I love Spring. I love when things begin to get leaves and green up. I'm not much into dead and barren looking, and in Texas we rarely even have colors in the Fall or snow in the Winter to make it pretty. Just dead and barren looking. Of course this last year with the drought and heat, most of the year from July on was pretty dead and barren looking. Except for areas that watered like crazy anyway. My water bill rivaled my electricity bill in August and September.
Because of the heat and drought last year I've become slightly less of a sun person, wanting sun all the time. Granted I'm still happier when it's bright and sunny outside, but lately I'm not at all unhappy when it rains. In fact it's been gloomy and overcast the last several days, but sadly, it's not dumping rain like I want it to. The forcast has been calling for rain all day today and yesterday, but there's only been some scattered misty rain yesterday and nothing yet today. Come on! Rain already! I think a lot of the rain by-passed us and dropped east of us.
Anyway, back to the Spring thing. I love it when things turn green. The Bradford pears have bloomed and are leafing. The redbud trees are blooming, and I expect the wildflowers will be coming out pretty soon. My little peach trees are putting on leaves as you can see from the picture above. I found another peach tree seedling coming up when I mowed the lawn and transplanted it into a pot. It's the same size as one of the two I transplanted last year. In the picture below, the new seedling is in the green pot. I'm not sure why the little from last year didn't really grow. Maybe it will decide to grow this year.
Yes, I've mowed my yard this year already. I mowed it last Sunday when I got back from my business trip. I'm not really ready to call it a 'lawn' because the grass is just beginning to think about growing. The weeds, on the other hand, are growing like gangbusters, so I mowed and weed-whacked last weekend. My roses never really went dormant this year since the winter was so mild, but I need to get out and trim them back. They're putting on new growth, but some of the old growth looks pretty ragged.
Tomorrow I begin house hunting for real. I'm meeting my realtor and we're going to go look at three houses. This first time out is really just for my realtor and I to meet and for both of us to get a better idea of what I'm looking for. There's so much to decide: older vs newer home, 2 story vs 1 story, split floor plan?, master bedroom upstairs or down?, open floor plan?, zero lot line? home owners association?, etc, etc, etc. We've been emailing back and forth and she's been sending me listings, but this will be our first meeting. Considering how much I like my little house and enjoy puttering around it, it's amazing that I'm looking for another house. Basically I'm looking for something with a little more friendly commute to work, either closer or nearer the light rail. Plus I want something a little larger than my current house. Yes, two cats and I have outgrown this house. Which is a nice way of saying I'm collecting too much junk. If I do find another house though, I'm going to have to have to decide whether to sell this one or rent it. We'll see.
So that's it for today. Nothing much to say, just thought I'd touch base and mention that I'm house hunting. I'm sure I'll post blogs about the search as I go along.
It's another gorgeous Sunday morning, so I decided to blog again although I really don't have anything to say. Well one thing I have to say is that last Sunday when I was blogging I should have looked at the date and realized it was my Mom's Birthday. Yup, I forgot my Mother's Birthday. Geez, Louise! Where does the time go? That was a rhetorical question, but if you have an answer, please let me know. I'd like to hope that I'm not really becoming more forgetful than usual, but I usually try to at least remember Mom and Dad's birthdays, no matter how bad I am with remembering dates in general.
I'll send her belated wishes this week.
I sent my passport renewal application in yesterday. It expires in September so I figured I'd renew it before it expired. I really hate putting my passport into the mail, though. It just feels so chancy to mail it to the passport office. Or maybe I just hate being without it. My only travel plans for the next little while are domestic, so I should be fine, but still.
I'm going to Palm Springs next week for a Board of Directors meeting. That should be interesting since it will be our first time meeting with our new CEO. Our CEO of 23 years retired at the end of 2011, so it will indeed be interesting to see how the new CEO and the Board interact. Palm Springs should be nice too. I've never been there, so I'll take pictures and post them if any of them turn out okay. Last year at this time I was posting pictures of my very first BOD meeting from Tucson. I was elected to the Board for a three year term, so I'm still on it for two more years. I enjoy spending time with the other Directors as well as the work of the Board. Some of them are colleagues I've known for years, and some are colleagues I've only just met through the Board. I've worked previously on other things with both of the two new incoming members this year.
