Clockwork Rage

 By now you all know I use these pages to vent about things that annoy me. I'm at it again, though this time I'm going to mellow it at the end with some flower photos.

The replica antique Coca Cola wall clock that has been following our travels around the country for years now is beginning to have some interesting glitches. It's nothing we can't deal with if we give it a few tweaks over the first couple days after we put the new battery in. For some reason the hands seem to snag on something in the vicinity of 7 or 8, and the time needs to be reset. We also have noticed that when setting the time we have to come at it from behind. In other words, we can't set the time to before where it was sitting, we have to go around the dial  until our last crank comes from behind, making the hands move ahead. None of these are a big deal, but it can get tiresome. We decided to look for a new one to replace it. It had been sentimental for Steve, but he also was willing to leave it behind via one of our garage sales before we moved. That didn't happen.

Rather than hunt for clock stores we went online to hunt. Steve started with the idea of looking for a pendulum clock. Not a huge Grandfather affair, being way beyond what we wanted to spend. But the ones we did find had chimes, and much as we like the Big Ben chimes which are now in our front doorbell, we were sure they'd be going off right when there was something on the TV which sits right next to where it would hang, with something we'd want to hear obliterated by the chimes going off.  In short, no chiming clock.

We did find a nice enough looking one (in it's picture), with a reasonable price, and ordered it. It arrived on time.

That's the last thing that went right.

The pendulum is shipped as a separate piece, which makes perfect sense, since a jolt during transit could give it enough leverage to bend something. We did try to put the pendulum on when we unwrapped it, but there was nothing we could find for it to cling to. There were a lot of things the right location, size and shape, but....

I'd recently bought batteries since we were siphoning so many through the old Coke clock. I dug one out and put it where it went... except it didn't go there. Or the other spot that looked perfect. Or even the third one which really did fit it snugly. Maybe it was upside down? I always make sure when I'm changing either AA or AAA batteries to be sure to note the orientation of the ones I remove and lay the dead ones out in that position as a template for their replacements. This didn't have any old ones of course. Nothing I tried, or that Steve tried, worked. We looked at each other and nearly simultaneously, said, "Call Paul."

He'd be off work soon, was usually willing to come over after and fix or install whatever we needed to make this place livable. (We joke that he does it to keep us from moving back in with him! I like to think it's a joke, anyway.)

When he arrived, he immediately found where the pendulum went... after three other tries. Buy hey, who's counting? I brought him a new battery and he figured out where it went, even if not sure after trying both possibilities which was correct. When he got no results from a second hand that resembled any kind of motion, he pulled the still functioning battery from the Coke clock, and... still nothing in the new clock. He replaced it in the Coke clock and it's still going strong. 

In the process of working with the battery he discovered that the pendulum swings freely - so freely that nothing in the clock mechanism is set up to move it. The damn things moves only when somebody swings the clock! It stops whenever gravity and friction win, usually about 3 swings.

Since we all came to the same conclusion that this was a total piece of cheap-shit crap, I started looking around for the box to put it back into for a return. Considering how things were going so far, it likely won't surprise anybody that the shipping box had already been torn up, de-taped and de-stapled, its pieces ready for the recycling bin. At least one thing worked! If I don't mind being called a thing in this context, that is. Yes, I did that. : (

Today came the email I've been waiting for, a chance to give a review on the clock. I wasn't going to get a refund, but I could give out a warning to the next rube. and boy, did I!

Meanwhile the Coke clock is still keeping perfect time up on the mantle. There is a large supply of  AA batteries left, and I'm just not in a hurry to buy a replacement. The next purchase clock-wise will be one of those kits like the one in the back of the current clock, where a central post/spindle/whatever goes through a hole, batteries on one side and hands and numbers on the other so it can be turned into a clock. I have just the thing. It will be its second life as a wall clock.

 Long ago, in a state far far away, friends of my parents used a kit to turn a piece of petrified wood into a clock. It's grey and white and red and tan-ish yellow. (The bright white at about 6:30 o'clock in the photo is from the flash.) The hole is well placed, and somebody worked a long time in lapidary to turn it into a smooth- faced pretty thing. It worked as a clock for a very long time. Unfortunately, rather than finish it off the way I learned to do for a polish, they simply poured lacquer over it all, stone, numbers, everything. Decades later the color was old brownish yellow. I mean everything was brownish yellow, except the black numerals were still black. I liked the stone, remembered its former glory, and went about finding out how to restore it. About three bottles of acetone later, in which it sat in a flat pan of, face down for several days (outside), the numerals were scraped off, the mechanism removed, nearly all the lacquer now gone, and color mostly restored. One more bottle for a last soak and scrape, then on to the machines in the club. This time however it got a wax-type polishing with a cloth wheel for a couple hours. The back side is rough but who cares? Someday if somebody wishes to reverse the clock and use new numbers and motor, they can repeat what I've done on the other side. I refused to find it necessary for my own use. Perhaps as a present? For me it was just restoring old beauty in a nod to its original maker and it's being gifted to my parents. Petrified wood is one of the hardest stones to work, and one side sufficed. The ugly yellow is gone. Now it's just a matter of style and size of what goes on the face.

Meanwhile I bought another houseplant:

This one is a calla lily, with lavender-purple blooms, bluer than shown. But purple is always hard for cameras to figure out: Red? blue? I had a decades long best friend who died a couple years back. Calla lilies were special to her, but at that time the only ones on the market were white. Where my plants sit for light is already white enough, so I go for color there when I can. When this came home there was a single bloom. Today there are 7, one hiding from the camera. A ponytail palm intrudes from the right, and a begonia maculata is trying to photobomb from the left.

Heading outside, this is the first of these greeting me in full bloom this morning,

They have a story to tell as well. Decades ago at the last MN house I lived in, a humongous rock was delivered to my front yard, granite with large seams of feldspar, and big enough to sit on - for two people. All because I stopped at city hall and asked the clerk if they city had a plan for it or it needed a home. It wasn't my choice of location, but no way could I budge it! When I got some sky blue iris needing a new home, they were planted next to it. They thrived. It became impossible to mow the lawn near it. Last year when I needed iris for my new raised circle bed, they got dug out and transplanted. Or at least we thought they all had. This spring Paul showed me three which escaped the shovel and which will be moved in a month or two. This is the first to bloom in the new home of all the iris or daylilies planted.

Meanwhile over by the rhubarb bed, my newly planted fancy columbines are thriving.

Yellow were the first in, followed by the rose/white ones.

Because Steve is from Colorado, one very important color combination was missing:

Have I stopped planting for the year? Do pigs fly? There are some late sprouting lily bulbs just showing life now, and a pair of potted early blooming ones on sale at a discount because they were already dropping petals. No more pictures for now, however. The weeds after 4 1/2" in recent rains are thriving all too well  and are calling for attention.

Those Damned Yahoos!

Yahoo used to be an exclamation of celebration.  On the other hand, yahoos were pretty clueless folks, provincial, ignorant, not terribly well educated. It was with a smidgen of wonderment that I first noted an email network with the name Yahoo: which did they mean?

