I kind of fell off the Accountability Chart this weekend, but I got back on tonight and actually figured out how to add products to my “shop” on my website. Woot! I think I have four items up, and that’s a fraction of what needs to be put up, but with a little copy and paste and a lot of patience, I will have my online shop open by the first of November.
I’ll be honest with you: this whole process has been a bit of a headache, mostly because I was starting with an already existing website, and most instructions assume you are doing this from the beginning. They obviously don’t know me. I’m a jump in and do it sort of person, and then I figure out how to problem solve later. Yes, it causes a lot of headaches, but it’s how those of us who are kinesthetic/visual learners learn. I’m not good at following verbal instructions, but give me a screen shot manual, or let me get in and play with things, and I learn.
So I had this existing website and theme which I had to take down, basically, and start up with a new theme that is compatible with the online shopping program I uploaded to my site. The shopping program is only compatible with select Word Press themes, most of which I don’t like. I uploaded their basic site, but when I went in tonight to work on things, I saw how poorly that was going to integrate with what I am selling (my own artwork). UGH. So I had to go search for and upload a new theme that was compatible with my image. There goes half an hour!
Uploading my inventory was a challenge, too: I don’t have excel or a csv program on my computer (hey, in my defense, I didn’t know I would ever need it). Manually entering the product is the only option, and – at first – that seemed daunting. But I did a test, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I learned quickly to ignore the SEO alerts. I can deal with those down the road as I expand my website. I managed to upload about four items to my shop and I think I have it down now. I think I will prefer to manually enter my inventory – for now.
I didn’t get everything done within the 31 day challenge I was on, but my shop/website will be ready by November 1, in time for seasonal shopping. I also have my Etsy shop open. I am retaining rights to the images so I can prepare giclée images and add them to my website.I’m pretty proud of what I have gotten done. I’m not as technologically handicapped as I thought I was.
Dang. I feel capable tonight. Never doubt yourself. You CAN do this!!
I have no “prompt” for tonight; I am merely going to recount my day. I am going to take a few days off from the nightly post (wait for NaNoWriMo, when I will type out my 50,000 words here on my blog, open to your real-time review, beginning November 1st!).
Today was a wonderfully typical Autumn (Winter or Spring) day here in the Pacific Northwest: it rained. Non-stop. They’re predicting 3″ by the end of this particular trough of storms passes through, which – while it isn’t entirely normal, is not, by any means, not normal. This is the weather where people from out of state carry umbrellas; Oregonians (and Washingtonians) merely put up their hoods or don hats, and slosh out into it.
I wore my dressy blue rain boots over my jeans. Rain boots are fun nowadays, not those simple black (and practical) boots you buy at the local feed store, rain boots are something you buy off the shoe shelves of the local Target, WalMart, K-Mart, Fred Meyer, or whatever. They come in arrays of designs and colors. You can still get ducky yellow, but paisley blue is more my style, and that is what I have.
My girlfriends picked me up around 10:30 and we took the backroads to the Old Aurora Colony, more commonly referred to as simply, Aurora, Oregon. There was a quilt show in the Aurora Museum. The girls are into quilting; I barely uncover my sewing machine to repair things. My great aunts and most of my cousins on the Scots’ side of the family have all quilted (or still quilt). It is a sewing gene that skipped me (I have made a couple of quilts, but they were simple things, and I never felt the desire to get artsy with fabric in that way).
I like to look at quilts. I like to pick out the hand-quilted vs. the machine-quilted. I love the patterns. The textures. I may not sew much, but fabric still lures me in. There were a lot of nice quilts, and a handful of them were hand-quilted with exacting precision.
There was also an herb garden and store where I got lost in the heavenly aromas of lavender and sage. My friends walked off on me at this point, less interested in the herbs and plants than I am, but I lingered long enough to inhale deep breaths and to rub an aromatic salve into my hands. I may look into joining the Willamette Herb Society.
I have lived in this area since 1983, and I stopped in and walked around Aurora a handful of times. I’m sure I’ve been to the museum at some point, but it may have been in the 30-years ago range. I’d forgotten about the long barn with horse implements and grist stones. Of course, it may not have been open like it is now when I was last in the museum.
