All posts by djones

writer's challenge

I Love, I Hate, I Don’t Do

5 Comments

Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge for this week features an interesting panopoly of juxtaposed ideas. The topics are:

1.) Share a love letter.
2.) Memorial Day Weekend plans?? Do share!
3.) List ten things you are currently sick of.(inspired by Jenny)
4.) Put an outfit together using pictures you found online and show us what you’d LIKE to be wearing today.(inspired by Lace)
5.) What have you been too busy to pay attention to? (inspired by Chris)

So you can see that some topics are almost diametrically opposed. So herewith is my attempt at rising to the topics.

#1 – Share a love letter. That one is a bit tough. L and I have been married for more than 33 years and have known each other for close to 40 years; digging the old love letters out would be a monumental task. One of the things we did when we were in college (attending colleges a few thousand miles apart) was to send small gifts to each other to remind the other of our love. Now more than 35 years later, I still have some of those gifts and trinkets on my dresser. One that never fails to warm my heart is this one:

This was a gift from L, way back when. Each time I see it, I am reminded of the emotions I felt then and still feel now. It has no intrinsic value; it is just a cheap trinket from the early seventies. But … every time I see it I am reminded of the most priceless thing in my life, L. I think that makes it pretty valuable in and of itself and I count it as a love letter all by itself.

#2 – Memorial Day Weekend plans. Since I am not speaking at the services at the cemetary this year, my weekend is pretty much open. I know L has plans for us to do some yard work, including removal of the volunteer elms and the first pass at the weeds in the pine trees. I know Mom has been making plans to have L and I and the MIL over for a meal, but the full details are as of yet a bit sketchy. I suspect the Son will be working up in the mountains, so I doubt we will see him. The weather people are finally forcasting normal seasonable weather here for the weekend, so it should have highs in the seventies and enjoy a really pleasant weekend. If you feel like pulling some weeds or raking pine needles or cleaning gutters, please feel free to stop by and help.

#3 – Ten things I am sick of.

  • Pulling weeds from the squash beds in Mom’s garden patch (Done at last!)
  • The blister on my thumb from pulling weeds (Even with heavy leather gloves!)
  • High temperatures
  • Low barometric presures (I ache in every joint I have ever broken!)
  • How needy Molly the dog is when it thunders
  • Rising gas prices
  • How weeds seem to win out over desired plants
  • Uncertainty and unpredictability
  • Abrupt seasonal change (2 weeks ago snow, this week 100+ degrees)
  • The thought of the coming of the long hot days of summer (Just get here already and be done with it!)

#4 – Put an outfit together. Given my distinct lack of style and clothing sense, that just isn’t going to happen. I’ll just wait and see what others choose to put together. Besides, I’m a guy. My closet could have 20 of the same outfit in it and I’d be perfectly happy. After all, the only reason a guy wears a different outfit is that his favorite is in the laundry. (Or he has a rather insistent girl friend.)

#5 – What I have been too busy to pay attention to. Both L and Molly. L because we aren’t having long phone conversations during the week (which is both good and bad) and the dog because Molly is so needy when the sound of thunder reaches her very sensitive ears. In fact I just spoke to L on the way home from a meeting, but it wasn’t a long conversation, just the essentials and then out. But L will be home for the long weekend, so maybe we can get caught up then. At the same time, since it is thundering in the distance, Molly is sitting with her paw on my leg and her head in my lap begging for a comforting rub on the head. In fact, here she is with me holding one paw while she begs for a head rub to make it all better.

garden, thunder, weather

Another Hot One

2 Comments

This afternoon it was sitting at 101 degrees at about 3pm when the thunderheads started rolling in. Within moments the temperature dropped ten degrees to a balmy 91 and the breeze made it feel pretty good. So it was over to Mom’s to continue planting the garden. Today was more beans, rutabagas, radishes, kohlrabi, winter squash, some of the summer squash, cucumbers and some other plants. So hopefully tomorrow we will get the rest of the drip system hooked up and continue on with the planting of various squash.

We had to stop removing weeds from the one squash bed today because we had too many weeds pulled to fit in the garbage until after tomorrow’s pickup. This was the second dumpster load of weeds pulled from the non-rototilled parts of the garden. I figure we have about one more dumpster load of weeds to pull in the garden area (and probably half again as many to remove form the flowers). mom finds out tomorrow if she can get rid of the boot and start getting out and about a bit. She can use the walker part time now so she at least escapes the wheel chair a bit now and then. On the other hand, she can’t manuver in the soft soil area yet, so i suspect it will be an ongoing project for me to keep the weeds down and do the needed thinning. Oh well, at least some of the crops will begin yielding before too long.

Remember up at the top where I mentioned the thunderheads? That is pretty typical weather out here on the plains. Heat building all day until mid to late afternoon, then all the thermal energy starts fueling thunderheads. They rise quickly to amazing heights, 10-20,000 feet. That brings on the thunder and lightning but rarely any precipitation. Later on in the year,  we may get hail storms, but generally not a lot of rain. But when the thunder clouds pass by, the shading and subsequent drop in air temperature causes gusty wind that I have loved all my life. The wind causes screens to sing in the breeze, a sound that is the harbinger to cooling and pleasant memories in my mind. I’ve talked before (here, for example) about how I loved that sound when out on the farm. Tonight was the first such occurance of the year here. I loved it!

Well, time to get cleaned up so I can mosey down to the radio station in the morning. At least the weather critters are predicting a bit cooler day tomorrow.

storage, weather garden

The Heat Is On

Leave a comment

The weather is once more being seasonably unseasonable. After having days last week where the high didn’t exceed 50 degrees, today it was already up to 95 by noon. Nice and toasty. The weather people are predicting that it will continue hot and dry until Thursday night. Then we’re supposed to have at least a few days of more normal weather with highs in the low 70s.

