Tag: At Play in the Fields of the Lord

On a Lighter Note

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , , ,

Wow, was I in a black mood yesterday.  I shouldn’t dwell on the motives and the just desserts that our insect overlords have and deserve respectively.  It’s not good for my soul.

So today Camera Girl and I were walking around the yards looking at what Fall has done to the place and we saw some interesting stuff.  We checked out the garden and there were some ripe raspberries left on the plants.


So we ate them as we walked.

We picked three butternut squashes that were still on the vine, even thought their color wasn’t very hopeful looking.  But the vine leaves were dying so it made sense to pick them.

I snapped a few foliage shots

 

I checked the Montauk daisies and they had bloomed.

I went over and checked the wolfbane and sure enough it was opening.

Then we went by the wall and I took a shot of the opened seed pods of the milkweed

 

And then on a whim Camera Girl checked under one of our reptile and amphibian tins and even though almost nothing showed up there all year except for crickets she found this.

That’s the only spotted salamander I can remembering finding all year. She really has a knack for finding good stuff out of nowhere.  In May I will have known Camera Girl for fifty years.  And our association has been very satisfactory.  I applaud her parents for raising such an excellent daughter.  I hazard to say that she is one in many millions in term of her qualities.  And not just at finding spotted salamanders!

So today was much better than yesterday and my mood is much improved.  Insect overlords, do your worst!

Oh and here’s a song I found.

Peak Summer 2024

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July 15th is peak summer; top dead center.  And this year it’s living up to the hype.  Lots of heat, lots of humidity, a pretty good amount of sunshine.  As opposed to 2023, I am satisfied with the ration of summer being provided.  I am watching countless hours of old movies and wandering the fields looking for pictures of bugs and listening to political talking heads panicking or laughing at the latest exploits of the Joe Biden Flying Circus and Freak Show Emporium.  I’ve had to stop watching anything that has James Carville on it.  The Ragin’ Cajun is so distraught that I’m afraid I’ll bust a gut laughing at his apoplexy.  I’ll be shocked if he survives.

Now I will pay for all this joy.  The karmic wheel never stops turning and eventually it will pay me back with pain.  But what the hell.  Let’s let this thing play out.  Sometime in September Trump and Biden are supposed to have their second debate.  I’m sure by then the Dems and the Media will have adjusted their depression meds and decided to stop their Biden freakout and concentrate on destroying Trump by any means necessary.  And ANY is the operative word there.  I won’t be surprised by anything but I may be dismayed anyway.  After all these are desperate and delusional people who control resources that have almost no limits.  Four years ago, they shut down the whole world’s economy for a year and a half just to get Donald Trump.  What might they consider out of bounds?

But I digress.  I read that Shelley Duvall died yesterday.  In honor of her passing I plan to watch “The Shining” this week.  There is a certain contrarian logic in watching that most wintry of horror movies at this most sultry time of the rolling year.  Watching Jack Torrance succumb to the poison that the Overlook Hotel has served up to him is a cautionary tale for every frustrated fiction writer that ever lived.  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And just to give equal time to a less disturbed ghost story I think I’ll watch the George C Scott version of “A Christmas Carol.”  I think Christmas in the middle of July is something that should not be left to only the Hallmark Channel.

Yesterday I got a burst of energy and took out my pruning saw, bow saw and extra heavy-duty pruning shears and went primitive on some small trees that have gotten out of control in one area of the property.  And while I was at it, I searched out some Virginia Creeper vines that had gotten completely out of hand in the woods.  Some of these vines were three inches in diameter.  The trees they were climbing on were almost overwhelmed by the parasite that had wrapped around and choked them.  Looking out at those trees I now see broad swaths of dead leaves up in the canopy where these vines have been cut off at the roots.

Camera Girl mocked me for all this effort for little tangible result.  But self-satisfaction is its own reward.  Vines, especially poison ivy aggravate me.  In August I have a plan to wreak havoc on a patch that’s growing by the road.  I’m going to soak them down with vinegar and cover them with plastic or paper to let them stew in that low pH brew.  I don’t want to use herbicides because of ground water contamination.  But acetic acid passes muster as an organic substitute.  In my book the highest good that bio-engineering could be put to would be building a virus that would drive poison ivy to extinction.  The man who did that would rise to the level of a saint in my opinion as having removed one of the great scourges in this world.

Well anyway, time to get back to peak summer.  At play in the fields of the Lord.

Juneteenth Failure

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Today Camera Girl entrusted me with a job she calculated I was capable of performing; renewing the licenses for the dogs.  And yet I failed.  Turns out the town hall is closed on account of Juneteenth.  Well.  Juneteenth can really sneak up on you.  All my preparation, anticipation and concentration undone.  Ah well.  There’s always next year.