The last building was the original log cabin, full of people’s discarded sewing notions, quilting squares, knick-knacks, and vintage patterns still in the original envelopes. A waft of nostalgia blew over me here: my mother could sketch like the artists who designed those 1950’s and 1960’s pattern envelopes. The 1970’s patterns reminded me of my mother. The sewing, in general, reminded me of mom, and of her oldest sister, who just passed last week at the age of 89. I felt their presence with me as I scanned old buttons, binding tape, and sequin pins. I could see them: Mary Lou and Phyllis.
I know where to donate all my sewing notions that I will probably never use, but which I could not leave in the house in Ely when Mom died.
We left the museum and made our way across Highway 99E to a hole-in-the-wall diner my friends knew about. Mom & Pop kind of deli, only 4 or 5 tables, and a ton of paintings of varying degrees of age from floor to ceiling. The best corn chowder I have ever had. Personal service. Christa’s Café and Antiques.
The rain never let up, and we sloshed back out into it. The debate: to wander around to all of Aurora’s many antique shops, or duck into the Main Street Mercantile? We opted for the latter, and it turned out to be a three-story antique mall, not a “mercantile” at all. How did I never know this was there? I thought I’d been to all the antique stores in Aurora as recently as 2015, and – yet – here was this hidden treasure of an antique mall so jam-packed with other people’s junk that you couldn’t turn around?
My feet were cramping by the time we decided our eyes were getting bleary and all the vintage and antique items were beginning to blur into one. The smells that overwhelmed me when I first entered – old spices, dust, old books, age – were now all blended into one scent, and I needed the rain to wash it away from me, along with the wish to spend money I don’t need to spend (because, dammit, I found the perfect buffet/hutch for my house and it was marked down to $315).
And there was this.
I don’t know what the hell that is, but I want it. I don’t care how ratty it is, how faded the little marble eyes are, or that the antlers are broke: I want this. The earless grizzmoo or Moogrizz or whatever bizarre cryptid this is (maybe it’s a Bigfoot? I’ve never seen one. Have you?), I need this in my life.
Sadly, I didn’t think there was room in my friend’s car for it, and I wasn’t sure where I would hang it in my house that a dog wouldn’t be able to reach it to chew on its nose (even Harvey, with his cataracts, would be able to locate this and find it – um, interesting). No one visits us anyway, so I wouldn’t be losing any Good Housekeeping points that I haven’t lost already. I’d freaking have THIS.
But I left it behind.
We hydro-planed north to Canby, where we stopped and had coffee to round out our day together. Then my friends dropped me off.
Don and I rounded out the evening with dinner at Feckin’ . We ran into friends and enjoyed our favorites with them. Came home and topped the evening with a Jackie Chan movie that is more “China meets Bollywood” than anything else: Kung Fu Yoga. I highly recommend it (if you are a Jackie Chan fan, which I am).
Now I am heading to bed. I’ll post before I start NaNoWriMo (my user name is jacidawn, so if you want, we can pal up and write our novels together). And I promise to open my closed little self off by posting my daily writings right here, on this blog. (Go to the NaNoWriMo link to read more).
I was first introduced to Emmylou Harris in 1974. My first college roommate had an eclectic taste in music and introduced me to artists who never made the Kasey Kasem Top 100, and who never got air time on our small town AM radio station, and who were never featured artists on the Columbia Records Album of the Month rip-off:
Lou Reed. Leonard Cohen. Emmylou Harris.
Who had even heard of Emmylou in those days? An obscure balladeer, the protegé of Gram Parsons (formerly of the Byrds), and certainly no Top Ten hit songstress. Her voice haunted me. Her ballads, some written by herself, but many penned by Leonard Cohen, Guy Clark (who, again?), and too many to mention. Today, she’s well-known. Then, she was obscure.
I fell in love. I met Guy Clark through her (not IRL – she introduced me to his songwriting). She covered Leonard Cohen. She wrote her own music. She partnered with Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton. She’s sung harmony with more male vocalists than I can think to name. Her voice always whispers over theirs. John Prine. Willie Nelson. Don Williams. Dan Fogelberg.
There are other female vocalists that I am in love with, but most of them I came to know because of my love for Emmylou.
