sore muscles, rainbow, and other miscellania

I was really feeling achy for a couple of days, a little discomfort in my chest and back, and so Tuesday morning I called the doctor’s office and spoke with the nurse just to make sure that this was either normal or something to be concerned about or just from lack of any exercise for months which I had been used to doing. She spoke with the doctor, should not be experiencing any discomfort from the procedure, did I try any pain relief and if it continued to call back and they would schedule a stress test. So I took ibuprofen during the day which helped and by the evening felt fine so I decided it was option #3 and did a slow and modified version of my yoga routine before bed. I slept all night, waking only once to go to the bathroom and felt fine the next day. The discomfort has not returned but by end of the day Wednesday my arms and other parts of my body were so sore! Regardless, I did my routine again Wednesday night before bed and went to class last night. Just three days in a row of yoga and I already feel better, still have sore muscles after a long period of disuse but even that makes me feel better.

We’ve been getting rain nearly every day since Monday for which I’m glad because we really needed it, a little over 2 1/2” so far this week. It’s been much less hot if not exactly cooler but that is about to change as we are getting a first real cool front this weekend and will have lows in the 60s all next week, highs in the 80s. It was drizzling/sprinkling a little when I left yoga class last night and saw this on the way home. At first I stopped and pulled into a side street and took a picture through my windshield afraid it would fade before I got home, but it was still there when I turned into my street so I stopped again and got out and took this picture over the cotton field. It was a double rainbow, the one on top very faint but you can see it in the upper right corner. The color bands don’t really show up that well in my picture but they were very evident looking at it.

I haven’t worked much on my new drawing. The ink came and I got my print. Here’s my progress so far on one leaf which still needs a lot of work.

I guess I’m going to get out there today and load up the truck again even though I haven’t taken the accumulated metal to the recyclers yet. I’m more interested in getting rid of two more piles of broken tree debris. I took these pictures yesterday of one of the ‘legs’ holding up the hanging limb on one of the trees.

And last, walking around the yard earlier yesterday I spied this tiny just hatched anole.

book reviews

I’ve accumulated 11 books since my last book review post and since I have nothing new to write about since Monday here are the first five. I’ll post the next six later.

Night Will Find You by Julia Heaberlin - Vivvy is the daughter of a psychic and has visions of her own that come unbidden when touches pictures, things, people. When she was 10 she started having dreams of a blue horse killing a boy, Mike, at her school and took to hanging around outside his house. One day she pushes him out of the way of a blue Mustang about to run him down. Grown now, Vivvy has gone off to college and become an astrophysicist, Mike has become a cop who believes in Vivvy’s visions and asks her to come in after hours and go through files of cases to see if she comes up with anything helpful, a success rate of about 42%. This day though, Mike has asked her to come in and review a file of a case belonging to Jesse Sharp, a skeptic but when Vivvy pulls a photo of a charm bracelet out of the file telling him it doesn’t belong and that the missing girl the file is about is alive he keeps his eye on her as she conducts her own investigation to find the child and the kidnapper. I’m not going to say anymore about this story, it’s worth a read. There’s the relationship with her mother, recently dead from a brain tumor, with her sister Brig, with Mike, and ultimately with Sharp, and attempts to reconcile her visions with her scientist mind.

The Institute by Stephen King - 12 year old Luke Ellis is extremely intelligent, he absorbs knowledge like a sponge absorbs water only he never becomes saturated like a sponge does and he remembers everything he reads. He doesn’t just remember, he understands everything he reads. He is also capable of very weak telekinesis. One night his parents are murdered and he is drugged and kidnapped and wakes up in a room that is exactly like his except for no window where there should be a window, a prisoner at the Institute, a secrete installation in the woods of Maine. He meets the other kids and learn that they too were kidnapped for telekinesis and telepathy and the kids stay in Front Half for several weeks being tested and given injections to enhance their abilities before being sent to Back Half from which no one returns and no one knows what happens there. Then 10 year old Avery arrives who has very high telepathic ability. When Luke escapes, a team is sent to capture or kill him, his friends are sent to Back Half who try to hold onto their sanity hoping Luke will find someone who will believe his story and bring help. When the kids in Back Half finally figure out what they are being used for and discover their true power they start wreaking havoc in Back Half but their revolt is doomed unless Luke gets there in time. I had stopped reading Stephen King for reasons which aren’t important but I enjoyed this one. It’s a good story and he’s a good storyteller but I could have used a little less detail on how train yards work. But that’s just me.

