A Quick Morning Update

It is now just after 7:00 AM and I have been up for over an hour. I have gone through emails, worked on photos, checked the FB page for various groups that I follow and finished my first cup of coffee. Hubby is still in bed, but the radio alarm is due to go off in minutes as he has invited a visitor to come at 8:30 and check out our oyster rafts as he discusses how oysters improve water quality. It gives hubby a chance to expound on his expertise. He is slowing down in old age and the opportunity to be an expert at his age does not come often.  I think this visitor is starting some company for floating oyster rafts driven by solar power...should be interesting.

Then we take a break for lunch and in the afternoon we are both listening to an online seminar given by a university in how to deal with nearby woodlands.  We are surrounded by woodlands and interested in ways we can keep them alive and healthy.  We had to pay for the course and its six seminars, but the hour can also be applied to our annual education requirement for our Master Gardener's group.  I may find interesting things to share on my blog for those who do not have time to take online courses.

The woodlands have changed.  I see more woodpeckers and more dying trees.  The undergrowth has been eaten away by deer, but the deer have been winnowed by my neighbors hunting across the road!  Branches get scattered in high winds making the normal shadows even barer.  

I have taken two days of long walks in woods (not ours) and have a bunch of photos of that beauty to post on my other blog.  We drove to two state parks that we have never visited in our winter boredom.  When I get that done I will link back to here so you can walk with me!

Well, I must go straighten the scattered magazines, piles of receipts on end tables, etc. so that the visitor does not see how we really live!  

Giving January Its Due

January is the cruelest month. Short days with little sun. Wind and weather that steals through your very skin. Endless politics on the TV. The continual battle not to eat all that fattening comfort food that you/I crave. Finding places to put that holiday gift you will never use.  And to add to the deep thoughts, some of my dear friends and bloggers are fighting personal health battles. Mortality is a big canvas staring me in the face these days.

I try to be a realist and accept that all things change both rapidly and slowly.  My grandchildren find me less interesting and more quaint.  Most of my friends are old people.  My routines are in concrete and interruptions make me like the stereotypical old foggey...grumpy.

Since my time is shorter on this planet, I tend to have less patience and have to control my temper when the change that I want does not happen fast enough or when a change is imposed upon me.

My calendar for the New Year is filling with activities in the coming months and like the smuck that I am, I wish it was not so full.  I want to crawl away and lick my wounds and sigh and be introverted.  Instead, I have a family that is busy making sure we are busy.

Not complaining but creakily adjusting.

Comments on a Blog

It is getting harder to monitor anonymous comments on blog posts.  When they praise me for my insight, excellent writing or want to offer advice on how I can get more people to my "wonderful" blog...all written in broken English...that makes it easy to recognize the commenter as nefarious.  I mark it as spam and delete it.  I am not a super popular blog, so I wonder how those who get many dozens of comments handle it all?

I got this anonymous comment yesterday, on a really old post, below:

"Tabor, thank you for correcting me.  I should not be commenting at 5:30 in the morning. My daughter is always telling me to PROOF READ."  This was followed by a link to some furnace ad!  (Furnace Calgary Prices Calgary)

This was an older post written after my first trip to Calgary Canada and I guess the business model is to search blogs for city names?

I do allow unmonitored comments for the first week only after a new post.  This usually means only one deletion.  After that comments are held for moderation by me.  That seems to allow me to screen most of the "scrap" from the real thing.

This Is All About the Complexity of Shoes

I bought myself a gift of fancy boots for Christmas and I have to be careful and wear them only on dry days.  These shoes are pretty comfortable!  I still have some vanity, unlike the wearers of the shoes that I feature below.

The above photo (created with some digital alterations for mood) was taken this past fall. You may guess that it was photographed outside someone's home or an ancient temple. Those are two places where people remove their shoes out of cleanliness or worship.  It was taken outside the Canggu Monastery temple in Lhasa, Tibet, China.  Look at the shoes. I was studying this and saw an unusual variety in style and color, but they were ever practical. These are the shoes of Buddhist nuns. They must shave their heads and wear the red robes each day.  No need to decide what to wear or try to find something that fits that newly expanded waistline.  Maybe having that stress removed was one reason for the peaceful smiles that they all gave us.  You just have to decide on shoe style.

