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

Mac Computer Problems

 I love my Mac computer.  It does things Windows doesn't do.  But sometimes upgrades can drive you crazy.  The Mac people love to "improve" things.  But they are expert users and don't always account for the difficulties changes can make for a regular user.

They think "Well, now you just go here in 3 steps, then over there for a couple and you have better features.  And if you have a problem then just reboot from the safety startup holding down 3 keys, and redo this and then that from your backup and then..."  

As if that was simple and obvious.  And to them it is.  To me it is nearly gibberish, assumes that I know where everything is on the computer, and even know all the terms they use.

I sometimes wish they would just leave the damn OS alone for a while.  I like my OS as it was, and I like most of my apps as they are.  I don't mind security improvements.  But I wish they would stop obsoleting my apps!

So I'm writing this to warn Mac users about upgrading to Sequoia 15.2.  15.1 one didn't mess up my computer; 15.2 really did!  Photos is bizarre in 15.2.  I used to just plug in my camera, go to Photos, turn on the camera, and it automatically showed my the new pics to but uploaded.  Now, I have to go find the camera as a "device" through a couple of menus were are not obvious.  And since one of my major uses is Photos, that is a real problem.

And Mac seems to be trying to force users onto ICloud!

So, if you are Mac user on Sonora, be VERY cautious about upgrading to Sequoia of either current version.  You get locked in.  Reseting to Sonoma seems to be a real bitch of a process!  It seems, that if you don't make a backup of everything at the end of your daily use, everything you did since the previous backup can be lost.  And I don't mean your last Time Machine app backup.  They say Time Machine won't help you revert this OS!

And speaking of upgrades, Firefox seems to do it weekly.  Which wipes out all your saved logins.  Yeah, just login again, but that gets pretty tiring.

Blowing off some steam!

Reading is FUNdamental

I hate computer updates, I really do.  Sure, if not for them, I would be back in 2000.  But they become so constant and every change makes some favorite app not work right.   Every Firefox or Safari update (about once a week each) means I have to create a new password or lengthen the existing one for my AOL email accounts.

And dammit, even with my accounts printed out on legal size paper and double-spaced, I run out of room and I have silly arrows pointing all over the place to wherever there is room!  Don't worry about my security though.  I have a stand-alone computer for a couple obsolete computer games and I keep my password spreadsheet on that.  Unhackable.

But what got my knickers in a knot today was Mac Photos.  The newest upgrade from Sequoia 15.1 to 15.2  "upgrade" (you will only understand that if you have a Mac) completely changed my camera-to-computer upload procedure.  I went nuts trying to get pictures off my camera yesterday for hours.  

I thought the problem was Photos.  Nothing I tried fixed that.  So I thought it was Sequoia 15.2 which had just been upgraded.  Looking for a new Photos version that worked with it got me nowhere.  The instructions for ways to revert to Sequoia 15.1 were beyond my ability.

And I will add that restarting the computer, shutting it on and off, and looking for "patches" got me nowhere.  So I shut the computer off and went shopping (eyeglass repair, DIY store) just to clear my mind.

When I returned (fed The Mews, cleaned the litterboxes) I went at it again.  And trust me, when cleaning the litterboxes is better than struggling with the computer, you know you have a problem.  

But then the great Spirit of Christmas descended upon me!  I saw a single line in a 4 page help article that referred to "device in the sidebar".  Curious, I went back to Photos and searched around.  And I found the word "device" in a drop-down menu.  Clicking on it, I found "camera".

The good part is that everything worked again.  The mean part is that Mac/Google were trying SO hard to get me on ICloud in a Google-controlled account instead of just letting me manage my little photo world myself.  Sometimes, I feel like a small mouse with a tiny mace fighting a Bobcat!

But I beat them again!

  --------

Allow me an admission.  My favorite baseball player of all time is Pete Rose.  Yeah he bet on games.  But as a player, he was everything I ever tried to be.  His nickname was "Charlie Hustle".   He did his best on every at-bat or fielding effort.  Mickey Mantle once related a story about the first time he saw Pete Rose in the outfield.  Mantle said something like "I hit a homer that was 50' over the wall.  And this new kid climbed the wall trying to catch it.  We called him 'Charlie Hustle' after that".  He always ran hard in a sure out, launched himself at every fly ball he could not possibly reach, and played every day as if it was his last.  I think he once said that he would pay to play baseball.

I understand him everytime I play a game or tackle a computer problem.  Sometimes it isn't skill, but determination.  Perseverance counts too.  Sorry, I didn't mean to talk about myself, it just went from the brain to the keyboard...

