by jphilo | Sep 5, 2008 | Daily Life
The old crab apple tree outside our bedroom windows has issues. The trunk is half hollow, which worries me, but the ground squirrels think in makes a dandy home. The tree’s leaves get a fungus in the summer, so by August they fall off and the limbs are bare. Then in September, as the weather cools down, it starts blooming again. Hence the photo of ripe crab apples and blossoms on the same tree.
Lately, I’ve been acting a lot like the tree – ready for spring and making every effort to deny the arrival of fall. But with the sun rising later every day and this morning’s chilly temperature, I am forced to acknowledge the arrival of my least favorite season.
Don’t get me wrong. I love fall’s moderate temperatures and beautiful colors. But, the season has the unfortunate habit of coming right before winter. Since winter is cold, dark and long, fall’s position as harbinger of doom makes me dislike it. If it came before spring, I would embrace it instead of resorting to a few tactics that maintain good mental health. Sometimes, I grin and bear it like a true stoic. Sometimes I look on the bright side: fall means Christmas is coming and by then the days are getting longer instead of shorter and it’s only a few short months until spring.
Sometimes, and this is my favorite tactic, I act like the crab apple tree. I jump right past fall and winter and pretend it’s spring. This little ruse only works until first frost for the tree, but I can get away with it until the first sticking snow. And by then, I’m ready to decorate for Christmas and drink cocoa. With the holiday rush and new presents to distract me, I don’t go completely bonkers until well into January. And since Hiram is very patient, he puts up with my winter sulks until spring finally arrives.
One thing has me a little worried, though. After seventeen years of living with the crab apple tree, he plans to cut it down this fall and use the wood for grilling. Once he’s done, just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll hide the axe.
by jphilo | Sep 3, 2008 | Daily Life
Right now my technological skills are as fuzzy as the cute little caterpillar I photographed a few days ago while possessed by a “seize the day” fury. I’m not moving any faster than the caterpillar as I crawl along, trying to figure out why some of you can post comments and view them on the internet while others (including me) can’t. I can see your comments when I get into my web folder, and I can delete nasty ones (something I’ve never had to do) but I can’t add my own comments.
Today, spurred on by my eighty-year-old aunt who has the mistaken impression that I know something about computers, I checked iWeb’s help pages. Then, I followed the instructions they said would fix the problem. This required a lot of calming, cleansing breaths as I tried to remember where I had stored the needed passwords and customer numbers. But I got it done, which is a miracle because I usually forget or lose the passwords and this time I didn’t.
So far, the problem is not fixed on this end, but the instructions said it could take 24 – 48 hours. I’m trying to be patient while I wait. For now, here is my reply to Janet and Mary: I will pass on your birthday greetings to Mom. She’ll be thrilled that you remember her. And Harriet, here’s a reply to the comment you tried to make: My knowledge of computers and Alaskan politics is pretty fuzzy. Don’t look for me to morph into a butterfly any time soon.
by jphilo | Aug 28, 2008 | Daily Life
I’m a bit bleary-eyed this morning. We had an hour long, rootin-tootin midwestern thunderstorm in the middle of the night. The rain was welcome and pretty much guarantees filled ears of sweet corn until the first frost. A short night is a small price to pay for a longer sweet corn season.
Even though I was bleary-eyed, I remembered to take my camera on my walk. I strapped it on and opened the door and there it was! The asparagus fern in the hanging basket outside the kitchen door was sparkling with water droplets. Was I ever glad to have the camera ready! If I’d had to walk clear to the living room for it, the hanging basket might have run away before I could seize the day.
Man, was I pumped when I downloaded the photos – at least until I saw they were technical failures. The colors in the flash shot were too bright and the one without flash was as gloomy and gray as Count Dracula’s castle. But a quick session with the “saturation” slide on my photo software brought the picture to life, so enjoy.
Another technical failure stands in the way for those of you planning to seize the day and make blog comments. Yesterday afternoon, I was unable to reply to your comments using either Firefox and Safari as my browser. I can see your comments when I use my iWeb software to post, but not when I use the internet. Last night there was technical gobble-de-gook at the bottom of each blog page. Today that ‘s gone, but I still can’t get to or add comments.
Email me if you’re having the same problem. I suspect it has something to do with the switch from .mac to MobileMe so it may resolve itself in a few days. If not, I’ll phone Apple after Labor Day. So hang in there, and send me your comments. If you want, I can post them as a blog entry:)
by jphilo | Aug 15, 2008 | Daily Life
The other night, while Anne and I were watching a movie, she whispered, “There’s a deer in the yard.” But there wasn’t just one deer. There were four: a doe and three fawns. I grabbed my camera and took pictures of them without the flash, so the photo is a bit blurry, but I didn’t want to scare them away. All the movement frightened them anyway, and one, two, three, four, the doe and her fawns slipped through an opening in the hedge and disappeared.
Either the doe was a siren last spring or she’s babysitting for the neighbors because the fawns were stair steps in height. They were beautiful and graceful and still sported spots. Hiram and I saw them again, hiding in the neighbor’s spruce trees just west of our driveway, when we walked Thursday morning.
The last time we saw a fawn in the yard was the morning after we moved into this house, back in May of 1991. Mom and Allen camped in the living room and saw a doe and fawn outside the east window when they woke up.
Certainly other does and fawns have meandered across our lawn in the intervening years. Since we saw the triplets I’ve been wondering how many deer families I missed because I forgot to look outside. How many times has busyness blinded me to beauty? For the last few days, as I work around the house, I’ve been reminding myself to look outside.
I haven’t seen anything yet, but someday I will.
by jphilo | Aug 5, 2008 | Daily Life
We got home in the wee hours of the morning today, and I’m already hankering for another vacation.
The laundry room is piled with dirty clothes, and beneath the piles are suspicious puddles that tell me we had water in the basement while we were gone. The clematis trellis which usually leans against the garage blew over and smashed the mums and cone flowers. A limb from one of our ancient silver maples is down, and we can only be thankful since it missed our house. But it’ll be a few days until Hiram can play lumberjack as he’ll be playing farmer with the lawn mower, harvesting what looks to be a pretty good hay crop off the lawn.
Once the laundry is done and the bills are paid, I’m raring to go on the mystery book proposal, as we have a few agents and two editors who want to see it. But there’s a fly in that ointment, too. Our internet service is out for at least five days. You heard me right. Five days – and that’s the hopeful estimate.
So bear with me if you send an email or check the blog. I’ll go to the library or the bakery (though I shouldn’t go to the bakery as I have several vacation pounds to shake loose) every day, but you may not hear from me as quickly as you expect. In the meantime, I should get lots done since I won’t be tempted to check my email in a desperate attempt to avoid writing when I should be writing, which is what I should be doing now.
It’s a good thing we don’t have a hammock, either. Right now I’d give anything to be swinging in one, though I’d have to have a death wish to hang anything from one of our silver maple trees. I guess I’ll go to bed early tonight and dream about the hammocks in Idaho where the humidity is zero and their mosquitoes are rank amateurs compared to the bloodthirsty critters that attacked me when I walked this morning.
It’s great to be home again – I think.
by jphilo | Jul 8, 2008 | Daily Life
If my name was Alexander, I’d be writing a children’s book about the last few no good, very bad days. But since my name’s Jolene and you’re adults, I’ll skip the illustrations and tell you what’s been going on.
I haven’t posted to my blog the past few days because I’ve been working on a big media project, and I hate media projects. Every time I opened anything, even my email, I got a nasty message saying I was dangerously low on disk space. So it was no iPhoto or iWeb until the project was done and burned on a DVD.
The project was hard to burn onto a DVD, and I hate burning DVDs. My daughter helped me and after a while we both hated burning DVDs.
I’ve had two writing projects to edit. They popped up all of the sudden and had very short deadlines. I hate short deadlines. They fluster me so much I sometimes forget to save my editing. Yesterday, I forgot to save some editing and had to redo the whole thing. I hate redoing the whole thing.
The weather’s been really hot and humid for the last few days. I hate humidity. It’s been so miserable, I’ve been running the air conditioners a lot, and I hate air condiditioning.
But last night, my daughter got the DVD burning to work, and I was able to trash the project and free up space on my computer. I finished both editing projects, saved and sent them. And the weather broke in the night so this morning’s walk was glorious. As I walked I thought of a sunrise picture I took a few days back, before the no good, very bad stuff started. I knew I should share it with you since you listened to me whine about the no good, very bad stuff.
I love sunrises. I hope you do, too.
