Sunday, August 31, 2014

Our friends and neighbors, The Robinsons, have an empty nest. Daughter Jonecca has gone off to college.

“Her room is so cute this year!” Steph told me. “It’s done up in a beach theme. Would you make her some sun catchers for her windows?”

“Absolutely!” I told her. Then I was on line looking for beach themed sun catchers. When I had a collection of a dozen or so, I called Steph to have her come and pick out the ones she wanted me to make.

“I’ll come after work today,” she told me.

Mike and I were on our patio when Steph pulled in. After greetings all around, she followed me into the living area of the mill that Mike has affectionately dubbed, The Sh** Hole. Maybe not so affectionately.

I sat down at the table in front of my computer, opened the lid and woke my computer up as Steph was chatting. She pulled a chair away from the table and as she sat down, I said, “You are not going to like my new desktop photo.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s kind of gross and I don’t like it,” I answered.

I know, I know! I hear you. “If you don’t like it, what’s it doing up as a desktop photo?”

Well, I actually like the photo, it’s the content.

“What is that?” Steph asked when she saw it and frankly, she didn’t seem all that grossed out.

“I think it’s a deer skull.”

“That doesn’t look like a deer skull.” Steph kind of squinted her eyes and cocked her head sideways. “Where was it?” she asked.

And I’ll tell you what I told her. “Someone set the skull up on the bridge abutment that crosses our little creek and you can’t really see it from the road.” Then I went into my photos file and we looked at a couple of other views of it and we decided that it is a deer skull, it’s just the angle of my photo that makes it look so weird.

Steph picked out some sun catchers, then we went out to my glass shop and picked out the glass and I guess I have a project waiting for me when I have a few minutes.

Now speaking of gross, guess what I found on the floor of the cat room this morning?

Rabbit! Squirrel! Frog!

Wait, wait. Don’t guess. Although once I did find a frog with his back legs chewed off-and he was still alive! But that was when we had kittens and mama was bringing her babies food. And yeah, I know that was pretty gross too.

I was taking scraps out to the wild cats and as I glanced through the glass of the door I see something laying right smack in the middle of the floor.

“What is that?” I wonder. I opened the door and gingerly step in. It was gray and slick and an image of a baby otter sprung to my mind, but I didn’t believe it was that for a second. Okay, maybe just one second. A few steps later I realize it was a newborn kitten still in it’s birth sac. The mama just dropped it and went on.

“Maybe there was something wrong with it,” Steph said when I called and told her what I found. Bless her heart, she always tries to make me feel better.

I got a shovel and a rake, picked up the dead kitten, took it out to the weeds and unceremoniously tossed it.

“Chances are, it was born dead and the mama cat knew it. She wouldn’t even fool with it then,” Momma said when I told her.

“Peg, I could have lived the rest of my life and been perfectly happy to have not heard that story!” you say.

Yeah? Well guess what? When stuff bothers me, you get to hear about it!

“Why does it bother you?” you wonder.

Well it bothers me because there was no nest. The kitten was birthed and left right in the middle of the floor. A cat will normally find a hideaway and make a nest to have her kittens in.

“Some people just aren’t meant to be mothers,” son Kevin said to me on the phone yesterday. Granted, we were talking about something else at the time, but I think the same thing can be true in the animal world too.

This has been quite a week! Let me tell you what happened!

We needed to have some work done on the braking system on the RV. Mike found a Camping World in Bath, New York that could do the work and he set an appointment for the following week.

In the meantime, Mike decides it would be better and safer to install a 30 amp plug where we park the RV when we stay here rather than run an extension cord. I can’t tell you how many places we went into looking for the right plug! We went to electric supply houses, hardware stores, farm stores and guess where we finally found it? A car lot that sells RV’s! I know, right! Imagine that! In our defense though, we didn’t realize they sold RV parts. We thought they just sold cars and RV’s.

So we finally had everything we needed to do this job. We laid out and straightened out some really heavy gauge wire, I climbed up into the dusty, dirty parts of the mill and helped run it. Then my job was to fetch and hold tools while Mike made the connections on both ends.

“There!” Mike says when it was done. “Let’s plug it in.”

As soon as the connection was made, things started popping and crackling inside the RV! I ran to the door and when I opened it and looked in, I see smoke pouring from the vents under the refrigerator. “It’s on fire! Unplug it!” I yelled.

Mike had pulled the plug just as soon as he realized something was wrong, aka we heard the popping and crackling. When we were confident there was not a fire, we sat down and scratched our heads. “What went wrong?”

It turns out that someone had a dumass attack. Mike wired up a 30 amp 220 volt plug. Our RV is 30 amp 110 volt! He was so mad at himself! We checked as many things in the RV as we could. Microwave, TV, lights, fridge... Oops! More popping, crackling and smoke when Mike turned on the breaker for the fridge. He turned it off and we switched it over to gas and it works fine that way.

