Hi everyone,
I have had two desktops up this week and even though I have been posting my photos to my blog, I have deliberately kept these back.
First I had up this passion flower with a Peck’s skipper on it.
Aren’t passion flowers fabulous! I think they are and this passion flower is also called maypops. You can eat the fruit or make it into jelly and traditionally, the fresh or dried whole plant has been used as an herbal medicine to treat nervous anxiety and insomnia. And it’s great for landscaping to cover a fence or wall as it’s vines are fast growing.
Early in August I saw this flower. When I saw it it reminded me of a passion flower but it was much smaller and the wrong color.
“Peg, did you ever think there might be more than one kind of passion flower?” you ask.
No. Well, that’s not true. I knew there were other, more exotic forms of the flower, I just didn’t know we had another kind here in Missouri.
Don’t laugh. I can be kind of simple sometimes. It just never crossed my mind that it was a passionflower.
While looking up other wildflowers in the field guide on the Missouri Department of Conversation website I stumbled on a picture of a yellow passion flower and recognized it immediately.
I should have known.
I also found out, via Wikipedia, that it is considered an endangered species in Pennsylvania.
This picture is the only yellow passion flower I have ever seen. Even when I was taking the photo I didn’t see any other flowers. And I have been looking for it again every since then and I can’t find it.
Sigh.
The other photo I had up as my desktop (and is up there now) is this one. I don’t really know what to say about it except I like it.
And this…
… will turn into this as it matures and it is a yellow ironweed.
Now since we are talking about my photos and since not everyone can see the photos I post online, I want to talk about another one -- or two!
I have been photographing a plant for almost a month now and it isn’t changing very much.
Thursday I take the girls for a walk and I see our city has been hard at work mowing the roadsides. To think of all the beautiful wildflowers the mowers cut down makes me sad. Then I hear my mother in my head. “When critters are killed on the road,” she told me once when I was sad about a dead deer, “it means that other animals can eat.”
She is not only a beautiful woman, she is wise too.
So I hear my mother saying that and I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe the same thing can be applied to wild flowers too. When some are cut down, it allows others to thrive.
Funny how we comfort ourselves with these kinds of thoughts.
So…they mowed. I shrug it off and keep on walking.
I get to where these guys live and I’m glad they are still there, although I’m not sure they are ever going to be anything more than they were right now, I still think they are pretty, and I take their pictures again this day.
I start to move on and what do I see?
A little further up on the bank, where the sunlight is more full, I see a purple flower, one I had not seen before. Ginger, who is normally very eager to go off-roadin’, puts her brakes on and doesn’t want to go up the bank with me. I lock her leash, set it and Itsy and Itsy’s leash on the ground beside her, a little ways off the road, and command, “Stay here!” I climb the bank to investigate this flower and it doesn’t take me long to realize these are the more mature version on the other one.
“Did you find out what it is?” you ask.
Yes. This is called a rough blazing star.
Now, I have to tell you something else. Goin’ off roadin’, taking photos of wildflowers and bugs and whatever else catches my attention is not without a price. Namely chiggers.
“Can’t you use insect repellent?” you ask.
I could. I hate using poisons and besides, when you come back in you need to wash the stuff off your skin. That’s a pain too. So what I was doing was just brushing my legs off when I come out of the weeds.
I’m walking down the road, stepping into the grass and weeds to photograph wildflowers and bugs, coming back onto the road and bending over to brush my legs off, and everything becomes unseated. Itsy doesn’t like me bending over when I’m holding her and she grunts. My camera, around my neck, and my Doggy Poopy Bag, on my shoulder, swing forward and I have to make sure they don’t collide or hit one of the girls. First I brush off one leg then switch and do the other.
Does this sound like a job?
It is.
And what’s worse is when I only go a few steps and see something else I want to photograph, then I have to go through the whole routine all over again. After doing this for a few days I realized I was either brushing the chiggers into my sock, or not getting them off my socks to begin with. One way or the other, the result is the same. My ankles, under my socks, are full of itchy red welts that wake me up in the middle of the night.
I know. I’m not getting any sympathy from you, “You get what you deserve,” you say.
In an effort to reduce the number of chigger bites, I add pinching and rubbing at my socks to crush the little boogers.
And in an effort to reduce the night time itching, I take an antihistamine before I go to bed.
