This stand of Goldenrod has sort of evolved within a mowed field. Another frowned-upon weed that brightens the approach of Fall in Ohio.
a gathering of unidentified goldenrod-bugs.
mirror image 🙂
Category: This and That
Who Doesn’t Fancy Pansies?
Our first visit to our favorite greenhouse today. We ordered some red Million Bells, and some Lantana…for a couple of weeks from now. Meanwhile, some other plants are blooming…Rhododendron, and some Azaleas. Daffodils are done, Tulips still around but ready to make their exit shortly. So here are some Pansy Photos…
(all photos on this post are © Sometimes, 2018)
Rarin’ to go
beautiful pansies
brilliant color
magenta pansies
neighbors
pink pansies
Hey! Where is everybody?
Cat Decisions
(photos ©Sometimes,2018) The colors in these shots are overwhelmed by the bright sunlight coming in the windows…except for Pearl, who is completely black and requires different camera settings to see her face. The green paint is prettier than it appears, but could use a fresh coat of paint. (The very thought of painting scares me! and yes, I know we should have painted before we put the flooring down. yikes!)
Flooring update half-way there!
The workers are here installing the new floor, which looks great. We will paint or stain the baseboards so they are nice when they go back up. The living room area is about half of the job, so it’s a relief to have it so far along. However, everybody knows what happens when major new infrastructure goes in…. right…. the walls look crappy now and also incidental window frames and of course the cabinetry in the kitchen, which needs only a good cleaning.
The rest of the walls in the house were re-painted a couple of years ago when the ceilings had to have major replacement work due to ice getting in below the roofing and the insurance company paid some big bucks to repair the ceilings. It was mostly drywall, but the insurance also covered having the ceilings AND the affected rooms re-painted. Now we need to paint the living room walls, because they look shabby compared to the new floor and the recently-new rusty-orange paint of the kitchen/dining area.
Man…these people make a LOT of noise. The owner(s) of the company do much of the labor themselves. Incidentally, I have known these people for decades…the owners’ mother was a police dispatcher when I was a news reporter, and although I haven’t seen her in decades the name came to me as I thought of a local flooring company.
I’d like to paint…well, to rephrase that, it would be nice if the walls were painted. The dusty green color is still nice and I like it as much as when it originally went on the walls fifteen years or so ago.
Well the living room part of the floor is in place, and Thursday they will do the kitchen and dining area. The baseboards need to be spruced up, so I bought a can of water-based stain (at Home Depot) to paint them with. The paint/stain dries in one hour, so that is a break. All the paintings and miscellany are off the walls, all the furniture is lounging in the dining area.
ah…those of you who are still awake…thanks for following along on my housewife work musings.
long live rock n roll!
back with my favorite band, Time Cat, live on a porch in Akron, Ohio…. Porch rockr 2018. These photos are mine, from my limited point of view on a sofa in the front row.
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=time%20cat
They have a new album out, I think that makes six.
Jeri
Colton n Sam
A Fan
Sam
Jeri
Colton
Cats, more cats…and dogs
Posing Peggy
Toby likes Blue
Barbara with kittens
Little Sister kitten: Callie
am I cute or what?
check this out
Mawkin..striking a pose
Bob
Peggy in the wild
Mandy and offspring
A thing of beauty is a joy forever…John Keats
(all photos ©Sometimes, 2018)
Here’s the opossum, right on cue
serenity in a shallow brook?
No more kittens…but here’s a possibility
The latest kittens from next door. Barbara has been featured in this blog before…she is a rough and tumble lady that appeared from thin air long ago; she lived in the now defunct greenhouse across the road. Not sure where she lives now, she is very illusive.
[all photos ©Sometimes, 2018}
A Word About Words From the OED
The Oxford English Dictionary remains THE word bible of the English language. The OED is available online, with a Word-of-the-Day feature to which one can subscribe without cost. A full subscription is beyond my budget, and I do respect the OED’s the prohibition against re-posting in its entirety. Anyone can subscribe to the daily word post through the OED web site at http://www.oed.com/ to receive the without-cost daily.
Often these selected words grab my attention for various reasons, not only to find out what they mean, but also as discussion topics.
A recent word that intrigued me especially is — dis-candy — which means literally liquifying or melting candy (lemon drops, or life savers for example,) from its candied/solid state to the sticky gooey mess that sticks to everything when melted.
Shakespeare used the word to good advantage, with a metaphorical meaning, as taking the overly-sweet or romantic useage of cleaning up “purple prose” or misplaced or just overstated descriptions in a line of poetry or speech. English teachers often like to “dis-candy” students’ writing.
