| You Are a Centaur |
 In general, you are a very cautious and reserved person. However, you are also warm hearted, and you enjoy helping others in practical ways. You are a great teacher, and you are really good at helping people get their lives in order. You are very intuitive, and you go with your gut. You make good decisions easily. |
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
mythological creature
Sunday, May 20, 2007
monarch butterflies & old junk cars
Yes, that's what prompted me to let the few milkweed plants grow beside my driveway two years ago. The Monarchs, that is. I used to be able to go out in the field behind my house and find a milkweed with a chrysalis on it for a neighbor's science class and wondered if any would lay eggs on these closer ones.
I love monarchs. One summer about thirty years ago I saw some flying over the house where I lived in the Chicago suburbs. Then I realized they were coming in a steady stream. I lay down on the ground and watched them -- for HOURS. A column of butterflies several feet wide stayed right overhead. It was one of those most special happenstances in life where if you hadn't happened to step out the door right that moment, you might have missed it all. That was the same summer when everyone else who lived there had gone away for a week or so. I had the place to myself and discovered that for several days in a row a spider made a huge web between two bushes right across from each other in front of the front door. Each day the previous web was gone and a new one spun. And it was huge. I felt that all this was happening just to reward me for spending some quiet content days with myself.
Monarch migrate from Mexico up North to the US and back again. Well, it's after the next generations that they return to Mexico. I saw a photo in National Geographic once of a large tree in Mexico so totally covered with butterflies that it was wrapped in orange.
So last year after returning from the World Cup in Germany I found that many more milkweed were growing. Okay, I hoped, maybe there is a chance that a monarch will find one.
Nope. Not one.
I then read that they like to return to the same area. And MY area is evidently not close enough to the field right behind my house.
So today I was outside doing everything but checking this area where the milk weeds grow. This isn't a happy story about monarchs in my yard since the milkweed isn't even showing yet. Maybe it won't even grow this year.
I'd struggled through making sense of those crazy peony circle things to support the future flower-laden stems and was planting a few more annuals and some perennials and filling a new pot with soil and plants.
As I turned away from one bed I saw that the entire side where the milk weed grows was overrun with berry brambles -- prickers I call them -- and Virginia creeper. Together they were drowning out the rugosa roses. The roses that somehow have managed to fight back and not to totally succumb after being crushed and broken when some tree guys working for the power company took the grey birches down.
A few winters ago the birches were heavy laden with wet winter snow, draped over and pressing down on the power line that goes into our house. We had gotten very tired of running outside after grabbing the longest thing we could find to poke up at the branches to unencumber them. The tree guys were out and when I called the electric company they happened to be right in our neighborhood. Fast response.
Now that the trees are gone letting in more sun, all sort of things have crept in. And not lovely things at all. It looks nasty and ugly there. One thing is a regiment of these green things (I used to know their name) that remind me of a plant near the Fort Josef geocache in Mainz on the Rhine in Germany. Before the trip when I was looking for possible caches to find, I was using one of those on-line translator services to translate from German to English. There were warnings about a plant that if you touched it, left you not only with raised vesicles on you skin, but feeling itchy.
I deduce the ones in my yard are related. Several years ago I discovered while pulling them out without gloves on (or maybe I did have on gloves, but my forearms weren't covered) I had this nasty eruption on my arms that evening. If you catch these plants early, before they are tall and stiffer, they come out easily and with no skin reaction.
So I found myself outside for much longer than anticipated pulling and yanking at the vines. And the green things.
If I'd ignored this much longer I would have had a real problem when I finally got around to calling the fellow to remove the old junk car from the driveway. The vines were making there way UNDER it - at least 15 separate strands were well under it. In one leap my mind envisioned the entire car encased in them by summer's end.
That whole side of the yard seems to be turning into an old abandoned secret place. But not at all a pretty garden. In among the trees that separate our yard from our western neighbor's is an old pile of rotting sawn tree logs left from a poplar taken down a good eight years ago, I think. And everything that's grown in all the chips the tree guys shot in there. It would have cost so much more for them to cart all that away. But the creeper seems to have thrived in the no longer visible chips. Previous years I've spent hours yanking it down and clipping it off from it's roots to save a few of the trees. And grapes vines joined in to wind their way skyward as well.