This photo above (painterly) was taken at the Canggu Nunnery in Lhasa.  The nunnery is open to the public.  In Buddhism, nuns can take on the same roles as monks in teaching, preaching, performing rituals, etc.  Although some sects are more strict than others.  (All religions seem to have some misogyny based on gender.)

About 100 nuns live here and the monastery has existed since the 12th century.  They make money by manufacturing items such as clothing and printed texts as well as donations.  The nunnery also runs a clinic and employs professional doctors and serves the local residents.  The nuns are loved and trusted by the local residents because of this.  They also run a tea and bun house, but I did not have time to purchase tea as I was off taking photos!

Now back to the shoes.  They are all very similar and practical.  They are easy to remove as the nuns must do this several times a day.  Yet some are a little more flashy than others.  I was wondering if a bit of their personality escapes through the shoes.  Are the shoes donated?  Are the shoes purchased by the sect?  Can nuns go shopping?  Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

We also were able to watch them doing laundry.  If they had not been so sweet and gentle this might have seemed intrusive.  Here below is another photo that raises so many questions.

I look forward to your comments!

Washing the Air

This past weekend, like many extended families, we had a post Christmas get together and exchange of gifts. Since there were nine of us, it got to be much like Christmas Morning all over again, except hubby and I and my son and his wife went out for Chinese lunch just before. (But maybe Chinese food is now also a holiday tradition in many families.) Anyway, the weather was predicting heavier rain in the afternoon and hubby and I tried to get an early start to the hour drive back home as the days are also short! I snapped the photo below on my phone as we saw we were driving into even heavier weather!

Getting back to our empty house (we had also dropped off the granddog which we had been dog-sitting for over a week) and this gloomy evening made the house seem even more somber. I kept looking for a tiny dog to pet, but it was just us two creaky old folks and hubby did not want any petting but did want a cup of hot tea.

This morning we woke to sunshine, but even better, the air had been washed super clean once again.

That did seem to lighten  and brighten our spirits.

Mind Mazes

Why do all of my most interesting questions, resolutions, ideas, and original thoughts happen at night as I settle in to fall asleep? I tell myself that the idea I am pondering might be a gem to pursue on my blog. My readers are erudite and outspoken and certainly could add something to the thought maze I have created as my mind misfires in the dark bedroom. 

Sometimes it is something I followed on the news while other times it is a phrase that captured my thoughts in one of the few books I am reading.  Other times it is an observation of human nature that interrupted my errands.

Then elusive sleep smothers my brain and I sleep the sleep of the half-dead, up a time or two and back to deep sleep.  The marvelous ideas evaporate with the disappearance of the morning fog on the river as the sun warms the air.

I am kind of glad because I somehow suspect that the thought that slithered off was something really inane.  Something of inconsequential importance or supercilious significance. If it had carried any weight, would it not have plunked itself on my chest as I lay in my bed in the morning demanding my immediate attention?

Still Life

When days are rainy I go through old photos and pass the time by trying to get creative.

Still life the digital way...

A Quick City Trip

My children and their children live just outside the District of Columbia, that city of famous and infamous history.

We arrived and found parking just as the sun was setting. Signs said we were not allowed to park for more than two hours, but this was Christmas Eve and it seemed that rules had been greatly relaxed. We parked across the street from the National Museum of African American History. I have yet to visit this newer museum (opened only three years ago) because it still is extremely popular allowing entry only with pre-reserved timed passes even though it is free. It always seems to be crowded at most times! The museum remains on my bucket list. Its architecture is very dramatic and the light from the sunset through the edge of the building made for a decent photo with my point and shoot camera.

As I walked further and pulled back with the camera I was able to get the Washington Monument in the background on the hill. Due to a minor earthquake last year, the elevator has been closed off and on some days although now I think it is running on schedule and finally repaired. The Monument also requires passes that you get ahead of time! I went up to the top many years ago and the windows give a rather blurred view of the city.

On the right, as we hurried toward the Ellipse, is the Department of Commerce Building (in the photo below).  Wilber Ross is the Secretary of Commerce now.  He seems to be able to stay out of the news recently, unlike other Secretaries, except for the citizenship question that he wanted to add to the 2020 Census, his failure to divest himself of his assets, and the use of a personal phone for business!  He has Yale and Harvard in his resume, which at least gives him some gravitas for such an important job.  The man, like our President, has been married three times.  He is now 82 and that might be one of the reasons he keeps such a low profile.  He is worth 700 million to  2.5 billion depending on which of his paperwork you believe and he made his money by taking advantage of bankruptcies.

