Take Joy!

Thou Art Goddess

Made for the Three Color Goddess swap at the Goddess Dolls group. A remnant of black and white quilters' cotton, guinea hen feathers, shisha mirror (it came with the embroidered border) and nearly the last of my gilt-lined red beads (bought nearly fifteen years ago from Blue Bear Beads in Myrtle Beach), translucent white seed beads and coral bits, and a bit of hand-dyed silk ribbon and a few metal roses (bought from ArtChix, I think, several years ago). Six inches or so, stuffed with polyfil.

Ysabeau Goes Hunting

. . . sort of.

Bears Again, Dammit! and Rain . . .

Actually, I suspect only one bear—the middle-sized one. The same one that carried off the cat litter bucket full of peanuts last week, which I found today (the bucket, not the bear) down in the middle of the neighbors' driveway, empty but relatively intact. Anyway, said bear demolished a feeder I'd had in the big fig tree and forgotten to take in last night, re-bent the shepherd's crook it was hanging on (this is about the fourth time; I won't be able to bend it back up many more times), bent another feeder that I'd forgotten was even there, 

rooted around in three pots of borage I was growing off on the porch (though, to be fair, that might have been the game hens; I'd already run them out once),

tore up a ziploc bag and cottage cheese container scoop  that had once held sunflower seeds and probably had six left in it, and then rambled around to the front porch and made off with a brand-new bag of birdseed . . . leaving a trail all across the yard, which the birds gleefully ate up this morning.

I swear . . .

John and Roger and Jeremy are outside now, putting up fence. I just hope this bear is too lazy to want to get over it. I'm still bringing everything in at night, though. Just in case.

The reason the birdseed was on the front porch (I've been very careful to bring all bags/cat litter buckets/etc. containing peanuts or seeds or corn inside every night) is that it was wet when we came home from the grocery store. We had three and a quarter inches of rain yesterday; over two and a half of it was during the hour I was at the grocery store . . . we had to wait to leave, because you couldn't see to drive for half an hour. Today there are state maintenance crews out all along Old Farm School and Riceville roads, clearing debris that washed into the road and unblocking drains; and the sound of the woodchipper is heard in the land . . . not here, fortunately; maybe everything that was going to fall has already fallen, for a while.

(And half the cats are mad at me, too, because I let them stay out while we were gone . . . Let us just say that they were not amused when we came home. Especially LeeLee, who must have been down in the back woodlot when it began raining, and came in looking like the proverbial drowned rat. I wish I'd thought to get the camera! She's dogging my tracks today, possibly to be sure I don't leave her out in the rain again.)

"Excessive rain" for forecast for TUESDAY, but never materialized. We had three-quarters of an inch overnight, but then things cleared off and there was blue sky, so I thought we were safe to go get things . . . PetSmart first (8 flats of canned cat food—the month's supply plus enough to rotate out my emergency supply— a bag of Cat Chow and a bag of "treat" food that lives in a big jar on the counter, and a bag of birdseed to eke out what I have until the fence is up and I can get a big bag), then groceries. I was nearly through shopping when I noticed things had gotten very dark outside, so I hurried to finish . . . but not fast enough. It could have been worse, though; we could have been on the way home when the bottom fell out!

As it was, I lost the bag of "treat" food and the bear-stolen birdseed, which wasn't bad. The chicken feed John had gotten in the morning was under a tarp, so it's OK; we left the small bag and the Cat Chow on the porch to dry out. Also the cans, which were soaked, of course. (This is the disadvantage to shopping in a truck with no cover. I do have a big plastic box to put things in, but it won't hold an entire shopping cart's worth of groceries. So I rode home with bags of stuff on my lap . . . ) The Cat Chow was OK; the  bear bit a small hole in it and apparently decided it wasn't worth fooling with any longer; I brought it in this morning and stowed it in its plastic tub. The small bag was too wet to use, in spite of there being an inner plastic bag, so I fed it to the chickens. The cans of food are out of their plastic and drying on the washer; I'll put them away when the labels are dry so they don't fall off and everyone is forced to take potluck for the next month.

And there will be no weeding for a couple of days at least, until everything that was beaten down by the rain has either risen back up or given up and remained on the ground. (And until I see whether or not the tiny plants I have/had started are permanently smooshed or are going to rebound. A little of both, I think.)

The keets (baby guineas) came today! They were shipped on Monday, so I'm surprised they were still alive. I guess guineas are tougher than chickens. They were thirsty, but very vocal, as guineas are . . . We'll check on them later and see whether they're still fine. I hope so; I really want some more guineas wandering around. And I'm sure the neighbors do, too.