I've decided the car has to go this week. It served its purpose for a year or two. It was a $300 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra that I bought from a neighbor for my younger son to drive. And our Japanese friends' daughter used it as well for 10 months. It was the one bad purchase of a used automobile that I've made. Why? On the back there is a small chrome remnant of the script that used to say Oldsmobile. "...mobile" My older son's ex-gf christened it with the perfect name. It stuck. The Ghettomobile.
Turns out that it had been parked on a street in Chicago. Right place, wrong time. Someone in a gunfight had ducked down behind it shielding himself, and had managed to shoot his gun leaving not only a crease on the trunk lid, but shattering the back window and embossing the roof with the bullet's impact. Whomever replaced the window did a lousy job. It leaks. But not in an obvious way. After it rains the head liner hangs down bowed with the weight of saturation. The back seat can be damp. And the salesman that used to own before my neighbor it must have thumped his body down into the driver's seat over and over again leaving a dip so deep we had to fill it with a pillow. None of this did I realize when I told her I'd buy the car.
Now all that car has done is sit on perfectly new all season tires for over three years shielding a bunch of junk in front of it: garbage cans, a car top carrier beside the garage, chimney terracotta liner pieces that I thought would make great planters (but seemed to kill whatever I was trying to grow in them), a broken snow shovel left from the first big winter storm. And all those vines stuck onto the asphalt drive. Working their way toward our front walk....
I love monarchs. One summer about thirty years ago I saw some flying over the house where I lived in the Chicago suburbs. Then I realized they were coming in a steady stream. I lay down on the ground and watched them -- for HOURS. A column of butterflies several feet wide stayed right overhead. It was one of those most special happenstances in life where if you hadn't happened to step out the door right that moment, you might have missed it all. That was the same summer when everyone else who lived there had gone away for a week or so. I had the place to myself and discovered that for several days in a row a spider made a huge web between two bushes right across from each other in front of the front door. Each day the previous web was gone and a new one spun. And it was huge. I felt that all this was happening just to reward me for spending some quiet content days with myself.
Monarch migrate from Mexico up North to the US and back again. Well, it's after the next generations that they return to Mexico. I saw a photo in National Geographic once of a large tree in Mexico so totally covered with butterflies that it was wrapped in orange.
So last year after returning from the World Cup in Germany I found that many more milkweed were growing. Okay, I hoped, maybe there is a chance that a monarch will find one.
Nope. Not one.
I then read that they like to return to the same area. And MY area is evidently not close enough to the field right behind my house.
So today I was outside doing everything but checking this area where the milk weeds grow. This isn't a happy story about monarchs in my yard since the milkweed isn't even showing yet. Maybe it won't even grow this year.
I'd struggled through making sense of those crazy peony circle things to support the future flower-laden stems and was planting a few more annuals and some perennials and filling a new pot with soil and plants.
As I turned away from one bed I saw that the entire side where the milk weed grows was overrun with berry brambles -- prickers I call them -- and Virginia creeper. Together they were drowning out the rugosa roses. The roses that somehow have managed to fight back and not to totally succumb after being crushed and broken when some tree guys working for the power company took the grey birches down.
A few winters ago the birches were heavy laden with wet winter snow, draped over and pressing down on the power line that goes into our house. We had gotten very tired of running outside after grabbing the longest thing we could find to poke up at the branches to unencumber them. The tree guys were out and when I called the electric company they happened to be right in our neighborhood. Fast response.
Now that the trees are gone letting in more sun, all sort of things have crept in. And not lovely things at all. It looks nasty and ugly there. One thing is a regiment of these green things (I used to know their name) that remind me of a plant near the Fort Josef geocache in Mainz on the Rhine in Germany. Before the trip when I was looking for possible caches to find, I was using one of those on-line translator services to translate from German to English. There were warnings about a plant that if you touched it, left you not only with raised vesicles on you skin, but feeling itchy.
I deduce the ones in my yard are related. Several years ago I discovered while pulling them out without gloves on (or maybe I did have on gloves, but my forearms weren't covered) I had this nasty eruption on my arms that evening. If you catch these plants early, before they are tall and stiffer, they come out easily and with no skin reaction.
So I found myself outside for much longer than anticipated pulling and yanking at the vines. And the green things.
If I'd ignored this much longer I would have had a real problem when I finally got around to calling the fellow to remove the old junk car from the driveway. The vines were making there way UNDER it - at least 15 separate strands were well under it. In one leap my mind envisioned the entire car encased in them by summer's end.
