Snow

I have read that snow predictions around Washington DC are the most difficult in the US.  Just to the west of us, we the Appalachian Mountians.  OK, they aren't the Rockies, but they are high enough to shift storms in subtle ways.  Snowstorms especially can suddenly go north or south 20 miles or hit us when it was not expected.  

The Rockies are tall and wide.  The Appalchians have gaps where just a couple of miles of the storm path can have considerable consequences in very local snowfall.  I suppose that is true about rain too, but rain just soaks into the ground.

2" of rain (or not) doesn't stop traffic.  But 2" of precipitation as snow is 18".  That closes down everything.  

We were predicted to get 3-5".  I got 10" and some places got 12".  I would just shovel off 3-5".  But 10" takes my snowblower.  Hey, I'm not young anymore.

I tested the snowblower last Fall, and it started up just fine.  It better work today, too.  I have loved using it.

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Funny story:  About 10 years ago, we got a foot of snow, so I started shoveling it.  I did about 5' (the driveway is 60' long).  Some teenager came by offerring to shovel it for $50.  I said no (I'm used to doing things myself), and he started to go to the next house.

But then I thought "why did I say no"?  OK, I'm also cheap.  But he was trying hard to earn money, and I have money.  And I was looking at at least 2 hours of miserable work.  I called him to come back and he did.

But all he had was a garden shovel, 😖  I let him use my (very good one).  He did a very good job and I gave him $50.  When I was a teen, I got $5 for a driveway.  Inflation, but probably about the same real cost.

And there is more to the funny story...

That Spring, when prices were low, I bought a top-rated snowblower.  That Winter, we got another 12"+ snowfall.  My Good Neighbor did his driveway with his snowblower and then came to do mine (being helpful).  I got dressed "wintered-up" real fast, ran to the garage, pulled out my new snow-blower and opened the door with a "Ta-Da" pose.

He cracked up.  👍  Then went to help another neighbor.

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Snowblowers aren't free.  And they have some problems.  Sometimes the snow slushes the output chute solid and you have to plunge it clear.  But having one means the difference between 1 hour+ of hard work and 15 minutes plus $1 worth of gas.  I love my snowblower!

Seed Companies

 I mentioned seed companies yesterday and it occurred to me that I should probably mention them.  They are, of course, just my personal preferences but I have had good success with them.  And their catalogues are very informative about each general variety.

Victory Seeds, Territorial Seeds, and Johnny's Selected Seeds, for standard garden veggies.

For excellent Spring bulbs, I go to Brent and Becky's Bulbs.  I've ordered from them for several years.  This year I was amazed to discover that almost all the daffodil bulbs were doubles or even triples.  They could have just snapped them all apart and sold them as singles, but they don't.

For standard, meadow and wildflowers, I go to Prairie Moon Nursery.  They have assorted trays and collections which are reasonably-priced.  And all the transplants arrive in good condition.

And oddly enough, Amazon has some decent tree saplings.  Two years ago, I ordered 3 Sourwood trees, 2 Korean Dogwoods (immune to a disease American dogwoods suffer from), and a Wisteria bush (should get about 12' tall and blooms in Summer.  All seem to be thriving.

Sourwood...  Red leaves and clusters of yellow berries in Fall.

Korean Dogwood...  Spring bloom.

Wisteria...  Not the tree-climbing vine, but a tree-form.  Usually white or purple flowers.  They vary.  Mine should bear purple in Summer.  You have to check.

New Year Chores

Calendars, mostly.  I have 2 in the kitchen.  One kitchen calendar is about regular scheduled things like recycling, contractor visits, and special TV shows.  The other is for medical appointments (both me and The Mews).  It helps to keep those things separate.  

The basement door has a calendar for my planting schedule.  I mark each weekend with a countdown number toward and after average last frost date in Spring and the first frost day for Fall.  Seeds can demand rather specific timing.  It really helps.

There is one in the computer room too.  Since that is where I post about The Mews, I add all their Birthdays and Gotcha Days.  Otherwise, sometimes I forget.

So I always have 4.  Mid-December, I go shopping for them at Walmart (they sell them cheap).  The computer room gets a cat calendar, the basement one is just a note-pad (no pictures), the main kitchen one is either butterflies of hummingbirds, the other is astronomy pictures (because it's about "time"), LOL!

