Coast to Coast

I'm seriously ready to go home. I've been traveling for business this week.  I flew to San Diego last Saturday for a five day meeting.  That's where this lovely flower came from.  I believe it's called a Bird of Paradise flower and they were blooming in front of my hotel.  I took this picture with my phone.

Then early Thursday morning I left San Diego and flew to Savannah, Georgia, where I am now, for a three day meeting.  We have a little break this afternoon, and then will get back together.  We are going to try to do some sightseeing in Savannah today, although the weather has not been cooperating.  It's extremely windy and wet out there, so we'll see how the tourist stuff goes.

Then early tomorrow morning I fly home - which I'm seriously ready for.  It'll be nice to be home and see if I can get my cats to forgive me for being gone for so long.

The interesting thing is that I left my air conditioning on in my house when I left since it was forecasting 80 degree days.  Yesterday morning they had a record low temperature, in the high 30s!  Luckily, on Thursday I flew though Dallas on my way between San Diego and Savannah and realized that it was COLD in Texas.  I asked my pet sitter to turn on the heat for Addy and Zoe.  So they shouldn't be both cold AND pissed off at me.  

The weather has been crazy.  It was cold and rainy in San Diego, it's 70s and wet and windy here, and Dallas has had record lows.  One of the woman at this meeting says they just got 16 inches of snow where she's from in Minnesota, and I think the guy from St. Louis said they have snow too.   Texas temp have been swinging back and forth from 80s to 50s.   It's just been weird-assed frigging weather.

The meetings I've been attending have been going really well.  I'm happy to have them winding down, especially the first one, as I was responsible for a lot of that one.  It's nice that it's over after more than a year of planning.   This second one has felt like something of a free ride since I'm not so responsible for it.  I'm glad their both nearly over though and I can now look forward to vacation time at the end of May. 

Oh yeah, it is May now isn't it?  That happened when I wasn't looking.  Or rather it seems like most of this year so far has happened when I wasn't looking.  Time's moving by way too fast.

Anyway, time to finish up  this post.  I just realized I was past due for one.  Later.   

Blooming time of year

I owe a big thank you to the previous owners of this house for planting flowering perennials that I can enjoy as I try to identify them.  I'd say they had a penchant for pink though, because the majority of blooming things so far have been pink.  Still, I love growing and blooming things, and so far I've got that in spades at this new house.  

Here's another picture of the swallowtail from last week.   He was so nicely cooperative.

Besides the pot of blooming pink azaleas out there, one of my rose bushes is blooming with the biggest pink blossoms I've ever seen on a rose.  These flowers are huge, probably larger than my outspread hand, and really gorgeous.  My rose bush in the front of the house is blooming deep red.  Those roses are gorgeous also, but not as huge as the pink roses in the back.  They're all long stem roses though.

I also have a plant that's blooming with big orange blossoms that I think is an amaryllis.  It's so great to see them all.  I can't wait to see what comes up next.  I also have a lot of mint growing out there, which I'm told I need to start thinning out because it will take over everything. 

I have two big trips coming up in the not too distant future.  One starts next Saturday and is back to back business trips - one in San Diego and the next in Savannah.  I'll be spending 5 days in San Diego then crossing the country to spend 3 days in Savannah.  It's a longer stretch than I like to be out on business trips, but it just worked out that way.

The second trip is at the end of May and it's a vacation trip to Japan.  My friend and I have been talking about doing it for 10 years, and suddenly realized that our timing might not ever again coincide as well as it does at the end of May.  So we're going.  It should be a blast.  

Luckily I have a good pet sitter who will watch the girls while I'm traveling.  Today I'm trying to plan wardrobe for the business trips.  It's so much easier packing for a vacation trip then planning and packing for business trips where I have to be professional. 

Actually, I might want to get used to an increased amount of travel.  I'm running for President-elect of the national organization I'm involved with, and if I win the election, I'd be President in 2015.  That year the organization would ask me to commit 30-40% of my time to them, mostly as travel, to represent the organization nationally and internationally.  That will be a LOT of travel.  The election's not until September, so I won't know until early October if I won or not.   So I'm not going to think about it until then.

I have a new Internet provider!  I finally got tired of fighting with the Internet connection provided by Time Warner.  It was so unstable, it dropped the connection randomly, including during transactions, and sometimes it wouldn't connect at all.  They came out the the house multiple times, and two different service reps told me the signal to my house was just barely good enough to carry the Internet connection, etc.  So when AT&T came to my door, I jumped at the chance to change.  So far I haven't regretted it.  Connection works every time and hasn't yet dropped anything I've been working on.  That makes me really happy.   I don't do well when I don't have an Internet connection.

