Rain

I'm sounding like a broken record, I know, because I'm again complaining about all the rain the Northeast has been getting.

My new experimental garden is almost a total loss. See the standing water?

In my other garden, these squash seedlings, planted June 1, are struggling to survive.

The peonies are so darned discouraged that they're bent over in despair.

What I need, if anyone should happen to have some handy, are plans for an ark. Please include cubits-to-inches conversion chart.

Folks Right at Home

I was just reading Amanda Soule's latest post, and that prompted me to check out Nest Maine. It sounds like a great project for knitters who'd like to help "folks right at home," as Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird: "Jem, how can you hate Hitler so bad an' then turn around and be ugly about folks right at home—" (I taught that novel every single year, to sometimes 3-4 classes at a time, for at least twenty years and never once got tired of it. So many passages are so beautifully written and powerful that I always insisted I had to read them aloud to the students, whether they wanted to hear them or not.) The ending, in which Scout stands on the Radley front porch and views the world from Boo's perspective,  just about reduced me to  heart-wrenching sobs every cussed time. What a novel.)

I digress. Back to Nest Maine. It's a project providing handknit items to people in Maine, and we Mainers know our beautiful state can have some cold, cold winter days and nights. If you knit, check out the site and warm up your needles. Note, however, that the knitted items need to be made from natural fibers, not synthetics, so that would include wool, soy, cotton. No doubt wool is best, and an excellent, reasonably priced wool yarn is made by Paton. 

Just sayin'.

Stuff

Here are some items I've been meaning to put into a blog for the past two weeks. 

First, the little pullover sweater and hat I knit for someone, I'm not sure whom. I had yarn left over from my February Lady sweater, so I figured a child's sweater would be just the ticket. Then yarn left over from that became a child's hat. I still have more of this yarn left over but have just about run out of knitting ideas.

Next, I wore my February Lady sweater to my niece Cheryl's daughter's high school graduation. I also took along a gift for Cheryl: a February Lady sweater of her own. (I figured Cheryl, who'd now successfully survived the graduation of three children, deserved a gift of her own.) You can imagine how pleased I was that not only did Cheryl love her sweater (and it fit perfectly), but she put it on then and there and wore it to graduation.

My photos didn't upload in the order I'd intended, so I'll now skip to a little fussing about the rain we've been getting in Maine (note the rhyme, but the rain hasn't been falling mainly on the plain; it's been falling everywhere). As you can see from my rain gauge, we've gotten 4 1/2" of the stuff in the past couple of weeks. No, we don't get blue rain in Maine. I put some food coloring in the gauge so the rain would show up better. I actually was hoping the color would be purple, for Purple Rain, but it turned out blue.

Clematis! I do enjoy my clematis vines and have no less than seven, maybe eight or nine. One of the two in my little front garden patch is now blooming like mad. This photo isn't of the large batch of flowers in the front of the fence, though; it's of the cute little rascals that are choosing to bloom in the back of the fence.

Now back to Ashton's graduation. Ashton was born on her mother's sister's wedding day. (Translation: Ashton was born on Cheryl's sister 
Margaret's wedding day.) Needless to say, neither Cheryl nor her baby made it to Margaret's wedding.

Here's the kicker: Ashon graduated on Margaret's younger daughter, Elizabeth's birthday. Neat, huh?

Grand Canyon Photo Op

Last night I had some sort of weird 

dream about trying to take pictures with my old camera, but it ran out of film as I was snapping away, or the film broke inside the camera, or something. I woke in a semi-cold sweat in the middle of the night and calmed down when I remembered I now use a digital camera, so film isn't an issue.

That got me to thinking about a trip Ken and I took to the Grand Canyon about 15 years ago. We were staying in Flagstaff, AZ, so my Kentucky cousin and her husband, who were vacationing in California at the time, drove over to Flagstaff for a couple of days to rendezvous with us. We had dinner together one evening. We took some pictures of ourselves before heading to the restaurant, and this reminded my cousin of a funny story about her dad, my Uncle Barry. Uncle Barry was a Southern minister, very serious and proper:

Uncle Barry was on a little trip with his wife. At a rest stop he sat on a bench waiting for my Aunt Edna to show up so they could continue on their way. Meanwhile, a little boy came along and began snapping pictures of Uncle Barry. My uncle dutifully smiled for each picture and wondered why the boy wanted so many pictures, snapped at various angles, of him, a complete stranger.

