Presenting Potentilla indica

Mock strawberry, growing next to the sidewalk in front of our house.  The rabbits who dine on the white clover in the front yard will be able to enjoy a little dessert. 

For now

Sharing Quality Time with my good friend Mr. Hobbes, March 3, 2013.  He passed October 1, 2015.  

 

Late-August sedum scene

 

An Annual Event

It seems like every year, some of the seed we put out for the birds ends up on the ground, where it goes about its own seedy business and sprouts.  So instead of one neglected seed, a few dozen seeds are produced, none of which go to waste.

Still laying out

Call it a healing regression, maybe.  Anyhow, Nebraska has gone up 2-0 against Colgate, and I'm snacking on frosted flakes during the break.

Feeling better than I have in the past week.  Enjoyed a walk around the development without feeling tired.  Planning a visit to Tabby's Place on Sunday afternoon to see my new friend Fenek.

Enjoying the cool of the evening after another week of work.

Shh...

 Just taking some time off.  A day or two, maybe.

Walking with a camera

Chicory flowers are plentiful on the edges of roads around here.  But this is the first I've seen that's claimed some land in our development.  A few feet away are some fleabane and hawkweed.  So far, the neighbor just seems to be mowing them rather than applying weed killer.   (Good.)

 

Midnight Monday at Tabby's Place: Pepperoni

Easy Like Sunday at Tabby's Place

 

Life in our back yard

 

Accomplishments, August 2021

 P. showed me the back door this afternoon and said that I would have to fix the way it fit into the jamb.  How, I asked?  Find a YouTube video, she answered, before adding that there was something inside the hinges or something for that purpose.  Opening the door, I worked on getting that sweet spot, the half-inch or so where my vision is clear, not the blur of being too far away without glasses, nor the fuzziness of being too close with them.  

In addition to the screws holding the hinges in place, there was a small circle within which appeared to be a set for an Allen wrench.  There's already one of those on the door itself, and a small wrench is kept on the frame above it for a quick tightening when the handle jiggles more than it turns.

That Allen wrench was too small for the spot in the hinge, so I pulled the full set from the tool kit that stays in the garage, and my second guess as to the size required was correct.  Then my second attempt at turning the wrench was also successful, leaving a uniform gap between the jamb and the door from top to bottom.  Accepting praise and a kiss from P. modestly, I put the wrenches back in the garage and washed my hands for supper.  

Woman Cat Wednesday at Tabby's Place: Fiesta

 

Fiesta

After work

After a supper of an Amy's enchilada, black beans, and corn:

Drove south on Route 29 to Bally and the Longacre's Dairy that has been redesigned since the last visit, probably five years ago.  A roof has been built over what used to be several parking spaces.  The open lobby or waiting area has been closed, and now you place an order at a window where nothing was in 2016.  

I asked for two half-gallons of whole milk, a pint of French vanilla ice cream, and a CMP sundae.  (When I first moved here from Ohio, the only thing I knew CMP stood for was "catchup", mustard and pickle, because that's how I ordered my burgers from Wendy's.)  I ate the chocolate/marshmallow/peanut sundae on the 20-mile drive home while listening to Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine and Rhinestones, the Tammy Wynette episode.

The rest of the evening:

- another 15-20 minutes on DuoLingo Russian.  I just finished a New Yorker article on people who learn languages by the dozen, and how they do it.  How they do it, if the case study is any indication, is the same way you become an expert at anything else:  have a talent for something and then practice, practice, practice.  Everyone has to go through the same steps, but some enjoy the process of sight-reading and playing scales over and over again for hours. The more time on task, the sooner you get there.  

I have great gaps in my knowledge of French, because I didn't enjoy it enough to sit for hours memorizing grammar and conjugations.  I wanted to play piano, but I didn't want to learn to play piano.  On the other hand, I enjoyed typing and wanted to do things with spreadsheets, so I got better at typing and using Lotus 1-2-3.  

Piano?  That's not practical.  Typing and word processing will let me put words on paper much more easily, and I have words I want to put on paper.  At one time, it was for college assignments, and now, mostly pertaining to cats.