You can see, in the lower left portion of my photo, that black, resister looking thing has a swollen and split top and the backside is burned black.

“It could have been worse,” I tried to console Mike. “We could have fried every electrical system in the RV.”

Our appointment at Camping World was for early Wednesday morning. “Peg, with the fog in the mornings, why don’t we drive up the day before?” Mike suggested. And of course, that was fine by me.

We fried the coach on Monday, so at least we didn’t have long to wait until we found out the full extent of our snafu. Monday night, as we lay in bed (we sleep in the RV) things started beeping.

“What is that?” I asked Mike

“Batteries are dead,” he replied. Then we guessed we may have damaged the charger as well.

Tuesday we packed up a few things and closed up the mill for our two day trip. “Let’s just turn all the power off,” Mike said.

“Good idea,” I agreed. “We won’t have to worry about fire that way.” The scare of the coach “catching fire” was still fresh in my mind.

Mike is driving the RV, I’m following behind in the Jeep. We don’t want to tow it until our issues with the breaking system are resolved. We get about ten minutes from our destination when it hits me.

We left a fridge full of recently purchased supplies and we turned off the power! Talk about dumass attacks!

“Are we going to have to throw everything away when we get home?” I asked Mike.

“I don’t know,” he said.

So what did I do? I did what I always do when I have a problem. I called my mother. “Momma, am I going to have to throw everything away when we get home?”

“No. I don’t think so. With no one there to open the doors, it will stay cold for a long time,” she told me.

And just so you know, she was right. We were gone from 11:00 Tuesday morning until 6:00 Wednesday night and stuff in the freezer was still frozen and stuff in the fridge was still nice and cold.

We arrived in Bath, New York two hours after we left home. Mike pulled over in front of some rinky-dink garage and said, “We’re here.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. If this was the place then there was no way they could handle an RV. There was a Walgreen’s parking lot right across the road. We pulled in there intending to walk over to the garage but before we would just leave the RV in anyone’s lot, Mike first went in to ask permission.

“Guess what?” he said when he came back out.

“What?”

“Our GPS let us down. Camping World is on the highway on the other edge of town.”

So we loaded up and headed out. Sure enough, on the edge of town, is a huge Camping World. We parked and went in. “Our appointment is in the morning,” Mike told Carrie, the gal in service. “When can we check in?”

“We open at 8 but make calls for the first hour. You can check in at 9,” Carrie told us.

“You’re not going to believe what I did,” Mike told Carrie.

“What?” she asked with care and concern in her voice.

“I had a dumass attack,” he said rolling his eyes. He started telling Carrie about the mix-up with the 110 and 220 and as soon as he started talking, a slow smile spread across her face.

“It happens all the time,” she assured him and agreed that they could check it out tomorrow as well as the braking system.

That left us with the rest of the afternoon to kill.

Bath, New York is an old town. It was founded in 1793 and you should see some of the houses! Wow!

We found a nice little family restaurant in the historic part of town and had a bite of supper, then it was back to the RV for the night.

The next morning we check in and since they need both the Jeep and the RV, we were pretty much stuck in the lounge. Fine by me, I have a Nook. All morning long we watch RV’s come on to the lot. Camping World had had a show in another town and they were bringing the RV’s back.

“Let’s go look at RV’s,” Mike suggested.

We wandered around, looking at RV’s and trailers, and campers and basically just killing time. Pretty soon we go back to the lounge and Carrie from service came to find us. “We checked all of your systems and everything seems to be okay. The only thing we found is that you need a new inverter,” she told us. We really were lucky.

Then, just before we were getting ready to leave, in came a class A Hurricane made by a company called Thor. “Let’s look at it,” Mike said. It was a pretty nice RV, it had LED lights inside and out and glass front kitchen cabinets, a king size bed, a good size bathroom and I was sure we would never be able to afford it. Then we saw the show price and I couldn’t believe it. It was a lot less than we paid for our class C Outlook six years ago! One thing led to another and before long Mike had made a deal on the Hurricane.

So, guys, it looks like we will be going back to Bath, New York next week and trading our Outlook in. In a way I’m excited about it, who doesn’t like nice new things? But I have to tell you, I have always really liked our Winnebago.

 
Hey! Check out this porch swing that I found in our little town of Wyalusing. Pretty classy, don’t you think?

Let’s call this one done.

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike

Sunday, August 24, 2014

My current desktop is a spider web in the early morning dew. Now, if you are thinking you already saw this photo posted on my Facebook page, you would be wrong. I posted other photos of webs I took on the same day but deliberately left this image out intending to show it to you today.

I have a confession to make. When I take a lot of photos, I may change my desktop several times in a week.

Having said that, this crazy kitty napping on the cross bars of a screen door was also up on my desktop for a while this past week.

 

And finally, Martha and George were up there for a while too!