Yeah, I could probably do better using my computer calendar app or even delayed emails to myself, but I'm old enough that the computer is not my main form of record-keeping.  And I like to see nice pictures on the walls as decorative anyway.

The other major New Year chore is to review my spreadsheet list of refrigerated seeds.  I keep them in numbered specimen vials in a tray.  The tray has 2 layers drilled with holes (so the vials stand up and kept in numerical order).  The spreadsheet has the vial#, seed name, purchase date, and expiration date.

So, I can skim down the list and see what new seeds to reorder.  A gardening forum I participate in has a list of the top 20 catalog companies and I only order from them.  There is another site that helps you cancel delivery of any catalogs you don't want to receive, and I have reduced my mailed catalogs to just a few garden companies and a few specialty companies for other products.   Saves some trees...

The garden catalogs usually arrive by end-of-year, so I will sit down with my list and the catalogs.  That can be a bit of work.  Not all sell each variety of seeds I want and it changes year-to-year.  So I have to make a list from each.  I wouldn't mind ordering some seeds from each, but the shipping fees are often quite high so I end up going with one company or another each year and making some variety adjustments.

String Art

You may have seen this partially showing in pictures of Lori on the aquarium hood.  But there is a story behind it.

Back around 1980, I saw a "string art" in the store front window.  I kept going back to it to try to understand how it was made.  That was before the internet, so I couldn't just "look it up".  What amazed me was that all the strings seemed to wrap around one pin at a time to form a kind of circle.

I love geometric shapes and I love making things new to me.  But figuring out how the string wrapped around every pin "just once" drove me nuts.  I even went to the mall on Thanksgiving Day and convinced the security guard to let me in just to look at it again.

And it finally struck me.  The number of pins (small brads, actually) had to be a prime number!  I drew it on paper first to check that.  And I was right...  So I started with a 2'x2' plywood board and figured out a circumference of a circle that would fit well in it.  I don't recall what prime number I used (57, 59, 63?) and I don't even want to try to counts them.  

And it took darn near a full day to accurately adjust my compass divider 

to get the spacing right.  But I finally got it.  On packing paper, LOL!  And I still have it.

Then I had to tap brads just an inch high into a cloth-covered plywood board to stay 1/8" above.  Each layer of thread requires counting a different number of brads.  The smallest circle is barely less than half the number.  Larger circles need fewer countings.

I discovered that carpet thread was stronger than clothes thread, so I used that.  Keeping the circles tight required a bit of tension and clothes thread broke. 

After making enough circles, I stopped and tapped the brads down flush.  I said "pins" earlier, but brads have a small flat head and literally nailed the threads in place.

The pic I showed above was my first effort, so I kept it.  I made a couple others as gifts to friends.  My best was a rainbow.  Light blue cloth with thread colors following the rainbow color order.

I did an oval version once just by extending the circle.  You can use the string and nail method where you attach a string to two fixed points and trace around it with a pencil.  That was a gift to another friend.  

I also extended the idea to an apartment wall (ceiling to floor) using black and red yarn.  It got a lot of attention from visitors.  I have old photos of it, but I can't scan them these days.  Need to fix that.

I tried to sell them on commission at an art store, but got no takers.  They took lots of effort and even at (only) $50 back then, kind of expensive.  But I sometimes wonder how life would have changed if they had "caught on".

So I guess I wanted to show off the original.  If I get the scanner working again, I'll show off a few more.  I really need to get the printer functioning properly.

 

Message In A Bottle

 Have you ever seen the movie 'Conagher'?  3rd-tier cowboy movie maybe.  But I saw the first half in a hotel room on forced govt travel and had to see the rest when I got home.  Sam Elliot impressed me no end...

Evie Teale is a western widow who writes notes and attaches them to tumbleweeds to drift away like messages in a bottle at sea.  Cowboys find them sometimes but her identity is a mystery.  Conagher has met Mrs Teale a couple of times and likes her and wants to tell her that, but he stays a drifter.

Long story short, he does finally figure out that she is the author of the notes.  