If I'd had it in me, I would have found a way and been a musician like my mother and father.  Instead, it's writing and photography and Excel, and where in the family tree did that come from?  But there is a practical use for them:  now I get to take photos of cats and edit them, and there's a place that can use them, so I am helping cats, which is all the reason I need. 

So DuoLingo, 15 minutes at a time, is all I want, and I recognize and accept that my vocabulary isn't ever going to be in the thousands of words.  

- The first 15 minutes of the LibriVox recording of The Story of Mary MacLane.   Talk about someone born too soon.  Her oversharing sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, and fit right in now, but it all took place in 1902.

- Read Ali Wong's Radical Raunch, and put Baby Cobra on the Netflix queue. 

- Learned of Love is a Crime and added it to the Google Podcast list.  They had me at "A Karina Longworth Podcast."

 

Twofur Tuesday at Tabby's Place: sweet Lemon and li'l salty Olive

 

Lemon

Olive

Moggie Monday at Tabby's Place

 

Easy Like Sunday

 

In a solarium at Tabby's Place.

Life in the back yard

Alsike clover... and a busy bumblebee who finds it just the thing. 

Forever Home Friday: Lester

Lester

On Fridays, we'll feature a cat from Tabby's Place who has recently been adopted.  

Fursday at home with Brave Nelson

 

Black and White Wednesday at Tabby's Place: Nyla

 Nyla

Not done yet with the Pandemic Quarantine thing

New large sign tonight at the entrance of Wegmans, "strongly recommending" that shoppers wear a mask.  Pat put one on, I didn't.  There were more masks than in the recent past, but couldn't say whether there were more people in masks than not.  It wasn't obvious one way or the other.

My employer has announced that people are expected to return to the office in early October.  Everyone who does will need proof of vaccination.  

Twofur Tabby Tuesday at Tabby's Place: Verde and Yuki

Verde

Yuki

 

Midnight Monday at Tabby's Place: Fenek

 

Fenek

What was and is no more

The kind of thing I can get into on a Sunday morning...

On one of the routes I take to get home from Tabby's Place, there was the skeleton of a large building.  It was pretty clear that the business that occupied it had gone away some time ago.  I dug around to try to find out what happened, but all I needed the search for was the details.  The story is the same all over:  there was a company, and like many other businesses, it was located next to a large body of water.  Back then, the water served as a method of transportation, and not incidentally as a receptacle for the company's waste products.  

This was a specialty paper company, and it produced lots of waste, much of it toxic.  When I began to drive by it in the mid-2010's, it had already been designated as a Superfund site.  Cleanup took years, complicated by the fact that the owners had declared bankruptcy and were no longer around.  

Sound familiar?  Everyplace I've lived has had the big local company where you went to work after leaving school (whether with a diploma or not).  Where I lived in the 1960's and early 1970's, the big local company was being bought out by a bigger national company and starting to lay off employees.

Where I lived in the late 1970's and early 1980's, the bigger national company was coming to the conclusion that they were not making enough money in the location they had bought.  Maybe they got the union to make concessions.  Maybe they even reduced their own salaries.  (I said *maybe*.)  

The work was outsourced to another part of the country, or another part of the continent, or even another part of the world, and the local place went silent.  Maybe not right away, maybe it changed hands a time or two, but inevitably the workers went home and couldn't come back, and the buildings remained empty for years.  Time did to them what time does to everything.  If there was toxic waste in addition to deteriorating structures, it took longer to settle the estate.

In the case of the site I passed every week or so, the last of the landmark see-it-from-anywhere structures went down in late 2019.  

No more walls with faded lettering just off the road to my left, only great piles of debris behind chain-link fencing.  Then came 2020, and you know what kept me away during that year.  Finally, I drove by last week, and there was nothing in sight except an open, mostly grass-free area.  The news sources said that there were plans to build new, modern businesses, a medical facility and maybe some housing as well.

On the blog where I learned the specific details of the story I already knew, there were quite a few comments from people who had been there.  Everybody knew someone who had worked there, often one or more family members.  Their father had worked there his entire working life and made a good living, and naturally the son believed it would keep on going just that way, except that time ran out and he was 60 years old and his former employer was offering to set him up with a contractor who would help him with his resume.  

