A wet month

Among the many things I have not been blogging is how much rain we are getting, in part because this seems like bragging.  I realize that many of our local crops require a very rigid sun/water/ temperature routine (on the other hands the catch-as-catch-can farmers market sellers have stalls overflowing) so all this rain is not a good thing in that way.  After the fires the first year we had this house & every couple years after that pretty much up until the year before last I have vowed not to complain about the rain.

But.

But the pressure in my head has been killing me.  My allergies are on wild monkey at the wheel overdrive & my ear are popping like that monkey is sitting on my brain flicking a clog/pop switch at random. 

Speaking of monkeys, we have had so much rain that we seems to be looking at an early banana crop.  We had some verrrrrry cold days last winter & I did not have my hopes up for bananas at all, but those distinctive purple petals showed up on the walkway last week so I looked up.  Sure enough, two purple blooms are emerging.  I have been reliably told that the variety we have is "lady fingers" which have a very distinctive (wonderful!) flavor & do not ship well at all so they are a strictly local pleasure.  & by local I mean my own house & maybe a few friends & neighbors.

In a not entirely unrelated note:  we have been doing a lot of gardening this year & I plan to di up some of the young banana plants that are encroaching on other parts of the yard.  If anyone (locals only again, sorry) is interested let me know.

52 Photos Project: Clouds

This is the last one, the last 52 Photos Project topic is Clouds.  Earlier this week it was very rainy, so a picture of clouds was a piece of cake.  Just what I needed, something simple that I could do from home.

I waited for a break in the rain & here it is, the view from our back yard:

It rains

Let's blog about spring

Spring is really more of a moment here than a season.  Okay a series of non-consecutive moments.  I live in north Florida, not the panhandle.  We are equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean & the Gulf of Mexico & while we cannot see either of them, we still enjoy a temperate climate.  A shocking number of people here think the weather is extreme, but once I listen to them a bit more it turns out they are not insane, they have just mostly never lived anywhere else.  Or they have been here for a really long time & other weather has lost its bite.

I am not saying it is always lovely & never dramatic, just that while 30F is chilly, especially if you don't own a heavy coat because why spend the money on a coat you might wear less than seven times a year (seven is my go to number- if I won't do it for a week a year, it is hard to plan for allocate funds, etc.)...  So yes, it IS cold, made colder by choice but that doesn't make it not cold.  & while the thermometers might have the a bit of overlap, 30s F here is NOT the same as 30s F in a place where the snow drifts so high you can only see the street from a second story window. 

Sure you could say that summer's here are harder than in colder places.  But they are not.  I have spent some miserable drought-amplified summers here.  I would still rather be here.  The Midwest summer are baking & they have not built to deal with it (yes, I mean air conditioning, but I also mean houses to catch the breeze, with interior windows so it can move right through).  I have spent many summers in CT, NJ & TX for the summer; it is generally more comfortable here.

But I miss Spring.  Every seasonal misfire everywhere else (cherry blossoms that bloom early & get caught by a freeze) is the norm here.  Every year Spring starts & stops & starts & stops & starts & then it's Summer.  & I like Summer just fine.  Still it would be nice to have a gathered Spring.  Instead I have learned to look for the redbud tree, the return of the birds, the Chickasaw plum tree.

& brightest of all, the indian azaleas. 

Spring is not so much a season, but a series of bursts between winter & summer.  Even with all that color (winter being mostly a drab green & summer being a vibrant green) it can be easy to miss.

Moonrise: JAN 17, 2014

Frost burn

52 Photos Project: Something Really Small

This week has been another month-long week here.  We have had weather (yes, I know everyone has weather) that required special prep & then, when it passed, special breakdown.  Not really adding to my pile, but certainly adding to our uh-oh levels, our next door neighbor was taken to the hospital on Monday.  She was moved out of ICU yesterday & I was able to visit, but she probably won't be home for a few days. 

Back to the weather.  I know two days with overnights below freezing (& at least a few daylight hours above) are not big deal to most people.  Here it is quite the headache, mostly because this kind of weather is so rare, there is no real long-term planning for it.  Let me give you a for instance:  three years ago we had a week of after dark freezes.  A friend of mine was living in a traditional cracker house.  Yes, there is such a thing & one of the primary characteristics is they have an empty gap between the round & the floorboards. which means no slab & more germane to this story no insulated plumbing.  this means turning off the water at the pump & draining the pipes before they freeze & not turning anything back on until the temperatures rise again.  V** has learned to live with the ice cold shows (no water in the water heater means no hot water), but in 2012 the thaws occurred after she had left for work, which didn't really matter as she would have had to drive home early to turn it drain the system & all off again before that night's freeze.  Not just no hot showers, but no showers period.  Also, no washing your hands, no flushing the toilet....you get the picture?  She too quite a few showers here & ate out a lot that winter.