There is a bar fight with The Bad Guy.  Conagher wins, barely almost beaten to death but still standing...  Mrs Teale arrives and says "It's time for you to come home now."  Happy ending.

I understand Conagher.  Yeah, I'm a home-boy and he is a drifter, but its not all that different.  We both just go along on our own one day at a time.  

Or maybe I'm Mrs Teale.  Internet posts are not very different from notes attached to tumbleweeds.  Thoughts sent out into the world with no idea who might read them and no results expected.  I write because I need to express thoughts, not for some number of replies (which however, are gratefully received and read).

I sometimes think I am both Conagher and Mrs Teale.  All of us are both in some ways. I suppose.  Some of us match up and some don't.   Myself, I just drift through life like Conagher, but like Mrs Teale, I send notes to the world.  Not that I'm trying to find a Conagher/Teale connection, just trying to to get through life.

I probably shouldn't post this, but "well why not"?  It's "just" the internet.  Notes attached to tumbleweeds...

I bet Conagher would have liked cats.  😀

Spring Bulbs

I got another 100 bulbs planted the past 2 days.  It has been a bit frustrating.  I may have mentioned some of this before...

First, I ordered the bulbs in March.  I intended to mark individual empty spots to plant many of the new bulbs.  Both to fill in and diversify the daffodil colors.  I originally planted 5 colors bloom time of daffodils in wedges around a circular bed, and I regret it..  

I even bought 60 thinset bricks (cheap) with the idea of using a cold chisel to break them in half (so there would be 120 markers for Fall planting.  And then in April, I woke up to discover my hip felt broken.  I couldn't even walk, so the breaking of the bricks and marking empty spots went out the window

By mid-Summer, when I could walk again (apparently it was actually just a very badly torn groin muscle that wouldn't heal easily) all the daffodil leaves had faded away, so I didn't know where to put any markers.  

But the new bulb order of 250 daffodils, some hyacinths, and some crocuses was not cancellable.  Worse, it arrived in late November.  At the same time, the other hip was giving my problems and it was suddenly cold and wet.  Bad situations for planting bulbs!

So, the hip healed in mid December.  Half the daffodils were planned to go in the existing backyard bed and half in the front island where there was nothing but weeds surrounding a circle of a tree and a boulder.   I couldn't plant in the existing backyard bed with destroying a lot of existing daffodils, so I focussed on the front island.

With meant rototilling the soil, putting down packing paper to smother the grassy weeds, and then covering the paper with 2" of soil to hold it down.  I figured the rain would soften the paper enough to drill through (it did).  And there was warmer weather forecast.  So 100 daffodil bulbs went in there.  Yay!

Well, that left 150 daffodils.  The past 2 days, I planted 100 of them in a empty 10' diameter bordered circle in the backyard.  Actually, I planted the 25 hyacinths in the center, and the daffodils around them.  There is a 50' flowerbed along a fence, and I had some species tulips and crocuses along the lawn edge, but the voles have gotten almost all of them.  So later today, I will plant the remaining 50 daffodils along there.

Not what I originally planned, but the best I can do given the timing.  

I will plant the 50 crocuses in some tubs to enjoy their blooms next Spring and hope I can retrieve new-formed bulbs in late Summer to plant in wire cages in the lawn in the Fall.  Without mesh cages, the voles just find the bulbs and eat them like candy.  Fortunately nothing bothers daffodils.  They are toxic to mammals (which is why I have almost all daffodils here).  

I am damn near worn out these days, so this will probably be my last major bulb-planting effort.  

And I don't know if this late-December planting will be successful.  Spring bulbs need chill time over Winter and they should have been planted in October (to give the bulbs time to develop roots and recognize the right time to emerge in early Spring).  But I've read that, even if they don't bloom well next Spring, they will likely recover during 2025.  

Climate change is affecting emergence and bloom time.  I planted my first here 30 years ago.  My daffodils used to start emerging in early February.  Then it was January.  And now, here I am in late December planting some, and existing ones are emerging NOW!

I don't know whether they will adapt to shorter and warmer Winters or just start to die out.  I'll be glad for any existing or new ones that survive, but I worry someday they will all be gone.  

I'll keep some hope for years more of the existing and new ones.  Daffodils are one of the few things neither deer nor voles will eat.  But a yard without Spring bulbs would be a sad thing.

The front island all planted an covered with soil...

The new daffodil bed is to the right of the saucer magnolia tree.  There isn't anything to see there right now. but it should be full of hyacinths and daffodils in some months soon.

The fence to the left of the tree is the flowerbed.  That is where some of the new daffodils will go as a border.  That bright spot is where I set down large cut-up large cardboard boxes to smother weed.  It is also The Mews Memorial Place.  So while they are 2' down, I don't really want to dig around there even shallowly so "smothering" weeds feels best.

I think I will plant a dozen catnip plants there next Spring.

Happy Holiday

MAY YOU ALL HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY!  

 

Good News

 My efforts to get the printer working again failed, but today the search function is working again.  Maybe.   I'm not sure if I got lucky, fixed something by accident, or an update got through without my knowing about it.  But at least I could find some pictures again just by the file name.

My computer success seems rather random, but I'll take anything that works regardless of why or how these days!

And I heard on the news that Solstice, Christmas, and Hannukah only occur so close to each other once every 20 years.  So Happy Holidays to all...

Good News, Bad News

 The Good News is that the Washington Commanders football team (9-5) beat the Philadelphia Eagles (11-2)  in the last minute of the game 36-33.  Yay!  😲

And I got my computer backup program working again. 

The Bad News is that after 6 hours struggling with the computer and downloading everything I could find, the damn printer still won't print in color.  😢. Time to have an expert visit (the printer weighs about 50 pounds and I can't lift that anymore).

And I still can't make the "search" function work for Photos either.  👎. I'll have the expert look at that too.

It's only 10 PM, but I want to just feed The Mews and then crawl into bed...

Daffodils, Trash, And Old Electronics

I finally got about 3/4 of the daffodils planted.  I have a front yard island bed surrounding the Saucer Magnolia tree and a 3' boulder I had delivered in 2006.  I've tried several different kinds of deer-resistant plants there before (astilbe, ferns) but grasses always grew too high for them.

So last Spring, I bought a couple of bucketloads of topsoil/compost mix.  The idea was to lay down large strips of packing paper and cover it with the mix to smother the grasses.  And then in the Fall, plant daffodils and transplant existing Japanese Painted Ferns.

Well, right after I bought the soil and ordered the daffodils (and some crocuses and hyacinths) with right hip went bad for months.  I couldn't lay down the paper, and so I couldn't shovel the soil onto any.  But I was finally ready to do that in November.  Then it turned cold and wet, so OK, "next week".

"Next week" turned into December.  I finally decided I had to do it regardless of weather, so I bundled up in layers and started drilling bulb holes.  I did about half the daffodils around the tree and then 1.4 around the outside edge of the bed.  That leaves a gap between them where I will transplant the ferns next Spring when they emerge and I can see where the daffodils are.

That leaves some 1/4 of the daffodils and the crocuses and hyacinths.  I'll try to plant the remaining daffodils in some large plastic tubs I have and then retrieve them after they go dormant next June.  The  crocuses and hyacinths will just have to get planted "here there, and everywhere" as weather allows.

The voles will get the crocus and hyacinth bulbs "eventually", but I should get a few good years from them.

At least I will have done the best I could given the hip problem.  The other good news is that the trailer is finally empty and washed clean from one hard rain last week.  Because I have some real junk to haul to the landfill and recycling center.  Two really ruined old (formerly beloved) swivel/rocker chairs from 1990, a non-functional wet.dry vacuum, etc.  

Plus, I have decades worth of old electronics filling up closets and it is time to recycle them.  And 30 year old boat batteries.  In other words, it is time to empty the garage of ancient junk.  I can barely park the car in there these days, much less get out of it!

With the time-required planting mostly out of the way, it is time to attend to the garage and basement.

Can't ManageThe Mac

 I can't deal with new Mac Sequoia OS problems.  Reverting to the previous Sonora OS may delete much of my current files.  And I'm just getting P/O about the whole computer thing.  I can't even upload photos.  So I may be gone for a while.

If and when I figure it out, I'll be back.

Mark