Yahoo is not part of my email address. I have a much older name on my address, so old that it's been prevented from going through on form replies at times as being likely made up... or something. Eventually the company originating it "sold" those email addresses to Yahoo.com. It didn't change much. The address is the same, format was the same, the boxes in the same locations, using the same commands, in the same colors, shapes, and sizes. I particularly like the wide box for writing the body of any given email. I knew exactly where the new ones were, which were archived and how to send stuff there, how to designate spam and even rescue stuff from span.

Yesterday, with no fanfare or warning, everything changed but the name. I dread trying to read or send my email now. There's a space called folders but .... it's empty and no clue what goes where or how to organize. I can't find my old archived stuff. Things might or might not be going to spam, with or without my approval, but there's nothing named spam to go through to check. Somehow the system has decided what's important to me to read (yeah, sure....) and I had to search to find an "all" to click on to see what I was missing, but still with no indication of what might be spam. If you happen to send me stuff and know I want to hear from you but haven't replied, this may be why. If it's about that gadget you're selling or wonderful new financial plan,well......

When I want to send something out, especially in reply to what it's attached to, I'm used to the new, composed-with-proofing-required message going on the bottom. It was the widest part of the email, getting about 2/3 of the page, horizontally. Now it's squished between stuff at the top of the message  - I finally found it! - and squeezed into a vertical column about an inch and a half wide. I can use a single word that takes up more space!  And it limits just how many people I can send the same message to. Or at least I think that's what happens. 

It's more complicated than that, starting with garbling up what I should just be able to click on among possible options to finish the first two characters into a choice of people to send to. There are a lot of people in that address book it's no longer communicating well with, and once it chooses the wrong one I have to fully delete after multiple tries, try typing it again, and hope this time some stupid algorithm picks a different one or just stays the hell out of the process! For some stupid incomprehensible reason it won't accept a backspace erase of characters on bad addresses. It will accept a full delete of everything, which is my frustration's last resort.  (Well. tossing the laptop across the room is a bit too expensive for my budget, so it's not part of my last resort list. However, if I could locate the one the software Yahoos put their new program on...  That might be worth worsening the pain in my bad shoulder for, right? )

How did I find this out? The first thing I needed to do with the new piece of crap software was type and send a birthday invitation to bunch of people. I finally made a single one successfully, sent it to my husband, and had him forward it in one group-send to all the recipients. He doesn't have Yahoo anymore, switching to Gmail months ago. (Did I need to mention that?)

Meanwhile I had to deal with disappearing messages whenever I hit a shift key to capitalize a new sentence, or addresses that weren't but just put the first letter followed by an X inside parentheses and couldn't be deleted, and about every other thing I could imagine somebody pulling on any given April 1st.

After fighting my way through that, Yahoo had the audacity - or hubris - to ask me for my feedback on their new system. After a couple thoroughly rude but honest paragraphs, including asking them to quit "improving" their system because they weren't, I asked for my old system back.

They've been a bit slow in acknowledging that.

Hey, I wonder of those DOGE boys were fooling around with some new project after Elon was done with them. Or is he actually done.....???????

ADDENDUM:

Having cooled down a bit after venting, I went back to my email out of desperation to explore some more and see what else I could figure out.  Let's just say the results were mixed. I did manage to find my Spam folder. In it was one thing of interest. It said I needed to reactivate my account in the new system, or words to that effect, "click here" (which yielded no noticeable result,) and it had to be done by May 31st. I didn't even get the new stuff until yesterday.  But as soon as I read it I went back to the main page to see if the opportunity for feedback was still up. It was. I used the opportunity:

Are you insane????? You tell me to click to update/activate my account in the new version or face deactivation, and then HIDE IT IN SPAM WITH WARNINGS ?????????

I did, of course, include a link to this.  : )

About Long Covid Anosmia

Steve and I met friends in St. Paul for dinner last night. It was raining very lightly, so little that I didn't bother with the umbrellas I'd put in the car. Walking past some evergreen plantings in the restaurant's  landscaping, he commented on how wonderful they smelled in the light rain, and all the great memories they brought back. Like me, much of his childhood was in or near pine forests.

I told him I know what he meant since I have those memories of that scent. But since covid I no longer smell what I used to enjoy. (Of course I no longer smell what I hate either.) Very rarely does some kind of scent get my attention, like the first grass cutting of the season this month. Subsequent ones in the neighborhood were simply mower noise. I have been with him in the car when he mentions how strong a skunk stink we just passed, and I take a deep breath to see what I might be able to detect. If there is anything, it will be faint and bears no resemblance to the weapon of that adorable black and white fuzzy creature that, when alive, waddles so cutely past. There is the tiniest bit of something, but bears no relation to any skunk, living or dead. Or anything else I can recognize or name. That's on a good day. Otherwise, nothing. If I had a farting dog I wouldn't have a clue, and unless you're noisy, none about you either.

This morning we were again discussing last night, and his reminiscence of the evergreens in the rain. I love that he can still have that as part of his life, and hope mine can someday finally return. He sympathized with me while I rejoiced for him. But I added I might be just a bit selective in my wish for myself, not being over-eager to smell my own stink again!

Probably best to just assume it's still there though, eh?

Columbines In the Garden

 I've been doing a bit of shopping lately, mostly for the garden. The fantasy is that once things are planted this time the critters won't come in and dig them out or chop them off or whatever their personal version of Nuclear War is this time around. "This time", of course, is defined as anything between my seeing something in the garden, or a store, or in a photo calling out for a new home here, and the end of the next century. Those critters mean business, by gum, and train their future generations in all versions of their particular vendettas and successful warfare techniques. Well, I can wage war too!

It's notable that the expensive stuff is always the first to go. These vegetarians' idea of steak, oysters, champagne and caviar had been everything coming from my bulbs that is wanted to grow here. If that wasn't enough, (since who's patient?) they've gone after the bulbs themselves as kind of a hardship buffet. It does seem like I finally have a modest win on my hands now that I'm spreading rhubarb bits amongst their smorgasbord. And here I've been doing everything I can to get rid of those plants since they've been crowding out really good planting space. It should have occurred to me that there was a good reason rhubarb was doing so well. Or at least noted that this end of the garden had more survivors. Good thing I am a failure at getting rid of it (though I'm still happy to let any and everybody pick it so long as they leave something. I'm going to need it by fall and for next spring during those hungry times for the critters: pick, chop, freeze some, scatter more. Then come snowmelt, thaw and scatter more and more till it's back growing all over the place again so I can take it directly from live plants. Hey, sounds like a plan anyway.

The south garden starts with rhubarb. In the middle is still-active bleeding heart, something else I inherited and which is unbothered by critters. It's large enough to hide the far end of the bed in this shot, so it's been around for a while. I guess I should have known what's still around is not on the critters' high-buck menu. Whether I think it's lovely or plug-ugly, they won't touch it. On both sides of the Bleeding heart is what IS on their menu: lily bulbs. And of course, lily tops.You may look at this and wonder what the complaint is. There's obviously a lot of lilies there, and even a hint of a bloom. That's a whole second planting to replace the first.