Mike and I had stopped in the little town of Meshoppen, at an old grain mill that has been converted into an antique mall. We walked in and started looking around and realized it was mostly all furniture.

“Hi folks!” a man came from a different part of the mill and greeted us.

“Hi,” we politely responded.

“Anything special I can help you find?” he asked.

“No, mostly we were just looking for antiques,” Mike told him.

“Oh. Well the gas well workers pretty much cleaned us out of all of those,” the man said. “You might find a few things downstairs though.”

Over against a wall I see a railing, something I might not have seen otherwise. We had looked out over the expanse of the room, decided it was all furniture and lamps and we weren’t interested, and we were headed back out when this gentleman directed us to the almost hidden stairwell. Not wanting to seem ungrateful, we headed for the lower level of the mill.

Holy cow! Only in Pennsylvania, I’m tellin’ ya!

The stairwell was only about as wide as me and the steps, although sturdy, were well worn. I could almost feel the decades of work boots and the men wearing them pass me by as I descended.

There were lots of cool things down there, old tables, chairs, cupboards, beds and dressers, as well as countless sets of dishes and silverware. In a narrow side room, I stepped through the doorway behind Mike, glanced left and right and turned to leave when Mike says, “What’s that down there?”

“I don’t know,” I answered automatically, but followed him deeper into the room. There, propped against the wall, atop an old cabinet, sat Martha and George.

“Cool,” I said.

“Want them?” Mike asked.

I reached up and flipped the tag over to see the price. Five dollars! What’s five dollars? “I do,” I answered.

“Okay,” Mike said and reached for George.

And that, my dears, is how Martha and George came to live with us.

Aren’t they cool! I am just sure that on the Antiques Road Show they would call this Folk Art and declare its worth at $350!

“They’re probably worth five dollars,” Mike said. (LOL!) Not wanting my illusions shattered, I’m sure I’ll never take them to have them appraised. I just love them and they are hanging in my dust adorned, spider web festooned, breezeway. And I expect that there they will stay until I am dead and gone, then my children can fight over Martha and George.

You know something?

“What’s that?” you answer.

When writing, my stories often take me in a direction that I had not anticipated. They seem to develop a life of their own and I truly hope they come to life for you too. My Martha and George story is one such story. I had no idea I was going to tell you how we found them until I actually wrote it. Meanwhile, I have tons of notes on things that I was going to tell you about.

C’est la vie. It is life.

On the top of my list, and something you may have gleaned from the last story, is that Mike and I are at our mountain home. We are in Pennsylvania.

Diane, my cute little red haired sister, will be here in early September and I am looking forward to that, but before she gets here is the Wyoming County Fair. I’m telling’ you what! Those ladies (from one of the church organizations), make the best pierogies! Mmmmm mmmmm! That and peanut butter ice cream are the only reason I’m going! There is one stand-and I hope I can find it again-that sells the best and only peanut butter ice cream that I have ever liked! It is awesome!

Mike and I have been busy since we arrived at our mountain home. One of the first things we had to do was to stock the fridge and pantry. We are so spoiled traveling in an RV. Normally we bring supplies with us, but this time, because we traveled from Missouri in the Jeep, we had to buy everything! I bet you we went out every day this past week! And next week looks to be almost as busy. I am looking forward to some down time when I can get in my glass shop and simply create.



Our cat population has been greatly decimated by Mama Fox hunting for her young en’s. I’ve seen four adults and one half grown kitten, that’s it. Once again, c’est la vie.

It has been so dry here that our pond is reduced to one little puddle.

The spatterdock, a pond flower, is resting his head on the mud, as you can plainly see from my photo.

We lost some of our trees. A few years ago we planted apples, cherries, Bradford pears, weeping willows and a host of other trees. Almost all of them were gone after the first year.

The Bradford pears are doing well as evidenced by the photo of Mike standing by one of them. And when we were here earlier this year, we had three apple and two weeping willows still growing. This time we are down to one apple and one willow.

C’est la vie.

Let’s do September birthdays: Patricia Ann Bowers Dycus, 3^rd; Kourtney Dean Kraft, 4^th; Stephen Soden, 10^th; Father Jude Smith, O.F.M., 13^th; Mary Smith Sisock, 14^th; Dessirae April Herold, 16^th; Eulaia (Lally) Layne Bowers, 18^th; Sue Marinello Opal, 18^th; Jaiyden Bowers, 19^th; Kathleen Bohensky Soden, 20^th; Autumn Franklin, 24^th; Steve Davidson, 26^th; Justin Daniel Soden, 29^th.

Lots of love,
Peg and Mike

Sunday, August 17, 2014

My current desktop photo is a pretty lavender wildflower with yellow star centers. I only took the photo because I thought it might work as a desktop photo for me. The way the flowers are balanced would leave the left hand side clear and that is where all of my icons are lined up. Boy, what a delightful surprise to find that spider on the far right flower and I think I see a pair of antennas (antennae?) or legs or something sticking out of the folded over flower in the center of the bunch. Can you see them?