We Are All The Same In The Dark by Julia Heaberlin - When Odette was 16 she went to Wyatt’s house for their scrabble date. Wyatt met her at the door, told her to run and never come back. He had blood on his clothes. She left and in her panic rolled her car and nearly died and by the time she was found had to have one of her legs amputated. Wyatt’s sister Trumanell, the darling of their small town, and their father were missing, her bloody handprint on the door, and Wyatt was found wandering out of his mind in the fields. The town accuses Wyatt of their murders but no bodies are ever found and no proof. Odette graduates and leaves for college and returns five years later and joins the police force, obsessed with Trumanells’ disappearance ten years earlier. Then Wyatt sees a young girl with one eye laying in a field. He stops and brings her home to protect her. Odette gets wind of it and shows up at Wyatt’s house and tries to shield him from the town’s conviction that he is a murderer and whisks the girl to a safe house run by her cousin, daughter of her Baptist preacher uncle, brother to her dead revered cop father. Odette is desperate to solve Trumanell’s murder and uncover the shocking truth of that night and clear her ex-boyfriend as well as the mystery of this young girl with one eye who refuses to talk and who Odette feels will somehow help to uncover the truth in this twisty psychological thriller. It’s a good story, well written.

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods - I’m not really sure how to write about what this book is about so here’s the blurb on the back…”On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found…For too long Opaline, Martha, and Henry have been the side characters in their lives. But when a vanishing bookstore casts its spell, these three unsuspecting strangers will discover that their own stories are every bit as extraordinary as the ones found in the pages of their beloved books. By unlocking the secrets of the shelves, they find themselves transported to a world of wonder…where nothing is as it seems.” It intrigued me enough to check it out. The story is told in the first person by the three characters. Opaline’s story begins in 1921 in London when she flees to Paris and then again to Dublin to escape from a forced marriage. In Dublin she finds safe harbor taking over a nostalgia shop after its owner had died, adding books to the inventory. The nostalgia shop was originally a library in a remote Italian village which had the extraordinary ability to direct the visitor to the one book that would change and set their lives on a new path. The villagers wanted to burn it down, spooked by its uncanniness. Instead a man from London had it dismantled and shipped to Dublin where he had it rebuilt for his nostalgia shop. Martha’s story starts in the modern day when she flees her Irish village and her abusive and violent husband ending up in Dublin and getting a job and a home as a ladies housekeeper for Madam Bowden. Henry’s story also starts in the modern day. A literary researcher convinced that Emily Bronte was writing a second novel, he meets Martha while looking for the lost bookshop run by Opaline that he thinks is the key to this lost manuscript and that should be next door to Madam Bowden’s house but isn’t. As Martha and Henry search for more information about Opaline, who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth when her brother finds her once again, their own stories become intertwined. I don’t want to say much more but it’s a good book full of magic and self discovery and I enjoyed it.