 The bloom was short-lived, but that was not the doing of any critters. After several days petals dropped. This was just an early bloomer. A generous assortment of rhubarb leaf pieces and stalk chunks decorated the ground with the second planting, and the "good stuff" was left alone. Well, except for the wind, but I'm not doing that battle. We all know who'd lose. 

There is one way only to fight the wind, and then only up to a point. That's with wire  cages, well seated in the ground. Once I was sure my tall balloon flower (remember that one?) was going to thrive, I visited the hardware store on its behalf.

You can see how much it's grown in a week or so. This was taken before we had several days in a row of rain and cold here. I set out a bucket and it shows rain of 2 inches! Not an official rain gauge, but upon that realization, a search online was made, and one should be delivered by month end. Meanwhile, these look like tender shoots, but they've not been bothered by anything's teeth, are growing quickly, and are tucked in behind one of the 4 wires keeping their cage properly shaped. If the rain ever stops and temperatures rise again, I'll take more progress shots. This was before the system moved through (s-l-o-w-w-w-l-y) knocking the temperature from high 80s to mid 30s.

I did say this was about columbines, didn't I? I've had the wild small red and yellow natives blooming in my previous garden since its first or second year, meaning early '90s. They are reliable, hardy, and spread seeds in any empty space to grow more. 

 Fine, but it's time for VARIETY !!!  Big and fancy! And by gum, already potted since the packaged ones I bought were apparently thoroughly deceased and determined to remain so. (Glad my nose still doesn't recognize rot - nor skunk either, but 'nother story.)

Last week on the way home from a grocery run, I stopped at a local garden center. I had one thing on my mind: fancy columbines. They have a huge area to browse, so I asked directions. 

"Hey, (fellow employee), do we carry columbines?... Where?" She looked terrible at giving coherent directions, but luckily just invited me to follow her ziz-zag through tables. I noted she slowed and was looking around for them just before I noticed I was already standing next to them! They had 3 varieties, so I picked out two. One pot of solid yellow, one of red/pink. The third was red/white, but they weren't quite as healthy looking. I looked around, but no blue ones. 

Sigh.

The pots went in a box for support for the trip home, and were immediately planted once the groceries were put away. Where did I pick to plant them? Next to the rhubarb, of course! We'd let enough be dug out the fall before that there was some open dirt space waiting. I don't know that they need the protection, but it was there and why not?

 

 

 

The yellow had fully open blossoms which dropped in a couple days. The red was showing color, but even now hasn't opened to show off, likely from the cold. 

There was one problem, however. The garden needs a blue columbine. Not only are they beautiful, but Steve's from Colorado, and grew up with those, its state flower. Time for more research online. I started with metro garden centers, the really huge ones for the best chance of finding a blue columbine. The first website didn't show plants, just gave hours and address plus listed major categories of merchandise and plants. I needed specifics!

I remembered I still had a gift card for one from Christmas. They had a fantastic website, the kind you show when you actually want customers instead of relying on decades of reputation alone to haul them in. This one had blue and white columbines! The photos were exquisite, easily found by selecting for perennials and spring blooming. I made a quick call to be sure they were still in stock, since a one way trip was about 60 miles. In rush hour. In the rain. Past construction!

After a quick conversation with Steve, confirming he'd like them in the garden enough to not mind me taking the trip (despite his worrying about all those previously mentioned conditions of the trip), and confirming he wasn't about to bounce around in the car that long despite having had his back surgery but was staying home, off I headed.

Once there, of course there was something else on my list, so I got directions to where to find those, which incidentally passed an irresistible succulent that would fill a gap in a planter where another had died about a year earlier. Those in my cart, it was time to head outdoors into the cold windy rain. Once I located all the columbines, about a block from the end of the building, helpfully organized under "Perrennials - A" for asclepius, I located two different blue/white varieties, a purple/white, a pink/cream, and a couple more empty spaces where varieties had sold out. I did a very speedy check since I was already chilled and the car's warmth was still about 15 minutes away. Comparing the two blue, my original choice stood out. The purple was tempting, but instead I went with two pots of the blue! Back inside, check out, wheel the cart down to where I parked, unload into the car, properly dispose of the cart which belonged back next to the building.... Yep. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr! Fortunately  the car still held its warmth and shortly everything was cozy.

Once home the pots were set on the porch till the rain ended. (two days?)  I wasn't going to ask Steve to leave his cozy spot to come out and have a look, but one of the blossoms was perfect! I plucked it, showed him inside, and then made a white background to get a photo.

The browns are not the flower, but the shadow. My camera insists of an overall light amount for grey, so even with flash and brightening it to the limit of my software, the background remains grey. But the blue is that deep! The black "tails" of the flower are also that deep blue. The tiny green stub was the stem.

I figure tomorrow they'll go in the ground. The rain has got to stop sometime, right?

Early Memories On The Farm

I told somebody yesterday I grew up on a farm. My family remembers it as a resort on the Crow Wing chain of lakes.  Of course I remember that part of it too. But it was also a farm, however modest. We moved in when I was maybe 3 or 4, then moved into town in a different school system when I was already in third grade, so my tender age is my excuse for many gaps in my memories. What I write here is not all I recall, but is indelible, however, for what it is.

Looking back it seems kind of weird that those years split into two sets of memories when it was all one home on one chunk of land. The private parts were the family home except for the store it was built over, and the bits up the hill and behind the cabins that were farm, nothing much like the full farms our neighbors lived on, with fields and barns, cows to milk and pigs. The public part was the resort, with 8 fairly rustic cabins, separate plumbing for them in a shower building our Dad put in. This was the way my parents made their living for about 4 months of the year, their public identity. Our dad had a winter job at a tree nursery, which barely made ends meet but kept us going for a few years. Few people care to vacation in uninsulated wooden cabins in what back then were very cold winters, reaching -40 often enough to think of that as common, so the resort season was understandably very short.

Up on the hill behind the cabins was a corn crib. I can still envision it both full and empty. I still am not completely sure what ate the corn. We didn't even grow corn, so it's likely a neighbor who did rented the space, though those kinds of details were not part of my awareness. A fenced area which also enclosed the corn crib held sheep. I have great memories of shearing time, watching neighborhood experts run clippers over the sheep and neatly separating fleece from suddenly sleek skin. The sheep were released to go wander within the fence, just like we kids were when watching got boring enough. I was short enough to hide in the tall grass, and occasionally one of my parents remembered I was... somewhere, and called me in to prove I was still safe. In hindsight it's weird that the grass was so tall at sheering time, as that is done in early summer so the fleece can grow out enough to keep them warm for winter. But sheep eat the grass so short that nothing is left for cows, and ranchers tend to hate them. This of course is me looking back more than 70 years, not something that made any kind of impression on my carefree mind, not like hiding in the grass, or looking for butterflies or whatever other bugs that might have been hiding next to me in the grass, or even picking a stalk to see what it could do or how it came apart.