That whole side of the yard seems to be turning into an old abandoned secret place. But not at all a pretty garden. In among the trees that separate our yard from our western neighbor's is an old pile of rotting sawn tree logs left from a poplar taken down a good eight years ago, I think. And everything that's grown in all the chips the tree guys shot in there. It would have cost so much more for them to cart all that away. But the creeper seems to have thrived in the no longer visible chips. Previous years I've spent hours yanking it down and clipping it off from it's roots to save a few of the trees. And grapes vines joined in to wind their way skyward as well.
I've decided the car has to go this week. It served its purpose for a year or two. It was a $300 Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra that I bought from a neighbor for my younger son to drive. And our Japanese friends' daughter used it as well for 10 months. It was the one bad purchase of a used automobile that I've made. Why? On the back there is a small chrome remnant of the script that used to say Oldsmobile. "...mobile" My older son's ex-gf christened it with the perfect name. It stuck. The Ghettomobile.
Turns out that it had been parked on a street in Chicago. Right place, wrong time. Someone in a gunfight had ducked down behind it shielding himself, and had managed to shoot his gun leaving not only a crease on the trunk lid, but shattering the back window and embossing the roof with the bullet's impact. Whomever replaced the window did a lousy job. It leaks. But not in an obvious way. After it rains the head liner hangs down bowed with the weight of saturation. The back seat can be damp. And the salesman that used to own before my neighbor it must have thumped his body down into the driver's seat over and over again leaving a dip so deep we had to fill it with a pillow. None of this did I realize when I told her I'd buy the car.
Now all that car has done is sit on perfectly new all season tires for over three years shielding a bunch of junk in front of it: garbage cans, a car top carrier beside the garage, chimney terracotta liner pieces that I thought would make great planters (but seemed to kill whatever I was trying to grow in them), a broken snow shovel left from the first big winter storm. And all those vines stuck onto the asphalt drive. Working their way toward our front walk....
Saturday, April 28, 2007
coffe maker advice needed
First of all the REAL story. ;-)
Before last summer during a scant few years when the ground was cold and spring was on its way, we'd get some ants in the kitchen. Briefly.
Last summer while we were in Germany at World Cup Futbol matches ants came into our house in the mud room (which is next to the kitchen) and the person who was staying in our house part of the time, and feeding our cat, put out one of those orange ant trap tins (which did nothing), but didn't move the spot where the cat was fed elsewhere.
So the ants thought they'd found a permanent food source since good ol' Monty never eats the little bits of dried food that break off and fall from his mouth while eating, thereby leaving these tidbits for the ants. Where oh, where is the dog? This never would have happened if Cody were still alive.
After that the ants sort of went away, I thought.
I'd see one or two at a time and spray them with Basic H. I really didn't want to kill them.
I won't forget the time I was in Miami Beach for a LLI cf walking with 2 friends on the boardwalk along the shore. You could tell the exact line where the insecticide spraying had ended. All of a sudden we heard crunching under foot. My pregnant friend started to scream. Cockroaches everywhere. Huge ones. These must be what they call Palmetto bugs, I thought. We walked a bit further, but the crunch was just too disconcerting. So we turned around. And saw that ants had cleared away all the carcasses we'd passed or made. That's when I really realized that ants are useful in nature.
Then I discovered that they'd set up housekeeping IN my house.
Where? In both the soil of my Jade plant that was in the corner on the counter under the kitchen windows and a small miniature violet plant. I'd forgotten to water the plants for a week or two or three and when I did, out poured a stream of ants dragging eggs with them.
After that all got dealt with I thought I was home free. I was -- for LAST year.
Now this spring a small number of ants have made their way in and again, I targeted them and thought okay, soon they'll all be gone. I remind myself that Albert Schweitzer never stepped on ants (did you read the same biography of him that I did in elementary school???) I was cleaning the counter today & picked up some old mail resting on top of the coffee machine. Why I thought that a suitable place to keep these pieces, I have no idea. Probably because the spot I usually keep things that I haven't made up my mind "keep, or throw away?" was spilling over onto the floor.
So I picked them up and looked them over for a fifth, sixth or was it the 100th time (okay, an Easter card from my step-mother -- as a reminder to write to her, a fund raiser envelope to send a donation to the hospital I work for, and, are you ready for this one? A twenty something page 4" by 8 1/4" pamphlet "Coronary artery stent thrombosis." For some reason I thought I should educate myself with this throw away sent to my dh. It's now in the trash.
Ants!!!!
On the papers. Spilling over onto my hand. (And I still feel as though they're all over me.)
Why are they up here? And there were scores of them (no really only ten or fifteen, but they were falling/crawling out from between the pages of one item.) But why here? I emptied the filter with ground beans that dh NEVER takes out until the next time he uses the machine, and thought, "Should I do the run-the-coffee maker-with-cold water-and-vinegar-to-cleanse-it routine?"
That thought was abruptly interrupted by the discovery that ants were not only under the lid of the water chamber, they'd decided to become part of the system that shows how many cups of coffee the amount of water poured in the top will make. Yes, they were all stacked up over an inch deep in the bottom of a narrow tube that fills when you pour in the water. Under the tiny red floater ball. And didn't want to come out.
Can you submerge a coffee maker in water??? I tried to only rinse the chambers and lid. Who knows if water got in by the heating element.
So would you use this coffee maker ever again?
Before last summer during a scant few years when the ground was cold and spring was on its way, we'd get some ants in the kitchen. Briefly.
Last summer while we were in Germany at World Cup Futbol matches ants came into our house in the mud room (which is next to the kitchen) and the person who was staying in our house part of the time, and feeding our cat, put out one of those orange ant trap tins (which did nothing), but didn't move the spot where the cat was fed elsewhere.
So the ants thought they'd found a permanent food source since good ol' Monty never eats the little bits of dried food that break off and fall from his mouth while eating, thereby leaving these tidbits for the ants. Where oh, where is the dog? This never would have happened if Cody were still alive.
After that the ants sort of went away, I thought.
I'd see one or two at a time and spray them with Basic H. I really didn't want to kill them.
I won't forget the time I was in Miami Beach for a LLI cf walking with 2 friends on the boardwalk along the shore. You could tell the exact line where the insecticide spraying had ended. All of a sudden we heard crunching under foot. My pregnant friend started to scream. Cockroaches everywhere. Huge ones. These must be what they call Palmetto bugs, I thought. We walked a bit further, but the crunch was just too disconcerting. So we turned around. And saw that ants had cleared away all the carcasses we'd passed or made. That's when I really realized that ants are useful in nature.
Then I discovered that they'd set up housekeeping IN my house.
Where? In both the soil of my Jade plant that was in the corner on the counter under the kitchen windows and a small miniature violet plant. I'd forgotten to water the plants for a week or two or three and when I did, out poured a stream of ants dragging eggs with them.
After that all got dealt with I thought I was home free. I was -- for LAST year.
Now this spring a small number of ants have made their way in and again, I targeted them and thought okay, soon they'll all be gone. I remind myself that Albert Schweitzer never stepped on ants (did you read the same biography of him that I did in elementary school???) I was cleaning the counter today & picked up some old mail resting on top of the coffee machine. Why I thought that a suitable place to keep these pieces, I have no idea. Probably because the spot I usually keep things that I haven't made up my mind "keep, or throw away?" was spilling over onto the floor.
So I picked them up and looked them over for a fifth, sixth or was it the 100th time (okay, an Easter card from my step-mother -- as a reminder to write to her, a fund raiser envelope to send a donation to the hospital I work for, and, are you ready for this one? A twenty something page 4" by 8 1/4" pamphlet "Coronary artery stent thrombosis." For some reason I thought I should educate myself with this throw away sent to my dh. It's now in the trash.
Ants!!!!
On the papers. Spilling over onto my hand. (And I still feel as though they're all over me.)
Why are they up here? And there were scores of them (no really only ten or fifteen, but they were falling/crawling out from between the pages of one item.) But why here? I emptied the filter with ground beans that dh NEVER takes out until the next time he uses the machine, and thought, "Should I do the run-the-coffee maker-with-cold water-and-vinegar-to-cleanse-it routine?"
That thought was abruptly interrupted by the discovery that ants were not only under the lid of the water chamber, they'd decided to become part of the system that shows how many cups of coffee the amount of water poured in the top will make. Yes, they were all stacked up over an inch deep in the bottom of a narrow tube that fills when you pour in the water. Under the tiny red floater ball. And didn't want to come out.
Can you submerge a coffee maker in water??? I tried to only rinse the chambers and lid. Who knows if water got in by the heating element.
So would you use this coffee maker ever again?
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