Guess I'd better get back to wardrobe planning.  Later.  

Blackbirds and Butterflies

I really like Spring.  I love it when things turn green again and leaf out, instead of the dull, dead tree and shrub look. And I love blooming things, even if I don't always know what they are.

This lovely fellow flitted around my Indian Hawthorne in my back yard and was cooperative enough to let me take several shots with my new camera before he flew away.  Isn't he gorgeous?  

I just got back this morning from another trip, this one to Washington DC.  It was a nice, uneventful trip, and since I'm back to full health, it wasn't a bad trip.  I got to see the cherry blossoms along the Potomac, although not close up.  They're in full bloom right now, but due to the meetings, I only got to see them from something of a distance on the cab ride in.  Still, I did get a feel for how beautiful they are, and how many there are!  Amazing!  

I laid down in the recliner about 12:30 this afternoon and woke up at 3:30 with both cats napping on me.  I guess I was tired from the trip.  

My bird feeder continues to be a big hit with the birds in the area. Here's my red-wing blackbird friend.  I've seen the female too but haven't gotten a good shot of her yet.  When I got home this morning the feeder was completely empty, which is amazing considering I filled it Wednesday.  I have a small flock of sparrows and a small flock of cowbirds, besides the other random species, so it's being decimated pretty quickly.  

I'm really happy to have a lawn growing again and things blooming, but once again I have blooming things that I'm trying to figure out what they are.   I have the Indian Hawthorne of course, mostly pink ones, but I have at least one small white one.  I also have a tall plant of Queen Anne's Lace growing out there and beginning to bloom and a pot of what I think are pink azaleas.  That's this lower picture.   I'm really glad to have the new camera too, so I can take pictures of all these plants and birds and butterflies.  And of course pictures of the cat-kids, but I'm giving you a break today from cat-kid pictures.  


So that's about all that's going on.  I'm in a great mood because it's warm, pretty and gorgeous outside ad I can have the house opened up while I do chores.  It's supposed to be in the 80s the next several days so again I'll be switching between heat and AC.  What can you do?  I try not to use AC, but I hate being hot.  Maybe the ceiling fans will be enough.

Later.

   

Down and out

Man.  Little did I realize when I posted last week, how right I was about viruses having it in for me.  I’m STILL trying to get rid of this one.  Eleven days and counting.  My voice was completely gone from Saturday through Wednesday.  Then Wednesday afternoon I started running a temperature above 100 and the virus moved from my throat and chest into my head and took up residence in my ears and nose and sinuses.   I gave up and called in sick Thursday and made a doctor's appointment.  She prescribed antibiotics and Mucinex to get me to cough the stuff out of my lungs.  Unfortunately, I gave them the number for the closest pharmacy to my new house, and when I got there, their computer and fax were down and they weren't getting any prescriptions in.   I was too sick to care and just went home.  

Friday morning I felt marginally better and went and got the meds and started talking them.   This morning I feel like hell again, but then I coughed so much last night I ended up sleeping in the recliner, partially upright.  I hope these drugs work because I'm really tired of being sick, tired of trying to cough up a lung, and tired of being tired.  Can you tell I don't do ill very well.  

I am a little concerned about the fact that I've had two colds in such a short period of time and that it's been eleven days and I still haven't cleared this current cold.  I usually don't have this much trouble.  Plus I have a three day weekend this weekend, and instead of doing a multitude of chores or anything fun, I'm home being miserable.  I really hate that.

Anyway, enough of the viral drama. Yesterday when I went to get my drugs I also went and got a new camera. My one concession to something fun for the weekend.  So you have new pictures today. 

Yesterday I had a pair of brown-headed cowbirds on the feeder.   The male is really distinctive, glossy black all over but with a brown head, like he's wearing a hood.  The female is just a pale even brown.  That may be the female I've been seeing out there and trying to determine what she was.  I try to take pictures of them through the back door, which isn't very successful.   In this picture you can kind of see the red male house finch with this head turned to the left on the left side of the feeder.  A male house sparrow has his back to us.  The picture I attempted of the brown-headed cowbird didn't turn out at all.  I may have to think about getting a motion activated wildlife camera and mounting it back there if so many interesting birds are going to be stopping by.