I wasn't allowed back there by myself, being so young, so sheering time took on a unique importance. Other things made much less impact. I'm sure there must have been a barn of some sort, as I kind of mentally place it as a backdrop to the sheering activity. But having a mental picture of it? I can picture the inside of a barn, without being able to swear whether it was ours or one belonging to the neighbors we kids visited with fairly often. It may well be overlaid with TV and movie images with the inside of barns as sets. There was hay up on the overhead platform, and a wooden ladder nailed to a hefty post. I could climb it easily, but transferring to the hayloft itself meant letting go of the ladder, a new thing at a young age.  I had to do it just to show that I could be just as brave and able as my older brother. He would tease me unmercifully if I didn't. So of course Mom decided it was too dangerous and I should stop climbing it. Somehow that made what I had been doing because everybody else did it into something scary, and made me doubt myself and whether I could safely do it. Still, I never did fall, and the views from up high and the games we could invent filled some otherwise boring days.

By the time I was five, my attention was drawn to the windmill tower on the property, down lower in the trees. It was just there and always had been in my existence, but once I really looked at it, I saw all the triangles it was made out of and figured out how safe it would be to climb. All I had to do was move and refasten one limb at a time and I'd be perfectly safe. One foot, the other foot, one arm, the other arm. The triangles got smaller and smaller as I rose, but the principle was the same. It was a fantastic adventure, written about here way back on July 28, 2011. It had been printed elsewhere while I was still getting comfortable with writing things to be read - actually read!!! - and finally brought over to my own blog to keep. It's title is "Reclaimed 3: Two Towers, Part 1. "

I bring it back as a different view of that day because I was a bit different when I wrote it, and did so then in large part because it contrasted with "Two Towers, Part 2." Today the climb contrasts with the hayloft ladder. Once again Mom freaked out, just much more so since I got much higher this time to the point where she couldn't even find me up above the tree line. After debating whether I could stay up there until my parents quit calling and went away, never knowing just where I'd been, I reluctantly decided that would never happen but only make what trouble I was in worse. Announcing myself, I climbed back down, one limb moving at a time, nothing else letting go until the previous piece of me was secure. I never was scared, never regretted doing it, and Mom never succeeded in making me feel scared for what I'd done. She was doing that adequately by and for herself. I gloried in that cllimb! I still do. What she did succeed in was getting me to promise never to climb it ever again! I never did break that promise.... Darn it! She made me unsure about hayloft ladders, but never the windmill tower.

Perhaps she should have left well enough alone, and me able to climb, since my next self-taught skill was learning how striker matches worked... in singles and multiples... right behind the house... in a pile of dry leaves. I scared myself just fine that time, but got the fire out before any real damage was done. I smuggled the box of matches back to where they were supposed to be without getting caught. I also had the presence of mind to bury the black leaves under brown ones to hide the rest of the evidence. I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has worn out by now anyway, so you have my full confession written down for the very first time.

In addition to the sheep, we had a chicken coop. It wasn't back up on the hill, but down on the level with the cabins, just back a bit behind them. I remember most clearly the part where it was time to eat one. Whichever parent was to dispatch one pulled it out by the feet, held it down with its head extended, and brought down the hatchet. Then the fun began, this headless feather-shedding thing flopping all around, this way and that, taking what felt like a full minute to die. My parents kept telling us it was dead the second its head came off, that all this wild activity was "just its nerves". I'm not sure whether we believed that then, but we tried to take comfort that it wasn't in pain. The rest of food prep details are fuzzy, but I recall dunking the bird in (hot?) water to help get the feathers off. I also recall spending what seemed like hours anyway removing them. We must not have had chickens long, because I also recall visiting a neighbor a few miles away and waiting while she "candled" eggs so Mom could buy them. I couldn't tell how she did it, perhaps because I had a bad angle for watching, but when the eggs got home none of them had the blob of blood that said they were fertilized and ready to become a chick instead of breakfast.

There were two more things involving animals, though not necessarily farm animals. There was a fairly long hike from the house up the hill to where the school bus picked us up. Something drew my attention to a pile of brush in the woods next to the road a bit more than halfway there. I wasn't in a hurry, nor was my brother along, so it must have been just an errand up to get the mail, also at the entrance to the property. There was a litter of new kittens in a pile under the brush, eyes still closed, happy to stay put rather than run away from those two small hands reaching in, gently petting them, picking them up for a cuddle and putting them back. Mom was nowhere around, likely hunting so she had milk to feed them. Eventually I went on my way, keeping the secret of what was under the brush pile. As always, had I told anybody, I would have been forbidden from doing at again. They were there the next day, and the next, so it was a total shock when they'd been moved. I never saw them again, not as kittens, not as wild cats doing rodent cleanup. But for years afterwards, any time I saw a brush pile, I'd wonder about what kittens might be hiding under it, sure that there must be some somewhere.

The other animal was memorable both for it's size and for the tragedy almost breaking my heart. A pine snake came visiting. A huge one, possibly 6 feet long and as thick as the 4x4 my dad used to kill it. They are harmless, except to rats or perhaps your pet cat, but we didn't have a pet cat back then. What we did have were customers on the resort part of the property, and they noticed the snake. How could they not? Just because many people fear them, and that's bad for business, the snake had to go away, and in a way that reassured everybody it would never return.  It could so easily been put in a gunnysack, into the car, and driven a few miles away to go about its business of rodent control. I didn't fear it, for two reasons: there are no poisonous snakes in that part of Minnesota, and my brother and I were well acquainted with chasing and occasionally catching garter snakes. We'd never been told to fear snakes. Our parents didn't seem afraid of it, but while they were intent on my Dad doing his grim job of pounding it over and over,  a crowd had gathered to watch, with nobody telling them to stay back for safety. Eventually it quit moving, and once the curious had examined it, the body was disposed of. I'm not sure I ever forgave that unneeded brutality. 

The last memory involves no animals. I got to drive a tractor! If memory serves, I was way too small to have had any sane person put me up in the seat by myself, tell me where to put my feet (I assume there was a clutch as well as the gas pedal) and how to move them. Yet there I was, getting it moving, steering it to avoid knocking over the swing set, and all too quickly asking how did I stop this very intimidating piece of machinery. Once again I did it to show big brother I was just as good as he was since he'd just driven it, but this time I also knew it was sheer luck that I did as well as I had and didn't do any damage. I never drove anything again until high school driver's ed, and after than not until I was married and had my first kid. Oddly enough I love driving now, and just in my working career as an IC courier over 29 years clocked over 2 million miles. (I kept track for tax purposes.)

Return to The Park

A friend of mine had some time yesterday morning and accepted my offer to revisit the park. She's only been to the version on the WI side of the river, despite living in MN. In addition she'd never seen either trilliums or Jacks in the pulpit. We headed out early, anticipating unseasonal heat later in the day. This time, not being a semi-holiday weekend but early on a weekday, the sole handicap parking spot was available. While I no longer qualify, she does, so the tunnel path was right next to the car. This time she was ahead of me, shooting things which caught her unique eye, like a mossy rock standing up in a tiny stream bed, its moss coat in two distinct colors, oddly green in the middle with a vertical circle of orange surrounding it.  I shot it myself, but the photo which resulted didn't say anything to me. OK, odd, but not my idea of special. Movin' on.