I know it is popular to think people who live like this are too poor to live any other way & many of them are.  In V**'s case she is a legal secretary & not without options.  That same up off the ground characteristic meant she never had to deal with termites (the plague of wooden houses here), she had fewer concerns during flash floods (even just a few inches of standing water can destroy your house, but not hers) & her a/c bill was a fraction of anyone else's.  In short most years her house was better than ours, but not when it gets colder-than-average.

Enough about that, right?  We do not live in a traditional cracker house but our water pump is still exposed, as is some of the house plumbing & all the livestock tanks.  During a hard freeze, the challenge is to keep the pump running enough that it doesn't freeze up, ditto the floats in the stock tanks & generally make sure water continues to move more or less all night long.  We do this with a series of orchestrated drips at the outer reaches of each water line.  This is the biggest outside tank & the something really small that meant it continued to function.

52 Photos Project: Light & Dark

I have spent a little too much time lately loafing.  Mostly it is because of dogs: worry about dogs, round-the-clock care of dogs, disrupted sleep because of dogs.  Don't worry, though, this is not another post about dogs.

When I am loafing, looking up at the ceiling, this is what I see .  I see it A LOT.  The reflection off the pool, through the French doors, of the rain during a sun shower.  When I see it, it is in motion & accompanied by a soothing rhythm that no white noise machine can duplicate. 

The show is presence & absence, sound & silence, light & dark. 

& then there were 18

Yesterday, during a MONSOON, we relocated our remaining 18 chickens to W*****'s henhouse next door.  For those who have not had the misfortune to speak to me directly in the past week, we have gone from 27 to 18 hens; something small & vicious has been getting into the henhouse. 

First, I thought the count seemed "light", but as the ladies had not been out (our henhouse is plenty large enough for them to never leave it & be quite healthy, I swear) I figured someone was behind something or I missed someone...  Then I realized I could only find one Lakenvelder; there should have been two.  I thought maybe one of them had not come back in from the previous day's outing & I had somehow miscounted, counting one twice.  Then I couldn't find Teensie the one&only Sumatran & I knew there was a problem.

I went through that henhouse as best I could.  Any opening I found larger than my fist (& I have rather small hands) I stitched up, or rather darned, using a lighter gauge wire.   Friday morning, there were 2 dead birds still in the henhouse.  That afternoon, A came home from being in CA most of the week.  He dug around the exterior, found an opening behind & below the feeders at the back where the wooden wall had rotted away.  The next morning, there was no doubt something had tried to dig in at that point.  Whatever it was, it had managed to get in somewhere else: two more dead hens.

Saturday we took everything out & examined the four exterior walls from the inside.  We added a layer of chicken wire over the existing layer of wire on the two side walls.  We added extra wire in the corners at the roof line.  Sunday morning: another dead bird & that made nine gone.  Another bird had most of her neck feathers ripped out, but looks to be otherwise healthy.

Our best theory is that whatever it is is small enough to fit in the channel of the corrugated roof.  We packed up the live birds (we used the dead one to bait a live trap) & brought them next door, where they are all a bit cramped, but at least they survived the night.  Nothing came for the dead bird, but Tropical Storm Debby was grinding herself for hours right on top of us most of the night.  The rain was so loud, we had trouble having a conversation in any room with many windows, forget the room with a skylight.  We could not even hear the tv, sitting less then 6 feet away in a room with surround sound. 

Soooo, we don't know was the dead bird not temptation enough?  Did whatever it is just not try because of the weather? Did it maybe (hopefully) drown where ever it was holed up?  We plan to leave the trap baited another night & check back again tomorrow.  No mater what the result, the birds are at W*****'s until Thursday or maybe even the weekend, because of course A is leaving town again tomorrow.

Smoke

When life gives you cowpies

I do not know what was up with Punxsutawney Phil, but six more weeks of winter starting two weeks ago would have made this the second week of winter.  That's a round-a-bout way of saying we had not had winter.  There was a hard freeze & then right back into the 80s day in, day out.

This is also the first winter I have had my greenhouse, all set up & ready to start seeds early, grow really long season tomatoes....& it is usually well over 100F in that space for at least part of the day.  Even after winter arrived, this past weekend just like Phil predicted (the groundhog was RIGHT!), the greenhouse could get too toasty unless the door was open.  All it takes is sun.