A few more days of this and still waking up with the itching -- one antihistamine doesn’t last the night through -- I decide that when I come in from my walks I’ll shed my socks and wash my legs, ankles, and feet. That seems to help too. I do this for a few days and all of this stuff put together really seems to be effective, albeit labor intensive. But after a few days, when I’m standing in the bathroom, running a washrag over my legs and feet, it hits me.
As long as I’m washing anyway I might just as well use insect repellent and not go through all that other bull stuff, right?
(Don’t laugh. I know I’m a slow thinker.)
And now the challenge I face is to remember to put it on before I take the girls out for their evening walk.
I feel sorry for Ginger though. People are not the only ones who suffer from chigger bites you know.
Living in the RV has presented a couple of problems with our pets. Itsy and Ginger can’t get up on the bed by themselves like they used to when we lived in the studio apartment. Even though we brought the steps with us, they are too short to be of any use at the bed; it’s too high, so we use them at the couch.
Mike and I don’t want the dogs to jump off the bed, and Itsy won’t, but Ginger will. Then after she gets her drink she has to sit there and cry until one of us gets up and puts her back up in the bed, sometimes Mike but usually me.
This was getting old.
Mike thought about it for a while and came up with this ramp. He used a one by eight and stapled stair tread carpet pieces on it. It lives between my side of the bed and the wall, one end resting on the lower tier of a two tierd cabinet and the other end against the slide. It can’t slip out from underneath them.
“Don’t ever forget to move it before you put the slide in,” Mike warned me.
Yeah. I’m sure something would get broken if I ever forgot.
I forgot to move the litter box once and remembered only after I heard something crack. I stopped to investigate and saw the litter box pinched between the slide and the end of the bed. I reversed the slide and discovered I had broken two of the fasteners that hold the top on to the box.
The ramp works great when they use it. Right now we have to ‘encourage’ them to use it. That means getting behind them and herding them up on it. Once on the ramp they run up and jump onto the bed. Like I said it works great although it seems to be a one way ramp. Ginger is still jumping off the bed. If I’m awake enough and I feel her heading for the edge of the bed I’ll yell, “WAIT!” She doesn’t always obey and jumps down anyway. She’ll usually wake me in the mornings but sometimes she won’t and she’ll jump out of bed before I’m awake enough to stop her. Itsy will just wait until someone gets her off the bed. The only way I’ve gotten them to go down the ramp is to put them right at the top and tell them, “Go on!” and they’ll go.
Ginger is still getting down in the middle of the night then sitting there and crying until I get up. I tried to ignore her thinking she’d give up and use the ramp but after twenty minutes I gave up, got up, got the little flashlight that hangs by the bedroom door, turned it on, lit the way to the ramp and ordered her (in a low voice so I didn’t wake Mike) to, “GO ON!” And she did.
What’s up with that?
I’m thinking she isn’t sure enough of the way to use it in the dark. Maybe with a little time -- and patience -- she’ll get the hang of it.
Keep your fingers crossed.
The other morning I got up and dressed and took the dogs out first thing like I usually do, came back in, make a cup of coffee, and settle in front of my computer to see what’s new on Facebook.
Itsy wolfs at me.
“What!” I exclaim, but that was just a stall tactic. She doesn’t usually wolf at me like that and I figure she just wants a morning treat. It’s not food, they are on free food. There is always dog food in the dish and if it’s not the kind she wants…oh well. She’ll eat it when she’s hungry enough.
After a few more wolfs, and me ignoring her, I hear her eating something. I turn around and see she is sitting by the dog food dish, her back to me, and is working pretty hard on something. She was hungry.
I turn back to my computer then I hear Itsy’s nails ticky-tacking on the floor. She didn’t go back to the food dish. Curious, I turn around and watch as she comes back over my way. Then I see it! I see, there on the floor, behind the drivers seat, is a poop, and she’s heading right for it. I jumped up, Itsy looked up at me and what do you think is hanging in her beard?
Yeah.
“Bad girl!” If I’ve told her once I’ve told her a dozen times. You don’t eat poop!
I get the poo picked out of Itsy’s beard and pick up the nugget off the floor, which evidently had been deposited there hours earlier as it was dry and I take Itsy to the sink and wash her face. I spank both dogs and take them outside and give them both a good talking to. I was mad. But I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t a little bit my fault. The night before, we were back from our walk around seven thirty and I totally spaced out and didn’t take them out again before bed.
“If it was your fault Peg, why did you spank them?” you ask.
Well, I have discovered that even if it is my fault, or if it was something they really couldn’t help, like diarrhea or something, if I don’t scold them, they think it was okay and they do it again.