“How about telling us how you dealt with all those chigger bites in your next letter?” Momma asked me on the phone the other night.

I have to tell you, I was thrown for a loop when she asked me that. About the same time I asked, “What do you mean?” it dawned on me what she meant. “Oh,” I said. “I don’t do anything.”

“Don’t they itch?” she asked.

“Yes they itch and when they itch, I scratch them!” But I try not to scratch them too much because if I do, they itch even more. Luckily I don’t suffer too much. Maybe because I spend most of the spring and summer dotted with chigger bites and I have a slight tolerance to them. Does that make sense? However, I have been known to take an antihistamine for the itching. Especially when I worked and I had bites in places it wasn’t nice to scratch in polite company.

Now Ginger, poor baby, has been scratching all week!

After I finish writing my weekly letters, I usually read them to Mike. Last week I was reading to him when I heard a snore. That stinker fell asleep right in the middle of my story! Am I boring or what?

Mike must have missed the part where I told you what LED stood for because I had it wrong. But in my defense, I always say, “Laser emitting diode,” and Mike always corrects me.

Mike loves LED lights! I can’t tell you how many times we have conversations that go much like this-

“Look at those lights, Peg! They’re LED’s!” Mike says enthusiastically. “I want LED lights! They are so efficient! They don’t use hardly any energy and they last forever! Everything’s going to LED’s.” Then, after a pause and just to see if I’m paying attention, he asks, “What’s LED stand for?”

To which I reply, “Laser emitting diode.”

“Light emitting diode,” he corrects.

And that is the game we play. Isn’t it funny how you can say something so many times that it makes it true, even when it’s not?



I mentioned last time that I was wearing glasses. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I used to wear glasses. Probably for 25 years or more. A few years ago I noticed that I could see better without my glasses. My vision was improving and I stopped wearing them. I could even pass my drivers test without glasses. So corrective lenses fell off my drivers license.

At about the same time, something else was going on too. I was getting dizzy spells. It took me a while to figure out that I was seeing double. More out of one eye than the other. I suffered with that for a few weeks before I decided that maybe I had better check it out and find out what was going on.

“You have cataracts forming and it’s splitting your vision,” the eye doctor told me.

Eventually I adjust to seeing double so well that I hardly even notice it anymore, and the dizzy spells have passed.

Well, let me just say that getting old isn’t for sissies. All kinds of things happen to your body (and mind) and almost no one warns you about the things to come. Or maybe we think it won’t happen to us. Either way, vision is one of those things that almost never gets any better.

Having said all that, I used to have myopia, nearsightedness, and now I couldn’t see things close up. Geesh! So, for the last few years I used over the counter cheater glasses. But you know what? That gets to be a pain in the arse because you never have a pair when and where you need them! I decided to get glasses for full time again. Besides, it adds interest to my face.

“Can you read the first line?” the doctor at the Wal Mart Vision Center asked me. And I read the first line. Then he asked if I could read the next and the next. Then we got to a point where I was having some trouble.

“How about the next line?” he asked.

“It would be easier if there weren’t two of them,” I told him, but in the next second it dawned on me that there wasn’t supposed to be two. I had been living with it for so long that I just didn’t think about it anymore. “Are there supposed to be two?” I asked, but knew there wasn’t.

“No,” he answered and his whole demeanor changed.

“Oh, yeah. I have cataracts forming that split my vision,” I had to explain.

He wanted to know when and where I had it checked and I knew the doctors name, but had forgotten how long ago it had been. Regardless, this doctor looked deep into my eyes and from what he could see, he didn’t think I had any other issues going on.

“I see you have [such and such],” he said. Which, such and such is not a medical term, I just can’t remember what he called it.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It’s a congenital thing you were born with and it means you have specks or floaters in a certain part of your eye.” He named the part, but I don’t remember what he called it, and maybe you guys already know about that stuff. Me? It was the first time, in all of my 55 years, that I ever had anyone tell me that.

Isn’t this pump beautiful!

It seems that creativity and artistry run in my family!

Do I sound proud? Well, I am!

My oldest and much adored sister, Patti, made this pump. When she sent me the photo last week she called it her California Pump. I was going to show it to you last week, but I had so much trouble with the picture, I gave up, deciding to deal with it later. But I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

I skirted around the issues with the photo that I was having and managed to get it imported into this letter than I called Patti.

“Why do you call this a California Pump?” I asked her. She laughed at me.

“That’s not what I said. I called it my California Inspired Pump With A Cowboy Twist,” and she laughed again. I love to hear her laugh.

It seems her friends in California had a couple of fountains and she enjoyed them so much, she decided she needed to add a fountain feature to her beautifully landscaped yard, and this is what she came up with. I love it!