Finally this is the first winter we have had our very own cow.  Most cows are not happy in the heat but ours seems to be different.  When we burned the big pile of fallen branches etc she was very interested.  During the night, it looked to me like she was standing in the coals, but I knew that was ridiculous.  Then the next morning I found cow pies steaming over the last embers.  Multiple piles. She is a Dexter, an irish cow, so we are thinking she was making her own peat.

So what would you do?  Overheated greenhouse, empty heavy duty paper bags (there is some debate as to whether or not they constitute household recycling, lazy ass garbage pick-up bastards) & lots & lots of cowpies. 

You guessed it, we are bagging our own fertilizer & cooking it ourselves.  So far things go nicely thanks.  Also now that the cold has come, those full bags sure help retain the heat overnight.

On another note, a friend of mine used to have a t-shirt of an obviously homeless man sitting on a flattened cardboard box on a city sidewalk, with his pack next to him & a lap full of lemons.  The back said: unless life also gives you water, sugar, a pitcher to put it all in & something to mix it with, you are still f*cked.

Saturday it rained

Saturday it rained:

It rained, I was drenched, we lost power & the sun came out.

It rained again, the sun came out, I loaded old boards into the truck bed until they were level with the sides.

Then it rained again, the new cow arrived, the sun came out.

It rained, the cow-delivering-family left, I was drenched again, the sun came out.

It rained,  C**** arrived to work on the milking stand & the sun came out.

It rained, A & C**** kept working, C****'s phone died, the sun came out.

We made C**** do other not-cow milking-stand related things, A left to go see what the deal was with our power, it rained again.

We moved the milking stand to the pasture, C**** rode sitting on the milking stand sitting on the pile of old boards.

A & C**** unloaded it, A took the truck to the dump, me & C**** got the cow in & she got milked.

Over night it rained again.  On Sunday morning, there were waves in the sand, but the water was all gone.  On Sunday afternoon, the grass seemed to grow before our eyes.  Monday morning, I ran the sprinklers for 30 minutes, it was already that dry. 

Spring sprung plum

I know it is hard to imagine while the snow is still piled up, but here spring has come early.  The groundhog was right.

Cold morning, warm feet

It was 52F in my house when I woke up a couple Friday's ago morning.  It was so cold outside (I think 27F is cold) that our heater had not been able to keep up.  I turned the heater off as it was blowing not-warm-enough air anyhow & am waiting for the sun to get that far & warm up the works.  Since I turned it off it got to 54F, which began to worry me.  & if you guessed the heat pump was dead, you would be almost right.  The good news is I have HVAC husbands & handyman boyfriends on almost-speed-dial (not my husband...or boyfriend, that guy tiptoed out after pushing little dogs under the covers to keep me warm) & later that same day I had a guy out dealing with it & around 10pm he came back a replaced the dead part. 

Anyone who cares to know (& I would certainly understand if you did not) knows that Fladidah has been having some cold, cold, cold weather.  It snowed here Christmas day, just flurries but still not the norm for 29degrees North.  This is roughly where Houston, Texas lies & just a shave north of Delhi, India.  Snow is hardly the norm.

But we are transplants here, directly from Houston but before that New England.  & before I was a quilter, I was a knitter.  & before handknit socks were all the rage, I knit them...out of worsted.

The short version is A cannot sleep if his feet are cold.  I know, weird right?  & he used to attend an annual conference in ski country, which was fine (he likes to ski & rarely gets the chance living in the USsouth with a non-skiing wife).  But at night, his feet were cold & the hotel had that weird discomfort=character thing that keeps me from traveling with him.

& so I made these, garden variety top-down socks, on US7 needles with the standard K1P1 rib.  I find it is easier to see the heel I am turning if it is in a different color, ditto the toe I am decreasing & just to make it look finished, I began with the first ?4? rows in that same contrasting color.

I know, I know it is hard to see the individual stitches.  This is not because the pictures are blurry so much as the socks have felted a bit over the last 18+ years.  Yes, you read that right, these socks were knit sometime before between 1991 & 1994.  It is true they get worn maybe three or four weeks a year & that's it, but for those weeks he might wear them almost every other day & that is plenty of washes & they have held up just fine. 

& that's it, that's all I've got.

