philly

We’ve been traveling, and it took me a bit to recover before I got to posting.

We had two main purposes of our trip:

1. to collect the boys back from their dad while we visit family in Connecticut and

2. to collect the last of our belongings in storage back in Massachusetts. We moved to Virginia six years ago. The time had come.

But the first stop for Honey, Toots and me was Philadelphia, PA. I had been emailing with a couple that are college friends of mine from the late 80s. I hadn’t seen them since then. They offered, why don’t we meet you as you pass by? Initial thought was that we don’t usually go north by way of Philly, we usually go an easterly route, but as we were aiming for Western Mass, why not? They have a couple of boys closer to Toots’s age than to my boys. Besides, why not show Toots the Liberty Bell? I think I saw it when I was about six years old and maybe again when I was looking at colleges.  Boy, has that part of Philly changed since I can recall!

So enjoy some pics of our minute wanderings from Chinatown to the Historic District. These are all cellphone shots. I have yet to go through what I got with the other camera.

 

It was nice to have a break on the road, eat some good food, see some old friends and meet their kids. Their boy #2 was very sweet and protective of of Toots. Both boys were loads of fun.

And then we got back on the road, more pics to come.

 

little beauties

Apologies for pause in posting while I’ve been writing and summering.

Today is brutally hot here in Virginia again. I guess I’ll grow accustomed to the oppressive heat eventually. I maintain, I’d rather be housebound due to a proper snowstorm than due to heat. The sunshine is such a tease.

Wandering the yard with the hose, I ran into a lovely little blue tailed lizard.

He was too fast for me to capture a picture. If you click on this one, you will learn a bit about him from the source website of this pic. He was so skinkin’ cute! (I had to)

The following are my own pictures of little beauties I grew:

I want to eat this morning glory, it is so delicate and beautiful.

Slowly, a vining begins to establish itself.

I have been trying to grow this Japanese maple for years. My father gave me a sapling from my childhood home in Connecticut.

Can’t remember the name of this decorative grass flowering thing. A friend had too much in her yard and shared about four or five of them with me.

Crepe Myrtles are busting out everywhere here. They smell like cinnamon Necco Wafers. I have some saplings of purple from the same friend who gave me the grasses above, I can’t wait until they bloom. In the meantime, the whites of my established trees are really gorgeous, too.

Thanks for stopping by in my little corner of the world.

dolphin moment

Yesterday morning I awoke and realized I had a day to just relax with Honey and Toots. This is a rare gift, and I decided to accept it.

Then Toots decided she would not pee for well over twelve hours since the night before, which was great that she stayed dry through the night, but by 11am, we stuck her on the toilet and she screamed and cried, and described why she didn’t want to pee til I suspected a UTI, and we piled in the van and headed to the Urgent Care place, because you know these things never happen when the regular pediatrician is open…

As we approached our destination, she declared she now needed to pee – she is going to hate me for this post later, right? – so I ran her in to pee in a cup while Honey checked us in and as she peed like Niagara Falls, she said she felt fine, and I declared false alarm, now let’s go to the beach, thankfully without paying the copay.

I never leave the house without a drink, even in the dead of winter, but I did yesterday, with a heat index of 113F. I left the house with only a swimsuit in a bag for Toots. Honey and I were fully dressed in tshirts and shorts, no swimwear. We thought we would just stay for a bit, let Toots dunk and play at the local river beach, then go get snow cones. A pleasant enough hour or so jaunt on a Sunday afternoon.

But then we met a young family and Toots helped them with their ditch pool at the water’s edge, and the girls became friends, and I got talking education with them and the mother was even chattier than I am. They had just moved here a week ago. They homeschooled  where they last lived, and I know a few homeschoolers, so I said I’d put them in touch, etc.

So as I started to feel brainfried and sick to my stomach from the heat and like I would pass out, I started splashing water on my neck and back, because I couldn’t cool off enough just standing in the bath warm water. I declared, let’s get going.

Then the other mom said, “Look! Dolphins!”

So we stayed. I couldn’t get a shot of the them as their fins and backs crested out of the water with my slow cell cam, but we saw about three pods pass us by, very close to the shore and docks. They seemed to be checking out the fun all those legged creatures were having on shore and in the water.

Of course, after that we stayed much longer than our intent, and Honey got his shorts and belt wet hovering for Toots in the water….and we were all completely brain fried…

But you know what? If we hadn’t risked the heat, we never would have seen those beautiful creatures, so playful, so like us, yet unlike us, so alien and familiar, so close to us.

How precious is this earth and all of its creatures.

fledglingly

It’s hot out. That’s right, I am mentioning it again. I went outside to water this morning and accidentally sprayed this fledgling out of the camellias.

Are you looking at me?

ARE YOU LOOKIN AT ME?!