Another beautiful day.  Blazing hot sun and hardly a breath of breeze.  Well, we wait all winter for this so why complain about what we said we wanted?  So, soak in the heat and feel the energy.  But all this heat has already got my gardens way ahead of last year’s awful summer of rain marathon.  Based on what I can see I’ll have raspberries this week and blueberries next week.  And that’s just in time for Princess Sack of Potatoes beginning of summer visit.  She’ll be here tomorrow and Friday and she loves raspberries.

The early summer flowers are all over the place.  Black-eyed Susans, cone flowers, Shasta daisies, daylilies, clematis, digitalis, roses and Serbian bellflower are blooming all over the place.

 

The hellebores, rhododendrons, peonies and irises are already finished and the lupines are down to their last gasp.  Last year everything was late and stunted.  And the Elecampane I put in two years ago is already about six feet tall even before it’s flowered.

Of course, all this fertility hasn’t gone unnoticed by my neighbors.  The rabbits and the deer have been enjoying the raspberry and blueberry bushes and also nibbling down some of the outlying hostas and Solomon seal plants but as Camera Girl reminds me everybody’s gotta eat.  Yeah, but why here?

But not everything is sweetness and light.  Massive repair work is in my future.  Contractor negotiation and management is upon me.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the money pit is well named.

I haven’t noticed too much about the election in November that’s worth discussing this week.  Biden is falling apart and various groups of people are beginning to notice and the Democrat upper echelons seem to be circling like sharks waiting to put him out of his misery.  But there’s not that much for us to say until they pull the plug or the ripcord or whatever the correct metaphor is for this termination.

But whoever and however the Democrats run their race it is the ballot harvesting and drop box stuffing that will probably determine the winner in Pennsylvania.  My hope though is that there will be enough video and other documentation of the fraud to convince the great majority of Americans of the truth about our “election integrity.”  If that is accomplished then a real threshold will have been crossed.  Hopefully enough people will stop trying to force reality to correspond with their idealistic conception of how our leaders are “elected” and move onto concentrating their energies on protecting themselves and their families from the regime and its destructive practices.

A friend in town has donated a large collection of books on Shakespear to me.  So of course I’m a kid in the candy store.  One of the best types of books in the collection are paperback copes of individual plays.  This tends to be much handier than my large heavy “complete works” volumes which are large and heavy and tend to have small print!  I especially want the tragedies and some of the better comedies in that form.  Let’s start with Hamlet, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing.  That should keep me busy for a while.

07JUN2022 – At Play in the Fields of the Lord

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner

Today was a day to get some stuff done out in the yard.  I had to do some measurements to figure out some volume and pH control problems for the pool.  Where’s that slide-rule?  Then I had some ultra-glamorous weeding to do, followed by fertilizer application.  I had to replace some components on the hoses I use for watering the gardens and I had to disassemble the lawn mower to find out why it was smoking.  Stupid mice.

But while I was doing that stuff, I checked on the elecampane (Inula) I planted in the spring.  It’s finally starting to actually grow.  About time!  I checked out the barn swallow nest and followed the parents darting back and forth and spotting from a tree for insects and keeping an eye on the nest.  Probably still on the lookout for that stupid blue bird pair from last month.

I went and looked at the sequoias and metasequoias and marveled at the growth they’ve put on since I planted them.  I spotted the first garter snake in two years.  After they were mysteriously absent the whole of last year one popped its head out of the day lilies and shot back in after seeing me.  I’m glad they’ve returned.  Otherwise, the frogs and toads might get too uppity.  I noted that the wolfsbane was doing better in one location than the other.  Maybe I should move it.

I turned over a muck bucket full of weeds near Camera Girl’s mulch pile and a couple of field mice or voles skittered away.  There are a lot of mice around this year.  That has me thinking of a new project.  I’m thinking of buying some black rat snakes and breed a few clutches of eggs a year and release the hatchlings around the yard, especially in the rock wall.  I think they’d improve the rodent ratio around here.  A big black rat snake can get over seven feet long and not only could eat plenty of mice but chipmunks and squirrels would be on the menu too.  Raising the rat snakes would take up time for cleaning and feeding the buggers but if I could establish a population, it would be well worth the effort.

When I finished outside, I read through the news articles.  Same old, same old.  When Camera Girl got back from the supermarket, she said it’s not so super anymore.  In fact it was depressing.  The half empty shelves were stocked with food almost too expensive to buy.  I commiserated with her and told her that hopefully this situation will get the Democrats fired sooner than later.  She said some very uncharitable things about Dementia Joe and I chuckled.

So today is a day for getting stuff done outside.  Not very good for writing on the blog.  Later on I have to find the next author for the Quotation of the Day.  I think Mr. Hobbes has had enough days for his say.  Who will be the next H?  Tomorrow I’ll write something mordant and wise about our political situation.  Today I’ll enjoy a June day with sunshine and warm weather.  I could do worse.