Fall color in the land of flowers

As I think I recently mentioned, I was in CT & am now I am back home, but I was there right around the peak of New England fall color.  & it was impressive.  What was -too me- even more impressive is I left here at the height of summer & came back home to autumn.  Yes, Fladidah has an autumn.

Some of you have probably heard the seasons here are subtle (I used to hear that all the time).  They aren't.  They are all quite sudden & could not be more clearly defined if the squirrels all jumped up & down shouting Hey you, welcome to the Equinox.  What they are is short, sometimes only a week or two, or very long (our fist summer here lasted almost ten months). Also, they don't seem to relate to each other the way seasons do in other climates.  Fall, for example, it is not always followed by winter.  Sometimes we have summer, then fall,  then summer again, then maybe straight to winter.  & other times it's once around once more.

I do understand how this could be confusing.  also it gives rise to that horrible old trout:  Don't like the Florida weather, wait a minute it will change.  For the record, they also said this to us in Houston about Houston, in Joisey, about Joisey & in London about London.  That's things about what they say, it's the same all over.

Still, I thought I would take a moment & show you what passes for Fall Color around here.  Once the sun stops scorching & the rain stops pounding (for 20 minutes a day) the local flora have the chance to really open up & well...have sex.  & this is what we get, color-wise.

Just to keep things apples2apples, I made NO alterations to any of these photos, no sharpening the outlines, no fudging the background, nothing.  This is how they came off the camera.  Now, tell me again about that sugar maple in your front yard.

Welcome to hurricane season

Atlantic hurricane season begins today & I am delighted to report it has been raining plenty already.  For days.  Every afternoon or so, a gully washer clears away the dust & grime & more things bloom after each deluge.  Among those blooming things, one of my favorites, the rain lilies.

I grow Zephyranthes despite the fact they are poisonous to poultry, despite the reality they. like day lilies, rarely offer a flower that lasts two days.  The rest of the year, they are at best small clumps of narrow leaves that barely fill a border.

In years of drought, though, they are the first proof that there was enough rain, that there will be more rain, that another rainy season is at hand.

They seemed an appropriate way to open Hurricane Season- they are also called zephyr lilies.

Full flower moon

It will surprise no regular reader of this blog that I am a big big fan of the the Old Farmer's Almanac.  I like the planting schedules for vegetables I do not plant, I like the stories about flowers that will not grow in this climate, I like the tide charts & the folklore & of course, I like the names of things.  Tonight, for everyone who lives an almanac-free life, is a full moon.  & because it is the full moon in May, it is the Full Flower Moon.

The name "flower moon" is a translation of the Native American name to English.  The English would have called this the Milk Moon.  Many other cultures have names for the moons, but we don't.  Our months are centered on paydays, week-ends, that sort of the thing.  The moon is not so obviously important as it has been.

This year, the Full Flower Moon is the last full moon before the summer solstice.  June's full moon (the Strawberry Moon) occurs just after, so it will still be the shortest full moon of the year, but this Full Flower Moon will also be brief.  Here there will be less than 11 hours of darkness & that darkness will hardly be dark.

We live on a street with no streetlights (we live on a street with no street, if you want to be precise) so I need to watch for full moons carefully.  These are the nights the dogs will be able to see clearly all the nighttime prowlers, if I do not remember to close the curtains.  Given the options, dog will stay awake all night barking at possum & raccoons & rabbits; a picture window in a country house is a dog's big screen television.

This full moon, when I am woken by the dogs, I will be able to look out & see the white confederate jasmine, in full bloom for several weeks now.  The small white flowers will look like stars trapped on the vine, more clearly visible than the stars in the sky.  If I left the house & walked out to the horses, larger white, still star-shaped flowers would warn me to keep away:  the tread-softly is abundant this year thanks to the late freeze & the timely rain.  Finally, if I wanted to put on real clothes & walk across the former farm to the west, I could see the large white platters of the native morning glory, aptly named Moon Flower.

Let there be water

The worst of the cold is long gone, but I have been so distracted (by horse with EPM, by my own meshugas) that until this past weekend that I have done almost nothing of the many, many return-of-the-sun chores that need to be done on 2+ acres of Florida pastureland.

I have not pile busted.  This is when I take an arrangements of chains & boards & drag it behind the truck all around the pasture to break up the horse piles before they bake like cakes in the sun.  Ideally this should be done well after or right before a good rain so I don't also churn up the grass as well.  On the other hand, I have removed one bag of, well, one bag full for the G*******s garden.  I could easily supply 15-20 more family gardens.