Finally, after several poses and shots, Uncle Barry said, "Do you think your mother wants you to waste your film on pictures of me?"

"It's OK," the boy assured him. "There's no film in the camera."

My cousin, her husband, Ken and I thought that story was quite amusing.

The next morning Ken and I got up extremely early in order to be at the Grand Canyon for sunrise. I especially hoped to catch several dramatic shots of the sun rising over the rim of the canyon.

I took picture after picture. The sun rose fully, and I kept on snapping pictures with such wonderful shadows playing on the canyon walls.

At one point I remarked to Ken, "Boy, I'm getting a lot of pictures from this roll of film. I'm on picture #40, and I thought it was only a 36-exposure roll." 

I kept on snapping.

Once I got to picture #45 or so, a light finally went on in my head: My camera had no film in it. We went to a store at the Canyon, where a fellow at the photo counter took my camera into a dark room, opened it, and confirmed my worst fears.

We'd gotten up at 4:00 a.m., driven many miles, watched the sunrise over the Grand Canyon, and I'd madly snapped "photo" after "photo," or so I thought.

I don't recall laughing at the time, but I did think it was humorous that I'd worked with a film-less camera the very next morning after hearing the story of my Uncle Barry's photo shoot.

Grand Canyon photos from http://www.nps.gov/archive/grca/photos/

My Sordid Past

My first t.v. love was Gardner McKay. He starred in the television series Adventures in Paradise, which I watched faithfully as he, in the character of Captain Adam Troy, sailed the South Pacific in his schooner, the Tiki. I was all of 14 to 17 at the time and I, quite frankly, lusted after Gardner McKay. He was handsome and adventuresome. I could picture myself sailing the South Pacific, with Gardner at my side.

Last week I picked up the June 7-13 issue of American Profile, which arrives tucked inside our daily newspaper once a week, and there, in the "Ask AP" section, was a photo of my Gardner. I swooned for old time's sake. Unfortunately his photo isn't included in the on-line version of "Ask AP," but no matter. I can still picture him on his sailing sloop, dressed in shorts and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and my heart skips a beat. (If you check this site, though, you'll see why I was so in love.)

According to the Ask AP  snippet, McKay left Holywood after his t.v. series ended and traveled the world. He died in 2001 at age 69.

My real-life first "love" was Jimmy Pickett. We fell in love in third grade. I don't recall that we had an actual conversation about our developing love for one another, but I told someone who told someone, and apparently he told someone who told someone. The rumor mill worked overtime, and before long word got back to me that Jimmy as going to ask me to go steady. 

The time for Jimmy to give me his ring was set, and I was at the appointed place at the appointed time: the front porch of the Mark Emery School immediately after school one day. 

A crowd gathered around us. Jimmy and I stood there looking at one another. Suddenly Jimmy threw the ring at me. It landed at my feet. I bent down and picked it up, making it official: We were now going steady.

I don't think we ever talked with one another as we "dated," and I certainly know we never went out on a date.

I still have the ring. It has a big, gaudy green stone, and it came from a bubble-gum machine.

Jimmy died in a car accident four summers after we graduated from high school. He was a good person whose life ended way too soon. 

A Little Fun, a Little Terror

Sometime this past winter I wondered if it's possible to make one's own hot dog and hamburger rolls. It seemed logical that it could be done, but I'd never heard any of my bread-baking friends say they'd done it. I kept telling myself to check allrecipes.com to see if I could find a recipe for them, but I never seemed to get around to it.

My procrastination paid off when my Idaho niece wrote a post in her blog about making hot dog and hamburger rolls and recommended highly the recipe she'd used.

I made them one day last week, and mercy, they're good. Easy, too, thanks to my trusty bread machine. To add a little more nutrition to the recipe, I threw in a cup of Lola's Fixins (a mixture of sunflower seeds, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, caraway seeds [which I leave out. Don't like the flavor.], rye flour, whole wheat flour, wheat germ, old fashioned oatmeal, potato flakes, and corn meal) in place of one of the cups of white flour, and that worked well.

