A Bigger Deal

I have been trying to breathe in and breathe out and find something worthwhile to write about.  I either have to tell something about what is happening to me or something uplifting to share.  Well, I just cannot.  I just plain cannot!  I have a friend who has a daughter that is seriously ill and facing some very big challenges.  I have a friend who just discovered that someone they love has cancer and it has a difficult prognosis.  I have a friend who recently lost a spouse.  And to add to all this big deal the kind minister that married my son and daughter-in-law has just been admitted to the hospital for some lengthy tests.

In addition, I will not go into the sad and unfortunate news that a number of bloggers have shared so bravely recently from their lives.

I believe in the power of prayer but am not sure who I should pray to.  I know, you wonder about my thinking, but that is the way I am.  Anyway, if prayer works for you, please ask for peace for all these souls who are facing such big challenges these days.  Please pray for light and peace so that their days are golden.  I am going to listen to some music and watch some birds live their challenging lives.

A Big Deal

We have lived for several years with three large tulip poplars on the side of the house where the storms arrive.  Most of the trees in the ravine that die fall in the direction of the house.  During hurricanes we go down into the basement and hope that they will not fall against our bedroom wall.

I took the photo above to show the permit office, because you need to get permission to cut any trees, and I call these 'hazard' trees which makes it easier to get permission.  The permit costs $180.00...our lives and the lives of those we love...priceless.

This photo is from behind the house and there are actually three trees we had to remove.  Two are very close on the right side of the photo.  The third is the one that appears to be leaning right beside it.

We asked our neighbor for a good company and he sent us these good old boys.  I use this term with the greatest of endearment...because they really are!

They use a slingshot with a weighted bag to shoot through the branches of the tree they wish to down.  It was not going to be topped or cut up for firewood.  We just wanted a safe 'drop', which is cheaper and safer for all when you have lots of room as we do.  They then feed a heavy-duty rope through the path of the slingshot and pull taught after the cutter cuts the wedge and the other side of the trunk directing the fall.

The fellow above who weighed about 90 pounds was in charge.  He was in his 50's and had been dropping trees for decades, one of the few with the skill in the county.  He had been working with some Naval group in his youth and kept apologizing for the four letter words that the crew was using.  He said they were somewhat new and he was trying to train them.  I just smiled.  All I cared about was that they were being careful and concentrating and if that meant they had to swear...so be it.  The trees were tulip poplars which are considered shallow rooted and easy to rot.

As you can hear in this video above (not taken with a fancy movie camera), I was quite impressed and just a little terrified!!  I feel so sad about the great gap that we left in the ravine and the death of these old ones, but I feel so much safer sleeping at night after the ground has been soaked for days and before the arrival of a nasty storm.

Getting Permission

Several bloggers commented on the fact that I had to purchase a permit to bring down those trees which were on property I owned.  First, the ravine, while owned by me, is considered an environmental easement and I am not allowed to do anything there without asking.  While I agree that it seems too much government in my life, I have seen properties where they cut down every single tree along the river so that they get a perfect open view and so that others can see their perfect open house and so that their lawn fertilizer and broad leaf herbicide can flow freely into the river!  Yes, they get fined.  BUT they are rich and the $10K seems a small price to pay for a full water view so they can show off and screw the environment.  I wish the county would make them also plant trees as part of restoration.  Other counties in this liberal state do that.

Why do we care if people cut down trees willy nilly?  Well, our river goes back and forth on being clean and then polluted and then clean again.  Run-off is a big deal and trees drink lots of that water and keep the rest of the run=off purer.  They stop erosion and provide important shade and habitat for animals and clean the air.  I could go on and on about living in balance with everything else.

Our county is so restrictive because I live within 100 feet of the water.  That 100 foot buffer I am not allowed to touch...build, cut, or clear!  My neighbor who owns a landscape company ignored this on his many acres and cleared his land under the trees and then paid the fine for clearing away too much brush.  They are rich and he just accepted the fine as the cost for what he wanted to do.  I feel strongly about trying to keep the environment protected and my footprint small and so I do follow the rules.  I am an environmentalist as well and terrified at what we are doing to the air, water and land.  I have seen more animals and birds in my yard each year.