We got a rain storm last night finally.  They've been calling for rain for days, and we've gotten nothing.  It looks like they are calling for rain most of this week also, so I hope it does rain, at least some.  I heard the storm come through sometime early this morning.  The birdbath is full this morning and it was close to empty yesterday afternoon, so we got a decent amount of rain. The little birds are so happy.  I have several blue jays that use that birdbath.  They don't come in to the feeder, but they use the birdbath. The rest of the birds use both. 

Anyway, that's it for today.  I'm going to go be puny and maybe play with my new camera.  Later.

Viruses have it in for me

Since I haven't replaced my camera yet, I'm putting another old picture in this post.  This one was from last summer at Monica's.  It looks like the mother deer is sticking her tongue out at us.

It’s another rainy and cold Saturday, but that’s fine with me today.  I have another cold, so I’m staying in and being puny.  Yes, I have ANOTHER one.  I had a bad cold which had me out sick for 2 days back in late January and now I have another one.  I’m beginning to worry about my immune system.  Or maybe I'm just particularly susceptible to Florida viruses.  I caught the January cold while at a meeting in Florida.  And this one was given to me by a friend who was sick while she was visiting from Florida.  

This one is particularly untimely because it began coming on on Tuesday afternoon.  Wednesday I was dosing myself with every home remedy known to man plus every over-the-counter cold medication I could buy.   And the reason for that was that I went to Philadelphia on Thursday and Friday to give two talks.  See why the timing was so bad, besides the fact that I shouldn’t be catching colds so easily.

Anyway, I wasn’t too miserable in Philadelphia, and my head wasn’t so stopped up that flying to and from Philadelphia was torture.  And most importantly, my voice lasted through my talks yesterday.  By the time the plane landed last night though, I didn't have much of a voice left, and today it's completely gone.  Nothing.   

Having no voice is kind of a pain, even staying home and being puny.   Addy’s doing her you-left-me-for-two-days-so-I-must-follow-you-everywhere-and-sit-in-your-lap-if-you’re-still-long-enough act.  If she loses track of me she starts yelling loudly until I call her name and she can locate me again.  Except when I try calling her, nothing happens.   So she just keeps yelling until she finds me. 

The talks in Philadelphia were very well received.  I gave a talk for the residents Friday morning and then gave Grand Rounds in the afternoon.  It was fun. 

I have a LOT of birds fighting over the bird feeder today.  Mostly house sparrows, juncos and mourning doves, but I also have a pair of house finches (he’s very red right now) and a pair of cardinals.   Plus this morning I saw a solid brown bird on the feeder with this pale streak behind her eyes.  I’m thinking it may be the female of that red-wing blackbird I saw a while back.  Or some sort of female blackbird, since they tend to be brown.  It’s fun to watch them and try to figure out what birds are out there.   Zoe likes to watch them too, which she’s doing from inside today since it’s cold and rainy and I’m not opening the door. 

I had to re-figure out how to program my sprinkler system.  The lawn service I use treated my lawn with a pre-emergent last week and said to water it in within 48 hours.  Since no rain was due, I figured out how to get my sprinkler system going again.  It’s working fine and I decided to leave it on, watering every 4th day for now.  I will have to make sure it’s not set to water on any day that might drop below freezing.  It’s not supposed to be very warm here this week. 

It was COLD in Philly and windy as hell, which I'm sure didn't help my cold.  Here's a funny thing.  One of the home remedies I use is gargling with diluted apple cider vinegar.  I really don't know where I picked that one up, but it does seem to help when I have a sore throat.  Anyway, I found a small travel-size bottle and put apple cider vinegar in it to take with me.  Only apparently I had used the bottle for shampoo or something soapy in the past and not successfully cleaned it out. The first time I diluted some of it in Philly and tried to gargle with it, I had foam coming from my mouth and it tasted soapy.  Yuck!  I'm sure it looked hysterical though.  I threw the rest of it out.

I guess that's about all.  I'm going to hang out today babying myself and resting and trying to get this cold to run it's course and move on, and feeling somewhat guilty about probably spreading it to two planeloads of people.  Although luckily I'm not, and haven't been, coughing much . . . yet.

Later.   

Rainy

Today is a gloomy and rainy day but since we need the rain, I'm not that unhappy about it.  A pretty good storm passed though last night so everything is saturated.  And the grass is coming up!  And my neighbor's Bradford pear trees are beginning to bloom like crazy.  Pretty!  I'd take a picture of it except my camera battery is dead.  Instead you get the most recent baby pine tree picture.

