Altivo

Saved the best mixed flower pots from the back deck by putting them under timed fluorescent lighting in the garage. As long as I remember to water them lightly a couple of times a week, they should be set to take off when spring arrives. [I hope.]

Last night was the third night in a row that temperatures dipped below freezing. In fact, this morning it was 20°F when I got up at 5 am. We went out to feed horses, cats, and ducks at about 8 am and found a film (sometimes more) of ice on every water bucket, indoors or out. Indeed, the boys' outdoor watering trough had a thin glassy layer of hard ice covered with fallen leaves.

The catalpa trees around the house have been holding onto their leaves for dear life, but this was the last straw for them. The leaves are hanging like limp rags from the branches, and will likely all be on the ground by evening. This event for the catalpas is generally decisive and quick. Often I wake in the morning of a first hard frost to find that all their leaves that were still green and healthy the day before have already dropped to the ground. When I lived in Lansing, Michigan, I rented a small house with several very large catalpas in the front yard. When they jetisoned their leaves, the result was an entire yard knee deep with leaves and all at once. That means winter is imminent.

We will be swapping out ordinary buckets for electric heated ones today. Have to put the floating defroster into the boys' water trough as well. Make sure the duck house has plenty of good straw on the floor, increase the amount of wood shavings in the horses' stalls, make sure the woodpile in the garage is replenished if it is down (it may be OK for now) and clean out the woodstove. Before using that, I have to relocate all my string instruments (guitars, banjos, mandolin, ukuleles, violin) from where the cases have settled over the spring and summer. They are too close to the woodstove and its brick hearth and would be damaged for sure by the heat.

I'm not exactly complaining about any of this, though. Now that I don't have to get up before dawn in order to shower, eat, and start off my 15 mile commute to work in the dark and snow, I find that I don't mind winter nearly as much. Taking care of the animals in the cold is not exactly pleasant, but I love having them and they mostly appreciate what we do so it's worthwhile. (Reminder to self: Asher needs a new stall blanket for this cold weather. Have to order that.)

The truth is, I love having four distinct seasons in my year. The variety in weather and changes in the landscape are fascinating to me. I grew up with that in Michigan, and unlike most of my family, I'm not inclined to move to somewhere that has no clearly identifiable winter. In fact, to my younger brother's credit, I laud the decision by himself and my sister-in-law to build a retirement home in Michigan and live with the shifting seasons. They had spent time in Japan and several homes in the southeastern part of the US where the weather is somewhat milder during the years when he was in the Navy. They still decided to return to Michigan and to the area of Traverse City, where our grandparents last lived.

Here, on the wall behind the woodstove, we have four large ceramic plates depicting the four seasons. Those were painted and fired by my mother when she was taking ceramics classes about 40 years ago. She and my step-father retired to Florida not too many years later, but those plates still hung in her kitchen. Once when I was visiting them she asked if there was anything in the house that I wanted to keep after she was gone, and I asked for those plates. She laughed and said she would put my name on them. What actually happened though is that after Ted passed away, Mom decided to move to live with my older brother in Texas. He went to Florida and helped her pack up or dispose of her house contents and sell the house. And at that time, around 20 years ago, those plates showed up in the mail here, packed in pizza boxes. Fortunately, they survived the trip intact and are mine to cherish now.

They hang on the other side of the stove from my grandmother's cuckoo clock that I loved so much when I was a child. Granny gave that to me while she was still living, saying she couldn't keep it running any more and the local clock shop said they couldn't fix it. But years later, after she was long gone and it had lain in a box in a closet for all that time, my dear husband sneaked it off to a clock shop here in Illinois and they got it running again. I have to wind it twice a day (no eight day movement for that one, it's nearly a century old) but the clock and those plates keep my Mom and Granny alive in my memory still.

Like Jack's beanstalk in some cases (beans, cucumbers) and like a snail in others (peppers, tomatoes.) I think the potatoes are about done, but I need to dig down to make sure.

Here is yesterday's haul of cucumbers:



I do love cucumbers. However, since husband Gary dislikes them, I'm going to have a problem eating this many. I may have to make some pickles. Or feed them to the ducks if they keep producing at this rate.

Not that I'm eager to go back to work Monday, no, not at all. But I've actually gotten a few things done that I needed to do, aside from going to the convention last weekend. Of course, it's never as much as I'd like it to be, but it's progress of a sort.

None of the peas Gary planted have come up. I'm about to dig around in there and see whether they are still there and just didn't sprout, or something managed to dig them out and eat them all. We like snow peas, and the same thing happened last year. Other stuff is coming along nicely, though some spinach had to be planted twice. Several kinds of lettuce and other salad greens, cilantro, chard, and I think two kinds of spinach are now past the seedleaves and making real progress. Apple and pear blossoms are pretty much gone but I can't yet tell whether they set any fruit. I did cut another asparagus stalk yesterday, just the one. Soon there will be enough rhubarb for a pie. Blueberry blossoms are starting to open seriously, and I hope someone is going to be around to pollinate them.

The white trilliums are in full bloom now, right alongside the pink arches of bleeding hearts. This is weird. Normally the trilliums are long gone before the strings of little pink hearts appear. We still have a few stray daffodils and hyacinths, in fact. Hickory and catalpa are holding back their leaves still, but just about everything else is greening up. You might say the oaks are in "pinfeathers" rather than full leaf, but it won't be long now.

For anyone with a clear sky, the Lyrid meteor shower is in progress. It was clear and sunny here all day, but as usual when there's an interesting night sky event, it clouded up right at sunset. ;p

We were watching Gnomeo & Juliet (very funny, see it, plus it has Elton John music and Patrick Stewart as Will Shakespeare) when it happened. New York now has gay marriage. I gather it wasn't any of this pussy foot wimp-out "civil union" stuff like Illinois did either. California, hang your head in shame for dragging your feet for so long.