My wonder isn’t really the word itself, but the prefix (DIS -candy. ) Some substance that starts out as a sticky-sweet solid that deteriorates into a liquid, or disappears; or a cringe-worthy saccharine sweetness in speech or prose. Upon consideration I suppose that (DE-candy) would have a different connotation, perhaps meaning some of the ingredients or adjectives of said substance (i.e. lollypop,) or line of spoken words would be present originally, but removed from the final product never having existed.
Beside the point, neither of my two little desk go-to-dictionaries: The New Oxford Spelling Dictionary, 2014; nor The Merriam Webster Dictionary New Edition, 2004 include the word dis-candy. My criteria for go-to-dictionaries is that they are small paperbacks that sit on a shelf above my computer and can be retrieved with one hand.
Books of Childhood
In a previous poem I wrote about a gift I received for Christmas, which my mother had concealed in an Oxydol Soap box…a book which our teacher had read out loud to the class. That book, is called Snow Treasure, by author Marie McSwigan, was first published in 1942.
At age eight or nine I was very impressed with this book about Norwegian children who smuggled their town’s gold down mountain, past occupying German troops, to a fiord, where an uncle waited with his ship to whisk the treasure away to safety. The story is said to really have happened.
About 70 years later I obtained a copy of the book that had been discarded by a public library, and available at a book sale. Marveling at my luck, I quickly paid the pittance asked and left with this great treasure of my own.
bringing down the trees: a study in accuracy & precision
I spent most of three days watching the clearing of a 1.8 acre lot which I sold recently. The operation was both sad and fascinating. The company that did this work was efficient, the crews worked magnificently together, and the huge trees fell precisely as intended…where they had stood for a hundred years. (All photos are my own.)
Enter a caption
Housewife Work revisited
Once my youngest son commented that there were tasks that definitely fell under the rubric “Housewife Work.” That immediately got my attention, and the phrase has become part of our family lingo.
One of the things I have always enjoyed about moving household was that it involved clean cupboards, drawers, closets, having been cleared of collections and extra belongings that did not and never did belong to anyone who ever lived in the house. Although I admit there is the occasional “junk drawer,” that defies sorting out and/or disposal of its contents, that arrives intact at the new location.
We have arranged to have a flooring company come in and install vinyl planking in our main living, kitchen and dining room areas. What that entails is packing up the things from the china cabinets, moving all the small furniture like tables and chairs, and moving out the refrigerator, which really moves pretty easily on wheels…and the stove, which has never been moved since it was installed about 17 years ago.
The problem is that all those things removed from the affected areas have to go someplace temporarily.
I do have a lot of stuff, but the bulk of it is books, as I’ve written before. I sell books exclusively online now, but my inventory is housed here, in addition to my personal book collection and thousands of unlisted (that is not in the inventory) titles in the process of being listed. A few years ago I had two bookshops, one at the indoor flea market, the other at an antique mall.
So my dilemma is that before I can accomplish A I need to complete B; and so on from room to room. Sigh. A bit of organization goes a long way, that’s true…so I better get to work.
Writing about it helps to solidify my thought process…such as it is.
The Thing I do Best is Now the Thing I Do FIRST
Trying to follow my own advice…I have been neglecting my blog and that is the thing that bothers me the most….not the blog, but the neglect…. So I dug out this old poem from 2015. (Having said that, I am about to write a post about my current task at hand—contracting with professionals to have my kitchen/ding area and living room re-floored. It is a big expense and a big job, which involves moving a lot of stuff out of the way. stay tuned…
Shifting Priority
I have decided to change my priority
without worrying about inferiority
or the ways of the majority.
No longer will I pretend to put domestic concerns
ahead of my life’s purpose — Writing!
Back in the day any writing I did was secondary
or confined to the secretary’s desk.
For a housewife back then
furtive moments were doled out as rewards
or stray opportunities to pen
wayword words or purloined phrases,
words of wisdom
a note, a word, a reminder
–confined to the backs of envelopes
or shopping lists,
written in pen or pencil…or lipstick
or eyebrow pencil..
Gone are the days when making soup,
baking cookies…
and pies
scrubbing and ironing…
dashing through the store with a grocery cart
all had top priority over the Writing Art.
No frilly little aprons or caps
are needed to fulfill MY kind of Real Work
no pretty cotton dresses
and certainly no high heels!
From now on–I…
View original post 25 more words
