and exhibition opening of “Point of View” at the Yadkin Valley Fiber Arts Center. We are also going to drive up to southern Virginia for a day to toodle around the Galax/Fancy Gap/Floyd area. At the end of the week the North Carolina Folk Festival will crank up in downtown Greensboro with Booker T. Jones headlining.

So far it looks like Hurricane Dorian will hit Florida instead of the Carolina coast, but as we know so well in the Southeastern US, hurricanes are unpredictable and can turn on a dime, circle back, sit over an area for days, or turn from Cat 1 to Cat 5 or vice versa within a day. Hurricane Hugo did an enormous amount of damage to Charlotte and the NC mountains even though they are a few hours inland. Flooding can be as damaging as wind. The most I would expect here is a lot of rain (knock on wood), which we’ve been getting anyway. It will be a good excuse to stay inside and weave or sew.

Back Forty, coffee pot posts, critters, More gardening, Permaculture

Sunday morning coffee pot post

Laurie

The garden is beginning to rot. So much rain! I weeded out a lot of ageratum and tomato plants that were done late Friday afternoon, and harvested basil for freezing in an ice cube tray yesterday. I found a few little potatoes in the planter. This yield was a bit disappointing but it was free, other than the bags of potting soil and compost I used. I will plant some more in it and see what happens.

So much of life now is a matter of wait and see what happens. I have always been a bit of a control freak, a trait that I have worked very hard to change for the last twenty years. Much of my art has changed as I have let go this and that “rule” or convention. My gardening is unconventional by most standards but controlled when you compare it to enthusiastic permaculturist standards.

Permaculture requires observation and reaction to the space and natural forces working within that space. My approach to the groundhog problem was to plant things that the groundhogs don’t like, such as alliums and smelly plants like peppermint and feverfew around the edges. They didn’t care for the ageratum either. Either it worked pretty well or somebody else took care of the problem. We’ve always had rabbits, but they don’t do that much damage.

I don’t think the high temperature got above 70 yesterday. That was how far the temps plunged with this last line of storms. It is still cool today so I am going to my UNCG garden plots and clean out the rest of the one that I am giving up. I will take some newspapers and a bag of good soil/compost to get the plot where I pulled out the cucumbers ready for fall planting. I hope that there will be some butterbeans ready to pick.

It doesn’t need to be said that everyone who is paying attention to the news is horrified right now. I haven’t taken a complete news break but I have avoided the hole. It helps to remember what I can and cannot control.

It is SO NICE to turn off the AC and hang out on the front porch with the cats again. I think that I will do that for a while first while I finish my coffee pot.

Why is my cat eating cobwebs? Seriously. I guess I will need to clean out here a bit too before Mr. Brilliant gets a spider bite in his mouth.