I tried to help him over the fence, he wouldn’t let me near enough to do so.

~~~~

One balcony garden I had at a condo in Massachussetts days of old, I grew a ton of morning glories. When I moved to a new one without a balcony, they began to die, so I gave them to my mother in Connecticut, and they still grow up the corner of the house at my parents’ patio.

I have tried to grow them here in Virginia every year….the voles always eat the roots, or the sun fries them in the droughts. I finally got one to take this year in a pot on the fence. I hope she lasts, because she is gorgeous.

Look at me, please…

I planted my gardens late this year. Here are my first tomatoes saying

Peekaboo!

Speaking of fledglings, look how this one stays cool in the heat.

breaking the block, life and stuff

It took a while, more like a month, possibly more, before I could really engage with the manuscript. On Tuesday, at my writing group, I seem to have finally broken through the block.

It took until then before I could even read it without going crosseyed and my brain shutting down in the first paragraphs. I’m not sure if a channel remains that puts the rainbow stripes up and that tone at a certain hour of the night, when programming ends. I am not sure if any of you remember awakening on the sofa to that sound that happened after a rendition of the national anthem and a stock photo of the flag flying, but that is what happened every time I opened my manuscript until Tuesday. Minus the flag and anthem.

In the mean time, I have been trying to stop staring at the computer so much and engage more with Toots and when the heat wasn’t thoroughly oppressive (index of 113F one day last week, and near that for about two weeks) walking the dog, since Captain Comic isn’t here to do so.

I had a moment when Toots seemed more discouraged that I could rotate my hoop so easily, and rethought buying one in my size with the idea I could teach her to hula by example. She hasn’t gotten the hang of it, yet, but I will keep trying with her.

I am off to the library today to edit some more, going to try to treat my writing more like a job, and get myself out of the house and someplace I can focus on it with minimal distractions. When I try to work on it at home, I can find anything to do instead far too easily – because things need doing.

I hope you had a happy Fourth of July, if you’re American. I am pretty happy to live here, even if there is a lot that I would like to change. Both sides of my family have been here since colonial days and longer, and though I have strains of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon folks of old running in my veins, I don’t think you can get anymore of a place than my family roots in this land.

a little more

Rock Hall, MD

yowza

Yesterday was hot.

It reached 113F heat index. There was no relief, only a hint of relief with central air conditioning.

I lay around most of the day. I couldn’t take Toots outside. I went outside to check the gardens and was sick to my stomach within ten minutes, in the morning, well before it reached above.

The air was still. Deathly still and hotter than I’ve ever felt. I didn’t walk the dog. I didn’t take Toots to the pool.

Around five o’clock, I thought I might be able to pick up a new hose down the street, our old hose in back had busted a small leak, rendering it unusable, we tried to fix, but failed. I knew as soon as the temperature came down, I would need to water the gardens a ton.

Toots decided to come with me. It was still extraordinarily hot. I feared roasted four year old on the store parking lot. Of course, she had decided to wear long pants yesterday. I told her she would be too hot, and she proceeded to pull them up above her knees. They didn’t stay. She walked funny holding her pants up. Skinniest, smallest Summo wrestler I’ve ever seen.

We went, we roasted. I panted, I bought cole slaw fixings along with the hose. then I got hungry and bought more groceries. I fear I really just didn’t want to go back out there, in that deadly heat.

Honey and I said we’d go to bed early last night, we’ve gotten into a bad habit of staying up too late. We didn’t make it, we both fell asleep on the sofa after Toots’s bedtime. We went up about 11:30 or so. Fell asleep nearly immediately.

Then a train hit the house and woke us – a rainless wind storm.

Then flashes of light, was it a police car? No thunder. Then the thunder. Then the hail then the rain…it was intense. Mostly the wind was intense. I made honey go out in the hundred mile an hour winds to collect the garden tools I had leaning on the front of the house before they broke someone’s windows. We turned on the news, we checked Weather Underground on the tablet, we were on the leading edge of the storm cell on the maps. We posted our shock on facebook, because surely, we no longer slept while the house was buffeted and the dog and cat took up trembling residence between us on the bed. I feared the huge pine outside our bedroom window and thanked everything I could think of for no tree outside Toots’s window.

Small blessing after we awoke to this scene: I don’t have to water the gardens. Not yet anyway.

big things

I make attempts to get to work on the 4th draft of my manuscript, but life is full.

Kitchen renovation is complete after spending about a month washing dishes in the utility sink in the garage, where I usually wash the dog…

I sent the boys off to their summer visit to their father, and am feeling a bit at sea without them here.

Honey and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by driving them to the midcoast meeting place, and because Toots decided she would rather stay home with Grandma, Honey and I suddenly found ourselves alone in the van, childless and so we made a spontaneous trip, guided weirdly by GPS. Trying for Delaware beaches, we landed on the Maryland section of the Eastern Shore’s western river inlets along the Cheasapeake Bay Watershed. We landed in a little town called Rock Hall and stumbled upon a restaurant which led us to a B&B. Turned out to be a pretty laid back artsy boating community. We had a nice little escape.

So now I bombard you with too many and varied pics, such is my jam-packed life, locations: our kitchen over the course of a month from destruction to construction, Wilmington, DE and Rock Hall, MD, last weekend:

waiting

Waiting is hard.

Captain Comic waits his turn while Mr. Cynic gets his hair cut.

Waiting is especially hard when you have Asperger’s Syndrome. It is a world of now. We’re working on it. He gets a wristband to ‘cut’ ride lines when we go to Busch Gardens. We went last weekend, and I managed to keep him in lines and not use it. But it was a comfort to him to know it was there and he could if he wanted to.

 

We’ve been waiting for our kitchen renovation to be over. It almost is.

As of Saturday, I will be waiting a month for the boys to come home from their summer visit to their father’s.

I am still waiting to write one last draft of my manuscript. Will try to cover that while the boys are away. Kill some of the waiting time with creativity.

 

begonias

This is the first time I have tried to grow begonias.

I had heard legends of how temperamental and sensitive they are to grow. How they must be coaxed to grow, coddled, and reverenced to bloom.

Begonia growers I have known are selfish beasts who wish to keep this kind of beauty all to themselves, apparently.

There are begonias blooming under my begonias. I water them when I remember to do so, haphazardly.

 

 

They are as showy and layered as peonies and roses, but not nearly so delicate. Their petals are tough and waxy, solid, stolid, even.

They are Stevie Nicks, Imogen Heap.

No they are the Joan Jett of phanerogams. They are gorgeous, would ride a Harley, wear no perfume.

Begonias. Ah!