It's funny. Back in 1973 and 74, when we were just getting into the swing of protests and demonstrations, and really starting to show numbers even though people threw eggs and tomatoes at us (or worse) I don't think we ever thought the movement would come so far in our own lifetimes. Perhaps there is hope that the human race will grow up after all.

Nah, what am I saying. Look at the Middle East, look at Africa... If it ever happens, it's going to take thousands of years still.

Not that I've ever thought gay marriage was a big goal. I've always said that "marriage" is a religious concept, and the state should get out of the marriage business entirely. But I'm rational, moreso than most people in the US I guess. The screaming hypocrisy of people like Newt Gingrich insisting that we have to "defend the sanctity of marriage" when none of his legal marriages have lasted as long as my same sex partnership just cried out for this. And now we are seeing it. As the big states go, so will the rest, even the holdouts like Kentucky and West Virginia. If necessary, the federal courts will force it on them, just as they did with interracial marriages.

If only we could get a decent national health care plan instead of this abomination congress has dumped on us, I'd be happy.

On another front, DECnet working perfectly on three machines at the library. It works at home too, except that one pairing is unidirectional. It has to be a configuration issue. A can connect to B or C, B can connect to A or C, C can connect to A but not to B. Makes no sense, but I can't find the flaw. Even putting the configuration files from one site alongside those from the other doesn't reveal the issue.

Fireflies have appeared. Flashing their little green lights at us through the glass, making what looks like Morse code until you try to read it and it comes out in Japanese or something. Catalpa trees flowered and within just a couple of days dropped everything in the wind and rain. Sad. Those are one of my most favorite flowers. They smell so nice and look so tropical.

Busy day, soggy weekend predicted.

There's got to be a big lesson in that silly business about United Airlines "rumored" bankruptcy causing its stock to tank, losing (undoubtedly) millions of dollars for investors. But when the truth comes out someday, will we learn that it was a deliberate manipulation? Someone better look and see just who was shortselling like crazy as the stock went down in flames...

So the GOP is all up in arms about Obama's statement that "you can't put lipstick on a pig" but of course, the barrage of screechy negative ads emanating from their general vicinity doesn't exist.

Face it folks, the US economy is in the crapper, and it wasn't 9/11 that did it, but rather the idiotic monetary policies that started during the Reagan administration. It's time to raise interest rates back up to where they belong even if the corporations scream bloody murder because they can't finance their executive jets and thousand dollar a plate luncheons any more.

Went to the garden to check whether more zucchini had inflated overnight. None had, but the pole beans are coming in with a vengeance. I hadn't taken a container with me (who needs a bucket to carry a footlong zucchini or two?) so brought back as many beans and snow peas as I could carry in my hands, which was actually quite a lot but didn't exhaust the available supply. Oh, and exactly one okra pod. But I'm sure there'll be more. Had stir fried veggies and rice for supper. *pats tummy*

Amazing. The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, is a serious pest in North America (for those who didn't know about it.) It's a large, handsome looking beetle that is native to east Asia and Japan, where it has natural enemies that keep its population stable and controlled. Once introduced to America, though, it ran wild. Few native species care to eat the beetle, though I've heard rumors that raccoons will dig up the larvae from under lawns and eat them (eewww, no accounting for raccoons' taste, but I knew that.)

Anyway, last week I noticed a large population of these pests on some wild grapevines near the vegetable garden. They eat leaves, leaving only the skeleton of veins behind, so the damage they do is quite apparent. I started looking around, and sure enough, they have attacked our blueberry bushes and some of the apple trees. They are noted for their resistance to pesticides, but I don't use chemical pesticides anyway. The larvae (and thus the adult beetles) can be exterminated from an area over a period of several years by applications of a bacteria spore to the soil. Like BT on most moths and butterflies, this bacteria causes the larval stage to die, but takes years to establish itself well in the soil. Gary went somewhere and came home with a couple of Japanese beetle traps instead.

I checked and found that some garden experts say the traps are ineffective. They catch only a small percentage of the adult beetles, supposedly, while attracting many more to the area. However, today I observed that the beetles are still there and I want to give my squash and tomatoes a chance to live. So I went and got one of the traps and read the rather vague directions for setting it up.

It consists of four vertical plastic vanes at right angles to one another, with an hourglass shaped plastic bag that hangs beneath them. A sticky pad containing fruit and floral fragrances and some kind of sex attractant is attached to one of the vanes just at the bottom. The scent draws the beetles in and they crash into the vanes, falling into the plastic bag and presumably not being able to find their way out before they suffocate or dessicate or something.

I peeled the cover off the scent pads and affixed them to the trap, which was already hung on a post about ten feet from the infested grapevines but on the far side of their trellis from the garden itself. This just happened to be upwind of the beetles I had noticed.

I had to duck out of there in a hurry. It was like being mobbed by a swarm of bees. I had no idea there were so many Japanese beetles in the area. They are about the size of bees, so you can hear them flying and see them quite easily, especially when there are hundreds about. They are clumsy fliers and apparently when drunk on sex pheromones, they don't look where they are going. Sure enough, they fly right into the yellow plastic vanes and fall into the plastic bag below. I could see the bottom of the hourglass shape starting to swell even as I watched. Standing back and watching the sky, I could see the flight pattern, just as I'm used to seeing bees fly. That little postage stamp sized patch was drawing bugs in from at least half an acre away. I think I'll have to go out in a short while and tie that bag shut at the hourglass waist. A second bag was included with the trap, and I figure any that I seal into the bag and throw into the trash will at least not escape. Anyone want half a pound of Japanese beetles? No? Speak up before they're all gone...