I saw Emmylou in concert at Blue Mountain Communtiy College (now Eastern Oregon Community College). She was touring with the original Hot Band. There were probably 30 people at the concert. It was the one and only time I did cocaine. She did not disappoint.
I can’t explain my draw to her: she’s a balladeer. I love ballads. They tell stories. She has a Voice that is unique. I have no musical Voice, but I have an ear for good music. She’s ageless. That silver hair? I’d kill for it. She’s popular now, in certain circles, but in so many circles if I mention her name, I am met with blank stares: “Who?”
That makes her proprietary: she’s MY heroine. You don’t know who Emmylou is? You must be a musical idiot. (Probably not, just interested in a different genre of music than I am, so don’t take it personal. Don’t take it personal if I don’t know who the newest & greatest pop music star is or the present reigning hip-hop king & queen are). (On a side note: do you know who Odetta was? No? OMG. You MUST research Odetta. That’s all.)
My love for Emmylou opened my ears to several genres of music: neo bluegrass, bluegrass, neo folk, 1970’s folk, early folk, early R&B, early Blues, and the most prevalent in our society now: Americana. Indie music. Even if you hate “Country” music, you can surf Americana and find relevant music.
Here’s a little Emmylou from the time period when I saw her live.
We moved into the house when I was 7. It may have been 1964, but I was still in the Third Grade, and I wouldn’t be 8 until the late fall. I remember a little about the house buying process: our parents wanted a large home, with plenty of rooms, and a shop. They looked a house after house, when this one fell into their laps: a rambling old ranch, hand-built by the previous owner, still lived in by his widow. $13,000.00 is what I believe they paid, or some figure near that amount.
The house was built entirely of poured concrete. The man who built it didn’t use forms, so the walls were often wider at the bottom than at the top, and the stairs were uneven heights. The plumbing was a nightmare as he jury-rigged everything under the house. It featured an attached barbershop (the man who built the house had been a barber), a work shop behind the barbershop, a hallway between the shops and the residence, an unfinished basement, an attic, and a roomy living space in the ranch style. The yard was huge and sported several old fruit trees, several flower beds, a side lawn, a large strawberry patch, a gravel area for extra cars, and a rusty old swingset with a tire swing. The drive was large enough to accommodate customers and family cars. There were arborvitae and Oregon grape planted along the concrete porch with tiers (unevenly poured). Chain-link fence. The lot took up a full third of a block one direction and half a block the other: we were bordered by the alley, two streets, and one neighbor behind us.
The place was a wonder. We moved in and were gifted with everything the widow, Vera Williams, didn’t wish to take with her, such as a collection of 1950’s and 1960’s rock and roll 45 RPMs (vinyl records with hits like Tequila by The Champs and Rockin’ Robin by Bobby Day that my sister and I danced to for hours). There were spices spanning the past two decades in her cupboards with exotic names like curry, cardamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, oregano, rosemary, thyme, allspice…
I recall my mother tossing all the spices out. My sister and I grabbed the tins and made mud pies to our hearts’ content: lovely wafting herbal and spicy scents that mixed in the mud. I suspect my life-long affinity to herbs and spices was sparked in those hours, but before then I was only vaguely aware of cinnamon, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
We found evidence on egg shells in the garden. “Compost”, my mother suggested, but we eyed it with suspicion: surely the widow Williams had been a witch, and the egg shells some part of a spell?
There was a dog’s skull we unearthed when we tilled the abandoned strawberry patch. What evil spell had been cast when burying the dog’s head in the garden, we wondered.
The fruit trees were a wonder, and my father forbade us to climb them, claiming we’d damage the bark. But those wide, twisting, strong branches were no match for his “no” and our agility. When the peaches fell and began to rot, we started a war of peaches with the neighbor kids – until we were all grounded for weeks.
My parents decided on a soft peach color to paint the house, and had the local hardware store mix up several gallons of the paint. They applied it, and it dried. Brilliant pink. Grotesque pink. Glaring PINK. I grew up in the Big Pink House.
Night would fall, and we’d snuggle into our beds, hugging each other. Night times were a test. The house was dark. Bedroom doors closed. Footsteps would pace the hallway. The attic would creak. Too frightened to get out of bed to scramble to the bathroom in the dark, I wet the bed. Again.