I finally retrieved the pictures from my camera, so here is one:

These were knitted over the winter, and I just sent them to afghans for Afghans for their current campaign. They're actually asking for hats this time! Which is good, because I like to make hats. I'm attempting to use some of my odds and ends, and possibly the occasional full ball of something, because in all the moving things about, I got all the yarn in one place, and . . . well, it's sort of embarassing, really. I had no idea there was so much here . . and there . . . and there . . . and there, too.

::sigh:: How am I going to justify buying lovely new yarn when I already have all these tubs full? (No, I'm  not mentioning a number.)

I have three more hats finished, and I think I shall attempt a pair of mittens. I don't feel quite up to socks yet, but I think I can do mittens. Besides, I HATE working with dpns; maybe mittens will get me a little more comfortable with them.

And here is a gratuitous squirrel picture, because I am ever-amused by them:

And now I am going to make myself a cup of tea and sit down for a while—not only do I have the new Progressive, there is also the current Rolling Stone with Peter Dinklage on the cover . . .

Catching Up

The garden is in (mostly): corn, beans, squashes of various kinds, herbs, cabbage, leeks, onions, potatoes, cucumbers. Tomatoes will go in next week, as will okra. Radishes are finished (and were enjoyed mightily while they lasted). Lettuce, mostly done, though I have mixed greens in a few big pots against the house. Peppers will be another couple of weeks, probably, and I have a new flower/pepper/herb bed for them:

It usually gets more sun; I took this early in the morning. The large black pots will have little tomatoes in them, and probably some basil and marigolds, because I like them. I'm working on perennial bee-friendly flowers around the edges, and peppers in the center. The blue tub in the foreground was going to be full of catnip, but my seeds are not doing well (too wet these past few weeks; they are damping off), so I need to start some in pots and transplant them. 

I have more plants to set out, from a trip to the greenhouse on Monday, but I'm doing them slowly. My knee has been bothering me, so I'm babying it.

We have a new (to us) washer and dryer, due to the sudden demise of the old washer, which was only thirty years old (the dryer died several years ago, or the heating element did; I still used it from time to time to de-cathair my black shirts). We were able to avoid any actual cash outlay (fortunately, since we have not much in the way of actual cash these days, what with putting up a building and buying fencing and buying plants and some expensive but nice fabric to make a dragon), since John's mother had bought a new washer only a couple of years before she died, and no one else wanted it. It only took two days to move all the boxes out of the  hall, move the old washer and dryer out and to the junkyard, move the new washer and dryer in . . . and move said boxes into the storeroom, after moving a bunch of other stuff (soapmaking supplies, jars, etc.) up into the newly-finished storage building. And move the bookcases from the storeroom out into the newly-vacated hall, so I can get all my books on Norse culture in one place, which of course necessitated going through all the disorganized shelves in the 'library' room, as well as the fifteen or so boxes of books we didn't think we'd need right away, and then moving them into the storeroom . . . Darla was not amused at having her retreating room disarranged, and immediately retreated into said room (the storeroom) for the past week or so, emerging only to meow plaintively for food every couple of hours. However, she came out yesterday and took up her accustomed place on the bed (behind John's pillows after he gets up; if he sleeps what she considers to be too long, she hops onto the table beside the bed and looks at him until he wakes up), so I think she's decided that moving boxes does not equal something horrible. (Oh, Earl was awful about that; if I moved boxes of stuff, as I do periodically in a vain attempt to fit 50 pounds of stuff into a 25-pound space, he hid under the bed and stared out reproachfully until it was apparent that we weren't moving . . . )

No wonder my knee hurts.

I was not intending to replace the dryer; I had intended to put shelves in that space. I don't mind using one, but I do mind paying for the electriciy to use it . . . however, John wanted it, it was free, and it wasn't worth arguing over . . . and it was handy the other day when we cleaned the closet and discovered that Kali had spent the winter sleeping on one of  John's camouflage coats, so that it was now camouflaged with cat hair.

We had lovely iris blooming this spring:

These are rebloomers, and there's a huge patch of them now; they have spread all across the path between the two front flower beds. (OK, I'll walk around.) There are also some others, the kind that bloom only once, but I have no pictures because every one bloomed when it was raining! They are some that we transplanted last year from a bed that used to be full of them, but was gradually shaded out, and these were all that was left. There was a pink one, an apricot one, a raspberry-colored one, and a white one with purple edges, and there are some others that haven't bloomed this year. They were such nice surprises!