We hurried to the Ellipse where the grands could see the National Christmas Tree.  It was pleasantly crowded with American citizens and also many people from other countries, all in excellent holiday humor.  There are several miniature trains running beneath the tree and little towns along the tracks that reminded me of the neighborhood in the Mr. Rogers movie we had seen that afternoon.  These were all behind a protective fence.  When I looked closely I saw that people had throw money, coins and bills, over the fence onto the trains and houses and station and lawn.  Much of it was foreign currency.  That seemed very odd and someone in the passing crowd joked that it was for the President's defense fund.  This is eternally a political city.

The sunset cooperated nicely on this Christmas Eve. I was also able to capture a murmuration of starlings (or some birds) against the pink skies!

All in all a very lovely evening!

A Day of Peace!

Hope that this day is your most peaceful yet. Gather your energies and your love and go forth in the New Year and make it better.

Festival Season

Today is the first day of Hannukah which runs through until December 30. Wishing those who celebrate this holiday of the Festival of Lights a joyous week!

When Life Gives You Lemons

My birthday falls in a few days and because it is squeezed close to the holidays, I am not expecting much. I do not care and that is not a lie. As a child, my birthday was important (to me), but because it was squeezed into a year of four other siblings birthdays and always close to Christmas, I only had two real birthday parties in my youth. The rest were family and cake. I felt cheated then but realize it was all unimportant now.  I neither look forward to or dread birthdays.  They are days on the calendar and numbers on my years.  There are far more important days in any life.

Having written all of that I decided to make some cookies.  Well, I decided to do a bunch of stuff.  As my readers may know, I have a Meyer lemon tree.  It is a sad little tree, much like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, but prior to the photo taken below it had 30 lemons ripening on its scraggly boughs.

I cannot use more than two dozen lemons at one time, so I picked half.

They smell marvelous and are super full of juice.

As I slice them I cannot but marvel at the seeds inside with all their potential to become new young lemon trees, but I have to control myself as I have no room or time in my life for growing more lemon trees.

I have tools for zesting the rind and tools for squeezing the juice.

The juice goes into ice cube trays and after becoming frozen goes into freezer bags for use in the months to come.  The zest gets frozen as well for seafood dinners and soups.  Other lemons are cut in half and frozen for future flavoring.  Then I get a brilliant idea from the Cooks Illustrated cookbook to make some lemon zest cookies.  I do not like this cookbook very much as it keeps giving me recipes that are photographed beautifully but rarely work---at least for me.  But, who does not like cookies?  The fresh zest gets mixed with the sugar and creamed with 2 sticks of butter and the juice gets added to the batter.  Hubby says it smells so good as he watches his football game.

And this is the result of all my labor!  I turned down the heat for the second batch and let them cool a little longer before removing them and this is still what I got!  They are so messy (but quite edible) you have to eat them over the sink!

Alas, when life gives you lemons you can sweep the crumbs off the plate and counter and add to a sealed container for topping on ice cream.

The Second Half of Eye Candy

Quickly selected and one or two were photoshopped for character or improvement. Almost all were adjusted for exposure and sharpness.

My front yard on a "good" day in July.

My grandson having fun in the nearby art garden in August.

A cloud on the low horizon throwing shade on a sunset in September.

At least one token photo from the thousands from the China trip in October.

A Thanksgiving Sunrise in Florida in November.

A foggy wet morning at my dock in December

12 Months of Eye Candy

I have finished wrapping 90% of my gifts, hubby is in charge of the Christmas cards, there is very little baking to do for our calorie-conscious time. Therefore, I am going to sort my photos of this past year and give you one from each month as a thank-you for reading, contemplating and commenting this year. Since I have thousands of photos from each month (addictive), the first quickly selected six will be delivered now and the next six...whenever I can grab a little more time. Happy Holidays to you all and don't forget to save the wrapping paper and recycle!

Natures decorations in January.

My neighbor's sailboat in February.

At the feeders in March

A spring trip to the Kennedy Center in April.

Getting the Grands bird-watching across a restored meadow in May.

Here's looking at you, kid, in the summery month of June!

Patience, something I keep opening files and trying to find....

Juggling Christmas:  card mailings, gift buying/wrapping,  decorating and maybe a little baking is about all I can handle this month.  I am not religious, but I am NOT anti-religious...and yet...someone who rules this universe has decided I am stronger than I think or just not worth worrying about.

I love my husband of 49.5 years... I really do! And somedays I have to tell myself that out loud. He is great at editing my Christmas newsletter filled with all our brags for the year. He is great at giving me a definition of a word when I come across something I am reading in a paper book. He knows history, chemistry, and biology and explains stuff to me.  He remembers the names of people I have long forgotten.  He is the social animal that keeps me from being a hermit.

BUT...he does not know how to use a computer. I will never understand how he got through decades of bureaucracy using computers when he does not understand the difference between save and save as, the difference between Adobe files and Powerpoint files, how to connect his laptop to the Internet when the signal gets dropped, or the difference between a browser and an operating system!

He is a (very) friendly soul and when someone asks if he will give a talk using Powerpoint slides he jumps right in (he loves to expound). I groan inwardly as this means hours ahead for me helping him find lost photos, lost files and various saved versions of the slide show as he plunders ahead.   I wish I was a more patient person.  I have taught all age groups in my lifetime and did not find it so frustrating as I do with him.  While I did not teach computers, except briefly to my son's high school teachers, I think  I would have done well.

I will try to be more understanding as he does get frustrated with himself.  Will you all light a candle this season for our silly problem?

The Wind Up

The world revolves too fast these days, at least for me it does. I am holding my own, but I think we are like those Afghanistan wealthy citizens that hung out at bars and restaurants before the war many years ago.  We can bury ourselves in the fun and craziness of life while a storm builds in the distance. Something big and loud is coming that will make our hair stand on end.

I am back from our quick jaunt south with the family for Thanksgiving.  It was fun, but as my prior post indicated, it was a rush job.  We said goodbye to them at the airport and then drove north to visit our friends for a few days and then a retreat for just us at our local timeshare.  The place was all decorated.

The beaches were so peacefully empty and the cold was very tolerable.

I finally had time to just breathe.  Now I have to pull our small Christmas tree out of a box and decorate the living room so we have a little bit of holiday before it rushes by so fast.

A Post Thanksgiving Post

It is an odd day as I sit only 200 yards from a white sandy beach and a tropical ocean. The beach has been re-created by man and is soft and mushy. It is surrouned by concrete cubes of architecture that block the sun by 2:00 in the afternoon.  Like migrating birds this sends all the beached whales that had flopped on towels around the pool inside to other activities. All around are people having too much fun. Lots of curvy skin (those large cheeks of tanned cellulite are really distracting) and their shiny gold bracelets demand respect as their bleached locks with streaks of carnival red are intriguing. The music is loud, the children are hyped, the drinks flow freely and I am feeling lost on an alien planet bracing my feet in the event that there  is a black hole sucking up ahead.

At least a third of the partcipants at sun and surf are well- toned runners with  phones  strapped  to  their arms and  water bottles  in hand as they gazelle along the beachwalk and weave past the rare homeless  man whose bicycle is piled with stuff.

The last of the group are elders like us who trod and plod from one gift shop to one restaurant and finally back to our beach chairs with some beach  drink in hand and a good book tucked under our arms.

I am here with grands who never leave the pool except to visit the hot tub or run in the surf and then back to the pool.  I exchange less than three words with them during the day, because when they return to the bedroom they focus on small screens snapchatting with friends back home.  Snapchat is  a  frightening way to communicate, I am thinking, but I am old, what the hell do I know?

We go with hubby to visit the home he left over a half century ago and oddly enough the house next door had younger (now old  and retired) neighbors that remember him from past visits! We talk about the history of  the neighborhood and are surprised  that while people have  passed and new people moved in,  it has not changed much  in culture or  architecture. 

Later in the afternoon we all tried to find the  gravesites of the great grands wandering  over the cemetary reading plot after  plot,  but with the cemetary offices closed on  TG day we will  have to do ask them directly another day.

Our meal on the holiday is an extensve buffet of TG favorites at some famous chef's restaurant,  and although it is expensive,  it is  really delicious.  No leftovers to take  home, though.

The crazy week comes to an end tonight and we drive back north and visit friends in Central Florida for a few days while the kids all fly home.  Then by mid-week we return to the land of  wintry storms and cozy fires.