Monday, September 28, 2009

Greetings from Oregon


I found this fine, fine specimen of a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusk on the wall near the hose yesterday. (It looks big in the picture but it was only 5" or so long.)

I am irritated at everyone and everything tonight, except then I read the Wikipedia page on banana slugs and it's full of awesome. Pneumostome? Estivate? Detrivore? Why didn't I go into biology and study slugs?

Oh, and those Green Zebra tomatoes?
Yeah, not so much Green Zebras.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

I don't tweet

Because I'm too lazy to set it up.

But life seems to be best summed up in one-liners lately. Or maybe I'm just lazy again.

Topic one: allergies
My sinuses are making a determined effort to kill me.

Cetirizine works but makes me tired all the time (sleep for 10 hours a night). I suspect that it also has the odd side effect of raising my blood pressure.

Loratadine works, but only at full strength, for a few hours.

At least there's benedryl, for when I can't sleep.

Really tired of sneezing. The BACK OF MY THROAT ITCHES


Topic two: dyeing
Really grooving on this lately. Especially the overdyeing.

Overdyeing also extends the fun, seeing as a) I don't have a yarn sale business, so b) I have way, way too much yarn.

Kraemer Jeannie has a really, really fast strike time. wow. Should have used that for my turquoise-brown mix, instead of the nylon/wool.


Topic three: knitting

Knittingly frustrated. I keep swatching for designs, can't ever get things right.

I really ought to pick up K's sweater, rip it out, and start over.


Topic four: weather
It's 90 degrees here today. Summer++!


Topic four: climate, meteorology, and popular belief
The Autumnal equinox is not the "first day of fall".

For no good reason, it bugs the hell out of me when people say this.

Don't believe me? The summer solstice, until relatively recently, was known as MIDSUMMER. MID. summer. That's because as the day with the longest amount of sunlight at the most direct angle, by all rights it should be the hottest day of the year (except it's not, because the earth takes a while to warm up and so lags behind a bit)

Which ought to be the smack dab middle of the season, not the beginning.

Really? end of December the "beginning" of winter? Where I live winter pretty much sets in by the end of November.

Grumpy old coot.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Remember that domesticity thing?

Kurt helped me can 7 pints of peaches tonight. I am now tiredly listening to the seals pop close. It's really entertaining. Did I mention I was tired?

(I know, 7 pints, not so many. If I was going to all that work, I should have made a bunch more, right? Except I can barely get through that many in one winter. I do pint jars because it takes me a couple weeks to go through one and that's about as long as they last. Also I only bought one box because I am insane and thought I would need more for the cobbler and fresh eating but no, I got through about 5 of 15 GINORMOUS peaches. If I really lose my mind this weekend maybe I'll buy a box of the Hales)

In other news, this is Harley:
Harley is the neighbor's new cat and he is very friendly and also dumb as rocks. He also likes to hang out in our yard. A lot. Frances is not okay with this development. Harley still hasn't picked up on that yet, as he still comes and hangs around until Frances the 3 legged wonder cat chases him out.

Full disclosure:
Well, I didn't get to the curtains. I need to dye the fabric yet because the piece I was thinking about is, I think, just not quite long enough.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Postcards from the garden

I'm really a haphazard gardener. I don't put in enough time or effort to make it look really nice. I use to think I was a plant killer until someone gave me a pothos as a house-warming present and The Plant That Would Not Die is still alive and has a few dozen clones around (the beauty of pothoses (pothii?) are that you are supposed to ignore them. I water mine maybe once a week. It hates more than that, despite that if you cut off a branch and leave it in water it'll grow roots. Go figure). Then I found that peas and mint are pretty much a given, as long as you water them, and the rest, well, if it survives, great. If not, I'm usually not heartbroken.

Anyway. Really I need to get a nice picture of the black and blue sage because it's a knockout, grows and blooms all summer, and a perennial to boot (oh, and dang, they drew HUMMINGBIRDS the other day!). But work is killing off what little brain I have right now and so I'm going to cheat and use pictures from the last few months.

These tomatoes are breaking my heart. They are Green Zebras and I have a whole plant full of heavy huge juicy... unripe tomatoes. They've been unripe for about a month now and I don't hold out much hope for them, now that it's September. They get less and less sun every day. sigh, teach me to plant tomatoes somewhere that doesn't get a full 8 hours of direct sun every day. I could use the excuse it's been a bad tomato year here; despite the heat wave in July it really wasn't that warm a summer. But I'd be eating green zebras now if I had put them in a better place. Maybe.

Baby heartbreaker tomato

Pink tiger flowers. These come up in the backyard every year, no thanks to me. They were here when I got here. Very pretty, though.

New daylily plants I bought bare-root in May (April?) I'm pleased they actually bloomed this year. And because I like red.

Frances says: surely you could find some tuna about your person?