Shoot The Moon by Isa Arsen - Annie is the only child of the only couple with a child in her neighborhood in Santa Fe whose residents live there because they are nuclear scientists working at the nearby facility. Annie finds little things under her mother’s rose bush in the back garden, inexplicably there. In 1948 when Annie is 8 years old a little girl appears in her backyard, she’s just visiting she says and is gone a few minutes later. When Annie is 15, her father, who she adored, died and Annie represses her memories in order to repress the pain of her father’s death, represses the need to love things that will leave her. Annie is brilliant and after high school she leaves for college and a double degree in physics. After graduation, inexplicably drawn to the moon, Annie heads to Houston and NASA where she gets hired as a secretary, leaving her artist girlfriend Evelyn behind. After correcting mistaken calculations from one of the engineers working on the moon shot/landing she confronts him and is eventually brought to the attention of the director who promotes her to the computer room/programming suite. As her relationship with the engineer, Norm, blooms, Annie discovers an anomaly in the back corner amongst the massive computer banks. Things that fall onto a certain spot disappear and then reappear 6 minutes later, a discovery that completely changes the course of Annie’s life. I’m not going to reveal any more, it’s a good story told by jumping back and forth from the past to the present, just that Annie must learn to let love in her life even though that comes sometimes with loss and that she must learn to reign in the single minded curiosity of her brilliant mind to let that happen. I liked this one a lot.

being a good girl, flowers, another harbinger

You might remember I wrote about getting rid of a few pieces of Pam’s furniture including the old cash register chest that she used for jewelry of which my sister had a lot. The day I published that post I got an email from a reader who lives in the city that wanted to purchase it. We struck a deal and she’s coming out today to pick it up.

The weather has continued to stay out of the 90s, overcast today with rain predicted off and on the first part of the week, with lows in the 60s and next weekend two nights maybe even in the 50s! So says the weather app but we know how quickly the forecast can change. Such a contrast to last summer which was brutally hot and dry and lasted for months, even into October. Another sign the season is changing…

The yard is liking these less hot temperatures and a few things are blooming…the plumbago, the morning glory bush, a few double orange day lilies are have a resurgence, a white rain lily popped up.

A few scattered cosmos blooms but they haven’t put on their full bloom yet. They are taking over the flower bed they’re in and so I’m going to have to get aggressive when they finish blooming and pulling up next year’s volunteers to keep them in their end of the bed. 

I’m still being a good girl and not doing anything so we’ve been streaming From on Prime. It’s from the same people that did Lost and is similar in many ways while being completely different. The first season was due to stop being available yesterday and having started it before my procedure we powered through the rest of the 10 episodes and are now into season 2. The premise is a nightmarish town surrounded by a forest where the residents are trapped, any attempt to leave circles them right back to the town, where they try to survive from creatures that come out at night and other spooky things while trying to find a way out. The residents have come from all over the US who are out traveling when they encounter a fallen tree across the road. When they turn around the road leads them to the town.

Today and two more days of basically sitting on my butt and then I go volunteer at SHARE on Thursday. And yoga Thursday night and then Monday I begin to start back to my normal life. I should avoid strenuous exercise for several weeks the All Knowing Oracle tells me. I looked up strenuous exercise...running, jogging, swimming, dancing vigorously, aerobics, biking, jumping rope, basketball, tennis, etc, none of which I do. Some forms of yoga can fall into that category but not what I do so I think I'm safe starting back up. 

all done, signs of summer's end, beautiful but deadly

I’m home. The procedure went well but once again had to lay flat on my back for six hours and an overnight stay in the hospital. Discharged in the morning and home by 1 PM yesterday. Another week of taking it easy slowly easing back into my regular routine. Still have to have another transesophageal echocardiogram in 45 days to make sure the device is still in place and stable. The shield is made of a sterile gortex like material with little titanium hooks that grab onto the heart muscle so now when asked if I have any metal in my body, the answer is ‘yes’ and I have to carry a card with me at all times saying I have this device in my heart with instructions on safely administering an MRI if I need one…specifications about static magnetic fields, maximum spatial gradient field, whole body averaged specific absorption rate. Have yet to find out if I’ll set off a metal detector.

Wednesday when I walked around the yard there was no sign of the ox blood lilies. This is what greeted me when I got home on Friday.

Once those two weeks of triple digits were over the weather has cooled quickly, the next two weeks of highs in the 90s changed to highs in the 80s a week later, partly cloudy/overcast with rain predicted all this next week. The change has been sudden and very welcome. Besides the ox blood lilies, other signs of the end of summer and approaching fall are emerging. Marc says the pampas grass is blooming though I haven’t seen any yet. The tallows continue to drop their speckled red/yellow/orange leaves and now the oaks are starting to drop some of their tired foliage. The days are definitely shorter, nearly full dark at 8:30.

I heard some clanking in the garage. One of the puppies was stealing empty dog food cans (rinsed clean) out of the box where I put them before it all goes to the metal recyclers. Minnie and I went out and there he was under the magnolia tree, she’s barking madly standing beside me and the goofy dog is not the least bit intimidated gently trying to get nose to nose with her which they did for a moment and then Minnie started barking again so we came in and I let her out in the little backyard where she continued to bark ferociously at the puppy on the other side of the fence directly opposite her, laying there wagging his tail. Puppy just wants to be friends. 

You might remember that I got stung by a wasp a month or so ago when I was working around the spot in the front yard where a pine tree used to be that died and the rotting roots have made a hole in the ground. A few weeks later I was using the trimmer around that same spot and saw a horde of wasps start to boil out of that spot and I ran like the wind and escaped getting stung. So last week, walking around the front I went over to check it out expecting to see a large paper wasp nest but what I found turned out to be a huge yellow jacket construction (no wonder that sting hurt all week). At first I thought it was a wild honey bee hive until I took a picture and zoomed in. Those were not bees. 

Definitely have to get rid of this, first on my yard to do list when my week of recovery is over. Even so their construction with the nest inside is really amazing and quite beautiful with the different colors and layers of chewed up and exuded wood.

drawing

I’m a lazy artist. If I can trace something instead of drawing it, I will. Often I will take a picture of something, print it out, and then transfer the outlines to whatever paper the finished drawing or painting is going to be on. I transfer the lines by using a pencil to scribble on the back of the paper, placing it scribble side down on the other paper and then tracing the outlines on the front. 

I have picked the picture for my next painting 

but my old printer won’t talk to my new mac mini. I haven’t bought a new one yet so if I want something printed out I have to send it to someone with a functioning printer that’s not out of ink. Unfortunately the two people I would ask, of which my grandgirl Robin is one, their printers are out of colored ink. So I have bought ink for Robin’s printer which arrives tomorrow. In the meantime, while I dithered about buying ink or buying a printer, I wanted to get started. 

I actually drew the leaves, proving to myself that I can still draw.

I’m going to do a colored pencil drawing first and then the painting. I’ve transferred the outlines to a page in my sketchbook

and put in a base layer of yellow in one of the leaves

but now I have to wait until the ink comes and the picture printed out for color reference while I finish the drawing.

My reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. 

Tomorrow I go in for the last medical procedure, then another week of laying around in recovery and I will be so glad to have all this behind me.

charm bracelets

When my mother was in high school the trend was, not just charm bracelets, but a specific charm bracelet. The girls exchanged silver hearts. My mother had two of these charm bracelets, both full of hearts, no two alike except for one heart of which there are three. Most of them have the giver’s name or initials engraved on the back. I tried in vain to get a picture of the back of one with the name but no luck. 

After our mother died Pam had Mother’s charm bracelets and her own charm bracelet, since they were still a thing when we were growing up and even when my daughter was in middle school so I suppose they still are a thing for girls, arranged in a shadowbox that she hung on the wall. Several months after Pam died I began to wonder what had happened to our mother’s charm bracelets. I didn’t recall seeing them after she moved into the house across the street which made me try and remember when the last time was I had seen them. I don’t remember seeing them in the yellow house where she lived before she moved over here. So I started asking her daughters and granddaughters if they had them as I would like to have at least one of them. No one had them or had any idea what had happened to them and so I gave them up for lost. And then about three weeks ago I got a text from Denny with a picture. She had put something in her safe and poked around to see what all was in there and she found one of them. Her mother had sent her one and she had completely forgotten she had it or even when she received it. So she sent it to me and we assumed her sister had the other one and had also forgotten she had it.

I had been planning on doing a post about the bracelet but just hadn’t yet so when Linda Sue did her post on Saturday about her mother’s charm bracelet I went in search of the one I had in middle school and high school. When I opened the box it was in, there was the other silver heart bracelet. I had completely forgotten I had it and also when Pam gave it to me. So now I have both my mother’s charm bracelets.

This is mine. 

All but a few were given to me by my parents. The scissors (they open) because I was very into sewing and making my own clothes, a dollar bill folded up in a box so that I will never be broke, a heart with a pearl, a bull for the summer my sister and I spent 3 weeks in Mexico with friends of our parents, a Christmas stocking that opens and Santa pops out, a little cameo from a pair of earrings that I lost one of, a heart with a key that maybe a boyfriend gave me, an ivory elephant because ?, a circle with 13 for my 13th birthday, a drunk leaning on a lamppost for the summer I spent 2 weeks in New Orleans with friends of my parents when I was supposed to be getting painting lessons from the artist father that neither of us were interested in doing, a paint pallet because art (all but two of the enameled colors are gone), and a Texas Tech charm that I guess my sister gave me from the year she went to college there.

outdoor work and outdoor kitties

I spent a little over an hour and a half outside yesterday. First I emptied the truck onto the burn pile and then swept out all the small twigs and leaves so that Marc can go get it inspected and I can take all the accumulated metal down to the metal recyclers. Then I got out my little baby chainsaw and started on the other pecan tree with the hanging limb cutting away the now very dead canopy. There’s not much of the limb still attached, just a thin strip of bark. 

The only thing holding it up are the weight bearing branches dug into the ground. While it was overcast and only (!) 90˚ when I came in at 12:30, it was humid and my ball cap was soaked, my hair was soaked, my shirt was soaked, my underwear was soaked and there might have been some areas on my shorts that were still dry. Did I mention I was sweating profusely? 

I splashed cold water on my face and then stripped down naked and stood under the ceiling fan on high with arms and legs akimbo like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man until I was dry enough to put on a lightweight dress that is so loose it only touches me on the shoulders, got a glass of ice water and sat under the aforementioned fan until I cooled off enough to take a shower.

I repeated it all again today sans emptying the truck but I only lasted a little over an hour. I’ve made a big dent the last two days in clearing out the small branches on the pecan tree by the back of the barn making three big piles since instead of four limbs I’m only dealing with two. And got bit on the neck by a tree ant for my trouble.

Here’s a before picture though it’s a different angle.

It’s been awhile since I posted pictures of the outdoor boys that live under Pam’s house. These are the kittens that were born last July under my sister’s shed, making them a little over a year old now. Pam started feeding Momcat and trapped her and got her fixed which left the three kittens that she was feeding with the intent of getting help from the local rescue group to have them fixed and adopted out when she died last November. I didn’t want the kittens wandering off before I could get them fixed so I continued feeding the little feral beasts. I eventually got them to trust me enough to be able to pet them and even pick up two of them and got all three fixed though the third had to be trapped and he is still wary. So here they are…sweet Handsome Boy, a brown tabby with gorgeous green eyes,

affectionate Lovey with his yellow eyes, who purrs readily,

and standoffish Twin who will sometimes let me pet him but not for very long.

I didn’t get a picture of Momcat but she’s still around though she doesn’t show up every night while the boys are always here. She’s very friendly and loves to be pet but can be kind of a bitch, hissing at the boys if they get too close. We think she was dumped when she got pregnant because we hadn’t seen her around until we saw her moving the kittens one day.