My sister screamed in her sleep. A lion was in the shadows on the wall, and the lion was trying to kill her.
Our father put in a wall and built a bedroom for our brother. One night, when the footsteps began wandering, the family dog shot into his bedroom, jumped on the bed, and shivered there, growling, but unwilling to go out into the hall to investigate.
The attic window broke out. Dad fixed it. The attic window broke out. Dad fixed it. The attic window…
There was probably nothing wrong with the basement, but my brother hid in the shadows and leaped out at me as I worked in the hallway, ironing clothes. My heart stopped. I cried. (To this day, if you do that to me, I will kill you. I promise.)
Dad remodeled the barber shop into a guest room. Sometimes we would beg our way into spending the night there, but only when we wanted to be scared witless in the night. Things moved. Doors opened and shut. You could hear footsteps on the concrete in the hall between structures. The walls breathed.
I was in my fifties when I had my last dream of the house. I stood across the street, staring it down. Every nightmare began and ended here. I stepped forward and began to march slowly around it: one, two, three… seven times. Each time, declaring it would never haunt me again. The Shop. The house. The two back doors. The hall between living spaces. The basement. The attic. The two front doors.
The poltergeist that lived within those walls. The one that moved things, hid things, smashed things, slammed doors, and paced the floors. I banished that from my subconscious.
I sleep easier now, but I am still haunted by basements and attics.
I didn’t respond to this hashtag when it first came out. I skimmed over it. I tried to dodge it. Ignore it. It took me three days to be brave enough to admit that #metoo. It’s nothing to downplay.
I’ve never even told my husband these things, not because he wouldn’t care, but he wouldn’t have the right words to say and he’d make me either mad or sad. Not that he wouldn’t care, but – words are hard to come by when someone tells you something. he’d be very sympathetic. He knows the pain, shame, embarrassment, self-questioning.
I finally was brave enough to, and most of the responses were encouraging and positive. But, then, I began to see responses (not necessarily to me) from other women. Boys will be boys. Cat calls aren’t the same as all out sexual harassment. A leering coworker isn’t the same as rape. Pull up your big girl panties.
Let me start out by telling you that all of those who have sexually harassed me have not been men. One was a pastor’s wife. I’ve had my eyebrows plucked (as if I had enough hair growing there in the first place!). Make-overs to make me “prettier (but I was already married, so what was the point, again?). I’ve had women look askance at my flat-chest and say, “You should buy a padded bra.” The pastor’s wife intimated I should look into transplants.
I was very careful about how I raised my girls, worrying – almost obsessing – about how they would view themselves. Both of them were more endowed than I could hope to be. I didn’t want them to view themselves as breasts firsts, everything else second. Or butt first, everything else second.
I’ve heard snide male comments as I’ve passed by. “Itty bitty titties.” You want to know how that made me feel? Really? Do you honestly think it made me feel pretty? And cat-calls from cars? Oh, hell, really? Do we have to go there to know that it’s more than boys being boys?? It’s ignorance, plain and simple. Give those assholes the Finger and they’d hoot and act like it was an invitation.
But lets back up. Have I been assaulted? I once hid in my closet behind my clothes when a stoned “friend” of the boyfriend I was seeing wandered back into my bedroom to see if I was “available”. the boyfriend confronted him, and everything calmed down before I breathed and came out of the closet. Said boyfriend was actually married – a truth I learned later, after his wife showed up on my doorstep asking me how I knew him. Asshole.
There was some guy who came to my house and banged on my doors late at night. I could see his truck parked in the alleyway, but when I confronted him – in front of his mother, my boss – he denied it. And she believed him over me. I never unlocked my doors during those sieges. I added a chair under the door handle.
There was the guy my mom set me up with up when I went home for my foster-sister’s wedding. It was all fun and bar-hopping until he became extremely jealous and controlling. I walked out of the bar on him and drove home, explaining to my mother later about his behaviour. I’m sure they never had the same work relationship that they’d had before, now that my mother knew what a total jerk he was.