I need to mow my weeds. I'm vacillating back and forth on whether to do that today or not. It's somewhat cool out, but the weeds are taking over, even though the grass hasn't yet decided that it's really Spring. I should probably mow and whack the weeds down. Neither the dogwood nor the holly I tried to grow last year survived last summer, but the two peach tree seedlings are both beginning to put out tiny green tips of leaves. They currently look like stick in pots, but the green tips are showing. I put the obligatory cat-kid picture that I took this morning into this post. The cats aren't much into cold or wet weather, but since it's sunny today they did go check things out this morning even though it was chilly. You can see the peach twigs in their pots, as well as the weeds that are coming up by the patio. The Bradford Pear trees in my neighbor's yards are beginning to blossom, and the crane flies are out in force. It looks like most plants are deciding that Spring has come. Even though we all have stories of freezing weather in March and even into April, I think I agree with most plants this year that Spring has come, especially given how mild a winter it's been overall. Yesterday morning the temperature gauge at the side of my house read 31 when I got up though and I thought, damn, I froze the aloe vera again. But the temperature gauge on my back patio read 36, although there was a thin skim of ice on the birdbath. So the temperature was probably right at freezing just before sunup. Poor aloe vera. They look pretty bad, probably because it's been a mild winter. I haven't been religious about putting them into the garage, so they've taken a couple of hits when the temperature dropped just below freezing. I've mostly left them out though to take advantage of the rain we've been getting.
Anyway, that's about it for today.
I really like Sunday mornings. I have nothing in particular to talk about today, but it's Sunday and I'm puttering around the house doing my Sunday chores. It started out this morning as a sunny Sunday, which is my absolute favorite type of day. It's become cloudy-ish, which isn't as good, but still okay.
Sunday puttering includes things like laundry and cat box cleaning and generally picking up the place. My cat-kids are so weird. The cat kids and I have been doing a running battle with the cat boxes. I have two cat boxes and I keep them in the closet of one of the spare rooms. As the kids get older I have to keep them scooped out more often as older kidneys require more frequent use of the boxes. Lately I had been moving the boxes closer and closer to the walls in the closet. The reason for that is that the kids have been missing the box when they pee. Not a huge problem since I have plastic down in that closet to protect the carpet from anything that might miss the boxes, but I still have to clean it up. The plastic just makes that easier. So anyway. I figured that if I moved the boxes closer to the walls, the kids would be forced to move more toward the center of the box, and would miss less often. Weirdly, the closer to the walls I put the boxes, the more often I had to clean up pee that missed the box. And it was always between the box and the wall! The only thing I didn't do was put the boxes up against the wall, not wanting to have to clean up walls also. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I gave up and moved the boxes back out about 6 inches from the walls. Those cats haven't missed the box at all since I moved them away from the walls! Go figure.
I did my taxes last night. Or rather, I plugged in numbers and Turbo-tax did my taxes. I went ahead and e-filed. I've gotten all the 1099's and charity acknowledgements that I'm going to get so there wasn't any use putting it off. Plus I did manage to get a refund, thanks mostly to my charity donations.
It's been an incredibly mild winter. Only 12 days have dropped below freezing, and we've had essentially no freezing precipitation. That's mild even by Dallas standards. Plus we've had quite a bit of rain, which I'm TOTALLY delighted about. If we're going to be able to water at all this next Summer, it'll be because we're getting rain now and it's working a little to alleviate the drought conditions. Weirdly I think the DFW metroplex is the only part of the state that isn't still under drought conditions. We've had more than 7 inches of rain since the start of the year, and that's almost 4 inches above normal so far. Keep it coming I say. The reservoirs in the area are still almost non-existent. It's actually becoming more and more cloudy, so I wonder if it will rain again today. It's not forecast, for what that's worth.
My new coffee pot is working fine so far. It makes random ticking noises though, which has me a little freaked out since the last one did it's meltdown. I imagine I'll get used to it, but right now every random noise it makes causes me to sit up and take notice.