I don’t know who left it, Itsy, Ginger or the one of the cats. So now when I have to get up at night to help Ginger get to the ramp, I check the floors.
And that my dears, is purely a gratuitous poop story for my neighbor Steph.
You’re welcome.
That cat!
That darn cat!
Yeah. Baby Blue.
Living with pets is a lot like living with kids. You seldom get to go to the bathroom by yourself. Our biggest culprit in that department is Baby Blue.
The sink in the RV has a rounded front and the bottom of it is not closed off. It didn’t really seem to be a problem until Baby Blue discovered it. So there I was sitting on the pot, catching up on a little reading, if you catch my drift, and I look up in time to see the back half of Baby Blue disappearing up under the sink.
Oh, boy, I think to myself, I’ll have to get her out of there before I leave.
Next thing I know I hear her meowing and rustling around under the shower! Doggone it!
Done and up, I open the cabinet doors and discover there is only a three quarter wall that separates the plumbing from the cabinet.
Actually, I didn’t just discover it, I knew it was like that. You would be surprised at how much money a company can save by doing little things like that. What I actually did discover was that Baby Blue had gone down behind the wall, around the corner and she was in the plumbing chase under the shower. “Baby Blue!” I called. She almost always comes when you call her.
“Meow!” Rustle, rustle.
“Baby Blue! Come on!”
“Meow!” Rustle, rustle and I think she’s moving further under the shower.
“Baby Blue! Come here…come on!”
“Purrmeow.”
Yeah, you can see how this was going. She was happy to be exploring a place she had never been before. Well, nothing motivates like food. I got up and got a can of cat food, opened it, stuck it over the wall and it wasn’t long at all until she got a whiff of that and came peaking up over the divider. I set the food on the floor by the door and Baby Blue climbed out, ambled over to the can and had a bite. I put my cleaners back in the cabinet and shut the doors.
I told Mike about it. “What if she gets stuck in there?” he asked.
“If she can get in, she can get out,” I told him.
“What if she can get out of the RV that way?”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
Mike has since closed off the underside of the sink by stuffing a towel in the space, but that hasn’t stopped Baby Blue from checking to make sure it’s still there. She used to check every time one of us went into the bathroom, but she only checks once in a while now.
I told you last time about Kevin and Kandyce hooking up my printer and computer to a router so I can print wirelessly. What I didn’t tell you is that by the time they were through with my computer, it was getting late. Although they
started on Mike’s computer, they didn’t get very far before enough was just enough. You know what I mean?
“Really, guys. It’s okay,” I told them. “Mike doesn’t print as much as I do and he can look at it or you can come back later and figure it out.” Mike has figured out things on the computer that I didn’t know so I knew if he wanted to, he could do it.
It took the two of us about half an hour to figure out that we had to install the software for wireless printing from our printer software and once we did that it worked, easy peas-y lemon squeeze-y.
And while I’m talking about Mike and computers let me add a little side note here. Microsoft is giving away a free upgrade to Windows 10 for a year -- I think it’s a year. Both Mike and I clicked on the notice on our computers to reserve our copy. Then this past week the upgrade became available for downloading. I Googled it and discovered people were really having a lot of problems with it and one person said, “If you are not having any issues with your computer, I wouldn’t download it.”
My computer works great since my older, much adored, sister Patti worked on it for me. I wasn’t having any problems and I didn’t want any.
“Mike, people are having problems with the Windows 10 upgrade and they say if you’re not having any problems with your computer to not download it. I’m not downloading it,” I told him.
What did Mike do?
He downloaded Windows 10 and it caused a conflict. Let me tell you what. Mike does all of his tenant billing and banking from his computer. The thought of losing it all just made him sick.
After more than an hour of trying to resolve it on our own I got on my computer and walked through the steps to un-install Windows 10.
Anyone else have any experience with windows 10?
“It was supposed to make my computer run better and faster!” Mike said when I asked him why he downloaded it.
Hey!
Guess what?
I know you can’t guess.
We have a new baby in our family!
Charlotte Rose Burns came into our world on August 16th at 4:01pm. She weighed 7lbs 11.6oz and 19 1/2in long.
Isn’t she a beautiful baby?
Wait, that really isn’t a question.
Isn’t she a beautiful baby!
Congratulations to my niece Taysha, her husband Caleb and big sister, E.J.
Let’s call this one done.
Lots and lots of love,
Peg and Mike
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