Our county also can ask you to plant up to 3 trees for every tree you cut under a permit!  But as the "good ole boy" tree cutter clarified, you can plant a seedling and if a deer eats it, it is not your fault and no one comes to check. 

I will pay the permit, get permission and now that the county office knows we have planted lots of trees on our own and are not pushing our limits, they do not ask us to plant trees to replace those we bring down.  I can live with it.

Monday Meanderings

Schedule:

The 8-year-old is up at 6:45, but knows he must be quiet and he heads down to the basement to play Angry Birds.
Hubby did not sleep well last night and is still in a deep snore mode until 8:00 A.M.
The 5-year-old...birthday next week...comes down the stair sleepy-eyed at 7:30...early for her!
Breakfast and taking some sliced green apples to the friendly box turtle at the edge of the lawn.
This is followed by an early morning tour of the fairy houses at the art museum, 56 this year (!)...so lucky I live in a nice area for kids.
Lunch is homemade quesadillas and sliced fresh apples with cinnamon...both a big hit.
Then "we" watch the first of the Narnia trilogy while I clean up the kitchen, catch-up with photos and shower and dress.
I quickly run out to the local T++++t, to purchase socks for the boy which mother forgot to pack.
This is followed by a trip to the local county pool which has lots of things for them to do until we leave at 5:00 P.M. for showers, a sliced pear and chocolate cream cheese snack and watching the second in the Narnia series.
I sit here blogging and while waiting to start dinner, I get all the kids laundry done so that they can start with clean clothes this week.  One has already run out of underware!
Dinner will be easy hamburgers on the grill, sweet potato fries and edamame for something green in the diet.
Then it is "free" time until bed and story.
I am still upright, so have no complaints.

Feet Still Not Up #2

I have the two oldest grandchildren through Tuesday of this week.  I think blogging will not be a priority, much less the luxury of putting my feet up.

I sat down just before the youngest dropped his milk and it drip,drip, dripped onto the wooden floor.
I sat down just before the middle child tripped over her own feet and needed an ice pack for her toe.
I sat down just before the oldest needed me to create a scavenger hunt, which is a tradition upon the first days visit which must not be broken.

I sat down just before we decided it was time to harvest crabs.
I sat down just before we decided it was time to take a trip to the playground.
I sat down just before we decided to check out X-Box and DVD sales at Best Buy.

I sat down just before it was time to cook dinner
I sat down just before it was time to get everyone bathed.
I sat down just before it was story time.

One of  these days soon I will be able to put me feet up...!

Put Your Feet Up, I Dare You!!

This past week was a non-stop round of taking vegetables to the food pantry, processing vegetables for the freezer, creating a brochure for the museum, packing for a trip to the mountains planned by my daughter for hubby's 70th, hiking in the mountains, watching little ones and breathing whenever the time allowed.

Hubby dressed much nicer for this hike than he usually does!!

What follows below are the "energy" photos...see if you can keep up.

My new daughter-in-law was complaining discussing mosquitos and how they always loved her.  She said she had sat down at home and put her feet up on a table and a mosquito bit the bottom of her foot.  My daughter (mother of three all below the age of 9 and middle-management consultant who works 50 hour weeks) let her jaw drop before she said, "You put your feet up??  I cannot remember the last time I could do that.  I do NOT want to hear about your tiny mosquito bite."  She did say this with good humor.

This is my new DIL seeing if she can still do a cartwheel.  (Another energy photo.)

This is me looking like I am lost in thought or making a Greta Garbo pose.  I am actually panting and leaning against that rock for support!  I stayed there until a jogger ran by me and shamed me.  (No comments on the color combo and the dangly earrings.  I was barely holding it together this weekend!)

I have not been able to put my feet up until yesterday.  But tomorrow I get the grandchildren again for four days.   So today I have to plan menus and food shop.  I love these kids more than anything in the world, but I do so want to be in the moment with each of them, and that requires lots of energy!

The Liberal Media...wherefore art thou?