And the sandstone catch basin? Isn’t it just perfect!

“Lee found it somewhere,” Patti said of her husband. It was naturally formed by water over the years-centuries maybe?

“What issues did you have with her picture?” you ask.

Sigh.

I have been doing this letter and blog thing for a long time and I have never come across this issue before.

Patti sent me two photos in a zipped file. No problem. I know how to unzip and save it, and that’s what I did. I picked the one I wanted to use, then I reduced it’s size as I do with all my photos. Then I decide I had better ask her if I could share it with you. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t mind, none the less, I sent her a text asking for permission. I was so sure she would okay it that I went ahead and put it in my letter while I was waiting for her to answer. I thought she would answer before it was time for me to send it anyway, and if she said no, then I would just delete it. But that’s when my problems all started. I clicked on the ‘Insert Picture’ button on my program, found the file and the photo and clicked on ‘Insert’ and nothing happened. I waited, wondering what was going on. Normally it is only seconds for the photo to appear on my page. Did my computer freeze up, I wondered. It does that sometimes. I clicked on a different program and the computer opened it up. That tells me my computer wasn’t frozen, it was just working. I fooled around with things for a while, trying to figure out what was going on and after what seemed like an eternity, my letter writing program started to respond again, however, I still couldn’t see the photo. Where was it? I thought maybe it was on the last page and when I glanced down at my page number it said....

Are you ready for this?...

It said page 6 of 32,767!

I know, right!

There must be extra information attached to the photo, was the only explanation I could come up with. I hit the ‘undo’ button and after a few seconds I was back to six pages. Whew!

I went over to my pictures library and looked at Patti’s photo. 202 KB. No way should that add over 32,000 pages to my letter. And...

Oh yeah!

Lots of times I copy and paste from the internet and I sometimes get the message that the volume exceeds what I can paste into my document. Why didn’t I get that message this time? I don’t get it!

Okay, what next? Try it again? You know it! I always try things more than once, or look in the same place for something more than once, because there are times when it works the second or third time you try it, or I will find what I was looking for the second or third time I look in the same place.

“Did it work the next time?” I hear you ask.

No. It didn’t. The same thing happened. 32,767 pages. But at least this time I knew what was going on. I hit ‘undo’ again.

Now what? With chin on hand, elbow on desk, and another sigh, I sat and thought about it.

Maybe there is something wrong with my letter format. And the only reason I suspect this is because I keep a saved, formatted, blank document that I use every week. I start my letter and click the ‘save as’ button. That keeps my blank document blank and dates my current letter.

I opened a new blank page and clicked on the ‘Insert Picture’ button, found the file and the photo and clicked ‘insert’. Bam! There it was, working just the way it is supposed to work! And just one page! Now I know it works. I closed it, without saving, and guess what I did next.

Yep. I tried, for the third time, to insert it in my letter.

Stop laughing, would ya?

I knew at once that I was going to get the same thing I got the other two times, namely, 32,767 pages.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on and frankly, I was tired of fooling with it. Then the tone on my phone alerted me to a new text message. It was Patti. Yes, I can share it, but wait. She has a better photo for me to share.

“Great. Send it to me, but it will be next week before I use it,” I texted back to her.

That was that, and I didn’t have to think about it for a week.

Today, when I sat down, the first thing I did was format the new photo Patti sent me, you know, reduce the size. Wrote my letter, got to the part where I wanted to put the pump photo and guess what?

“It worked?” you guess.

I was hoping with the new photo that it would work too, but it didn’t. Once again I ended up with 32,767 pages. And that puzzles me. I was on page six last time and ended up with 32,767 pages and I was on page three this time and ended up with 32,767 pages. Same number of pages.

I opened a new blank document, copied my text and pasted it into the new document, inserted the pump photo, and ended up with 32,767 pages.

I started again. This time I inserted the photo first, then I copied and pasted my text from the other letter and that is how I skirted the issue.

Isn’t that the screwiest story you ever heard? Does anyone, have any idea what is going on?

I have just a little bit of room left. Tell me what you think of this photo that was posted on Facebook.

Lots of love,

Peg and Mike

Sunday, August 10, 2014

My current desktop photo is of my two best guys, Mike and Andrew.

I took this photo the day we got to keep Andrew for a few hours and in the photo Pop-pop is getting Andrew to wave at Grammy, who is sitting in the golf cart, waiting for them to come back from riding the kiddy rides.

Can you believe it?

“Believe what?” you ask.

Can you believe this big old gruff man is putty in the hands of this little boy? I know right! Me neither! But Pop-pop and Andrew adore each other.

This past Friday night was Hot Summer Nights here on the Strip in Lake Ozark. There were lots of people and lots of cars on the Strip that night.

“Where’s the pics?” you ask.

Well, I didn’t take any pictures of the Strip.

