Bernard of Menthon

When you think "Saint Bernard" it probably is not an actual saint that pops in to your mind but an actual dog. For me, it is Nana from Peter Pan.  It seems, the dogs were named for the famously impassable Great Saint Bernard Pass & the pass is named for the man himself.

For perhaps the first time ever in my looking into the saints & what they do for us, Bernard is invoked by Alpinists specifically, mountain climbers & skiers more generally & ultimately all travelers in the mountains. No skin ailments, no lost children/innocents or innocence, no diseases, no random occupation associated with the gruesome way he died, nothing. Sweet blessed relief.

The man seems almost normal, as well. During his mortality, he held a clerical/local magistrate-type office near the 10-months-of-winter pass that bears his name. While there he established the patrols & shelters for travelers in this plagued (by weather & thieves) region. I can find no grand show stopping number in his repertoire, just 40+ years of hard work, patrolling, administering & preaching against idolatry, pretty much in that order. His miracles have been described as "numerous" & that is all; the entry has a kind of after thought quality. I marvel that the church made him a saint. It seems to me the man himself might have been more pleased about the naming of the dog breed, but maybe I am projecting.

The final thing that struck me about Bernard of Menthon was not so much that lack of information about him as the extra information about him. I found TWO definitive years of birth (923 & 996), THREE definitive nationalities (Italian & French & Swiss), as well as a number of offices for which he was 'most well known'. I cannot help it, I feel if anyone is 'most well known' for something it ought to be just the one something. There are also legions of other Saint Bernards (not to be confused with other saint bernards) & so I cannot help but think they might be raining on this everyday clergyman's day. Which is a damn shame, because I think I like him best.

//in the course of writing this I double checked to see if Nana was indeed a Saint Bernard, she certainly looked like one. She was, according to stage directions, a Newfoundland. Interestingly enough, many Saint Bernards are also almost Newfies; the avalanches of the 18-teens were particularly hard &, because of the dog-death-toll, the Newfie line was introduced into Saint Bernard breeding stock.

No, not the rapture

This morning, I took time out of my busy schedule to observe one of my own high holy days.  Not the rapture (like that needed saying).  & no, it is not the library book sale; those are April & October.  Today was the annual Master Gardeners Plant Sale.

I look forward to this sale all year; well for months anyhow.  I start making lists of things to try & find at the sale.  In the past I have hunted lilies of the valley, any white flowering flower, something that will survive deep shade, lemon tree, plum tree, any kind of flowering fruit tree.  This year I went looking for the fruit trees, especially lemon & plum, lavender & catnip.  Last year I got the worlds most gynormous catnip plant for W***** & now I want one for my own cats.

I came home with a catnip plant & nothing else I went for.  There were flowering fruit trees, but nothing that really whet my appetite.  The lavenders sold out before I got there, less than an hour after the sale started (curse you people who can leave home before milking the cow).  Instead I got  lime basil plant, a lemon balm & two cannas.  The taste for cannas was slow in coming to me, but now whenever I see one that even suggests it might be a color I do not already have, I must purchase it.

Eliza Doolittle Day

It is just a little thing, but today is kind of a silly-big deal in my world.  It is Eliza Dolittle Day.  For those of you who have never heard of Henry Higgins or maybe think Pygmalion might be the patron saint of swineherds, let me ease yOu in.

Have you ever suspected your boss might be conducting experiments to change your speech pattern (i.e. have you ever been a telemarketer asked to pass for an american)?

Have you been sexually harassed & kind of liked it...until you didn't?

Do you fantasize about a world in which you hold the power of life & death over people who barely acknowledge you as human?

Well, any of these things might mean you need an Eliza Dolittle Day.  We will celebrate by watch My Fair Lady start to finish & jumping up & down on the furniture shouting The Rain In Spain et cetera. 

Nymphaeaceae

I have so many many not-quite-finished projects, but when it came time to spotlighting a finished quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, I could not believe how many of my finished quilts have already been covered in my blog.  Virtually every one I had here that I could take a picture of or had taken a picture before I shipped it off has already been shown here.  With one exception: Nymphaeaceae.

Quite some time ago (yea, I could look it up or I could just move on), a floristic inventory of the local botanical garden was begun & a while after that it was mostly finished; these things are never finished-finished.  As it was wrapping up, the wife of the inventoryer, the guy collecting & identifying one of everything in the garden, & I took a fraction of the digital images & made a quilt for a show at the museum of natural history (they were having a quilting natural fladidah-themed exhibit) & we made this.  Meanwhile, the manager of the collection was doing everything in his power to make things easier for us.  By everything, I mean everything, including re-prioritizing what specimens got mounted & photographed when so we could get the images we needed ASAP & not taking it to heart when they turned out not to be quite what we wanted & oh, could we have this instead?

In the course of this whole process, it became very, Very, VERY clear which image was his favorite.  He used it for buttons on the website, he used it as his screen saver; everywhere he could squeeze it in, he squeezed.  When we finished our main project & started planning our Thanks For All Your Help project there was no other choice. 

As with all the images for our original quilt, I printed the images on 100% cotton using the Bubblejet product & an HP Photosmart printer.  We used a single close up of the primary image for the center of the front & several others that we cut up to incorporate into the sawtooth border.  As patterns go, it is not complex; we wanted to be careful that the quilt layout not clash with the image we were trying to highlight.  For the back, we printed the whole specimen with label.  While not particularly important in terms of the quilt, it is (almost) the most important part to an herbarium manager. The whole thing is less than 30" x 30"

If you want to see the original specimen (kind of) you can search for accession number 214601 thru 214601 at the collection search page.

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.