Pretty lazy or busy or whatevah...but encourage you to read and see if you agree with this argument about the liberal media.

One Night In Baltimore

Baltimore is an interesting and dynamic city.  It is also a dangerous city.  One can wander just a few blocks off center and find themselves in communities of extreme poverty, communities that are mostly black, and communities where people will fix your car if it breaks down on their street and then drive it away. There was a TV drama show called "The Wire" about crime and the drug trafficking in the city of Baltimore which got positive critical review for its honesty and acting.  It was dark and gritty and the kind of thing us white folks in our safe little homes watch with interest as we might watch a train wreck or analyze cultural diversity.

All of the ugly racism which has crawled out from under our dirty beds and is being displayed on Facebook, Twitter and talking head news shows brought back a memory of something that happened to me a few years ago in Baltimore.  It was a very short incident, and had the city and the character types been different, it would not even be a memory.  I searched to see if I had written about this before, but could not find a related post.

The time of year was August.  Hot town summer in the city.  My husband and I had taken this lengthy drive to celebrate an anniversary.  He was taking me to a favorite fancy restaurant in this town.  I was dressed up more than usual and had shiny swinging earrings and more make up on than I normally wear and was in a dress-up mood.  We had been ignored by our kids for the better part of the summer, and as a reassurance, we were purposely going to celebrate the end of the summer like we used to so many years ago.

We were driving on a brightly lit street downtown in a main tourist area of the city where the weekend evening traffic was picking up.  We came to a red light and hubby stopped the car.  I glanced over to my right at the car next to me.  Inside were four twenty-something black men.  Their hair was in crazy shiny dreadlocks and one had gold earrings and their heads were bobbing back and forth to some music I could not hear.  One of the men said something funny and they all threw back their heads in laughter, their brilliant white teeth like tiny flashlights against their dark black skin in the dark car.  They were having a really good time.

I instinctively broke into a broad smile perhaps feeling glad that others were also in a good mood on this evening.  (Perhaps in the back of my mind hidden way deep somewhere, I realized they might be drug gang members and carrying guns inside or high on cocaine or ecstasy, but this thought did not surface to the front of my mind.)

The driver instinctively turned mid-laugh to look at me.  Our eyes connected for one of those seconds that seen to last for ten as we both sat just a few feet from each other, our proximity almost creating a personal space.  The whites of his eyes were as bright as his teeth.  He clearly saw my smile but I could see he was registering my race, my age and my attitude and so many other things in that second and evaluating me and what I had seen.  I did not stop smiling and since my smile was not some fear-filled reaction but a true feeling of enjoyment at their fun, he suddenly grinned an even bigger grin and tilted his head to me in greeting as the light changed and we both pulled away, hubby making a left turn and the car filled with black young men driving on.

I have no idea what I am trying to convey by writing about this incident.  I am not saying I am some sweet person who can see the good in all and help change the world with a smile (although why not?), or that drug dealers are balanced folks and just need the reasonable smile of some old white lady, or that black men with dreadlocks and earrings and nice cars are even always drug dealers!  Maybe they were Ravens players!  Maybe they were DJ's heading to a wedding?

I guess I am just saying that I wished the world was always like this.  Nonjudgmental and gracious and ending with peaceful departures.

Miscellaneous Opposites That Meet When World's Collide

(I could not come up with a complete Thursday 13...for some reason this goal always eludes me.  If you want to see how an expert plays the game check out Colleen's  posts on Thursday 13 Days!)

That cute little ten-year-old ring bearer in the gray suit in those earlier wedding pictures that I posteed looks so precious and gentlemanly, doesn't he?  He walks like a careful dancer across the grass holding the hand of his baby brother.  At 10:00 P.M., when his family was leaving after the wedding celebration, the same young man left the front door of the country club, took a weird sharp left skip down the driveway and proceeded to fall to the ground and tear open a nice hole at the knee of this $75.00 suit and cut himself a nice knee wound as well.  So this is the way that one gets wear and tear out of a new suit!  The same new suit was used for his first communion just the month before, so I guess it got some use before he outgrew it.