Yesterday I sent a few hours surfing the Internet looking at Realtors. Just for the record, there are too many realtors in the DFW area. How can I possibly decide on one!? I can see that it's probably going to come down to a coin flip. I can at least narrow it down a tad by only looking at people who cover the areas I think I'm interested in, but that doesn't narrow it down much. *sigh* Wish me luck on this one.
I guess that's it for today. Nothing exciting, just a few random thoughts.
Lately I've been having a little bit of an issue with coffee pots. Yes, coffee pots. Weird, huh. I'm more than a little addicted to coffee, so it's important to me to have a functioning coffee pot when I'm here on the weekend. The problem is, I'm kinda picky about my coffee pot. It's for a good reason. On the weekend I like to make 10-ish cups and just slurp it as I do stuff around the house, chores and whatnot. You can get a feel for my level of addiction by the fact that I often finish the 10-cup pot I make.
Anyway, if you've tried to buy a coffee pot lately, you know that most of them are made with an automatic 2 hour shutoff, I suppose to protect us from ourselves. That way you can't leave it on and burn anything down with it. The problem is, if I get up at 6:00 am on a Saturday or Sunday, I'm not ready to quit drinking coffee at 8:00 am. And I'm not really that fond of re-heated, nuked coffee. I buy coffee from Gevalia, and periodically they gift me with a coffee maker, but they always have the 2 hour shut off. So when my old decrepit white coffee maker (with no automatic shutoff, that's how old it is) began to look really bad I searched around until I found a coffee maker that you can program not to shut off until after 4 hours. Cuisinart. The Cuisinart and I have been coexisting happily for a couple of years.
About a month ago I was sitting here working on my computer about 4 hours after I started the coffee, and all of a sudden I heard the sound of something frying. That's a little startling given I don't used any appliances in my kitchen beside the microwave and the coffee maker. I thought, "What the hell is frying?" and walked into the kitchen tracing the sound of popping and crackling. Lo and behold, I discovered the coating on the heating plate on the coffee maker was frying!! I jerked the pot off and the coating was popping and crackling and literally frying off the heating plate. I jerked the cord out of the wall, but it was so hot it just kept frying. So I dumped water on it, and created a huge steam cloud in the kitchen. Then I submersed the whole coffee maker in water in the sink, just in case anything was burning inside it also. As near as I can figure, the heating plate began heating up instead of shutting off at 4 hours. I'm glad I was home. Well, I never leave it to shut of automatically anyway. I'm too type A. I turn it off if I'm leaving the house, but who knows if it would have shut off?
Anyway, I dug around in my garage and found one of the Gevalia coffee makers. Yes, it shuts off at 2 hours but I figured I could make 2 small pots if I was going to want coffee all morning. Or I could be really radical and drink less coffee. That coffee maker and I have been getting used to each other. This morning, I got it ready and when I pushed the 'on' button, nothing happened! "Don't tell me!" I tried another outlet. Nope. I tried a third outlet, just in case. Nope. So I dug around in the garage and unearthed my old white decrepit coffee maker and made coffee, so I could get going this morning. And I thought about the first coffee maker Gevalia ever sent me, that grew a swarm of ants, and I began to wonder if I'm some sort of a jinx on coffee makers.
I dropped by Bed, Bath and Beyond when I was out running errands today and picked up a new coffee maker that can be programmed to stay on for 4 hours. That's the shiny new thing in this picture. It's the first silver coffee maker I've ever owned, but hey, I'm trying to break a jinx here. I decided to try something different. And you can bet I'm not throwing the old white coffee maker away. It's lovingly packed away in my garage, waiting for the next coffee emergency.
I usually blog on the weekends but lately my weekends have been fairly busy so I figured I'd try a week day evening for a blog post. This evening I'm going to talk about cacti and my ability to grow things.
I think I've established along the way with this blog that although I love to grow things, I'm pitifully bad at it. A year ago (yes, last January) I put a bunch of cactus and succulent seeds into a terrarium-type arrangement, hoping I wouldn't have to do much with it since it was a terrarium, and thus I couldn't screw it up as easily as a regular plant. That was the thought process anyway.
