Confessions of a Grandma

Appropriate for the day… This old cemetery is about a mile north of my house.  As you can see, this is a pretty old cemetery: Jericho’s famous resident, Snowflake Bentley, is buried here, but I have yet to come across his grave. I really wonder abut this one: **My thoughts and prayers are with those so affected by the devastation of Sandy.

The trees are mostly bare as I write this and we are expecting lots of wind from Frankenstorm Sandy over the next few days so I suspect they will be completely bare by the time I get around to posting this. however, there are a few individual trees around that are in full regalia.  There were three maple trees next to the Vermont Meat and Seafood Market where I shopped yesterday.  The were all a brilliant orangey red.  When I parked my car outside the store, I noticed that there were two Japanese tourists taking pictures.  She had a fancy (meaning very high-tech looking) camera and he had a movie camera.   She was slowly walking around one of the trees, snapping away all the while.  He as sitting on the ground tossing up handfuls of leaves and filming as the fluttered back down.  They were still there when I came out of the store, still clicking and filming. Sometimes it is really a good thing to have a reminder.  The awesome beauty is r...

The Vermont fall color on our road is definitely past peak, but I still like the metallic hues that linger the longest. For me, this is about as decorated for fall as a yard ought to be.  My yard is not even this seasonal this year. Although…I have given a nod to the season inside my house. That’s it.  The whole show. This picture represents only about one fifth of the Halloween décor in this particular yard.  I don’t know the home owners so I can’s say anything.  However, it was my house, I would be spending time putting siding over the tyvek wrapping instead of putting on all the holiday displays.  (All right, so I did say something.) I pass this barn often and I always notice the yellow cat painted in the window.  This time I snapped a picture of it. Later in my walk, three deer went racing across the road about fifty yards in front of me.  So fast!  There was no chance of getting a picture of them, but I realized why it is no...

  Our last night in Florida, Mike called from the car port, “C’mon out and watch this light show.   It was one of those nights when lightning was flashing every two seconds off in the distance, lighting up the fluffy clouds but far enough away to be as entertaining as a fireworks display.   I went out to find Mike sitting in my usual chair.  What was that about?  He offered to try to encourage his little buddy to vacate the other chair, but I decided I would just go back inside.       

  Long pants, long-sleeved shirts, socks…we must be back in Vermont.  It feels like vacation is over.  Funny how we had things to get done at the Florida house, but it still felt relaxed—like a vacation.  As soon as we got back (about 1:30 p.m. on Monday), we were both, “OMG! So much to do!  How will we ever get it all done?  OMG!  Where to start?  Winter is coming.”  Kind of ridiculous, actually.  Mike went out to mow the lawn while I unpacked.  I went grocery shopping. Two days without the computer on—87 posts to catch up on.  This morning we were out raking and all the while I am itching to get at my sewing machine to finish up a project.   Breathe.   I once went to an educational conference where a doctor from Washington state was presenting a program on what brain research had to tell us about learning and, thereby, teaching.  It was a good workshop, but I particularly remember her saying, “We on the we...

It is time to think about packing up and returning to Vermont.  Wednesday was spent on yard work—weeding where needed,  shaping up some of the bushes, and rearranging some garden borders.  We had a local guy come in to do the spiny plants and we have a neighbor signed up to stop by once a day and pick up any fallen grapefruit.  Thursday will be dust and polish, vacuum and mop—generally tidy up the inside.  Friday we will do laundry, clean out the refrigerator, pack.  Saturday morning we will be good to go after a few closing up details are accomplished. I will have to catch up the new television season when I am back in Vermont.  I won’t be sitting out in the evenings watching sunsets and stars and moon risings, chatting with the neighbors strolling by. I just read Linda Reeder’s post about her SMART television .  My television in VT is not a smart one, although it sometimes gets the best of me.  I can use the on-demand for shows I miss an...

as in cost of living adjustment… not   Those of us who are collecting social security benefits can expect an increase of 1.7% in 2013.  WOOHOO!  We’re in the money! The cost of living adjustment is in place to insure that the purchasing power of social security benefits are not consumed by inflation.  This is determined on a limited time sample.  Apparently, the cost of living did not rise significantly between 8 a.m. and 1:32 p.m. last Tuesday. Well it is obvious that the cost of grocery items have not gone up significantly.  (??)  You can still buy a container of ice cream for about five bucks.  Never mind that ice cream used to come in half-gallon containers.  If you can even find a half-gallon container these days, it will cost more than five bucks.  Don’t quote me on the prices of ice cream, but surely you notice that everything comes in old size packages with less product inside.  Ice cream packages look to be the sa...