I have not thinned the amaryllis.  Back in the days before we lived here, before the backroom was added to what was then a quaint block house, someone planted amaryllis at the back door. My guess is they were tipped out of a left over easter basket because these are not the kind of amaryllis any normal person would plant, if normal people were planting amaryllis.  Sometime later the slab for the backroom was poured, creating a corner roughly two feet to the north of where the backdoor had been.  Every spring a few bulbs seem to creep out from under the slab & push themselves up to the sun & we have the most flamboyant amaryllis Publix has to offer blooming in a space between two walls of the house & the air compressor.  For those of you suggesting I thin the amaryllis after they bloom well, then they are hard to find.  Also, they don't exactly have handles & I need something to pull them out from under the slab.  Yes, they are really truly under the slab.

I have not mowed the back yard.  Immediately out the back doors there is a small pool (I mean spa-without-the-jets small) in a fenced yard that the dogs are slowly turning into a potential site for the filming of Capricorn One: Part Two.  This yard need to be mowed, cleared of dog deposits, weeded, cleared of dog deposits & generally cleared of dog deposits.  Ideally the clearing of the dog deposits happens before they dry out to be chucked up by the mower blades.  This is not an ideal year.

On Saturday, I did get the yard in front of the house mowed.  A threaten to do it (he knows it can aggravate my allergies something horrible & is a good sport about trying to do what he can in the time he has), but I figured I could manage.  & I mostly did, except for the buckets of sand underneath the broader leaved weeds that went into my eyes, my mouth, my hair.  I know rain would only amplify the problem making everything more, but I am still wishing it would.  Then I would have a good reason to wait.

Fat man all in red

Today is the first full day of Spring...& it is 60F & rainy.  Which is just fine with me.  Most of the week & thru yesterday it was bright & warming & we saw a lot of my favorite harbinger of Spring:  a fat man all in red.  No, not him!  Does it help if I tell you he hangs out where it is all pink?  No, it is not gay pride week (I think that is in April, actually.  Maybe it will time nicely with the mayoral run-off.  Or is Gay Pride Week in August?  Those A months always scramble me).

I am talking about this guy here.  He always means spring to me.

Scholastica

At one point I said there was no Patron Saint of Weather. I take it back & give you Scholastica. OKay, I did not exactly say there were none. & I did talk about Swithun, who if not patron of weather is certainly associated with weather. & technically Scholastica is invoked against storms & rain (& convulsive children & nuns) not ALL weather. So maybe I will stick with the original declaration I never really made: there is no patron saint of weather. That clears that up.

Scholastica was the twin sister of another saint: Benedict, the founder of the primary sect in monasticism better known as the Benedictines. He is colorful too (reading minds, driving out demons, etc.). But today is not his feast day it is hers, so lets give it to her.

By all accounts I could find, Scholastica was leaning towards a spiritual life while still very young & it was she who lead her later more widely known brother into that same life. She lived more or less in seclusion with a group of women she oversaw on behalf of her brother (hence patroness of nuns, although why that would not go to an outright leader I could not say).

Taking a longer look at the whole storms & rains thing, the story is that she & her brother could only visit each other once a year (some rule of the house; I don't get it either). She was not permitted in his monastery because of her lady-parts & he would not spend the night outside of his monastery because...just because. So they met at her place or some undisclosed mutually convenient location. On a particular visit, Benedict was preparing to leave when a downpour came out of nowhere, delaying his departure until the next day. Scholastica explained this storm was her prayers being answered, so that they could be together longer. They spent the night together in prayer. & meditation. Meditation & prayer. Three days later she died.

Is it me or is this beginning to sound like The Fall of the House of Usher? Let me walk you through that story: the narrator goes to visit his friend Usher who is hanging out at his family mansion waiting for his sister Madeline to die of some mysterious malady her doctors cannot quite figure out. Usher & his friend spend their time rereading all kinds of depressing, to-die-for romantic crap, painting & playing the guitar & Madeline does indeed kick. The two of them put her coffin in the family tomb conveniently located off the dining room. OKay I made that last part up, but it is somewhere in the house itself which is just plain weird.

After Madeline dies, Usher actually perks up a bit until it turns out she was not really dead & they buried her alive. Also the house splits in half. & I guess Usher dies....? Edgar Allen Poe has always been too mysterious for me & I am quite sure he would like it that way. Still, all I ever walk away with is the question: why does he keep walling living people up or burying them alive in the house or both?

In the end, Benedict & Scholastica (& Usher & Madeline) are buried in the same tomb. Maybe even the same grave. That is not creepy or anything; they do that to save space.