Lo and behold, the little things sprouted! They started out as tiny green nubs and began putting out a spine or two here and there. I carefully documented their progress with pictures at intervals, which I then lost all of when my hard drive crashed last summer. So I don't have remaining proof that I grew them from seeds, but I did.
Anyway, the terrarium part lasted only until the succulents got well under way. They sent out long thin shoots which began being bent and curled by the terrarium, so I gave up, took the top off the thing and have been treating it like a regular plant. That entails things like watering it when I think it looks dry and trying not to over water it, trying to make sure it gets sunlight, etc, etc. Luckily, cacti can stand dry spells. So despite my tender loving care (or lack thereof), the little things continue to grow. As you can kind of see from these pictures the plants are perfectly happy and thriving.
I have two types of succulents and about 10 different varieties of cacti in there. The bigger ones came up first. The tiny little ones at the base of the big ones and among the pebbles were slow to sprout and are small and low to the ground. They also don't have the serious spines on them that the bigger guys do. Most of them are getting to the point where I should be able to actually identify what type of cactus it is soon, besides using descriptive names like "roundish with long spines" "roundish with purple stripes and long spines" or "short and roundish".
I had a few seeds left so I started those leftovers this year, a year behind the original ones. The new ones are struggling more, probably because when I was starting the first batch they were in the terrarium and the watering was via condensation dripping onto the soil. This year they're just in a pot and when I water them I disturb the soil. I think they've had a hard time getting started. You can see a couple of pale green stalks in this picture below. That's what all my little thriving cacti looked like last year at this time.
Anyway, it does look like I am capable of growing cactus-type plants. Of course, except for occasionally letting them freeze, I have managed to keep aloe vera alive, so I suppose I knew that. It's just so much fun to watch things grow.
Speaking of watching things grow, I hope we continue to get some rain so that things will actually grow come Spring. The drought from last year is supposed to continue this year. People are saying they may not let us water lawns at all this year if it does continue. We had about 24 hours of pretty continuous rain starting late yesterday, and it's supposed to be scattered showers tomorrow. There was lots of standing water in places today as I was driving home, but unless we get more than an occasional, widely spaced day of rain, the outlook is not good. The reservoirs between here and east Texas are basically dry . . . or were when I came through during the holidays. Those won't fill with just a few days of rain. So me, the sunshine girl, is actively hoping for rain.
I guess that's all for now.
2012!? The years just keep rolling by, don't they? This is my much-delayed new year's eve reminiscing. Actually I'm only half a month late so I suppose it could be a lot worse. This will be a short post though because I'm not really in the mood to be deeply philosophical. Still I've looked back every year, so I'll look back at least briefly today.
Let's see. Overall I'd have to say 2011 was pretty good to me. I'm actively involved in work and everything is going well there. I'm actively involved in my national professional organization and everything is going well there. I got my promotion to professor, with a raise, and in December we got a good bonus which paid for Christmas and then some. My life and work seem to be on a pretty nice even-keel for a change.
So personally, things are going well, but there are also a LOT of changes going on at my work. The department has a new Chair, and with a new Chair come changes, so that's one aspect of it. Add to that, our interim Division head has decided she doesn't want the position and is leaving, so we'll have a new Division Head in another month. And add to that our lab administrative director left in December. Whenever there is this much change, people are nervous and unsettled. I've ridden so many changes at this place that I'm sure I can ride these too, but it is a pretty excessive amount of change in a fairly short period of time this time. It'll be interesting to see how the department grows.
Family-wise things are going well, too. I have a new niece-in-law, with my oldest nephew getting married in November. My nieces and nephews all make me so proud. What a great group of kids. Plus I have four grand-nieces now. Maybe my newly married nephew and his wife will add a boy to that mix along the way. So far I'd have to say that my nephews have excellent taste in women. All my nieces-in-law are good-looking girls. So of course my grand-nieces are perfect. *laughing* Which is not to say that my nieces and nephews aren't good-looking. As I mentioned, I have nephews ands nieces to be proud of.