Or D. D haunts me. She was from “the other side of the tracks” than I was. She claimed sexual harassment by our boss. She told me. She told M. Neither one of us witnessed it, so we couldn’t help her. We believed her. But be her back up in a civil case? No evidence. I told my father about it and he mused, “She’s probably telling the truth.” M & I had fathers with social ties to the community: we couldn’t be “touched”. But poor D was fair game. And my father knew this man was capable of that! But who had proof, outside of she said/he said? That boss would never have approached M or I, out of “respect” for our fathers. WTF?
Someone in one forum said that boys saying things wasn’t the same as rape. She didn’t even include being felt up. I beg to differ. Perhaps it is because I am flat chested and I was rather pear-shaped in my youth, but those comments hurt. They destroyed my self-confidence. Made me falter in my step. Made me loathe my life and my body.
Somewhere along the line. I developed a spine. I came to see my body as beautiful. I met a man who valued me as an equal, and we had children together. I could sense assholes from a distance. There was one who came to work in my office who chose to harass my coworkers. Not me – I was a strong woman figure who didn’t take shit from men, and he could see that in my eyes. But he tried to prey on my coworkers. Tried, being a keyword here.
Because I was in his face. Sometime after the age of 25, I haven’t pulled punches from assholes. You want to harass my girlfriend? Go through me. Because I no longer stand down.
I was raped. I won’t tell you when or how or where or how old I was. It doesn’t matter. I was naive. I was trusting. It took me years to understand what had happened. Typing #metoo helped me acknowledge that ugly truth. I’ve dodged it most of my life, telling myself I deserved it, wanted it, whatever lie we tell ourselves as women.
Boys will not be boys. My husband was not one of those guys. I pray my son is not one of those guys (and if I trust my daughter-in-law, I know he is not). My sons-in-law are not those kinds of men. Most men I know are not those sort of men. This isn’t a “witch hunt” against men, in general. It isn’t even a witch hunt against our past abusers. It;s just a signal to the world – in general – that more of us than we want to admit have been victims.
If you haven’t – I celebrate with you. What a wonderful, blessed, beautiful life you have been given. Treasure that and pass it on to your children. If you have, don’t be afraid to use the hashtag. You don’t have to tell your story. It may bring back memories buried deep that you do not want to deal with (but, you know, you will eventually have to deal with because it affects everything). Get a counselor. Don’t tell anyone but post the blended words and acknowledge the pain.
Do not make my life experiences lesser because you have not shared in them. Do not tell me that the one time I sat in a movie behind my friends, watching them make-out with other 6th graders, while to my left sat some pervert was my imagination. He was real. I never glanced to the left, some instinct warning me against it. My friends got hickies. I ate my popcorn and watched the movie in my own bubble. But I never, ever, looked to my left. And I ducked out of the theater and up the dark streets by myself long before that perv had the chance to fire up his car’s engine.
My instinct told me that I’d dodged a bullet. I trust my instinct.
We meet once a month, usually. It began as a rebellious get together to honor the elderly among us who were unfairly canned, and to whom we looked up to and adored. We may have even been a bit clandestine – in the beginning. We got bolder as the lay-offs continued and our tight-knit little office group was whittled down. Those of us that remained forged other work-place friendships, but we still longed for the camaraderie of the original accounting and administrative staff.
We have all moved on now. Still, we meet. Same place, same time. almost every month. We talk about hospital visits and near-death experiences, the aches and pains of growing older, and how many grandchildren (or great grandchildren) are there now? Sometimes, the grandchildren come to dinner with us.
I have toyed with writing a story about us. We’re a murder-mystery group, the dissatisfied ex-employees who get together for wine and pasta every third Thursday of the month, and we somehow become embroiled in some murder mystery that we solve as a collective. The murders would, of course, be somehow related to the big corporation that gave us all our pink slips (or, for some of us, we gave them notice before the pink slip could be written).
There’s the elderly head accounting woman leaning on her hand-crafted cane, her thin, white hair delicately coifed to cover her balding skull. The boisterous and enthusiastic accounting assistant who was laid off first, and everyone lost touch with, but she’s recently joined the group. The laconic administrative woman who comes when she feels like it, which isn’t all the time. The sisters, laid off ages ago, who still carry a grudge, and who make it a point to come every other month. The world-traveler, who used to be the head of HR and was quite the naive older woman who kept getting into bad relationships, but who is now happily married to a traveling entrepreneur. The mild-mannered former CFO who scared us all when he had heart problems shortly after being laid off, and who rides a Harley-Davidson motorcycle when the weather is nice. The grumpy, stubborn, former corporate receptionist and all-around OCD office manager who is a secret gamer. There’s me.