“What’s up with that?” you wonder.

I’ve taken lots of photos just like it over the years and seldom find a use for them. But had I known I was going to tell you about it, I’d have taken one!

The Lion’s Club sets up in our parking lot and sell the best hamburgers and brats on the Strip. And since Andrews’ parents are both members, I got to keep Andrew for a while.

He is so stinkin’ cute, I’m tellin’ ya! And smart too!

Andrew knows where Pop-pop and Grammy live. Once he had a heart painted on his arm and a Spiderman balloon from Sparky The Clown, he pointed upstairs. He wanted to go upstairs! So Pop-pop and I took him upstairs. Once there, Andrew made the rounds between all his favorite haunts at Grammy’s house, one of them being my bed where he knows I keep my Nook. That little stinker can work my Nook better than I can!

“You have your shoes on Grammy’s bed,” I said to Andrew. He looked down and saw that he did indeed have his shoes on. He laid the Nook aside and reached down for the Velcro strap of his sandal and he peeled it open and he took it off. Getting to his other shoe was a little bit more of a challenge as he had his leg folded under him. I didn’t help him though, I let him struggle until he got his foot out in front, then he took that sandal off too.

“Good job, Andrew,” I told him, took his sandals and put them by the door.

One of the things that Andrew loves is loud... Things. I don’t care if it’s a helicopter flying overhead, a truck, car, or motorcycle with loud pipes, revving motors, squealing tires, or fireworks exploding in the night sky. If he hears a loud, unexpected noise his eyes get big and he gasps in surprise and points. Well this night there were lots of loud noises from outside so after a while we decided to go back down to the party happening on the Strip.

“Put your shoes on,” I said to Andrew and I helped him get his shoes on. He is either much better at taking them off or I’m not as patient with the putting on process. Then I got busy with something else and I was in the kitchen when Andrew comes in carrying my shoes!

“Thank you Andrew!” I said taking them from him. What a kind and generous young man he is!

“He got mine for me too,” Mike told me when I told him about it. I hadn’t known that.

“He’s a pip,” to quote my favorite Jersey boy, Mr. Zee.

Oh my gosh! You won’t believe what happened to me this past week!

I haven’t been taking many photos lately, mostly because it’s been too hot to go walking with the dogs. The weather has started to cool off some and I knew the passion flowers were in bloom and I really wanted to shoot them.

I harnessed up the girls and walked down the access road behind our buildings where I knew there were passion flowers. I didn’t think the road was too overgrown with weeds so Ginger and I picked our way along as Itsy rode on my arm. I found and took a few shots of these beautiful flowers and thought “I’d better get out of here.” I turned to go and oh! There was a swallowtail on the ironweed! Ironweed by itself isn’t a very pretty flower, but put some bugs on it and I’m all in! As I stood there snapping photos I realized there were at least four different

swallowtails. I thought it would be cool to get as many swallowtails in a photo as possible, but the most I managed to get in any one shot was three and it didn’t come out very well.

Trying to get that shot caused me to stay and move around in the weeds even longer! I knew I was risking chiggers and ticks. Every time I felt a tickle on my bare legs, I’d glance down expecting a tick but it was usually the brush of a weed that I had felt. The lure of a good photograph trumps the fear of a few bug bites, don’t ya know?

After I had tempted fate long enough, aka the butterflies flew away, I headed back out to the blacktop. Along the way I see this pretty little flower growing beside the weed overgrown track, but it didn’t take me very long to click off a few shots and I quickly moved on.

I hadn’t gone very much further when I felt a tickle behind my left knee. I glanced down I what do I see?

“A tick?” you guess.

Nope. Only about a million specs and they were moving too!

“What are those?” I wondered. “Baby spiders?” Then I saw they were scampering every which way and spreading out and I thought, “The heck with what they are....get them off me!” I brushed at them and they were still there. Nope, not spiders! If it had been a nest of newly hatched baby spiders that I had gotten against, a brush of my hand would have knocked them off. Chiggers? Ticks? I don’t know that much about chiggers, but I know that ticks are kind of sticky. You know what I mean? You can’t just brush them off, you have to pick them off.

“Peg, you can’t see chiggers,” I hear you say.

You know what? You can. Now the old me couldn’t have, but the new improved me-with the help of my laser-vision glasses, could. Especially when there are a million of them in one spot.

“Laser-vision glasses?”

Yep! I got glasses this past week, and now I can see little things! But that’s another story.

“So what did you do?”

Good question. I didn’t know what to do so I kept on doing the same old thing. I kept brushing at them. It wasn’t working any better the fourth or fifth time so I thought maybe I could roll them and kill them. I rubbed my hand up and down my leg as hard as I could...but it didn’t seem to affect them very much.

Sigh.

“Now what?”
I was wondering the same thing myself. Maybe a wet nap? I think I have a few in my doggie bag. I fumbled around in my doggie bag looking for a wet nap and found everything else but!

