Roses Still Going Strong...

In spite of the constantly changing weather in recent weeks, including that bucket-brigade style deluge earlier this week, my roses seem happier than ever, and are starting to bloom all over again. Many of them are full of new buds, and I need to get out and groom them to make way for new blooms. Here are three of them showing off:

New Day


Falling In Love


Chris Evert

Goodbye, Emma...

Emma Allebes, one of my favorite people, crossed over last week. Emma was a woman of extraordinary talent and creativity in the fabric art world. She made some of the most wonderful quilts and wearable art I've ever seen - colorful, imaginative, flamboyant, sometimes silly, always excellently crafted, and, most definitely, never boring! I met her many years ago when I was just a novice at art quilting, and used to attend quarterly meetings of the NorCal SAQA group. I've been unable to attend the meetings for quite a while, and have missed the group very much - the inspiration I got from seeing and talking with those exceptionally creative women every few months kept me going, even though their creativity and talent often awed me into an intimidated speechlessness (yes, they did... can you imagine???) I especially missed Emma - she imparted the most delicious sense of humor and style, and was such a delight to talk to, and to listen to. She was a great story-teller, an excellent teacher and always inspired me with her sense of flair and fearlessness in creativity and her joie de vivre. I attended her memorial service yesterday afternoon, and was moved by the wonderful tributes and stories I heard about her life. It was especially delightful to see all of the gorgeous flower tributes festooned with black and white checkered ribbon - one of Emma's imprimaturs, and present in so much of her work. Years ago, she and her husband, Ted, started Tayo's fabric store in Fair Oaks. It was too far away from me for a casual run to a quilt shop, but I usually made a point of stopping there after SAQA meetings, and loved the selection of fabrics that so closely mirrored my own tastes.

I'm so very grateful I had the opportunity to know Emma. Shalom, and נוחי על משכבך בשלום, My Friend.

25 against 1 - and guess who's ahead?

We have a mouse living in our kitchen and one would think, with twenty three cats and 2 humans, the mouse wouldn't last long... but it's been three days and Ms/Mr. Mouse is still running the show. The cats have practically destroyed the kitchen - knocking stuff off the counters, breaking dishes, burrowing under small appliances, rummaging in cupboards, ripping up plastic bags. Still the mouse endures. The two humans have set up the Tin Cat and loaded it with a big, yummy dollop of peanut butter and some cat kibble, but so far it hasn't had any affect on the mouse, although the cats sure are interested in it. All things considered, I think I prefer the mouse over the ants we hosted last month... at least there's only one mouse, and the cats just don't seem as interested in catching ants.

Mmmmm... Something new to try

I really like black-eyed peas, and always look forward to New Year's Day when I prepare a giant pot of Hoppin' John, with lots of onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes and a fistful of bacon ends - enough to have for a half dozen dinners during the first couple of weeks of January, when the cold weather makes them taste sooooo good! Occasionally, during the summertime, I'll whip up a batch of black-eye salad, when the rest of the family gets tired of potato salad (me?... I NEVER get tired of potato salad...!) However, I've never prepared (or even seen) FRESH black-eyed peas before last Wednesday when a pound of them arrived in my veggie box from RiverDog Farm. I spent a very cool, and meditative, half hour this afternoon sitting at the kitchen table, shelling the peas, and enjoyed a tactile experience I hadn't had since childhood, when I often sat with my grandmother on her enormous front porch and shelled regular old peas for her famous pea soup, swimming with ham hocks, carrots and pearl onions. (Now, that's one recipe I sure wish I had these days, though I could probably concoct it if I gave it some thought.) I've just finished lining up my ingredients - fresh tomatoes from the garden, onions, peppers, and a ton of garlic from RiverDog, and a mess of bacon ends. I just fired up a pot of brown rice, and I'll start cooking the beans in an hour or so, after I've had a couple of Jack Daniels to put me in the mood. While the beans are cooking, I'm going to bake some cornbread in my cast-iron skillet, and whip up some Moroccan carrots and coleslaw. For dessert, I'll throw together a Cake Ina Cup, and I'll be ready for anything... but, most probably, CSI and bed.

Chaos in the guise of improvement...

It's difficult to believe things could get more chaotic around here than they've been for the last few months, but this week we've managed to make it so. We've been having some major dry rot and termite repair work done to the front of the studio house, and the bamming and slamming and hideous noises of hammers, saws and power tools has been driving us, and the cats, bonkers. The smell of fresh paint and various other noxious sealing and anti-vermin potions has only added to our despair. Fortunately, the work will be finished by this evening, and, after cleaning up tomorrow morning, things should return to normal. The street view of the house will be freshly painted and far more presentable to the world (and the Neighborhood Association), even though the backside of the house will still look like a tenement. We'll take care of that later - no one can see it anyway, since it's far up the hill from the houses down below on the next street. The best thing about all of this confusion has been having a couple of shirtless, hunky guys running around the place all day...

Paphiopedilum lawrenceanum (Rchb. f.) Pfitzer 1888 SUBGENUS Sigmatopetalum SECTION Barbata SUBSECTION Barbata

What an overwhelming name for something so simple and lovely as a gentle orchid!

This is the second time it's bloomed for me, and I'm so delighted with it's grace and beauty! The Greenhouse in the Loo is incredibly blessed!

Back at the Auction... AGAIN...!

I'm in luck... tomorrow is the last day of the SAQA auction. That means I can start saving my money again! This is my most recent, and probably, final, purchase this year... "The Grass Beneath Thy Feet", by Judy Haas.


The stitching on this piece just blew me away - so wild and free - it rather reminds me of the beautiful, wild land at Sea Ranch - where I'd like to live more than any other place on this planet. A fun fantasy to have, but it'll never happen. Thankfully, I'm quite content right here on La Canyada Hill. The auction has been fun, and I'm absolutely delighted with my four purchases - all of which have a significant meaning to me in one way or another, and I'm enjoying looking at them every day, which is how art should make one feel. Biggest problem is to find a place to hang them - my studio is the best place, where they can inspire me on a daily basis, but wall space is getting scarce in there, especially since I added all of the new shelving. But, never fear... I'll figure something out!

Back at the Auction

I just can't stay away from the SAQA Auction! Today, I bought two pieces from the Week 2 collection. I missed out on the one piece I reallyreallyreallyreallyreally wanted. The bidding in my price range began at 11:00 this morning, and even though I was watching the clock like a hawk and got my bid in at 11:04, someone else was more on top of it, and got there first. Dang! This is worse than closing moments on eBay! I was heartbroken for a few minutes, but got a grip and did succeed in getting my second choice, and quickly found another to fall in love with. Here are my two treasures from today:

This is titled "Currents" and is by Sally Gould Wright. Much of Sally's work is quite whimsical and full of detail - the kind of quilts I just like to sit and stare at for minutes on end. The thing that really made me fall in love with this one is the embellishments. I'm an embellishment nut... but you knew that...!


This is "Remains of the Day" by Linda Witte Henke. Linda is a very spiritual person - something with which I can truly resonate. Much of her art is liturgical, and thanks to many years of making liturgical art myself, her work really speaks to me. Again, this piece has the detail I love... I doubt I'll ever tire of looking at it.

Week 3 bidding begins on Thursday. I'm hoping I can rein myself in this time around. But it's for such a good cause...!

Garden Oddballs

Mother Nature has a wonderful sense of humor, and I enjoy weird looking, out-of-the-ordinary plants.

Society Garlic... A pretty, delicate, fragile little plant that sways seductively with every breeze, and emits a pungent blast of "garlic breath" that practically knocks you off your feet when you get within 3 feet of it - especially on a hot day!
Shrimp Plant... It doesn't smell like shrimp, and, though I haven't tried it, I seriously doubt it tastes anything like shrimp, but it certainly LOOKS like a shrimp.

Chinese Lantern... Doesn't look like any Chinese lantern I remember from San Francisco's China Town parades, but I'll give horticulturalists the benefit of the doubt!

Art Quilt Auction

Studio Art Quilt Associates, an art quilting group of which I've been a member for nearly ten years, holds an annual online auction, selling works by members to raise money to support SAQA's exhibitions, catalogs and outreach programs. This year, 234 12" square art quilts, in an awesome variety of subjects, colors and techniques, are being offered in a "reverse auction", in which prices begin at $750, and decrease every day for six days until they bottom out at $75. If you really, really want something, bid early and high, or else it's gone! I got wiped by a hugely generous lady (bless her!) who swept through the first day and bought three of the four quilts I'd oogled during the previews. I had to wait a few days before the prices dropped into my comfort zone, when I was able to bid on and nab the fourth, a spectacular piece by Anne Parker. It'll soon be hanging in my studio gallery... I can hardly wait!
Here it is:

YAY!!! 28 years!!

9/13/1981 - Northbrae Community Church, Berkeley CA
Featuring:
Our comrades in the 16-voice professional choir of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco...
Good friend Alan Blasdale - The Best Organist in the Bay Area...
150 balloons...
9 wedding cakes - chocolate fudge, carrot, tutti-frutti, orange, peppermint, champagne, bourbon, a chocolate cheesecake for the bride and groom, and a pint-sized traditional white with white frosting, which we saved for the 1st anniversary party. (All 9 were cheaper than the cheapest boring wedding cake the bakery offered)...
Entertainment by the stupendous Wesla Whitfield, pianists Alan Thomas and Dick Clark, and polkas by Deane Merrill on his trusty accordian...

It was a "dry" church, so things wrapped up quickly and about 20 of us repaired to Casa Maria for the real celebration.

Red Beads

A few days ago, I talked about one of my projects being stalled for lack of sufficient red beads. I went to Michael's yesterday intending to rectify that situation, and was blown away by what I saw... Michael's is in the process of upgrading their bead department, and they now have an absolutely prodigious selection. And... there's more to come, because, even as I was there, three employees were unpacking dozens of boxes of beads and hanging them on the new display boards. I was told to come back late this week by which time everything will, supposedly, be on display. (They can count on it.) In the meantime I filled one red bead box, but, if one red bead box is good, two, or even three, are better... right? Then, there's all those other colors as well... orange, blue, green, yellow, purple, smoke, brown, heliotrope, black, silver, gold, copper, brass, turquoise, semi-precious, not to mention wood, crystal, clay, bone, glass, shell, stone, ethnic, alphabet...
Oy! Such a problem I'm going to have to deal with...

Studio View

I'm in the midst of a major overhaul in my studio, and I've made sure to have a space that will allow me to really appreciate the view. This is what I see from my new cutting table, which will double as a desk for sketching, journaling, doing hand work and, when I feel like it, just zoning out in front of a window with a great view! The place is a total wreck right now, and I probably won't have everything back together again for a few weeks, but sitting here makes the wait tolerable, especially at sunset.

YAY!! Dimples!!

I had a very pleasant online shopping experience last week. I use a lot of Andover Fabrics "Dimples" pattern in my work, and was beginning to run alarmingly short of several colors. We all know that sinking feeling... cut, cut, cut, sew, sew, sew... Oh NO!! SHIT... there's no more of THAT fabric... ARGGGGG! After a panic-filled internet search, I found a few sites offering "Dimples" fabric, but most of them only had 5-10 color choices, none of which were the two colors I wanted. As my despair deepened, I ultimately wound up at The Old Country Store where I found Dimples in 119... yes... really... ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN colors! I have no idea how long their supplies will last, but, for now, they have enough to hold me for years! I intend to go back over the next few months (after the next few SSI checks) and lay in a supply of other colors that will blitz my fears of ever running out again. The customer service was great - I screwed up my order, but sent them a quick e-mail, and they fixed everything and sent out my order the next day. The shipment arrived two days ago, and I'm back to work on a stalled project, and happy as a clam at high tide. Best of all - in addition to great selection, great service, and the best price I've ever seen for this fabric, my order was packed in color wheel order, and it looked soooooo beautiful when I pulled it out of the package! How cool is that? I love it! Check 'em out!

Gone for a while...

"Elephants, Leopards, and Cheetahs, Oh, My!" left home this morning to hang in the Vallejo Piecemakers' exhibit at JFK Library. It'll be gone for three months, leaving a big blank space on the hallway wall. Guess I'd better get busy and finish a UFO or two to fill the space while it's away. This quilt is my serious favorite - I always miss it when it's gone!

Laundry... (one of) The Curse(s) of my life...

I hate doing the laundry... but, then, I hate doing most housework... what else is new? I don't know how I'd manage to get through it all without the aid of my special helpers. Here's Maxene, doing her best to make life more pleasant for me...

What planet is this?

I've been frightfully scattered for the past couple of months with the task of caring for our three seriously ill cats while trying to hold body, mind and soul together. It's been one of the biggest challenges of my life, and I'm beginning to feel totally slammed. The Love of My Life, who has been performing the lion's share of the nursing care, has also begun to fray around the edges. The daily grind of co-ordinating six tube-and/or hand-feeding sessions, four fluid therapy events, dosing out 12 or so (lost count) meds, dressing changes, feeding and paying attention to 20 other cats, in combination with keeping ourselves (relatively) well fed and in clean underwear, trying to keep the garden alive (alas, I've already cooked one of my beautiful fuchsias by failing to notice its gasps for water), waging an almost daily war against ants, dealing with a flea problem that's nearly gone over the edge, weekly veterinarian appointments, and the occasional emergency trip to UC Davis when Diana pulls out her esophageal feeding tube... to say it's been a nightmare is a massive understatement.

Creativity, in the form or making art and/or music, has pretty much gone out the window. Last week, in a near-deranged effort to fool my poor, confused muse into thinking I could still make art, I escaped to my studio and started slicing fabric and slapping it together into a "scrumble" - no, Maude, not THAT kind of scrumble - in this case, a scrumble being a small, improvised art quilt. It didn't turn out half bad, though it was thrown together without a moment's thought in an effort to just get SOMETHING done. Since then, I've tried to get to the studio every day - a half hour here, a half hour there - I hate working in such a disjointed way, but if that's the only option, I'll take it. As an indication of my inability to concentrate more than a day or two on a single project, I confess to starting three new projects in the last 10-12 days, all of which, unfortunately, are stalled for one reason or another. The scrumble is pieced and quilted, but on hold in the embellishment phase until I can get to Michael's to replenish my supply of red beads. The second piece is at a standstill because it needs some rather complex machine work, and, at this point in my life, I'm pretty low on tolerance for dealing with dittsy, detail work. The third piece languishes while awaiting the arrival of a fabric shipment after I discovered several fabrics I just HAD to have were in zero supply.

Saturday, my distracted brain felt compelled to start something new once again, and, while scrounging around for something, anything, to work on, I came across these chunks of fabric:


This is yet another version of my absolute favorite fabric from Senegal, which appears in my second most absolute favorite quilt, "Ladies of Senegal":
Here's some early work on the center block:


I appear to be stuck in a black/white/red phase - three of the four new pieces are in that combination. But... if I have to be stuck somewhere, better to be stuck inside the color wheel than in front of the TV.

Backyard Bonus

This volunteer tomato plant appeared a month or so ago, and is rapidly out-growing all of the other tomatoes confined in their containers. Hard to believe it's making any progress in the rock-hard clay crap that passes for soil in our yard. It has a bunch of blossoms, and I expect to see some fruit soon. Don't know for sure what kind it is, but who cares? It's probably a result of last season's plants getting clobbered by the typhoon that ripped through here on New Year's Eve. It's been fun watching it grow, and I'm looking forward to seeing exactly what I'm going to wind up with. It would be wonderful if it turned out to be that fantabulous orange and green Heirloom I loved so much from last season, but it's probably just another "Better Boy".

Gifts of the Gods

Strawberries are my favorite fruit. Not just any old strawberries, mind you, such as you'ld get at Raley's or Safeway, but the big, fat, juicy, fire-engine-red honkers that come out of your own garden on a sunny afternoon. While the closest thing to ecstasy I can think of is chocolate dipped strawberries, my second choice for ecstasy is strawberry cobbler. When I picked our first real "harvest" a few days ago, I didn't have any dipping chocolate on hand, so I did the next best thing and made a cobbler. Oh. My. Goodness. Ecstasy was truly mine. It only lasted for two desserts, but dinner was worth waiting for those two days!

2:00 pm
5:00 pm
The only thing wrong with my micro-farm in the back yard, is that I'm going to have to wait a few weeks before there are enough strawberries for the next cobbler. Not to worry, though - in the meantime, my faithful weekly produce box from Riverdog Farm has been yielding fresh peaches and apricots for the last few weeks, and, hopefully, will continue to do so for the next few at least. Luckily, both of those fruits make more than adequate strawberry cobbler substitutes, as recent desserts can attest!

Spuds!!

There are few comfort foods on this planet I love more than potatoes... I love all kinds - red, yellow, blue, Yukon gold, itty-bitty fingerlings, huge honkin' russets... any kind you can think of. I like 'em mashed, broiled, skillet fried, latke-ed, french fried, scalloped, hash browned, chipped, baked, twice-baked, roasted, steamed, as a crust for a savory tart, O'Brien-ed, sliced thin and fried on my sandwich grill, and, Goddess help me, even boiled. Out of curiosity, one day I Googled "varieties of potatoes" and found the Washington State University Research & Extension site has a list of 575 varieties! My idea of heaven would be to eat my way through the entire list - one variety a day - until I either croaked or decided I hate potatoes.

This year's potato crop was a pure accident. In early February, I started receiving potatoes in my weekly veggie box from Riverdog Farm. After several weeks, I had tons of potatoes on hand, and one sack of them got forgotten in the back of my veggie bin. In early April, I noticed some strange tendrils growing out of the veggie bin, and found, to my dismay, the forgotten spuds. By that time they looked terrible - wrinkled, shriveled, soft and sprouting ten-inch tendrils, that were threatening to take over the pantry closet as well as the veggie bin. I was about to relegate them to the yard waste container, when my husband suggested I plant them in a spare planter and "see what happens". Long story short... they sprouted, then grew into a gorgeous array of bright green plants, then, after 6-7 weeks, faded and dried up and started looking terrible. I'd read on the internet that potatoes are ready to harvest when the bushes start producing blossoms. I waited and waited, and... no blossoms. About a week ago I noticed some lumps poking out of the soil, and realized they were potatoes! I decided to wait a while longer, but when no blossoms appeared by this morning, I decided to go for it, and started rutting around in the dirt under two of the plants. Wow...!!! Bunches of potatoes appeared - some the size of tiny cherry tomatoes, and others the size of a small fist. So, here they are - fresh from the dirt and ready for breakfast! They were the best home fries I've ever had - tender and fluffy, and fantastic tasting. The best part is, there are still another eight plants I haven't dug up yet!

Diana - Still a half dozen lives left...

Diana spent ten days earlier this month at the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Center being treated for severe kidney failure. We drove up to Davis nearly every day to visit her and consult with doctors, and went through fifteen kinds of hell along the way - watching her get better, then get worse, then get better, etc. I'm sure some people would have pulled the plug long ago, but we simply couldn't do it. We've had some serious ups and downs since she came home, but for the last few days she's been doing very well. She requires buckets of time for her nursing care - tube feeding, sub-cutaneous fluids, various meds, dressing changes, yada, yada. Is it worth it? How much pain is she in? Is she happy with her lot? Is she miserable and wishing we'd just let go? Unanswerable questions, of course, and I wonder, hour by hour, if we're doing the right thing(s). Then, there's days like today and yesterday, where she runs around the house, jumps on the furniture, sprawls in the sunlight, does a really cool "elevator butt" every time we pet her, is conversational, and is interactive with us and some of the other cats. Time will tell, and maybe we'll never know what's "the right thing" to do. In the meantime, we're giving her all the love we can muster, and hoping that amounts to something in her little kitty mind.

Life in the Garden

All seventeen of my new roses are blooming, and some of them are real block-busters. Here's a couple:

Queen Mary
Just Joey In fact, they're blooming so bloomin' fast and furiously, they've gotten waaaaay ahead of me, and for the past couple of days, I've had to dive in and do some serious dead-heading and pruning back.

My succulent garden is going nuts...
...and a couple of my violets are really struttin' their stuff.

I recently joined an African Violet group on Yahoo!, and have realized the error of my ways these many years, in which I've never paid much attention to the names of the violets and orchids I buy. Thus, these two beauties are "Sine nomine" (without a name)... but I love them anyway! The lesson has been learned, however, and I resolve never again to buy another plant without knowing it's name first!

Happy Birthday, Jenny

Jenny just had her 18th birthday! That makes her the longest-lived cat ever to grace our lives. She's still a healthy, active, and often feisty Princess, who shows no sign of slowing down except for a mild touch of kidney disease, which we're managing to keep under control. She can hold her own in a fist-fight, and has been known to punch the crap out of another cat who isn't behaving toward her in a manner befitting someone in the presence of Royalty. She's truly a credit to her race!

None of our other kids - 23 current and 24 who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge, have lived beyond 17 years and a couple of months. One of the truths we've had to accept along the way, is that one almost always outlives their companion animals. Losing one is never easy, but we have lots of fun memories and at least 4 or 5 boocoodle photographs with which to ease the pain of loss when it occurs.

Here's to our former kids: Misty, Odyssey, Felicity, Felix, Fanny, George, Ira, Sarek, Amanda, Julian, Andrew, Josef, Michael, Borris, Erroll, Clara, Hildegarde, Winston, Tiger, Alicia, Darius Meow, Igor, Johann...

And our current kids: Dmitri, Yoda, Beverly, Gerald, Wanda, Amy, Lucia, Alessandro, Domenico, Carmen, Cecilia, Frederick the Grey, Elvis, Ralph, Diana, Robert, Lavernne, Patty, Maxene, Jenny, Nikolai, Martina, Sarah...

Unwelcome Visitors

We woke up to a kitchen full of these little bastards this morning. I saw a few of them running around yesterday and feared they'd multiply overnight when I couldn't be there to keep an eye on them, and I was right. We dispatched them after a half hour's hard labor, but they'll probably be back again tomorrow morning. They always seem to "test" us for a couple of days before they move on. Fortunately, once they're gone they tend to stay gone for months. I think this invasion is retaliation for my drowning out one of their colonies a couple of days ago when I revived an old planter that hadn't seen any water for a long time. Actually, I rather enjoy drowning ants - I get a kick out of watching them run around like their little asses are on fire - probably very much like I'd behave if some giant six-legged creature with a multi-sectioned body smelling like formalin burst into my house with a fire hose. My mother used to pour boiling water on them whenever she found an invasion, but I've discovered plain old hose water is just as effective, and you don't waste electricity boiling up the water.

One time, an old woman at a church where I worked, put a question to me; If I could ask God any question, what would it be? I told her I'd like to know how many ants are alive and well on this planet at any given moment. The good woman was scandalized. She, it appeared, had a whole list of lofty questions to ask The Maker, most of which I thought were absolute balderdash. I'm sure God's answers to all of her nosey questions would invariably be, "Because that's the way it is, Sister." Now, the answer to my question would be one you could sink your teeth into... a number with a million billion gazillion digits. Sort of like Pi.

No, as a matter of fact, I DON'T have anything better to do this afternoon...

The Garden - five weeks later...

What a change from the pics on May 21! Most of the plants are covered with hard, little green veggies. I'm getting impatient! Another couple weeks of weather like we've had for the past two days, and we'll have veggies up the wazoo. (ACK! What am I saying... please, NO!!!)

Picked the first strawberry today...
A half for each of us tonight with a bottle of champagne to celebrate First Harvest!! (That's reason enough for champagne, isn't it???)

Hey! Some excitement...!

It F.I.N.A.L.L.Y. arrived!! I've been waiting for this magazine for what seems like forever. It was announced last fall and the Premier Issue finally fell into my hot little hands yesterday. It's an absolute masterpiece, and (though I didn't think so while I was waiting) it was absolutely worth waiting for! It's nearly 150 pages, with a gorgeous color photo (or two) on nearly every page - even the ads are beautiful - printed on wonderful, heavy paper, and filled with so many exciting ideas my head is spinning. I've barely been able to put it down! It just screams at me to dive into my studio and GET BUSY!

So that's where I'm headed, like, RIGHT NOW!!!!

No excitement here...

As my header says... Excitement??? Not here! This has been a month of taking care of sick cats and little else. It's sent us into some terrible habits that we're now working our butts off to break; staying up too late, getting up too late, drinking too much, eating too much take-'n'-bake pizza, wasting too much time in front of the computer, lumping around doing nothing... UGH. June has been an almost total waste. By the time we give three cats six doses of sub-q fluids, four pills, and five syringes of liquid meds (all of which they hate and fight like tigers to avoid), then deal with feeding the sick ones (who are fussy as hell), then feed the twenty healthy ones and worry about who's eating enough, who's not eating enough, who's trying to steal food from another, who's punching who out because they sense our anxiety, et cetera and et cetera; all of this on a daily basis just wears us out.

Even though my acceptance of the B.W.O. pledge (Blogging Without Obligation) exempts me from apologizing for lapses in blog entries, I feel bad about missing so many days. I really enjoy blogging, both doing my own and reading the ones I follow, and sometimes wish I had a more exciting life so I'd have more to post. But then I sit down and take a few deep breaths and let the feeling pass over me. I like my slow, sometimes humdrum, life very much. I had enough excitement to last a lifetime during my years in St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco - the memories are wonderful, but I wouldn't get myself back into that life style for anything, thank you!

Re the cats, Dmitri is much better - the only thing remaining from his terrible ordeal of eight weeks ago is loss of stability in his right hind leg. He gets around fine, and recently has been quite active. He tires easily due to the congestive heart failure, but his blood work looks good, and he's eating well. Right now, we couldn't ask for more. Jenny is regaining weight and energy, eating much better, and becoming more feisty and active. Diana isn't doing as well - continues to lose weight, isn't eating very well, and is drinking a lot of water - all of which probably indicate her lab values are going back up. She's going to the vet this weekend, so we'll know soon.

Life goes on...

Prayer

I've often said I'm not a prayin' woman, and the concept of intercessionary prayer (as in, "Oh dear Jesus, send me a new Cadillac or a new refrigerator or a new husband or a million dollars, etc...") really turns me off. Prayer in the form of meditation, on the other hand, really does something for me - it calms me down, tunes me in, fills the hole in my soul, and just plain feels good. This prayer is shared by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley and is hanging in their beautiful lobby atrium. I see it every time I go there for my organ lesson, and it never fails to have an effect on me - especially the part about taming that which rages within me. Click on the picture below so you can read it, and relax... breathe... have a beautiful day!

Progressing one pot at a time...

I'm slowly getting all of the planters on the front patio "repaired". I was an absolute do-nothing over the winter and practically everything croaked. And, no, I didn't do it deliberately so I could run out and buy a bunch of new stuff this spring. Here's the two latest...

This is an Oragami Aquilegia, a species of columbine. Did you know there are 70 species of columbines? Neither did I. They're all so delicately beautiful... I love them. I saw my first columbine when I was about 7 or 8, and wanted to move to Colorado because my aunt told me they were Colorado's state flower, and, as such, were growing wild all over the place there. At the time I was dull enough to think the California Poppy was boring. (Stupid kid...)


Someone's having a lot of fun with Calla Lilies this year. I've seen so many new colors it's made my head spin. I already have them in yellow and hot pink, and, of course, the requisite white, and I just found this purple and white beauty last week. I also saw one in pumpkin orange with a delicate outline of darker orange around the edges; and others in light green, red, and dark purple. I think it's time to just buy them all and get my bulb garden going...

Hooray for Hostas!

I love Hostas, but I live in a sunny, windy place, and, ultimately, Hostas don't love me. I wasn't really planning to try growing them again, but I found these two at the supermarket nursery last week. They were inexpensive, and looked pretty good, so I decided to try one more time. So far, they seem to like it here... one is already sending up flowers, and the other has shot out an entire new set of leaves. Maybe this time we'll get lucky!