My friend, who is on my landscape committee, has some concerning health problems, one of which is migraine headaches.  She has been taking botox injections in the forehead which have reduced the pain substantially.  BUT she mentioned that she feels weird because she cannot raise her eyebrows even though she thinks that she is trying to convey an expression.  We also cannot tell if she is in a good or bad mood anymore!

On the evening of the 21st and the early morning of the 22nd of this month, my husband and son passed on planes in the night as they both crossed the Pacific Ocean going in opposite directions.  One on his way back from a honeymoon vacation and one on his way to work on a project.

I am allergic to cats and even looking at them can make my eyes itch.  Yet, I have decorated my powder room in cat art.  (I am sure I have posted this information before...bear with me!)

My sage was dying from too much rain and it started to recover and now it seems to be dying from too little rain and too much sun!  I though herbs were easy to grow.

I am alone for 10 days while hubby is on travel.  I wish I could say I was alone.  I have a lawn keeper that I must meet with tomorrow, I have a meeting the day after that with my volunteer group, I have another meeting two days later that I am covering for my husband where I have to help teach gardening to children.  Others days are FILLED with so many errands and activities!  I was actually viewing this as a vacation time not having to cook.   So naive!

It is so charming watching the little goldfinch balance so delicately on the sunflower heads in my garden.  His acrobatic poise and gentle pull on each little seed is fun to watch and then he mushes up the seeds like the hungry bird he is.  It is not so cute when the annoying furry chunky squirrel climbs the sunflower stem and proceeds to snap the stem with his fat belly bending the whole plant to the ground while he goes for the entire head mushes it up permanently!  (A photo post on my other blog will document this tragedy.)

I purchased a container of half and half the other day.  When I was younger half and half meant half milk and half cream, but the label said it was 'fat free'!  I did not realize I had purchased this until I got home because it looked like the regular container of half and half.  Well, it is half skim milk and corn syrup and thickening agents...meaning it may still thicken your waist and has nothing to do with cream although it tastes almost the same. It is opposite of what I wanted to purchase and I hate the way marketers lie to us.

I have grown more addicted to all those British mysteries on TV these days.  Please read the following in a nice British accent.  "Why you might ask do I add this to my list.  I dare say, they do pass the time for one such as I on a warm summer night and the opposites that they bring to the evening are lovely cottages with bunches of pastel flowers hanging over rustic stone walls followed by entry into a room with a well-stocked library and a prone body usually covered in crimson blood."

And my final news that I discovered this week is that space Scientists have provided a photograph of the tiny earth next to Saturn's rings from that distant telescope at a fun new angle from so many miles away.  Our planet is just a spark of light in the photo.  You and I are so small in the grand scheme of things.  But, for additional perspective, science also has discovered a new virus that is 1,000 times larger than any virus known to man and 80% of its DNA is brand new to us.  Science keeps looking inward and outward and finds many new miracles.

(only 10...can you come up with the rest?)

So Lucky

I am lucky today.
It is 4:00 in the morning and still dark outside, but I know it is a lucky day for me.
I look down at my polished toes that rest on the coffee table.
I can wiggle my toes, I am so lucky.
The coffee pot beeps three times to let me know that my coffee is ready.
I can clearly hear its high pitched call.
I am so lucky.
I can smell the rich liquid from the next room.
I am so lucky.
I listen carefully and hear my husband's gentle, regular breathing through the open bedroom door.
He can breathe, I am so lucky.
The fan above my head whirs mixing the cool and warm air across my skin.
I am so lucky.
I stretch fully and can feel the pull off every muscle.
I am so lucky.
There is a new Cook's Illustrated magazine to explore at my side.
I am so lucky.
There are chores to do followed by the reward of accomplishment and need.
I am so lucky.
There is a day of crazy photos and events to peruse posted by crazy Facebook friends.
I am so lucky.
There is another day to live vicariously through my exotic Blogger friends scattered all over the planet.
I am so lucky.
The first light of the sun is teasing and tickling my photographic eye.
I am so lucky.
I have been given another rich day.
I am so lucky.