Geesh!

One of things I had pushed aside in my search was a bottle of lotion with sunscreen. Not finding any wet naps maybe the oil in the lotion would make them let go of me or in the very least suffocate them? But the last thing I wanted to do was stay in the weeds any longer than I had to, so it would have to wait until I got out to the blacktop. Doggone it! I’d just have to suffer the little critters crawling on me until then.

I hurry along then I hear the call of hawk. I glanced up and there he sat, just as pretty as you please, on the branch of an old dead tree. Of course I have to take his photo, even if the little devils on my leg are heading toward my panty and sock lines. You have to have your priorities straight, right? After I snapped a few photos through the foliage which I first spotted him through, I walk on and realized that even though he saw me, he wasn’t leaving. I had to stop and take a few more photos! Consequences be damned! I wanted at least one photo that wasn’t blurry. Then I moved on. I was hoping he’d stay a little longer but this is the closest I got before he flew away.

I got to the blacktop, put Itsy down, fished the lotion off the bottom of my bag and squirted it out onto the palm of my hand. Take that! I thought as I slathered it over the thirsty little blood suckers.

“How’d that work for you?” you wonder, to which I will answer, not very. They stuck to me tighter than super glue and it didn’t slow them down a bit!

“Cut them off!” you say. Well, now that you mention it, I do have a pair of scissors in my doggie bag for harvesting herbs. I dug them out, sat down on the blacktop, opened them up and raked the edge against my leg and...

I could have cried.

It didn’t do a thing! My old scissors were as dull as a butter knife. The little shits were going everywhere and I was out of ideas. I had just started my walk and I’d have to turn around and go home and get in the shower. I didn’t know what else to do! I stowed the scissors back in my bag, picked Itsy up and half drug Ginger as I high-tailed it for home. She wasn’t ready to go back yet!

Quick as I got in the door and got the girls out of their harnesses, I headed for the shower, kicking my shoes off and stripping along the way. I stopped only long enough to grab a plastic bag to put my clothes in, a trick that has worked for me in the past. After about a week you will see all kinds of dead ticks through the plastic after they came out of your clothes in search of food. I hoped it would work again.

Once in the shower I poured soap all over a scrubby and scrubbed just as hard as I could-everyplace! I scrubbed with a vengeance, I’m tellin’ ya! My skin was a pretty lobster-pink when I finally emerged from the shower.

I sure hope it was enough, I thought to myself.

Shoot!

I was hardly dressed when I felt a tickle on my left arm! I looked down and saw a spec moving. My new glasses are wonderful. I tipped my head back and with the aide of the strong bathroom light, I looked through my bifocals in an attempt to identify it. I couldn’t tell very much because the little bugger wouldn’t stay put long enough for me to focus on him. About all I knew for sure was that he was moving. Quickly I picked him off my arm, trapping him between my finger and thumb. Maybe with the magnifying glass I could see better. I went to Mike’s desk, turned on his high-powered LED (laser emitting diode) desk-lamp, picked up the magnifying glass and attempted to focus in on it. I’ll tell you what! This thing was tiny! I couldn’t really see anything other than it had legs. That and it didn’t like being pinched in my fingers. He came out the shoot running and I was afraid he was going to get away from me.

I surmise it was a tick since it survived the shower and the scrubbing. They’re nearly indestructible, you know. But one thing ticks can’t stand is fire and this one is waaay too tiny to get a flame on. The other thing they can’t stand is being crushed. As carefully and quickly as I could I maneuvered him between my two thumb nails and gave him a big ole hug.

Yeah, they don’t survive that.

I was fine that day and thought I was going to come through the event unscathed, but it was not to be. The next day I reached to scratch behind my left knee and there were bumps! Lots of itchy little bumps! Not only that, I had bumps popping up all over! My arms (worse on the left side of my body), back, belly and even my feet. They were chiggers after all.

Sigh!

I really hope you like the photos.

Let’s call this one done.

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike

Sunday, August 3, 2014

My pretty desktop photo is the front walkway of Miss Helen’s house.

Can you believe it?

“Believe what?” you ask.

Can you believe it’s August already? The kids will be starting back to school pretty soon and from there it’s only a hop, skip and jump to Christmas!

“Peg, you’re rushing it!”

It’ll be here before we know it.



I realized (after I had already sent it) that last weeks letter read kind of funny at one point.

“What part?” you wonder.

I was talking about taking Mr. Zee and Miss Helen shopping and I called Miss Helen “my other lady”. I wasn’t implying that Mr. Zee was a lady and Miss Helen was the other one, as it could have been read. I was thinking about Margaret and Miss Helen would be my other lady. But you couldn’t have known what I was thinking and I should have written it different.

But alas! None of you called me on it.

Something else that no one called me on was the set of eyes I used in my story last week about my brother Michael.