Yesterday was yet another “plant in Mom’s garden” day. We got the tomatoes and peppers planted and covered from the wind. This evening it will be time to put in the radishes and beans and melons and … Plus hook up the drip system for the rest of the stuff so it will survive the next few days. All that will be left to plant after that is squash and cucumbers and carrots and turnips and a few afterthoughts like rutabagas, etc. Then it will be time to settle down to the ongoing battle with the weeds and weather and …. All that just harvest tons of yummy things.

I am always amazed by the amount of biomass that can be generated from a given plot of land with the addition of a bit of water, a little fertilizer, and a lot of sunshine. Plants are amazingly efficient converters of solar energy into biomass. It also amazes me that with correct farming/gardening methods, the same plot can remain productive year after year. Of course, that means that you have to remove a lot of biomass produced by the weeds that have settled in from last fall to now. One of the rules of thumb this time of the year is that if it looks really healthy, it must be a weed. The desired crops haven’t had a chance yet to really settle in and establish themselves in the pecking order. And because of the prevailing winds on the plains, weeds are *always* reseeded every year as the seeds get blown in from hundreds of miles away.

In other business, I had a meeting this morning with representatives of the engineering firm putting in an underground gas storage field about 20 miles from here. It is interesting how they take an old played out oil field (about a mile to mile and a half under the surface), seal the drilled entries, and then pump gas into the cavity under high pressure for storage and load leveling in pipelines. What makes it more interesting out here is that a variant where they wash out a salt dome formation (at the same depths, but with no oil) and then use it as an air tank. They use the wind turbines to compress air into the storage area when grid demand is low and then use the pressurized air to run turbines to generate power when demand is high. Storing anything at several thousand psi is always an interesting engineering problem. Requires a fully stratified geology and some pretty good ideas of the structure of the strata.

Well, time to get cleaned up since I am back from Mom’s now. I left this in an open window before I mosied over to work on the garden, and just spotted that I hadn’t posted.

friends, medical students, random, trackball, weather

Random Thoughts For A Friday

Leave a comment

Today was one of those days full of random thoughts that lead nowhere but are too good not to blog about. Thus, you get to suffer right along with me.

Random Thoughts For a Friday

I was reading a Dave Berry column and was struck by the aptness of his discription of much current music: “it sounds like angry men clubbing a yak to death with electric guitars.” Beyond the fact that Dave Berry is one of my favorite humor columnists, the way he captures the true gut level feeling of things is great. Besides, who else has the entry to their web site feature the quote “If you leave this web site, I will kill this defenseless toilet.”

My trackball is nearing the end of its life. This one has lasted five years and through several computers, so I guess i shouldn’t complain. Trackballs are getting harder to find in the size and variation I like, but I dread the idea of going back to the three button + spin wheel mouse. Once you get used to having 7 buttons and a spin wheel plus the trackball, you really hate to go back. Not to mention it lets one avoid certain variants of carpal tunnel syndrome. Maybe I can cobble together one working one from the 5 or 6 carcasses I have stored around here. Twenty years of mousing technology encapsulated via the broken remnants. (I am a pack rat. I knew you’d never guess that.)

It was windy here for the third straight day. 30 mph with occasional gusts up to 70 mph for days on end gets annoying, a bit like the Santa Ana wind when we lived in LA. In any case, the wind killed off going to nursery for some plants and other such oddities. (Mom is still in the wheel chair and decided that using the handicapped van in the wind was not her idea of fun. Since she was the plant picker outer, no need for me to go if she didn’t.)

I had an odd call from the CU Medical school this afternoon. They are bringing a group of medical students out here for a program and called to ask me to set aside an afternoon to speak to the students. I suspect it is for their rural medicine rotation, so it should be interesting to talk to the students. I figure I’ll find out more in the coming weeks. Be interesting to see how the medical students differ from the pre-med students I used to teach college physics to long ago.

The Son left a really strange telephone message last night. I assume it was an incident of butt dialing while he and his house-mates celebrated their last day together for this year. Not often you get a non-butt dial at 2:25 am, hence the diagnosis of butt dial. We’ll have to see if he remembers the call this weekend. (I stored the message away for use in future embarrassments.)

A good friend called and invited L and I over for Italian sausage and an evening of fine conversation, but it was too late when I got home and retrieved the message. L has client meetings in the mountains for the weekend, so it would have just been the trio of me, myself, and I that could have attended. Given that the friend cooks really good sausage and brats, it would have been tasty. Oh well.

friday high five

Five Beautiful Things ….

5 Comments

Time once more for

Five Beautiful Things I Experienced on Thursday
  • The wonderful fragrance of the lilac bush in the back yard. In spite of the fact that the wind blew at a steady 30 mph most of the day, the backyard remained fragrant as I mowed the lawn.
  • The tiny white flowers on the bush of unknown origins in the from yard. As I mowed the lawn this evening, I was captivated by the delicate features of each tiny bloom each time I passed the bush.
  • The purple and white wild flowers that are blooming beneath the pine trees. They take the brown barrenness of the needle beds beneath the trees and turn them into colorful abstract paintings.
  • The wonder of coincidence. Today as I walked out of a business meeting, showing one of the attendees a sculpture by a well known local artist, I ran into the local college president and one of the town benefactors. So I got a chance to visit with both entirely by chance.
  • The support of friends and well wishers. My phone has been ringing off the hook with people congradulating me on my innocence and standing up for what is right in the face of threats. Makes the pain of the whole process a bit easier to handle. (Read about it here.)

(I thought about doing my five in photos, but by the time I finished mowing and cleaning up, the light was too far gone. Maybe next week.)