Modern Ruins has galleries of its namesake, and I learned about some area examples at Antiquity Echoes.  There were other sites; if I'd had the time, they had the ruins.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

couldn't fit this in above:  everywhere I've lived had this story, too.  In the 50's, there was the big downtown department store where you could shop for your needs and wants, and maybe help yourself to a local specialty, like a good slice of strawberry pie.  In the 60's, the downtown faded as suburban malls grew, and by the 70's downtown was barely alive.  Of course, they tried to keep hope and business alive, and in some cities their attempts were a little more successful than others, but in my experience, Tiedtke's and the Lion Store and Lasalle's went under, and Hess's and Leh's and Zollinger-Harned went under.  It was the same all over, for Hudson's and Lazarus and Marshall Field's, and so it went.

Easy Like Sunday with Good Queen Swirly

 

Fresh flowers

The rose bush given to Pat for her birthday continues to put out fresh blossoms.  

#ifthisisn'tnice

Getting to the end of the day, so before I forget:

- Several hours at Tabby's Place this afternoon.  Most of it with black man cat Fenek, all of it snapping pictures left and right.  Some of 'em are bound to be good.  Something to look forward to tomorrow, downloading and going over them, preparing the better ones for upload to Flickr.

- While there, donated some old towels and sheets, and I dumped the small change collected over the past year in a yeast jar into a donation box.  Reverting to quarantine blog for a moment, masks are once again mandatory.  Not much of that anywhere else I go these days, but the delta version of the covid virus has been particularly contagious, so even the fully vaccinated who can still carry it are subject to the same rules as non-vaccinated citizens.

- The drive was enjoyable, some of it on I-78, other parts on two-lane state roads with a fair speed limit and nearly no traffic.  On the way home, the route took me over the Milford, NJ bridge and on along the Delaware River for quite a distance.  

- As I pulled in the driveway, I caught sight of a cottontail at the back of the property.  

- Pizza and Pepsi for supper.  Some quality lap time after supper with Good Queen Swirly.  A new Vin Scully ballgame on YouTube.

- Tomorrow, besides fiddling around with cat pictures, I'll probably be baking some more cookies, or maybe a lemon cake.  Who knows, maybe both.

Traditional Friday Cat Blogging at Tabby's Place

 

A walk in the park

Green Queen Anne's Lace and a framing stalk of grain, Rodale Park, July 19, 2021.

In spite of everything

I need a GIF of Rex Harrison declaiming, "I'm an orrrrrdinary man."

But I am.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a reason why I'm not.

Reasonably well-educated, open-minded, and very good to cats.

Yet...

When I see a tweet from Carl Bovis that says "A gorgeous rare Penduline Tit..." 

I admire the attractive bird and his photography skills, but...

...for more than an instant, I go all Beavis and Butthead with the word Penduline and its close relative, pendulous.  

Insert B and B GIF with the caption, "Uh heh-heh-heh."

Fun with filters

Hawkweed growing along Trexlertown Road.  The depth of field wasn't deep enough, so I applied a filter labeled "oil painting" to work around it.  

A little list

Things I'd like to get accomplished, jotted down yesterday afternoon:

Reading:

Fred Allen:  Much Ado About Me

Louise Brooks:  Lulu in Hollywood (after seeing the mention in Rachel Syme's New Yorker article)

Ernie Pyle:  Brave Men (want to read this right before writing for Tabby's Place. I like how he told a story, and maybe something will rub off.)

Le Monde:  Catching up with the Pegasus story.  

The rest:

T5i refresher course via YouTube

Speedlite refresher, too

Sand down the patch on the family room wall and re-paint

Credit Union for SD-box

Tivo:  more than one old movie, maybe also an episode of Tuca and Bertie

Daily DuoLingo lesson; since becoming a fan of Kate NV, it bugs me that I know nothing about the Cyrillic alphabet and Russian language.  Not expecting miracles, but at least I've been exposed to the words for "thank you", "happy birthday", "this" and "where", even though I can't remember them yet.

Moggie Monday with Brave Nelson

 

Easy Like Sunday