I have other characters I’d love to add to the pile: the former payroll director who seems mild mannered and shy, but who can send a stink-eye to an entire school board and shut down the place. The art director who once was subjected to the gaudiest purchase-by-mail faux office art imaginable hanging over her cubicle (because the new CEO had terrible taste in art – or maybe a secret vendetta). The sometimes nutty, but always endearing, Administrative Coordinator who believes she is a reincarnation of Mary, Queen of Scots, has strange food fetishes, and is a crazy cat lady on the side.
The problem with my idea is this: “characters are fictitious and do not resemble anyone living or dead” – or however that disclaimer is worded. Because these characters do, indeed, represent people I know.
I wonder how they would describe me? Maybe I don’t want to ask.
And maybe I need to take a course in writing mysteries. 🙂
I’m the glass on the edge, and let me tell you, it makes me nervous. I hold about 4 ounces (113.398 grams) of purple grape juice. Katie left me here when she ran into the kitchen to tell her momma that Zeke keeps staring at her. Zeke is quietly sniggering behind his lap top. Behind me, the television is set on some annoying sing-along kiddie program.
Forgive me, I didn’t properly introduce myself. I am a juice glass, usually reserved for the adults, but Katie is meticulous. She doesn’t like spills. She’s very particular.She is the first of them – Zeke, Julie, and Katie – to be allowed to carry me around. Katie places me carefully in the center of the table – except for now. Now I am on the edge.
Meow-Meow has been curled up on the sofa next to Zeke, purring loudly. I think Meow-Meow has the same warped sense of humor as his favorite human, and now he has cracked open his baleful yellow eyes to study me. I know he’s looking at me. The tip of his tail twitches. His whiskers quiver. Just like that, he’s jumped from the sofa to the table where I am sitting and he is sniffing at the contents I am holding.
Zeke looks up. “Better not, Meow-Meow. Mom just shampooed.” The cat looks back at his human and seems to nod. Then he looks at me.
WHOP! I am airborne. I bounce off of the sofa in a spray of purple and the sound of my sides exploding from the blow. I hear the background exclamation of, “Oh shit! Meow-Meow! Bad kitty!” I dimly notice the cat’s paws as he leaps past my line of vision and out of the room, and I bounce onto the white carpet, still spilling grape juice. The toe of Zeke’s sneaker catches me and I am sent rolling into the darkness underneath the sofa.
It is scary here. Dark. Dust bunnies open their eyes and stare at me. Beyond, I hear Katie crying, and the momma yelling at Zeke to clean up the glass and juice. Glass. Shards of me. A dust bunny hops forward. “If they clean under here because of you, we’ll finish you off in the dust bin.” I shudder.
My heart is hurting tonight. I cannot quit thinking about people who live in Myanmar. Mogadishu. Puerto Rice. The Virgin Islands. California. Florida. Texas. Ireland.
You name the site and the tragedy, and my heart weeps.
You can tell me to not read the news, but I will check, anyway.
Don’t take it personal. I will, anyway.
I just want everyone in every affected area of the world to know that even if I cannot give my time or resources, there isn’t a moment that I don’t think and pray about you.
Failed lesson. I can’t write about this. California just went up in flames. Puerto Rico still has no water.
If sending positive vibes/prayers/thoughts can help, I have sent many, many, many.
I gave blood for the very first time, ever. I’ll become a donor from now on.
I can’t give money for every single disaster that has passed the threshold of my door in the past few weeks. I weep.
Yet I am hopeful. The human spirit is resilient. We rebuild. We rebound. We fight back against the elements. We are strong.
I have a lot of weird possessions, so this is just “one of many”. Some I inherited from my parents and some I picked up, all on my lonesome – or with the aid of my husband, who is also drawn to weird possessions.
Weird possession du jour: a carved wooden snake. It’s 20″ long, and appears to slither across the floor.
I don’t know who carved it. I am certain it came from either the Wilcox side of my lineage or the Cusick side. Basically, it was in my father’s family, not my mother’s more Scots side of the family tree.