We're at last getting a great spell of warm, sunny weather, so my two vegetable gardens are finally in. There's my usual garden, which I've been planting here every summer for ten years, and the new, little experimental garden, which Ken prepared for me this spring. We want to see if we get better results from the new location, which is sunnier. I always plant tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, green peppers, spinach, beets, and various squashes, but I've never felt that the "usual garden" yields as well as it could. I used to grow mountains of green peppers at our former house, for instance, but now I'm lucky to get 2-3 peppers per plant. The tomatoes do fairly well here, but I can dozens of pints each fall and would like to can even more. We'll see if the experimental garden does well.

When I planted the tomato plants this year, I tried a little trick: I put some banana peel in the bottom of each hole before setting the plant in it. I've read that banana peels are great for tomato plants. I know they're good for roses and have been amazed at how one puny little rose bush has done so well in one of my flower gardens. I give full credit to the banana peel buried with the roots.

My final fun item for this post is a great pasta recipe which appeared in a recent issue of Parade: Plum Tomatoes and Artichokes with Penne. Um-ummm. So good. It's quick and easy, too.  
And finally, here's a little terror for you, if you're as startled by snakes as I am.

I was puttering in the front yard on Sunday, watering the tomato and green pepper seedlings mentioned above, and turned to walk into the garage. Lo and behold, this fella lay at the base of the kitchen steps. It set me back a few years, let me tell you. I'll never outgrow my fear of snakes, not even harmless ones like this one. I can't even handle looking at photos of snakes.

Ken coaxed the snake into a trash can, then carried the can down our woods road and set it free (the snake, not the trash can). I hope it likes its new digs and won't be back here any time soon.

Lost in a Good Book

Ken received a copy of J. Maarten Troost's Lost on Planet China for his birthday in January. Our nephew and niece, Kevin and Rachel, chose this book for him because Ken spent two years, off and on, in Chengdu, China when he did contract work for his former employer there in '05-'06. Kevin and Rachel knew Ken would most likely find Troost's story interesting.

They were right. And so have I.

I took three trips to China while Ken was there, staying at his apartment in Chengdu. I was there a total of three months, so I got to see China fairly well but not as well as Ken, who actually worked there.

Anyway, Ken and I loved reading Troost's account of his travels in China: Beijing, Hong Kong, Tibet, and several other areas. Ken and I saw much of Beijing, Xian, and Hong Kong, in addition to Chengdu.

What made both of us mostly chuckle (but sometimes sigh in despair) while reading Lost on Planet China were many of Troost's details: young children in split pants (The first time I saw a child in split pants, I thought he had accidentally torn them and wondered if I should try to tell his father), the habit of the Chinese to spit on the streets, the amazingly unsanitary public restrooms, the smog (oh, my word, the smog), the menus with no hint of what one might be ordering, the hair-raising experience of riding in taxis  (Troost observed seven lanes of traffic on a four-lane highway as he rode from the Beijing airport into the city. That sounds about right. And stop signs? A "mere suggestion," as someone once said.), endless tearing down of buildings and construction of new skyscrapers, the appalling living conditions of workers who come from the countryside to work in the cities.

Despite many of the unappealing aspects of China, Ken and I also remember the kindness of the people, their willingness to help us, the absolute refusal of waitresses and taxi drivers to take tips, the pride of parents when we asked to take a photo of their children, the brides and grooms in a Chengdu park one Saturday morning, hot pot, Carrefour, the Great Wall with its uneven steps (and the elderly gentleman who hurried past us, climbed to the top, turned around, and came down to meet us, all while smoking a cigarette. Ken and I struggled on.), the "authentic" items sold in souvenir shops (one of our guides mentioned that the antiques there might have been made hundreds of years ago...or yesterday), our housekeeper who was paid 400 yuan a month ($50) for about 48 hours' work, our many visits to Luodai, an ancient  village outside of Chengdu, and of course the pandas at the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Center.

I've wondered if Qingcheng Mountain even is recognizable any more. That's where the devastating earthquake occurred a year ago. Ken and I hiked this mountain twice. 

P.S. I just checked a website for Qingcheng, where a visitor mentions the mountain has partially reopened for hikers.

(P.S.S. It's been raining in Maine almost all week, I've been cooped up inside, and I'm feeling nostalgic, apparently.)