I need a new camera.  Badly.  Neither of the batteries for my current camera hold a charge any longer, so I can get maybe 10 pictures before both batteries are dead, fewer if they are flash pictures.  Plus I have one piece of the camera duct-taped on it, so I think I'm due for a new one.    My friend's camera took such great pictures last summer.  I'll have to ask her what make it is.  

My older cat Addy has been getting increasingly fragile.  She's unsteady on her feet, sleeps on the bed essentially all the time except when she's being fed, and lately she occasionally cries when I pet her.  She seemed to be in some amount of pain almost constantly.  So in desperation, trying to find some way to alleviate some of that, I bought a little package of chewy treats that contain glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate.  OMG!  I'm not a believer in stuff that's hyped a lot about how it works, and scientifically, I can't see how these would work or how they could help her, but the fact is, they are helping her!   She's up and active, going outside and wandering around the yard.   Her balance is better - she can stand on three legs while scratching her ear, which she couldn't before.  And she doesn't spend her entire day laying on the bed, she seems more comfortable.  I know none of this is measurable, but she's better.  She's moving more easily and she's moving!  I'm going to keep giving her these treats, which luckily she likes the taste of and eats easily.  I sound like an ad for these things, but it's just such a difference.  I may even consider taking the human version if/when I ever get to the stiff and creaky stage of life.  

I also treated both cats for fleas this weekend.  Interestingly I never had a flea problem with them in the old house, even though my neighbors on three sides had dogs.  But I've seen a flea on each of them this last week, so they got treated yesterday.  

That's about all that's new right now so, later!

Found it!

After a bunch of searching I finally found what it is that's blooming out by my back fence.  It's a flowering quince.  I have to give my sister credit for the find though.  Monica asked me if it had thorns.  I told her 'no' but today I was out there, unwinding and cutting out a vine from the middle of it, and it very definitely has thorns, about an inch or so long.  So when I came back in I googled "long thorns pink blossoms" and there it was!  Yay!  There's some hope that I will be able to identify the things that bloom around here this year after all.

As you can see Zoe is in a lazy mood.  That thing she's laying on is a scratching post that she uses regularly and likes to sleep on.  She's been outside today but not much, and even I came scampering back in after cutting that old vine out.  It's cold today!  I ran some errands this morning and it never got above 38 while I was out there.  And the wind is COLD.   Brrrrrrrr!   It's so bright and sunny that I expect it to be warm, but it's definitely not.    

I went ahead and did my taxes using TurboTax last weekend.  Yup, got them done and e-filed.  It took me almost 5 hours on Sunday to do it though.  I was trying to be really thorough, as well as trying to figure out what the hell this statement means each time I came up on something else.  Tax-ese is no doubt written by the same folks who wrote lawyer-ese.  But I felt as sure about the finished results as I ever feel about taxes, so I went ahead and filed.  Weirdly, I already have my refund!  I had it direct deposited and noticed it in my account this morning.  That's what I call service.    

Something, probably a squirrel, destroyed my bird feeder.  I came in one afternoon and it was hanging funny.  I went out there and when I touched it, it just fell apart.  Luckily it was mostly empty.  I jury-rigged it and refilled it.  The birds have been using it still, even jury-rigged with baling twine.  I bought a new feeder today and will replace the rigged one when they empty it.   

There was a red-wing blackbird on the feeder the other day.  I haven't seen one of those in forever.  They're so pretty.  I hope he sticks around.  The house sparrows, mourning doves and junkos are the most common visitors.

Despite the cold spell we've had this week, the Bradford pears in the area are starting to show signs of flowering.  When it warms up just a little I think everything will go into full bloom mode.  I'm waiting for the trees to leaf out.  I really am not that fond of dead-looking bare branches during the winter.  My aloe vera did indeed take some serious damage this winter, but it looks like the centers of all of them are going to survive.  And I found the tiny start of new leaves on the peach sapling I said looked so dead, so I think they'll be fine also.  


So far I'm keeping up with my exercising.  It's actually easier since I bought the Wii, because the Wii Fit Program makes it fun to exercise, rather than a chore.  That's the thing about exercise.  I don't mind exercising if it's for a purpose.  I love to hike for example.  But just to exercise for the sake of exercising is BORING!  And tedious.  And hard to maintain.  Even with switching out between my little exercise machines I was bored.  But the Wii makes it fun, plus it keeps track of your time and calories.  So, so far I'm still doing it regularly.  

I guess that's about it for today.  Here's another picture of the flowering quince.