For that matter, although we celebrate the Scots/Irish, my DNA tells a very different story. The Scots and Irish were simply more recent immigrants to the United States, or the prouder of the lineages that came down through the ages. I can trace the Cusicks back to Ireland, and the Melroses back to Scotland. The Wilcoxes and Robinsons come from a much more diverse (albeit, very white) nationalities. The closest my blood line gets to possibly being mixed with anything less than Northern Europe is the 13% Iberian Peninsula.
Seriously. Europe West – 40%. That would include the Dutch (Van Esseltyne would be a huge hint to Dutch ancestry, and probably why I own a set of adult wooden shoes and a set of toddler wooden shoes). 30% Great Britain, which includes the more recent Scotland arrivals of the 1800s.. 7% Ireland (probably all Cusick). 6% Scandanavia. 4% Finland. I’m going out on a limb here and guessing the Finnish and Scandinavian happened during all the many raids and pillages of great Britain. I mean, what is Great Britain, anyway, except a hodge-podge of Europe West, Scandinavia, Norse, and Roman?
But I digress. The snake.
It seems to have a very Norse personality, don’t you think?
Hell, I have no idea. I don’t know who sat on the porcah and did wood working. Who might have hammered scales into a piece of wood and carved a face into it, then handed it down to the next generation. Why my dad saved it.
I slipped up and did not post either Friday night or Saturday night. Friday, my office hosted a little meet-and-greet for past clients, and while I was not obligated to be there, I went for a couple of hours. I hate small talk, but sometime you have to do what you have to do, and I wanted to support my real estate agents. Small talk kills me, and I came home and dove into a movie instead of getting on the Web.
Saturday, I gave myself permission to take the day off from responsibilities, writing, and plugging away at my website goals over at Two Crow Feather Woman. I did some minor chores. but most of the day was just a long, lazy, happy day.
Today, I jumped back into responsibility. Groceries, laundry, feeding the birds. The sun came out, although a bit weak, what with high, thin, clouds. I dove into the garden. Who knows when next we’ll have a relatively decent and warm day to tackle the constants of a living garden? The rainy season is fast approaching and I admit that I am none too fond of working in the yard in the cold, finger-cramping, Autumn weather.
This doesn’t look like much. I’ll explain: you are looking at a slew of yellow evening primroses (Oenothera biennis). I have wonderful childhood memories of the fragrance of these wafting on a warm summer’s evening. Then I grew up and forgot about it until some bird dropped these seeds into my yard and I decided to see what grew from the clumps. They are every bit as fragrant as I recall, and they are insect-friendly, hosting bees, moths, and hummingbirds. Occasionally, we even get hummingbird moths (common name for a sphinx moth that resembles a hummingbird, but which flies at night. The evening primrose blooms in the evening and fades with dawn’s light.
This year, they spread over the top of my beleaguered mountain penstemon, and I had to decide: primroses or penstemon? Oh, why choose either/or? I chose to pull apart the broad leaves of the primroses to find the living branches of the particular penstemon I have: something we dug up in eastern Oregon or the high Cascades and replanted in the yard. This particular kind grows much like kinnickinnick (I love that word!): woody, close to the ground, and on slopes.
I planted it in three different areas of the yard, naturalizing it into the rocks.
Well, that was easy, so why not tackle the irises? It is Autumn, and the best time to dig around irises. My irises survived the gravel drive of my folks’ house in Ely, Nevada, for decades. They were my mother’s, and a few years after she died, my father dug them up (he hated them) and boxed them, and shipped them to me.
They survived the wet climate here, but every few years I have to dig them completely out and pull the grass out from between them. The grass is insidious. It strangles my other plants, from peonies to irises to gladiolas to my lavenders and the Russian sage. Anyplace that was a neglected flower bed when we bought this house, the grass creeps in and takes my garden hostage.
I don’t have this problem in the beds I created since we moved in, only in the beds that were neglected by the previous owner.
Grass and red sorrel.
I have temporarily won: the irises have been replanted sans grass roots.
Finally, I mulched a zone 9 plant out in the front garden (I live in a 7/8 zone), and I pulled out half the Hallowe’en decorations. I’ll put up the lights next weekend.
Jaci Dawn 