“Weren’t they Michael’s eyes?” you ask.

That’s what I wanted you to think. But what I wanted to have happen was for Momma to say, “Peggy, those aren’t Michael’s eyes.”

No, they’re not. I had a bet with one of my brothers that our mother could tell who the picture was-just by the eyes.

Lost that one, didn’t I?

I have some news for you.

“What’s that?” you ask.

Most of you know that we had a deal pending on our Missouri property. A couple of guys were going to give us a lot of money to run this place for us and eventually they would own it, but the deal fell through.

“What happened?” you wonder.

Well, it’s a little bit complicated, but hang in there with me and I’ll tell you what happened.

These two guys came to us a year ago, wanting to buy the place but couldn’t get their finances in order. Then a few months ago they came back to us again. They had the money and wanted to make the deal. We saw the first draft of the contract, sent it back to them with a few minor changes, got the second draft and sent that to our lawyer for review, but before we could sign papers, they wanted us to reduce the price. Now mind you, the price was never in question before this!

“What changed their minds?” you wonder.

And that’s where the complications set in.

On the corner of our block, two new bars are being built. Our property is shaped sort of like a pot with the long, thin handle extending behind these two properties. In order to build their business they have to cross our strip of land.

We just had our entire parking lot, along with that piece of land, resealed and re-striped. It was like new!

“You have to make my property back to what it was before you started,” Mike told them, and they agreed-in writing. They would repair all damage, reseal and repaint it to it’s pre-construction state.

Then they wanted to put the utility easement on us!

Well, since Mike and I were not planning on being here much longer, we thought we would let the new guys make that deal.

“But with an easement, you can never build on that piece of property!”

That’s true, but it is a long, narrow strip of land and needs to remain an egress and exit from our property. Therefore an easement wouldn’t matter that much to us. It isn’t big enough to build on and you can drive on an easement.

When our guys talked to those guys, one or both of them said that this property was offered to them last year for a lot less money. So our guys came back to us wanting us to reduce the price.

“It isn’t true,” Mike told them. “It was never offered to anyone at that price.”

They chose to walk.

Sigh!

Mike and I were looking forward to moving on with our lives and doing something else for a while but it wasn’t meant to be.

Even so, I am not totally unhappy with this turn of events. We get to spend more time with this little character right here.

“Is that Andrew?” you ask.

Yes, that’s our little grandson Andrew. We got to spend the day with him yesterday and we had a good time too, but that may well be another story!

There is not a doubt that sooner or later, someone will come along and want this piece of property, and it will be worth more then.

I had the girls out for a walk the other day when I spotted a family, sitting at a sidewalk establishment, with a beautiful Great Dane at the woman’s side.

Gosh! I love the Danes!

Luckily I saw the dog before Itsy and Ginger did. That is always a good thing because then I can corral my girls. I pick Itsy up and divert her gaze so she doesn’t see the dog and bark her fool head off, and I can shorten Ginger’s lead so she has to stay closer to me. It just makes my life a whole lot easier.

“Pretty dog,” I told the lady as she watched us walk past. Her Dane was very well behaved and just watched too.

“She’s a big baby,” the lady said. “She’d be afraid of your dogs.”

I didn’t say anything, I just kept going. She must have assumed I thought her Dane would eat my Yorkies but that was never the issue.

I did something I haven’t done in a few years.

“What’s that?” you ask.

I put a jig saw puzzle together!

“Are all the pieces here?” I asked the lady when I bought this at a flea market.

“Yeah,” she said.

Guess what?

“What?” you answer.

She lied to me! I was getting down to the end and knew that at least two pieces were missing. It didn’t stop me though, I still I kept going.

“Peg! Be kind!” I admonished myself. “Maybe she didn’t know and just said yes.” I think I would rather believe that than to believe she deliberately lied to me.

“What did you think she would say?” you ask and are you laughing at me?

If she would have said there were a couple of pieces missing and I could have it for half price (50 cents) I might have bought it anyway. My mother can make replacement pieces so good you can’t even see them!

I finished the puzzle this morning and there were four pieces missing! FOUR!

Hmmmmm.

I had been using a small lap quilt to cover the puzzle in an effort to keep the cats from knocking the pieces to the floor, and Baby Blue had claimed it for her own. Every time I turned around she was sitting on my quilt-covered table, even though she knows she isn’t supposed to be on the table! The quilt seemed to change the rules for her. I started checking around and I found one piece on the newspapers that were relegated to the chair instead of the corner of the table where they would normally sit until I got around to reading them. There was a partially packed box (from our afore mentioned, impending move) sitting on the floor by the table, and I found two pieces right beside it! Yay! Jackpot! I thought to myself. Only one piece missing! I can live with that. Then I decided to unloaded the box and I found the last piece!

She didn’t lie to me!

My faith in mankind is restored!

Let’s call this one done.

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike