Shopping and peaches

I have seriously boosted the economy today. Obama would be proud. I started at Lowe's. This last week I killed my weed-whacker, so I had to go buy a new one. I tangled something in the old one and burned the engine out. Or that's my guess anyway. I semi-disassembled it (I love to take things apart) and couldn't find anything obvious, but it's dead even though it's registering a full charge. It was about 6-7 years old anyway, so it was probably time to reinvest. My new one is nice. Red. Electrical with a 20 V lithium battery so I don't have to drag a cord around. I've already assembled it and will try it out as soon as it has a charge. I also picked up a few odds and ends while at Lowe's: an extra water filter for the new frig, a new trimmer (officially called 'bypass pruners' whatever that means), more bug spray for the roses, extra line for the new weed-whacker. Then I went to Michael's (hobby place) and got more frames for posters, calendars and various other pictures. Then I went by the bank (to cash a small check I'd gotten to balance my escrow account) and the cleaners. Then I hit the mall.

I shopped the mall last because I knew it wasn't going to be pretty. I needed to clothes shop and I'm currently chunky enough that I knew I wasn't going to like the way anything fit me. I know myself well enough to know that if I get frustrated/depressed at the first store I go to, there's a good chance I'll go home without buying anything or shopping anywhere else. So I did all the stuff I needed to get done BEFORE I went clothes shopping. Despite my misgivings, I did manage to find a couple of decent dresses. I was completely surprised because the styles out right now SUCK bigtime. Short, high-waisted dresses made of flimsy, clingy material that's cut low and crosses between the breasts. Are they completely unaware that those styles look good on anorexic teenagers, and that's about all? So, I was happy to find something that didn't make me look like I had stolen the clothes from a high-schooler, but also didn't make me look like I was playing dress-up with my grandmother's clothes. I had to buy designer labels to get decent styles, but that can't be helped.

So it was a very productive morning and I did my patriotic duty, stimulating the economy. And I can ignore just how much stimulating I did for awhile ... at least until the bills come in.

My peach tree is looking good. Here are a couple of pictures from this morning. The first one gives you a basic idea of the number of little peaches that are growing. They're everywhere. I want them to be thinned somewhat or I'll have broken branches. No, I'm not going to thin them. The birds and insects usually decimate them pretty well without me thinning them. I don't spray for insects. I could say that I'm a minimalist, or that the insect spray might harm the birds, etc, but the truth is, I'm just lazy. If I have a great peach crop, I'm delighted and I share it with everyone I know. If the birds or insects get the crop or the frost keeps me from having one, then I just don't have peaches.

The closer picture shows you the little fuzzy green peaches. They're very cute and soft looking. These ones are currently a little bigger than my thumb probably.

It would be nice if the birds share with me this year. It looks like there will be enough to go around.

Here's a picture of my little yellow rose bush with the first three buds on it. It's grown enough to have flowers now. This picture was taken the day I killed my week-whacker, so the grass around the rose is a little out of control. I had just finished edging around the front and was about to come do the back yard when I tangled it and it gave up the ghost. So I need to weed-whack around this little guy as soon as I have a charge on the new whacker.

Washington DC - traveling by air

Actually, I'm not in DC, but in Alexandria, VA. I have a business meeting here this weekend, so I figured I'd see if the hotel internet is good. The answer to that would be "Yes". Unfortunately, it's unlikely that I'll get to see much of Alexandria since this is in fact a business trip. I suspect I'll be hotel-bound most of the weekend.


Yesterday I was a little worried about this trip because we were scheduled to have thunderstorms roll in last night. I was thinking in terms of delayed flights, etc. But once again my luck held .... or my guardian deities were on the job, which amounts to the same thing. It was just starting to rain as we were taking off this morning. Smooth flight, no problems. Just like I like them.


Washington Reagan was as crowded as ever. Seems like that airport is always crowded, or anyway it is every time I come through it. I was a little surprised today. I didn't think noon on a Friday would be so busy. And there seemed to be a lot of ground traffic also. Once when I flew out of Washington Reagan, both my flight and another flight to a completely different location were actually posted on the board as leaving from the same gate at the same time. You can probably imagine the congestion at that gate. It was a day of bad weather, flight delays and frustration.

Actually I try not to get frustrated with air travel delays. The nature of the travel beast is that things come up. It's very definitely a roll-with-the-punches type of experience. Flight delayed? Diverted? Grounded? Canceled? Okay. Find an alternative. On top of that, I'm pretty much an anal-retentive traveler. I always arrive at the airport 2 hours before my flight. I always sit where I can watch the gate and the screen behind the gate counter. That's from experience. I've had several times when they switched gates on me, and for whatever reason (noise level in the waiting area usually) I didn't hear the one announcement they made. Once at DFW, I flew into terminal A and had a connection to make at terminal D. By the time I got to terminal D, they had switched the gates .... you guessed it. My connection was now leaving from terminal A! Luckily DFW now has the SkyLink train which is extremely functional and pretty fast because those terminals are not close. At any rate, I've learned to keep one eye on the screen right up until I'm walking onto the plane.

I've had some really unique experiences while traveling, and of course airports are ideal for people-watching. It's an amazing thing sometimes. Today there was a little woman on my plane who's hair was bright fuchsia. Really bright fuchsia. It's interesting to look for the ones that really stand out like that, but I like to look at the average people and make guesses or draw conclusions. Like: men are more likely to be traveling alone than women. Or: women with children tend NOT to be traveling with a man. Or: 8 out of 10 people passing by are SERIOUSLY overweight .... which says bad things, either about our society or about the traveling public. Or: Most people who are running through airports are in heels. Or: people don't bother looking even fairly nice when they're traveling. It used to be that when I traveled, most people were in business suits, or nice clothes. Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. A few people would be "scruffy" looking. Now "scruffy" is more the rule, not the exception. Does that mean a lowering of standards of what's acceptable for wearing out in public? Does it mean that more "average" people are now traveling by air? I don't know, but people watching in airports lets me have all sorts of interesting thoughts.

And of course, it gives me lots of time to catch up on my reading. I've just recently started carrying my laptop with me when I travel, so I used to exclusively read. This trip in particular would have been hard without the laptop since I had more than 100 pages worth of agenda and documentation that I needed to bring.

Oops, gotta go start the weekend meeting marathon.

Cats

No doubt anyone reading this will get tired of hearing stories about my cats, or as I call them, my cat-kids. They're pretty spoiled rotten, so it's lucky I don't have human kids. I'm not so sure I'd have made a great parent. Above you see another example of how they spend their days, busily mattress testing.

Zoe likes to think of herself as a great outdoors type cat. Here you see her flattened out, pretending to be a pancake of some sort. Both she and Addy were interested in this same spot by the patio the other day. I thought they were eating grass there. Like all good cats, they periodically eat grass and then thoughtfully come inside to throw it up. Anyway, when I saw Zoe laying here eating something from the same spot as Addy had been earlier, I went to investigate. There are ants there! Surely my cats are not eating ants. I wonder what I'm missing in their diet that they feel the need to eat ants?

Here's the birdbath I've mentioned before. As you can see, it's a low birdbath, a concrete one that sits on my patio. Zoe thinks it's her own personal water dish, and she attempts to protect it from marauding birds. Mostly the birds just ignore her and use it anyway, even if she's only a few feet away on the patio. I've seen as many as 18 little sparrows vying for baths in it at one time, or at least there were more than 12. It's difficult to count them when they keep switching places into and out of the water and into and out of the peach tree.

Addy likes the outdoors too, but as she's gotten older she's become more of a home-body. She wants to be underfoot or wherever I am, especially after I've been gone on a trip. This is Addy in her element, right in the big middle of everything. She lays on papers, on keyboards ... in this pic she's about to knock my ipod off the table. She likes knocking things off as an attention getting mechanism.

Addy is particularly good at getting attention. She tries something and if it's not irritating enough to draw attention, she ups the ante until she finds something irritating enough. A good example is her weekend ritual for getting me up. She'll start out with the direct approach, hook a claw into available skin and draw it slowly toward herself. It's true. I have many scars on my arms to prove it. When I retreat under the covers, she'll try a couple of times to dig me out with claws into available places. Then she goes to back-up plan B, which involves pawing at the venetian blinds, followed by pawing at the pictures that she can reach on the walls to make them swing and scratch back and forth. Plan C, which is her final back-up plan involves going into the bathroom and beginning to knock everything off the bathroom counter, one piece at a time. Now, I've learned to sleep through claws in my arms, and I'm pretty good at ignoring swinging pictures and venetian blinds, but when bottles and things start hitting the floor, it's time to get up and severely reprimand a cat. But since getting me up was her sole purpose, she's quite happy to sit there and look contrite(ly happy).

Addy is way too smart for a cat. I hung a bell on my back door one Christmas and it's still there. When she wants out, she rings the bell. I can here it anywhere in the house.

Zoe is the complete opposite of Addy. Zoe is not all that bright, but she's so sweet. She has a phobia of having her feet leave the ground. She doesn't jump up on things, she climbs. And if you pick her up, she totally freaks out and you're going to end up scarred for life. Razor sharp claws. If I need to get her into the house from outside, all I have to do is walk toward her and act as though I'm going to pick her up. She RUNS for the door. Luckily that's true because she's a pretty hefty cat.

Both cats are good about coming in when I call them, unless Addy is in the middle of hunting a small lizard. They bring in lizards, small snakes, katy-dids, grasshoppers, an occasional preying mantis. Insects that find their way into the house don't live long. Lizards, snakes and preying mantis I'll rescue and let go, Grasshoppers and the like the cats can have. I could wish that they wouldn't let them go inside the house though, especially things that fly or leap at you. Addy once let a hummingbird moth go inside the house that I then had to catch and release. Interestingly, once I've taken a lizard or some other small animal away from them, they lose interest. They never seem to be mad at me for taking their toys. It's as if they just want me to acknowledge the catch, although they will continue to play with whatever they've caught until it no longer moves.

I guess that's all. Just sharing some cat pictures.

Habits

Wow. Yesterday evening the rain rolled in. It went from blue sky to raining in about an hour, and it's still raining this morning. This should make my grass go ballistic, or grow ballistic. I'll have to mow it some evening this week since I'll be in DC over next weekend. The trees are leafing out nicely, so I'll have my privacy back soon.

I'm a caffeine addict. I'm working on about my 7th cup of coffee this morning. When I started my current job I didn't drink coffee. I started with an occasional cup here and there and progressed to where I am now, which is 6 - 10 cups every morning. The only time I don't drink coffee is when I'm out camping. I start hiking early in the mornings and don't hang out in the campsite drinking coffee. I'll have very little caffeine period the whole time I'm out camping although I drink an occasional Coke. Mostly I'll be drinking water and Gatorade for hydration purposes. I'm not sure why I don't get a caffeine headache, or rather a headache from caffeine withdrawal other than that maybe I have endorphins from the physical activity. If I don't drink my usual caffeine load when I'm at work I often have a headache by mid-afternoon. I should really cut down, but it's pretty much my only physical addiction. I quit smoking back in 1989. Alcohol, I probably have less than a drink a week, although it can be more than that on occasion. *laughing* I drink more alcohol- than caffeine-containing drinks while I'm out camping because of a tradition I have of drinking a beer to celebrate setting up a new campsite or returning to a campsite after a hike.

My other addiction isn't a physical one. I'm addicted to anime. Japanese animation, for anyone who doesn't know what anime is. What makes it an addiction is the amount of time I spend watching it, and the amount of money I spend on DVDs, CDs, manga and other anime-related products. As addictions go, it's probably not very harmful since I can afford it, both time- and money-wise. It does gain me some strange looks on occasion, mostly from family members and friends when they see how much anime-stuff is in my house. Still, being 'normal' would be boring, wouldn't it?

A less harmless habit than the anime is my general love of shopping/spending money. I blame it on one of two things: 1) I was twisted by being below the poverty level for so many years as a graduate student, so now that I have money to spend, I spend it. Or 2) I have multiple copies of a shopping gene (located on the X chromosome, of course) and all of my copies are up-regulated. I suppose it could be a combination of both of those theories. Absolutely nothing lifts my spirits like spending money. Until I get the bills of course, but then I can cure the depression of bills by going shopping, so it's something of a vicious cycle. I'm getting it under control though. Citibank actually helped me by being so horrible. I stopped using them and opened new accounts elsewhere. Except I'm paying off my new cards every month, and slowly paying down the Citibank card, so it ended up being all good. Who knew I might have to eventually thank them one day for being such *delete, delete, delete* . . . . a fun group to work with.

Roses

Here are the first roses off my bush this year. The ones in the vase are the ones I cut last weekend. The two damaged buds behind the flower opened only a little, but this one was really pretty. From this picture you can tell what a deep red they usually are, sometimes almost a reddish black. The other two pictures are ones that have bloomed on the bush this week, one just beginning to open and one fully bloomed. The picture of the fully bloomed one doesn't do it justice. The red is deeper than what came out on the photo.

I like flowers, but they have to be things that don't require a lot of care. Unlike my sisters, I have a brown thumb. Living plants don't do well in my care. I currently have pink Indian Hawthorn blooming at the front of my house and purple and white irises are blossoming also. Don't think this is all due to my landscaping ability. The hawthorn was here when I moved in. I did plant the roses and irises, but both are fairly difficult to kill.

Along with things blooming around my house, my neighbor's Japanese Holly is hanging over my fence in full bloom. The roadsides are carpeted with bluebonnets. This is really my favorite time of year, when everything comes back from the dead. I suppose that's why I like roses. Besides being beautiful, they bloom for so much of the year.

I'm waiting to see if my swallows nest here this year. They should be coming back into the area soon now. I'm so hoping that they nest over the front patio where I can watch the babies when they hatch. We'll see.

I still have a lot of birds hanging around. There are four or five blue jays that live in the area and have taken to coming to my bird bath for daily baths. I'm trying to make sure it stays full of water. The birds that use it totally disrespect my fat cat who lies on the patio a few feet away from them, tail twitching. They know she's nowhere near fast enough to catch them. The jays must be a family unit because there seem to be more of them every year, although I don't know if jays stay together. Last year I watched a jay trying to take a piece of twine that I had used to tie the roses up with the year before. When I cut the roses back I left the twine, and the jay really wanted it. I watched it for about 30 minutes. It would grab the twine and try to fly off with it, but since the twine was tied to the trellis it would be brought up short and drop it. After watching it struggle for 30 minutes or so, I went out and cut the twine into pieces. The jay came back after I'd been inside a while and took all the twine with it in several trips.

We had wildfires here this last week. Nothing close to my house but the wind carried the smoke like a thick yellow-grey fog over the whole area. Driving home it kept getting thicker and thicker in the direction I was going, which was a little worrisome. I'm glad I don't have asthma or breathing trouble, because it was pretty thick and strong. *laughing* Well, it seemed like it was to me. I suppose a firefighter would be scoffing at me.

It's gorgeous outside today, about 75 degrees, totally blue sky and sunshine. I like it just a little warmer, but this is almost perfect . . . and as much as that's true, I really wish it would rain. It's so dry here. I'm watering to try to persuade my grass to grow.

I was struggling to install a computer program on my laptop this morning. Usually I'm not too badly computer illiterate, but this program was making me a little crazy. Every time it came to a certain point in the install, I would get a dialogue box about the computer using programs it needed, so I kept trying to make sure nothing else was using the programs it was referring to and clicking on retry. Which it kept retrying, to the same point, with the same result. Finally after four times and a reboot, when the same dialogue box opened again I noticed that along with the "retry" and "cancel" buttons, there was an "ignore" button (which I had been ignoring!). I chose the "ignore" button, and it installed the program with no problems! Geez! What was the point of that? Just install the damn program. Why give me those options?

Which reminds me, yesterday at work I was wading through the computer-based training modules for the new hospital computer system. When you're inputting patient demographics it allows you to put in the status of the patient's relatives. Your choices for their status are: "alive", "dcst" (deceased), and "other". I kid you not! I laughed out loud. I'd love to know what 'other' status is possible besides alive or deceased. And computer programmers wonder why we all look at them as if they've sprouted horns. "Don't you think we should have an "other " option here?" Sure. It's possible that there are people out there who are neither alive nor dead. Sure. Let's have an "other " option. *laughing* I love computers, but I'd never be able to be a programmer. I'm not good at thinking of all the possible permutations. I tend to think of the obvious.

Well I guess that's it for now.

Refrigerator blues

Oi! What a week I've had! If I had had any doubts about my determination to never buy anything appliance-related from Sears again, this week would have settled them.

My 7 year old refrigerator broke down. The first time it broke down was within a year of purchase ... which you seriously don't expect with a $1200.00+ refrigerator. Yes, it was under warranty. When I called Sears, they informed me that the soonest they could get to me was 6 days later. This was on the third of July. Useful warranty, right? I called a local repair guy, who had me running that evening. This time also I called the repair guy, but no good. He tried getting a computer board the next day to replace one that was fried, but it just fried the new one when he put it in. The compressor or condenser or whatever it's called was "froze up" as they say in these parts. And unfortunately, that doesn't mean it can be thawed. That means $600.00+ repair.

Anyway, I discovered this problem when I walked into my kitchen after work Wednesday afternoon, and found a small pond ... which I hadn't put there. The freezer was totally thawed so it had been out for awhile. And just to make it fun, I had actually been grocery shopping on my way home. So I not only lost everything in my refrigerator/freezer, but also everything I just bought that needed to go in there. I drove to my nearest appliance store, Lowe's, and bought a new refrigerator, which they kindly delivered the next day. The picture is my shiny new frig, already plastered over with all my magnets and photos of family and friends. I never really thought I'd want a silver frig, but I figure it'll match anything when (if!) I start remodeling. It's a Samsung, since the Kenmore I had was a Whirlpool, and I wasn't going to buy another one of those. Bad track record.

The best thing is having cold things to drink again. Without a frig, I was stuck with tap water, or hot cokes or hot gatorade, or *shudders* hot beer.

I've been doing yard work today. My grass isn't really growing alot yet, thanks to temperature swings from 30 - 80 degrees, but there are patches that are longish. The lawn was just looking pretty ragged. So I mowed and did the edging. It was a good day for it because it's about 60 degrees outside. Too cool to be out without being active, but if you're working, it's just about right.

I cut three buds off my red rose. They are a little cold-temperature damaged, so I decided to see if they'll bloom in the house. It looks like one for sure will open, but I'll have to wait and see about the other two. That rosebush is absolutely covered with buds right now. It produces some really spectacularly beautiful roses at times. The little yellow bush is settling in. It's putting on some growth, and has three little buds on it. Here are some recent pictures. Both rosebushes are putting on a lot of growth. The smaller picture of buds is a close-up of the red bush. Lots and lots of buds.

I like working in my yard and watching things grow. There's a tiny peach tree comin up under my peach tree. I actually mowed around it rather than running it down. I'm considering digging it up, potting it and seeing if I can grow it. That would at least give it more of a chance at survival than just mowing it down. *laughing* Probably not much more of a chance, given my track record with growing potted plants. I'm going to try it.