  ----------

There were only 5 pics on the camera, but 3 were so weird...  I woke up yesterday and thought my neighbors had put a row of fake owls on their roof-ridge to scare away pest birds. But then one of them moved!  And I realized it was a whole row of vultures!

I love taking pictures of The Mews of course, but THIS is really why I have a camera...  For the things that you can never even imagine could happen...

Not Really Been A Good Year

I'm not gonna try to list everything.   Some things you don't need to know, some are boring, and I'll probably forget to mention some.

The neighbors got a yappy dog.  The Mom there lets it out in the backyard as soon as the kids leave for school.  It runs around barking all day long,  It drives me crazy when I am in the backyard.  It seems convinced it should kill me.  Which is sort of funny, because if it somehow got in my yard I could strangle it with one hand.  Not that I would, but if it died of natural causes or the family moved away, I wouldn't shed a tear.  

And I suspect the Mom doesn't much love it either because as I said, she puts it out in the fenced backyard as soon a the kids leave for school.  It must be maddening to have it in the house.  I am surrounded by dogs on 3 sides.  The yappy dog on the east, a large barky dog on the south (which desperately tries to get at me through the fence), and 2 large dogs to the west (which are at least mostly indoors and don't threaten or make much noise).  But the east and south dogs make being in my backyard less pleasant than it should be.

Taxes were a misery last April.  I fill out the H&R Block software forms, then tried to "finish" them.  I kept getting a notification that I was "not on the network".  Which was ridiculous because I was all over the internet otherwise.  I wasn't going to try to call H&R Block just a few days before the filing date, so I filed for an extention and sent the Feds and State estimated additional tax payments to be safe.

The next day, I had my annual physical exam.  Everything was fine.  But 2 days later I woke up , got out of bed and fell to the floor with terrible right hip pain.  Three days later, I had an appointment with my primary care doctor.  He got me scheduled  for a hip x-ray at the radiology lab in the same building (it's not a hospital but a combined medical center).  

Guess who didn't have an x-ray technician on staff (vacant position for 4 months)?  But the center had an emergency x-ray center a block away.  They were alarmed at the results.  They said I had either bone marrow or metastatic cancer.  I went through a more detailed series of tests over the course of a month (needed a roller-walker to get around with difficulty), and was then referred to an oncologist and an MRI specialist to have more tests.  3 month waiting list...

But the pain went away after another (2nd) month.  It became obvious that the problem was a very severe groin muscle injury that healed slowly.  I felt perfectly fine again.  

But that completely ruined my gardening season.  By the time I could get around outside, I was late with my tomatoes, corn, and beans.  I had ordered ten 10 gallon buckets (so I could put them in the sunniest part of the backyard) to plant them in and bought a small trailerload of 50/50 topsoil/compost to fill them.  But by then it was June.  I never got a decent crop of anything.

Funny thing about the trailerload of soil/compost.  I have good at basic geometry.  I calculated the cubic feet for 10 cylindrical buckets.  Looked up the volume of the nursery bucketloader.  It said I needed 2 bucketloads, so I went and bought 2.

The nursery apparently has a very wrong idea about the cubic feet the bucketloader delivers.  I filled up all 10 buckets with only a 1/3 of it.  Not knowing quite what to do with the other 2/3s, I covered the trailer with a tarp waiting for inspiration.

But before my hip injury, I had ordered about 500 various Spring bulbs.  They arrived in mid November and sat in my chilly basement.  I decided to smother the grassy weeds in the front yard island with standard brown packing paper, cover it with the trailer soil to hold it down, and then plant most of the island with the daffodils by using an auger to drill holes through when the paper was wet.  

But that's a lot more work than it seems.  Even mild breezes want to blow the paper around.  So I bought 50 thin "bricks" to hold them down.  I got the island all covered with bricked paper.  Digging the trailer soil into buckets was harder than it used to be.  I have probably never quite recovered from falling off the extension ladder in 2021.

I am happy to say that I emptied the trailer of the last of the soil mix and covered the paper inn piles and raked them carefully to smooth it out.  We are supposed to get about 1.5" of rain the next 2 days, so the paper with be soft.  I will use my auger to drill 200 holes for the new daffodils.  Drilling holes with the auger is is not difficult.  Dropping bulbs in the holes is not difficult.  Raking the displaced soil back over them is not difficult.  The hard work is done.

I scraped the trailer pretty well of all soil.  The rain will clean the trailer of any leftovers.  So I will finally be done with that project.  Next is the crocuses and hyacinths.  I think I will just plant them (rather than make metal cages).  I'm just too tired these days.  I still have some crocuses and hyacinths surviving after 10 years (that the voles have never found) so I'l just hope for another 10 years.  By then I probably won't be able to do much landscaping anyway.