I had stopped a bit earlier to video the stream just before it had funneled into the tunnel under the highway, its gentle current leaving reflective ripples. Not only did I have to fight with highway noise overhead, but my friend was excitedly pointing out a variety of things which caught her eye. I'm guessing she hasn't tried to replay video with a specific soundtrack before, and I didn't think it would be all that useful to ask for silence. Besides she was having a good time for her first visit, and I'd been there before. With my permit sticker, I could return any time.

She found, while waiting for me, what I'd missed the day before, however. Embedded in the nook of a twisty old debarked and thoroughly insect-drilled stump on the highway bank was a clump of mushrooms. The whole clump would have fit in a hand, but we weren't going to disturb it.

 She was gung-ho to continue straight on the path to see what's next. I wasn't. First, what's next was all vertical. This was the gorge the river had carved over millennia, after all. I knew we were both fairly low on energy for ambitious hikes, even with frequent stops to take photos, and the path was a bit too full of raised tree roots. The distractions of looking way ahead at the next thing left both of us open to tripping, possibly needing to leave before even seeing what I'd brought her to see. She'd already passed the turnoff we needed to take, where three feet in were the jack in the pulpits. I called her back.

There they were, same as they' been. But this time, after gently showing her the unique shape of the plant, I got her to hold the big leaf out of the way so I could get a shot of what was mostly a hidden blur before when both my hands were managing the camera. The "Jack" was perfectly visible in one of the same pair from the day before, and now they had parted slightly to give me the perfect angle.

After we finished I asked her did she want me to do the same for her to get a shot. A bit puzzled, she asked me, "But where is the flower?" I explained she'd just been holding the big leaf to the side so we could both see the flower. That was the big show. She was enlightened, just not impressed. A whole hillside of trilliums awaited her and off she went, happily spending about ten minutes, until her body said enough already.

On her way she found still another Jack in the pulpit, and as I was seeing if I could get an angle on that, (nope) I heard her mention pink trilliums. Pink?

My first thought was she'd fond a different pink flower, much pinker than what she really had found, as it turned out, as well as smaller and different number pf petals. I'd passed some minutes earlier and taken a shot. But this wasn't what had caught her eye.

The day before everything blooming in that large patch was white. Not a hint of pink anywhere. I caught up to her, and started to find them.

There they were, one here, one there, sparsely sprinkled among the white. Standing in place, I could see hundreds of white ones, and about a dozen pink. I could tell research was needed, but later discovered Google is kind of iffy with information. These might be how they start, blending in to the white around them as they age. But does "as they age" mean between morning and afternoon? Or it might be a mixed patch. But why no pink ones the previous afternoon's visit? I'll have to ask the horticulturist in the booth where you pay for permits, as she'd already directed me to the tunnel and which way to turn on the other side a few days before to find the trilliums. She wasn't in yet, and we needed to leave.

On our way out, I stopped at the far end of the tunnel for a shot of the water. It was a different sky from the day before, a different sun angle,  and a whole different photo. So why not?

A Transplant Sucess

Many years ago I tried a flower I'd never heard of before to go in the home garden: balloon flowers.  Go look them up. You'll find they grow about ten inches tall. They also come in multiple colors.  My research was wrong on both points, or at least for what I bought, and not at all helpful for replacing it. 

It's not that anything happened to the original plant. Unless, that is, you count freely reproducing as something happening to it.  One plant became a clump, added an adjacent clump, became a third clump in the middle of a former garden path, the one that cuts across the corner of the "L" so we don't have to walk down the driveway to get into the rest of the yard. With that path blocked, we stopped using it, and it became more blocked, filling with lily of the valley, hostas, coneflowers,  small volunteer burning bushes,  daylilies, columbine (the small native red/yellow ones), thistles, dandelions, violets, and grass. I'm sure I missed a few plants in there, along with a multitude of baby trees. It's not even that large a path! Plus it was covered with square paving blocks!

Still, the major obstacle was the balloon flower. We kind of hated to step on it. Stepping over it wasn't an option. Remember my research showed it was maybe a foot tall?  Try over 5 feet! And colors - plural - was a light pastel blue. No plural. Just blue, so pastel it shows in pictures as more white. The shape of the flowers is as described, where the bud petals stick together along the seams, puffed out in a balloon, a bit smaller than a ping pong ball, and with some corners. Then they suddenly separate into a familiar flower shape.

This is part of a mature clump in front of the former house, the original one. The siding is medium blue, making the flowers look white. This was shot years ago before I had the ability to enhance colors on my computer. You can see the heaviness of the tall stems leaves them vulnerable to tilting and breaking, but they do bloom prolifically once established. Note down in the right bottom corner is a yellowish bud from a foreground daylily, an old-fashioned tall one, not the short ones like Stella D'Oro.

You can easily imagine the challenge stepping "over" one of these would present.

I wanted some in the new garden after we moved back north. I couldn't find a duplicate. This is where selling your old house to a son comes in handy. He's been a willing provider of sections of anything I wanted from 35-year-old gardens. Clear the path by digging out that balloon flower? Sure!

So we watered everything before a major digging spree, this one plant especially. It turns out they have a lonnnnng tap root. Some of that got left in the ground, so I'm a bit curious how stubborn it will be about returning. But I got a section, top cut way back, root about a foot long. This made it interesting because we're not supposed to dig deep holes here, per the lease. Lots of infrastructure, electric, gas, water and sewer, crosses unmarked underground. They don't tell us where. Since it's technically private property and I'm not an owner but a renter, I'm not entitled to the information. It's why so many gardens here are raised beds. So I dug carefully, wider than deep, and slanted the root - a bit shorter than when I received it - at about a 45 degree angle, and buried it by putting a circle of rocks around it and filling an extra 3 inches of dirt over the top.

Fingers crossed.

It survived its first summer. I'd left the stems about a foot long, giving the roots less work to do to nourish the top, and before frost it produced two balloons. Yeee-haaaa!

So, spring is here. All over, things are beginning to leaf out or sprout up. The first blooms are showing, except those chopped off or dug up by our abundance of rabbits and squirrels. The red peony which came with the property is as tall as its cage already, and tiny buds are showing. It's next to the balloon flower, which now has it's own cage, 4 foot tall above the ground. Winds here are fierce so they'll need protection.

I've been watching the ground daily, looking for signs that the balloon flower survived winter as well.

Finally, one shoot! Then two!  Paul came over to help with more planting over the weekend, and took a close look, gently brushing dirt aside to show more tiny buds. We counted 7. The next day I found 9. Now perhaps 11. It's getting watered daily in this heat, and more tiny hopefuls poke up. The above photo is from this morning, before today's watering, and the ground is splitting even more. I get a kick out of green on top of purple stems where first was a whitish bitty bump. Looking down on these you can't tell the first two are 3 inches tall.

There is a paved path through the yard so folks on our block can easily access the community center / mail boxes on the middle street. These face it so we can all watch them grow, along with my circle garden and the lilies in the back which were just planted after starting indoors, then hardened on the porch inside mesh walls.

Right now the bleeding heart, also a legacy plant from previous owners, has been doing a bang-up job of showing off for everybody. The above photo is about a third of the plant, since I can't get far enough away to fit it all in the frame. In a couple months it will have disappeared back into the ground, if it's on the same schedule as last year, but the lilies will be taking over. And weeds.

Wind straight off the lake shoots up that corridor between back yards, so we'll have to see how those hold up and whether we need cages next year.

A Walk InThe State Park

I say that like there's only one.  If we're talking within ten miles, that's correct. It's along the St. Croix River just north of Taylors Falls. I drive past/through it every time I head to Wisconsin. Now that we're permanently here, and the trilliums are in bloom and visible with a tiny bit of risk from the highway while driving, I decided to get the annual car sticker for the car. I've been passing those triliums for years and never stopped with a camera. The road is too fast. There's no shoulder. It's too far to walk from safe parking. I didn't know yet that there was a tunnel from inside the park under the highway to a very walkable path where they grow in a huge patch.

It's not a sitable path, not level because it's the river bluff, but it's doable. If it were sitable... OK, scratch that. If I were still somebody who could sit on the earth and get up again without an assist, there would have been a whole lot more pictures taken, especially for the surprise at the end. But I was relegated to shooting downward, or bending over and holding the camera where I thought it was pointing to the right place - it wasn't:  the the important part was cut out - there would be better pictures.  But following is what it was, this afternoon, as good as I could do.

First there were a ton of violets along the ground.

Then the usual supply of fallen, mossy logs gently rotting away to renew the soil.

The opening to the tunnel has a small stream running through it, of course, because of the bluff. Low flow and minimal breeze lent themselves to perfect reflections of sky and canopy.

Then trilliums,

                                        and trilliums,

And trilliums, smothering the hillside, the path climbing up through the middle. Or perhaps I should say  one of the paths, as there was a split. One could choose to turn to the side for the gentle climb through trilliums, or a steeper climb up to ... well, I can't say to what except for seeing a wooden bridge because I didn't take it.

It had been a long day on my feet, since back home Paul and I were working on the south garden bed. There were still weeds to be pulled, plants to be sorted and organized, with holes to be dug so lilies which had finally sprouted cold be planted to replace those the squirrels had eaten last fall or the bunnies munched down to nubs this spring, then watered, then mulched, and watered once again once I finish this. Just say I was really footsore, especially after taking 64 shots of the trilliums. 

I know, right?

As I turned to head home I almost missed the surprise, back near where the path rejoined when I retraced my path heading downhill.

It started out looking fairly ordinary. I'd been looking at three leaf plants for a while now. I could easily have walked right past. Something stopped me. Kind of like a tickle in the brain.

Immediately adjacent were more of the same, except what had almost been hiding was more pronounced. Jack in the pulpits!!! Or was this duo Jacks in the pulpit? This pair was fun because they were touching each other but facing opposite directions. One jack barely shows, there if you know where to look. I tried one more time to get something showing the Jack more plainly.

Instead I got this. I apologize for the blur, but the fat fuzzy thing under the dark striped curl of leaf, a bit lighter then the darkest green and darker than the lightest green, is the Jack sticking up. Once I got home to get a large view, part of me wanted to  go back. but my feet were defiant.  I may try again tomorrow. 

Or not.

I'll have to ask my feet. Maybe 64 tries with them will get me a few good shots.




 

Are You Eating Tires Too?

 I bet you thought that was a totally silly question, that only an idiot  - or one of those morons filming themselves on camera doing stupid stuff just to get attention - would even give it a try. Come to think of it though, not much difference between the two categories. They probably are eating tires, too, but then, so are we.

We haven't studied it - yet - here in the US. But Switzerland has. And the answer they found is pretty much everybody has been eating, drinking, even breathing, tires. Yep, rubber automotive tires.

The thing is, what probably everybody knows without considering the implications, is that tires aren't just rubber. They get vulcanized for strength and longevity of use.  You may have thought of that as mostly a heating process, but it involves a lot of additives as well. We expect a lot of our tires, like 60,000 road miles of abuse before the steel belts show. Of course we almost never let them get that low on tread since they're simply not safe to drive well before then, but most of us hate to spend money until we absolutely have to do so. We pop in our cars, turn the key, and expect to go smoothly to wherever we want... for nearly forever. 

Manufacturers try to keep us happy by selling tires that perform as close to reasonable expectations as possible. They know we'll be back for more. Where we buy them will depend on how the last set worked for us. So stuff gets added to the rubber, things like DPG, 6-PPD, and 6-PPD-quinone.

Yeah, I have no clue what those are either, nor what precisely they do for tire longevity and performance.  But what is known is that those particular chemicals are toxic to mammals. You know, what we humans also are.  In studies on rodents, they have found that these additives lead to decreased fertility in males and have neurotoxic and neuroinflammatory effects. They haven't been studied for their effects on humans yet. After all, who would volunteer? "Hey guys, we know these things are poisonous to rats, but who wants to give them a try and report back what your symptoms are?"

Ri-i-i-ight. Remember they haven't been studied in humans on purpose. But the thing is, humans have been eating them. In Switzerland they've started studying them, finding them in the food supply - and in the air - and in the water, including high mountain lakes.

Go back to the tires and that inconvenient part about them needing to be replaced. The rubber wears off in microscopic bits with use. It gets in the air, on the ground, in the water. It lands on fruits and vegetables, gets taken up in plant roots, gets inhaled by whatever breathes. They're even in pristine (?) mountain lakes and rivers. They're everywhere.

Yummy!

Now alerted, while scientists have commenced to study how it's affecting us - though I'd imagine the first hurdle is separating out those rare people who may not have been exposed, off in some isolated corner of the world where tires are not used - we have to start thinking about how to minimize exposure. One way might be to no longer put those chemicals in rubber, but what happens to our tires then? Will they start falling apart on us? And under what conditions?

We could stop driving as a species. Uhh, camels, anybody? Horses and wooden-wheeled buggies? Lay rail everywhere and we have to walk all those places not on the lines? Sure, you bet, right away. It  could be great for the environment too,  but it just won't happen.

Those of us who don't bother to wash off our produce will have to start since the chemicals have been found on them. But as they're already in many of them it's only a tiny partial solution.

We could change our driving habits immediately, not by totally quitting but by doing it in a more tire friendly way. Fast starts and stops just make it worse. Ever heard the expression "lay rubber"? It's literal. You've seen the black streaks on the road. People get impatient, even angry, or their minds wander and they're surprised by that sudden reason to stop immediately running out right in front of the car. So we need to do better by giving ourselves more time to get where we're going, and consistently paying attention to all around us. (Put the damn phones down!)

Those are the kinds of things we could choose to do just for ourselves, and get twice the benefit from doing so. Meanwhile, it's a good thing that somebody's scientists are studying the problems to find out how much harm all that rubber is doing inside us. Our country's scientists won't be, or not soon.

But it's a pretty good bet we all are breathing, eating, and drinking rubber tires.

I'll take mine ala-mode please. How about a sprinkle of cinnamon?

His Best In Four Years!!!!

 Yesterday was the day we were waiting for. Both of us were a bit sceptical of how good the results would be, and tried not to be too confident ahead of time. After all, the last time we did this it not only hadn't been great, it turned into more problem than cure.

Yesterday was the day his back's pain interrupter was turned on. In preparation he's been going easy on his limited prescription of Percoset so he'd have some left for his 100 plus miles in the car. We discussed him having one before the ride to Minneapolis, but decided we didn't want any interference with his ability to tell how much pain relief he needed. If necessary he could take one on the way home.

His appointment started with the surgical staff inspecting his incisions for signs of healing or possible infection. He passed, and even better doesn't need to come back for stitches removal since they'll dissolve internally and let the outside bits drop away.

After they left, the tech from Medtronic came and spent over an hour with us. First he connected his computer up to Steve's now-internal mechanism. Wi-Fi is wonderful. It also means that like me, Steve now has to avoid magnetic scanners like those for security or in MRIs. That would reset the programming inside his body, which is what the next half hour was spent setting up, making a series of different programs for different uses. As each lead was powered Steve reported when he could feel the electricity and how far in which direction, while the tech asked him to move in different directions or in different movements like standing up or sitting.

The rest of the time was spent in showing how the chargers, programming tech, and nest of cords we were taking home and would be needing to use would work. The procedure took long enough that Steve needed to excuse himself for a restroom break, and reported when he returned that the walk produced no pain whatsoever! It was working!  

The one thing he did notice was that the more he needed the pain relief, the more he felt the electricity going through his body. What this means is that this system is smart tech, sensing need and supplying the right amount of relief, then backing off when not needed again. This resulted in the ride home providing a lot of tingling... instead of pain! We both still wince when a tire hits a bump or hole, but that's habit. Steve felt so well that he decided we'd head out to his current favorite restaurant and have a nice late lunch. His optimism led to a bit of over-reach, using muscles too long ignored, and exhausting him. PT is definitely going to be needed!

It also meant that the implant was working overtime once he sat in his recliner, and lying down didn't help at all. So we made what we hope is both first and last call to the tech guy, who is both smart and experienced enough to expect that kind of thing. He helped Steve change the power level to a lower point where it no longer was too strong but still knocked out the pain. The new plan is to power it back up when he's active, and back down for sleep.

This morning when he came out to the family room he was delighted to announce he'd just had the best sleep he's had in years, and several times today he's announced to others he's not felt this good in four years!

Next comes fishing !!!!!!!

From April Showers....

It's been nice to get some of them this spring. We've been watching the earliest garden plants spring up, as well as a lawn which will soon require mowing. The mowing won't be my idea, but part of the lease requirements as this place apparently is inhabited by people who like to pretend they live on a golf course green. Or that's what I guess anyway, since I haven't actually been rude enough to ask any of them. Yet.
Scillas pop up first. For some reason the rabbits and squirrels don't feast on either tops or bulbs. In a few years these will go from isolated plants to ground cover - inside official garden boundaries of course. They die back early in the season, leaving lots of room for other flowers.

A rainy April means a bumper crop on the outside of the concrete block walls as well, this time in moss. Some will get knocked off either from drying out or careless lawn mowing. Since I pay somebody else to mow, I try not to complain. It'll return when conditions are right.

With luck you'll also see early crocus and the beginnings of the rhubarb patch.

Unfortunately for the crocus - more so for those of us who like to enjoy them, the rabbits also like fresh spring greens/yellows/whites/purples. Many of those bulbs were harvested by squirrels in the fall, and what survived got their tops nibbled off. The bottom picture of the two shows two plants, which you may not have noticed, as the one on the left proved especially delicious. Of course the rhubarb was never in danger from any of the local critters with more than two feet. By now it's much bigger and we're starting to eat it.

Many of the daffodils failed to thrive over the winter, just rotting in the ground, and a few are simply slow in coming. Others had their tops cropped before buds could form. Fortunately, my absolute favorites popped up in a clump of four - after planting over twenty, of course! In the space of a week the blossoms go from cream and yellow to white and orange, which they finally arrived at today.

                         Happy May Day!

These were not the only surprises outside this morning. One of the good ones was seeing the Bleeding Heart going overnight from a tight clump of lacy stems of green to  draping rows of blossoms, the first stamens starting to turn white.

Last year I didn't get to them with a camera in time, due to the move delays, and missed the best part.

I also didn't get the hydrangeas pruned back at all, nor had the previous owners for at least a couple years, so a major cutting happened last fall. I've been anxiously waiting for indications that I did it right. Buds yet? No buds. How about now? Nope. Today? See for yourself:

In another few days I should be able to sort out the maple trees growing inside through and between the branches and get rid of those... for this year. I'm sure more helicoptor seeds landed last summer for another year's sprouting. One I partly got rid of last fall was the tallest thing in the north garden bed. It's short, not gone. Not yet anyway.

Of course not all surprises were good ones. My lilies have been sprouting, with more inside waiting for being ready to transplant into the garden to make up for squirrels. But while the squirrels are ignoring them, the bunnies have taken a liking to the leaves and buds.

Have I mentioned I've ordered a pair of live traps, to be delivered Saturday? I'm already baiting the area they'll get set in with fresh fruits and veggies the rabbits are supposed to prefer. I figure a couple days of watching to see what their favorites are will both inform me and reassure them that here is a reliable feast for dependable safe munching. I figure about a 4 mile drive for release should work well enough.  I know where several eagle's nests are.

Bair Hugger

No that's not a typo, or at least not mine.  It may have started that way. The logo is a blue bear silhouette with a smaller white bear cut-out, the young one getting a hug from the older.

Steve is home now recovering from his surgery. Our alarms were set for 3 AM. We were told be be there by 5:30, and there was a lot of prep ahead of time, including two showers with special soap to kill germs on the skin prior to the procedure. I got to rub it in all over his back, since that's where they operated, and he - like most of us - can't truly wash his own back. Since surgery was at the U of M hospital system in Minneapolis, and it was raining, dark, and the route contained road construction, the alarm time seemed sensible. 

What they "forgot" to tell us was that the building was locked until 5:30. We had the best luck on all parts of our route, arrived half an hour early, and had the rare privilege of standing around in a cold breeze in the dark waiting to the doors to unlock. Of course we were both cold. So were the other five people who hadn't gotten the useful version of arrival time requirements. But following this is where Steve lucked out and I didn't.

Unless you've not been to get surgery you know the silly paper gowns they hand out for .... modesty? They certainly don't do much else. Modest can even be iffy. But you come in a  bit chilled, the operating theater and your room are a bit cold, and most times the best you can hope for is a thoughtful nurse who will pile several heated but thin blankets on you. 

They never quite do the job, cooling down quickly. Nurses stay busy with many tasks and blankets are not the top of their list, even if they are yours.

Steve got no extra blankets, just a paper gown, and a pair of socks to keep him from slipping and falling while walking on the floor. There was a pillow in a weird place, designed to keep a sore back in the most awkward, painful position available. His bed was more slanted chair than bed, so the pillow was unable to be pushed aside, and the footrest was set at an angle where he had to keep squirming to keep from sliding off to the floor. There was also this odd little inset in his gown.  When he held it up to show me, neither of us could figure why they'd put a cup holder in a paper hospital gown in a surgical unit where beverages had been banned for hours. How cruel can you get?

Knowing he'd be much more comfortable with his feet up, but unable to figure out how it worked, I wandered down to the nurses' station to request a bit of help. As soon as she fixed his footrest she reached over to the wall and pulled a flexible hose off  the Bair Hugger. It plugged into that weird "cup holder" which of course wasn't a cup holder, and a flick of a switch turned on a lovely stream of warm air that piled out of the Bair Hugger and floated around inside his gown across the skin, bring welcomed heat to every inch he could get under that gown, lasting until he was wheeled away to surgery. AHAH! Hence the "air" instead of "ear" or even"are". 3M came up with a good name for this gizmo.

Suddenly he was warm and snug, and I was a wee bit jealous. Then again, I didn't have to go through surgery while they didn't quite put one under so they can still talk to him about the placements of the electrodes they were implanting. Of course, in the event, he got stubborn and refused to wake up enough to respond to them, giving them what I'm sure was a polite version of "Go *** yourselves." Or if not, they didn't bother me with details while chuckling over the story. After all, everybody knows you can't be legally responsible for whatever happens under the influence of anesthesia. It's why you can't sign documents, or drive, or ... whatever.

He goes back in a week to get the planted electrodes charged up from the new battery. This is much more sophisticated than the one that needed to be removed. The electrodes each have sensors which tell some other part how much current is going through them and whether it's right in the Goldilocks zone, too much (like the shocks from the first one), or too little and effectively useless. In the meantime he's getting lots of sleep today, and has a handful of good pain pills to last him till the gizmo gets officially turned on. They hand out antibiotics as well to prevent infections, and order him to basically not move his back. No twisting, bending, or lifting. If it drops to the floor it stays there until - guess who? - gets to go pick it up. If it's off to the side, guess who fetches it? If it's heavy... well, it just might stay wherever it is till next year!

Meanwhile we're both catching up on sleep. Or he is anyway. I'm getting a lot of phone calls, and surprisingly they're not all about how he's doing. The last one was about the solar panels on the house we sold. And no, if anyone else cares to know too, the bird guards around them didn't do much good. Pigeons are pretty smart critters as well as messy. By now eggs should be rolling off the roof and breaking all over the ground again. Apparently nest building under solar panels just isn't a pigeon's strong point!

Not my problem any more.

What Do You Call....?

Scientists are excavating fossils from a site in Big Bend National Park. The bones are huge and so was the dinosaur, one of the long necked variety. It is believed to be the largest dinosaur to have existed in North America, certainly appropriate for upholding Texas's reputation for pride in size, and lived in the Cretaceous period, around 69 million years ago.  Similar fossils from this species have been found before in the park, but this is the most complete and well preserved.

It needed a name, of course. So, they picked a very Texas kind of name for the beast:  Alamosaurus!

Imagine how that battle might have gone if one of those was still around. I can just see that huge neck swinging back and forth knocking fighters off the walls. While I doubt somehow it moved vertically I can also visualize it's head pounding down whomping on the fighters to clear the area so it can get back to some peaceful grazing again... supposing it wasn't as arid back then. They haven't said whether it was carnivorous or not, though my uneducated impression is the long neck varieties foraged from the treetops. It comes, of course, from watching "Jurassic Park" repeatedly. I doubt a "Cretaceous Park" would be all that different in general form/function memes. The name just lacks the same punch though.

But "Alamosaurus"?  LOL

On the Edge

As time gets closer, the worries increase. That's Steve's reaction to his scheduled and long awaited surgery coming up. It's close to a year now since we knew he needed it, when the pain interrupter in his back began to fail, first by not sending enough current to the electrode tips to disrupt the spinal signals, and them by sending shocks instead. Not only was each shock painful in itself, but the resulting jerks which each caused created even more pain in his back. We had to totally stop charging it, which still gave it about two days to lose all power.

There was a combination of efforts to assist him. First was a pain specialist who worked with him to prescribe opiates to ease the pain, which did a pretty fair job until she moved her office far enough away that the ride in the car to visits became their own torture. Arrangements to switch pain control to his primary care doc resulted in a lesser medication being prescribed for him, one which both of us have experience with and find about as useful for pain as a sugar cube. So after discussing it, we both decided to add ibuprofin back into his regimen. He's not actually supposed to be taking it, but we make sure it is combined with a meal to minimize digestive issues.

Concurrent with that were visits with back specialists who understand the various problems his back has, the failed implanted equipment, and the need to remove and replace it with a different version (brand) without quite the same history. Nearly a year later, the roadblocks to getting surgery for a "non-life-threatening" condition are finally surmounted. Those roadblocks included having both surgeons getting their schedules together, plan their strategy of one removing the old while the other placing the new, in as close to a simultaneous procedure for each electrode as possible, and finally, waiting ... and waiting ... and waiting for the shortage of sterile IV fluid to get him through the surgery to abate, after hurricane destruction of the factories. The diminished supply had to be held for truly life-threatening emergencies. Quality of life, or lack thereof, was not top of the list. As a result his inactivity resulted in its own set of health issues, one of the results being he now uses a walker to get around without fear of falling from lack of strength or balance.

One other thing that gave some relief, but only when used, meaning almost constant use, was his heating / vibrating "vest", which lets his back muscles relax somewhat. It doesn't actually cure the pain but keeps him from reacting to make it worse by tensing them. It needs standard household current to work, not a plug from the car battery, so basically he's become housebound. He orders groceries online and I drive to pick them up. I now do the same for my own, so it works out well enough... except for wear and tear on my shoulder, but that's another story, and I'm making my own adaptions.

Steve had to travel down to Minneapolis a few times, quite a trip in the car even if I manage to avoid every pothole and manhole-cover divot on the way. Unfortunately, I don't quite manage that. The surgery will be at the U of M hospitals, and the pre-surgical exams are held there. At least we know the route quite well now, which will be a good thing at 5AM, or what I refer to as O-Dark-Thirty. Yes, I know that's the wrong phrase for the time, but reflects what it will feel like when we have to wake to start the involved home pre-op process before we go. Plus it's a catchy phrase, even if I never saw the movie.

As long as it has taken, a bad as the pain has been, as frustrating as the many setbacks have been, Friday looms with oversized importance. It HAS TO work!!! Nothing can go wrong, the pain finally has to leave, and life has to change for the better. So of course Steve worries about it. 

Wouldn't you? Flip a coin, heads it works and he can start to resume a normal life, tails and the worst imaginable happens. There no longer seems a middle ground option. It no longer is maybe it won't be that effective, it's now thinking something will go wrong and he'll be paralyzed... or worse.

One practical thing we both agree on, because we've done it before but the documents are in Arizona, is both of us redoing our living wills. Before Friday! Since we first did them, things have changed, including geography, closeness to family, marital status... and the ravages of getting older and the realities of living with them.  What has also changed is the increasing strength of our love and the depth of our appreciation for the other, even in the simple things like me doing something for him that will save him moving his back, or his assisting me to get my arms into sleeves or pulling things down off high shelves because my shoulders won't cooperate. Such little things, yet so important: we work as a team, because we are a team.