Mike has gone off to the beach this morning.  I will give that a pass for the rest of the week, but he doesn’t seem to be as sensitive to the red tide and smell of dead fish.  My stomach lurches at the thought. We cleaned shutters and windows this past weekend.  The shutters on the shady side of the house were badly mildewed.  After a few attempts to get it off, we ended up using a product that attached a spray bottle at the end of the hose.  It contained bleach and it worked, but boy, did I suffer all day yesterday.  Renewed commitment to my homemade cleaners and respiratory masks if I ever attempt that again.  And, I am staying away from the red tide. Last night was one of those toss and turn and fling pillows around the room nights.  I never woke up for long enough to have to get out of bed, but it was NOT a refreshing night’s sleep.  Probably related to chlorine poisoning (over dramatic?).  Earlier this summer I was having nigh...

  Sarasota Bay on a clear, fall day.   White egret   . Blue heron.   A modest cottage,   and the next door neighbor.

We went to the beach on our first day here in Venice, but I have not been back since then. I started coughing right away, as soon as my feet hit the sand, and I knew that red tide was the culprit. I was right. According to the paper, this has been the largest outbreak of red tide since 2007. The bloom is affecting a hundred miles of west Florida coastline and killing thousands of fish. Seven tons of dead fish have been cleared off area beaches in the past two days.   Mike went for a look.   Caspersen Beach is a designated rural beach and they tend to leave it to the forces of nature a bit more than the better known and more ‘civilized’ beaches like Venice Beach and Nokomis Beach. North of us in Sarasota, the beach on Siesta Key, is just out of the range of this red tide bloom. I expect the turkey buzzards will be taking over Caspersen in a few weeks.   From today’s Herald Tribune: "It is a pretty big red tide bloom. If we look at the linear distance along the coas...

Synonym : a word to use when you can not spell the word you really want. I find myself doing this more and more lately.  I am losing my ability to spell.  Not that I was ever spelling bee material, but I was pretty good, when writing, at seeing that a word just did not look right.  I was also good at looking up the word if I needed to do so, but usually I could make the correction easily enough. Then along came spell check and I am losing my ability to spell and to recognize errors.  My spelling brain has gone soft from under use is my guess.  I don’t have to pay that much attention.  If the work is misspelled a red line or a yellow highlight will appear.  One click and I have the options in front of me.  Another click and the offending error is fixed.  Even less thought goes into those words that are habitually misspelled.  They correct themselves automatically, often without my even registering more that a slight blip on the scree...

I wish  had written down the name of this plant because, of course, I do not remember. So pretty… Not all the plants are friendly: In fact, quite a few of them are down right mean looking. But these are the kind of plants I can actually grow—the kind that are full sun lovers, drought tolerant, do well in poor soil, and thrive on neglect. The canopy walk (above) is guarded by this fellow:

I had planned a trip this time down here to Sarasota and the Marie SeIby Botanical Gardens.   Mike surprised me greatly by suggesting we make the trip together.  I was very happy to have his company for this outing. We started in the conservatory, a room filled with orchids and humidity. The camera lens was very quickly fogged up, as were my glasses.  Beautiful, nevertheless! The gardens are relatively small in scope.  They said an average visit took two hours.  This represents a third of the bonsai exhibition. The fern collection     Epiphyte gardens over our heads   I loved the posts with bits of poetry and watercolor like illustration. Two hours and Mike was done.  I could have stayed much longer and will visit again sometime.

It is autumn according to the calendar—even here in sunny/rainy Florida where the humidity reached 100% a couple of days ago and the “feels like” temperature was 100 today, until a cold front moved through and dropped it down to the 70’s. Now you may think that Florida is tropical, land of always summer.  But let me tell you that there are seasons here.  It is clearly fall and the deciduous trees know it.  It is time for their leaves to lose the green, turn color (weak yellow mottled with brown tho’ it may be) and fall to the ground.  I have proof: frangipani and: crape myrtle   I have been looking at so many pictures of the fall color in northern states and hearing so many questions about why we would miss the Vermont foliage season that I just had to show that leaves do change here too.  Okay, maybe the look is more diseased than brilliant color, but it is the same concept.  They turn and fall off.   When we come back for our...

Have you ever wondered—for some strange reason—what the under belly of a dishwasher looks like? Wonder no more: The new motor arrived very quickly.  It only had to come from Jacksonville, Florida. The old is on the left, the new on the right. Really, it is not the most convenient appliance to work on.  Poor Mike, with all his recent aches and pains—but he got it running although it pretty much killed his Saturday morning. He spent the rest of the day taking the defective motor apart and problem solving exactly what went wrong.  He found the defective part.  Next time it will be “much easier” to fix.  He also did research on the net to confirm his trouble shooting and find some better method of putting the thing into storage mode. I would be doing all the dishes in the sink OR buying a new dishwasher.  By the way, he did go to an appliance repair place early in the game, but got nothing more than shoulder shrugs.  He snatched the motor ...