Civ 2 Game

 Finished a 3 week long game (played a few hours at a time several nights) at Prince level.  Got my civ to land on Alpha Centauri so     I won.  But it was a hard struggle.  The program knows everything I was doing.  And it cheats to make things harder.  If I am being successful, it builds units and advances faster and cheaper.

If I build a spaceship, it just builds a faster one.  You really have to gain a lot to stay ahead of it.  I usually lose.  And there are 2 levels above Prince (King and Deity).  

I won at Deity level once a decade ago.  I suppose my mind was sharper back then.  It's like chess.  At some point, you see everything and win, but in later years, some creativity slips away.

So I was glad for the win at Prince.  You can win 2 ways.  Kill all the other Civs militarly or land on Alpha Centuri.  I'm not the killer type, so I always go for the spaceship.  

I've tried the military thing a couple times, but it just isn't my nature.  I'm a builder and I arrange my forces defensively.  But I think the next game will be all force.  I need to know what that is like.  Really really really all force...  

A typical game image...

Pearl Harbor Day

I wasn't born yet then, but it was recent history when I was young.

 

Behind Yardwork

I find it harder to do yardwork these days.  Bad knees, bad back, muscle cramps from gripping tools tightly...  I think I have pushed my body too long doing too many things it really takes 2 people to do.  I sure wish I had a cloned Me to help out.  I may have to hire one.

Today, I got up and (because it was going to be 40F and windy) put on thermal underwear to prepare to move the last of the topsoil from the trailer to the front island bed (to start to plant bulbs I ordered last Spring) etc, it was past 4 pm.  It gets dark before 5 now.  Not much time to do anything useful!

Shorter days and Standard Time really mess up my life November to March...  I am not an early-riser these days.  

So by the time I made lunch, fed The Mews, started some laundry, cleaned the litterboxes, got the mail and newspaper, put out trash for pickup, cleaned up the kitchen pans and plates for the dishwasher, the light was about gone.

I just can't seem to get out of bed after only 8 hours these days.   8 hours in bed doesn't mean 8 hours of sleep for me.  I need 10-12 hours in bed to get 8 hours of sleep these days.  Getting old is bad enough, but needing that much bedtime for 8 hours of sleep is worse.  My awake time is getting less.  

I resist taking sleeping pills, but I've seen ads about"non-addictive" ones.  I will add that to the list of things to discuss with my Dr.

When I retired in 2006 after 35 years of getting up every day at 5 am (and returning home at 6 pm) I swore I would never get up that early again.  I might have to start forcing myself to get up earlier.

I have the front island almost covered with paper (to smother the grass) and soil covering most of it (to hold the paper down and fertilize the tree and future bulbs).

But I need to finish the soil covering and plant the bulbs.  😓

The odd part is that planting the bulbs will be the easy part.  The drill auger makes creating 6" holes in good soil easy.  Putting the bulbs in the ground is easy.  Raking the loose soil to cover the bulbs is easy.  

It is shoveling soil from the trailer into buckets and dumping the buckets onto the paper that is the hard part.  But any project has a hard part, and I have to get at that part before I can to the rest!

Food

Typical lunch:  A ham or turkey sandwich with lettuce and onions (actually usually just a half sandwich), surrounded with some crunchy veggies and tomatoes, green tea and half a Coke.  Usually a mug of chocolate milk too, but I had cheese on the sandwich.

Typical dinner:  3-4 oz of meat, a green veggie, a yellow/orange/red veggie, a tossed salad, 2 small glasses of wine.  I only make shrimp rolls about once a week though.  Pic is from last year, but the best one I could find.  And assorted fresh fruit for dessert.

I seldom make breakfast.  When I do, it is usually 2 fried eggs on a pancake with maple sausage.  I have the pancake down to a science.  3 spoonfuls of commercial mix, stirred with enough milk to leave it thick but pourable.  Small non-stick pan, heated to 375F (I have an infrared thermometer, sprayed with extra-virgin olive oil).  Pancake mix poured in immediately.  Two minutes on each side.

Turning the pancake can be tricky.  I can't just flip it up and have it come down centered in the pan, but I have a very thin flexible spatula that helps.  Another brief olive oil spray and both eggs go in.  The instant the egg whites are set, I turn off the heat, flip them, and count to 10.  I like a slighty runny yolk, but I can't stand runny whites.

I have both maple and country link sausage.  Maple goes with the pancakes and eggs.  On the rare occasions when I just make pancakes with maple syrup (the real stuff), I use the country links or bacon.  I pre-cook and freeze them, so it is just a matter of thawing them out.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about my diet, but I had the first picture and wanted to use it.  And all the rest just naturally followed.  😁