So what about the new year? I think this year I may buy a new house. I like my little house, but the commute is getting really old. I'm seriously considering moving to somewhere close to the rail lines. That will be my big project for the year, probably. At work I have lots of projects to work on to keep me busy. Maybe I'll consider losing some weight and getting back into better shape. And of course I always have lots of around-the-house projects that I never seem to get to. The cat-kids and I are fat and happy. It should be a good year, I think.
Wow! Three months since I posted. I always let the back end of the year get away from me and this year was no exception. I didn't even do my usual end of year/new year musings. I'll have to try to fit that in sooner or later. Or I guess I could just skip it this year.
Let's see. I have so much to talk about. Guess I'll do this blog about my trip to the Big Apple and catch up on other things in another blog.
I have a good friend in medical school in New York, so I went to visit her for five days the week before Christmas and we had a blast! I can totally see why people love New York. Everything is there. And I mean EVERYTHING. Things we can only get online in Dallas, you can actually stop and pick up in a relatively accessible store. Authentic food from probably every known culture. Yum! And of course, Times Square, Broadway, Rockefeller Center, etc. It was impossible to do everything in five days, so we were selective of course, but everything we did was fun.
First of all, all transportation was public, which was really different for me with my independence defined by my car. You can't live without a car in Dallas. In New York it's not only possible, it's often preferable. Traffic isn't pretty. Also, I've never been on a subway in the US before so it was a learning experience. I've been on the London Underground, the Paris Metro and several systems in Japan, but nothing here in the US. I'm VERY glad to have had my friend to act as guide. She was in charge of getting us from point A to point B and did a great job at it.
My friend lives in Jersey City, so we went into New York every day for food, shopping and entertainment. We ate Greek food, we ate Falafels, we ate the best greasy cheeseburgers I've ever had, we ate authentic Japanese at a place where we were the only non-Asians inside. Basically we ate our way through 5 days.
We went to see Wicked! AWESOME! I had never been to a Broadway show, so likely I would have considered anything we saw awesome, but Wicked really was amazing. I want to see it again. And I now have the soundtrack for it.
We went to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center at night, which is the first picture in this blog, and also wandered around looking at all the Christmas decorations, which are the other pictures. As you can see, all the decorations were amazing, although of course the pictures never do them justice and I can't possibly post all the pictures I took.
We went shopping pretty much every day. On one side of Macy's the windows are all done with fancy Christmas scenes and puppets. Those window scenes I absolutely could not do justice to with a picture, but this will maybe give you a little flavor of what they were like. "Magical" is probably a good word. In fact I'd have to say the New York is fairly magical at this time of year.
We got home pretty exhausted every evening after walking and wandering around Manhattan all day, but it was sooooooo worth it. One minor downside - temperature. One day in Manhattan the high temp was 27 degrees, which as you know is WAY too cold for this Texas girl. Hats, gloves, thick scarves, heavy coat ... these are absolute 'musts' for December in New York. And add an umbrella for those wet days. Still the weather didn't slow us down much. We still had a blast.
Oh, one other minor downside, I picked up a Yankee virus, which I was coming down with the day I flew back home, and then I kindly took with me to east Texas for Christmas. Hopefully my whole family didn't end up with it.
So that was the NY trip. More on the rest of my life in the next blog.
Because of the heat and drought last year I've become slightly less of a sun person, wanting sun all the time. Granted I'm still happier when it's bright and sunny outside, but lately I'm not at all unhappy when it rains. In fact it's been gloomy and overcast the last several days, but sadly, it's not dumping rain like I want it to. The forcast has been calling for rain all day today and yesterday, but there's only been some scattered misty rain yesterday and nothing yet today. Come on! Rain already! I think a lot of the rain by-passed us and dropped east of us.
Yes, I've mowed my yard this year already. I mowed it last Sunday when I got back from my business trip. I'm not really ready to call it a 'lawn' because the grass is just beginning to think about growing. The weeds, on the other hand, are growing like gangbusters, so I mowed and weed-whacked last weekend. My roses never really went dormant this year since the winter was so mild, but I need to get out and trim them back. They're putting on new growth, but some of the old growth looks pretty ragged.