We had a late frost that got the fig trees (which are marginal up here anyway), but they both lived and the older huge one (in the south corner of the house) is putting out more tiny figs; I doubt if the younger one will fruit this year, but it's got new leaves, so perhaps next year. Frost got the bush cherries (there are some left, but not over a gallon or so, probably), the crabapples and the apple tree, as well as the yellow cherry in the side yard (not that we ever get any cherries from it, but it's fun to watch the squirrels eat them) and the chestnut. The weeping cherry, however, has berries (and the catbird has found them), the persimmons are full of flowers, and the black raspberries are loaded, as are the wineberries. The blackberries, unfortunately, don't look well . . . I think we will need to move them, or dig them up and plant new ones further down the garden for next year. I hope we have some blackberries this year, though; at least enough to eat! I'm sure there are things as good as blackberries right from the vine, but I can't think of any. (I still mourn John's mother's blackberry patch: we used to go up every summer, several times, and pick—and eat, in my case; if I'm going to get hung up in thorns, I want berries for my trouble! Right then!—and dodge the mockingbird that nested in the thicket. But it was full of honeysuckle and she had it mown down, thinking it would come back. It didn't.)

We have new chickens; several batches, due to accidents. The first ones came along nicely, grew and feathered out and were moved out into the fenced end of the chicken lot to acclimate themselves to being around  big chickens . . . and then we had a bad thunderstorm, lots of thunder and lightning, and they did what chickens do sometimes: panicked and piled up in the corners of the lot and smothered themselves. Two-thirds of them. ::sigh:: And they were such pretty little chickens, too. But, you know, this stuff happens. . . so now we have more. One batch will be ready to come out in another couple of weeks, maybe, depending on the weather; the other is only a couple of weeks old and just beginning to feather, so it will be a while. And we have 15 guineas coming . . . today, I imagine. We only have three of the old ones left, and ticks are already bad this year, so maybe these will take care of some of them.

And there are these chickens:

 

These are game chickens, which actually belong to our neighbor Martin over the hill, but have escaped and taken up residence here. The rooster brought three of his hens with him; they're tidy little brown hens that aren't much larger than the young hens in the lot. They roost in the dogwood outside the chicken lot and wander around the yard during the day, coming up on the side porch periodically to eat cat food and have a drink, and lay the occasional egg . . . in fact, one of them built a nest on top of the brooder boxes where the young birds are growing off, and laid and hatched nine eggs. John caught them and put them and her in one of the boxes; now she's out and they're in with the middle batch of chicks, feathering nicely. She spent a couple of days sitting on top of the wire cover, guarding them, but then she either got bored or decided they were ok on their own and now she wanders around with the others.

We've had bears . . . several times. There are three of them—Mama Bear, who must weigh 400 pounds and is not at all afraid of people, a last-year's cub, and an in-between one who's probably about 200 pounds. They have eaten my peanuts and sunflower seeds, destroyed my bird feeders (thus vindicating my choice of buying cheap ugly plastic feeders which are easily replaced), and been generally highly annoying . . . so now my peanut and sunflower seed trash cans are empty, which means I must buy small bags so I can keep them in the house, and I bring the feeders in at night. Particularly the suet feeders, which I suspect is what they smelled in the first place. And the cat food.

At least they didn't find the bee hives . . . we have six now, all doing well, and it would be catastrophic to lose them.

So we are putting up a fence on the remaining unfenced side of the property, which is all along the neighbor's driveway, 300 feet or so. That's how they came down, across Rita's field and down the drive . . . they also ripped apart Robin's daughter's rabbit cage and her two rabbits escaped. They're pretty white ones, with black eye patches, and apparently uncatchable; they've been living in a patch of woods near their erstwhile home, and coming out into the field to eat clover in the evenings. I usually look for them. So does Sam . . .

At any rate, we have fencing, and stakes, and ties, and John has cleared half of the fenceline . . . as soon as it dries out a little, he will clear the rest and then put up stakes and so on. And, hopefully, that will take care of that. . . bears are lazy, and they'll go around a fence if they can unless they're really, really hungry; and there are plenty of people who put trash out with scraps in it . . . they've begun coming this way because someone down the way who own a couple of acres of wooded land that they used to cross is putting up an eight-foot solid board fence (to keep his dogs in) and has blocked their usual path, so they've moved over nearer to us.

William is dead; the same storm that spooked the chickens killed him. Lightning struck trees in the goat lot (at least two; there were four down, but wind may have downed the others), and struck him, too. He never knew what hit him, which is something . . . Jesse is lonely; he and William hung around together, but I don't believe we will get another sheep. We are getting old to be wrangling livestock.

And that's what's going on, mostly. Everything is smothered in weeds, because I have been moving boxes and whatnot and not weeding, and when I wasn't moving boxes, it was raining . . . and so it goes. I was going to weed this morning, but it's raining, so I suppose not. Maybe this afternoon. Or maybe I'll just knit.

Wordless Wednesday

Sam Warms His Nethers

We've been having a cool spell this week, and the stove has been back in operation . . . with considerable competition for the best spot.

"You, sir, are in my place. I shall stare at you until you leave!"

"Ahhh! My rightful place, at last!"

Wordless Wednesday—Heartsease

Maggie in the Sun