Can you believe another week, another month has passed? The next thing you know, we’ll turn around and it’ll be Christmas!
But I’ll try not to rush it. Let’s talk about this week in the Luby household.
Well, I was right about one thing!
“What’s that, Peg?” you ask.
I was right about Tiger. He brought a mouse in this week and growled at me when I tried to get close enough for a picture. “Good boy!” I cooed over and over. “You got a mouse! You’re such a good boy!” But Tiger didn’t care. If I got too close, he’d pick his mouse up and move farther away. He tossed the poor thing in the air a couple of times...
...and once, it got halfway across the yard before he caught him again, but Tiger didn’t torture him too long before he tucked in and had a meal of mouseburger.
“I wasn’t going to take the mouse away from him,” I told Miss Rosie. “Can’t he understand the difference between a mouse and a bird?”
“I guess not,” she said.
When I woke Thursday morning, Tiger was curled up near my feet. He almost always sleeps with me. I stroked his fur and whispered good mornings to him. I noticed he’d been drooling and thought that odd. Later in the day he started doing this weird lip-smacking thing.
“Cats will chatter or emit a clicking noise when they’re focused on a tasty morsel, like a fly,” you tell me.
This I know. I’ve heard our cats do that before. But in Tiger’s case, there was no flying raisin or tasty morsel in sight. I thought it was odd. That evening he came in to jump in the recliner with me and he was doing it again.
“Mike, I think there’s something wrong with him.” I’m thinking Tiger eats a lot of wild game, maybe he’s got a little bone or something stuck in his mouth. I pried his mouth open; he didn’t like that at all and it wasn’t open long enough for me to see anything. He’d let me lift his lips at the sides of his mouth without too much fuss but I couldn’t see anything.
The next morning, when I came out to my computer, I realized Tiger hadn’t eaten his treats from the day before — and that’s really odd!
I called our vet and got Tiger right in. He didn’t like being in the carrier so I opened the door and let him roam the car. He didn’t like that much better and went back to the carrier and laid half in and half out.
Then he got the whole way in and that’s how he rode the rest of the trip.
It’s gonna break my heart if I have to have him put down.
Most viruses resolve on their own and we’re giving him support. A pain killer and a mouth numbing agent so he can eat. Both of those things he hates when I give to him. I’m worried Tiger will refuse to let me give him medicine, that he’ll even start avoiding me all together. But it can’t be helped.
Speaking of cats, Sugar is getting more comfortable with house noises. Here she’s sleeping so soundly that she never stirred when I took her picture.
And Smudge.
I made giant ladybugs this week. After I made the first one, I decided to make myself a cardboard pattern for the next one with. Smudge helped.
And that’s all the cat stories for this week.
“Wait, Peg! Wait a minute! You made giant ladybugs‽” you ask.
I did! I had some nice big flat sheets of coil stock (that’s what Mike told me the name of this stuff is) and thought some giant ladybugs would be cute.
I used an old steering wheel off one of Mike’s tractors for the body...
...and a plate for the head. I had to freehand the antenna. I had a day to think about the spots and wasn’t really looking forward to painting them on. What if I use my Cricut? I wondered, then wasn’t sure if I had a cartridge with round dots on it. I know I’ve got some that aren’t quite round. “Do they have to be round?” I asked my morning love-notees.
“All the ladybugs I’ve ever seen are round,” a couple responders said. “But it’s your world and they can be any shape you want them to be!”
I love my peeps!
But I guess I wasn’t clear on what I was asking had to be round.
And I need’ve worried. I did find a round pattern and spent some time making a stack of ladybug spots.
But I have to tell you, it burns my butt every time I get my Cricut out.
“Why’s that?” you wanna know.
I have 5 cartridges that are online only and Cricut will no longer support my machine so I can’t get on the website and access any of those cartridges. Instead, they want me to buy a new model. I don’t wanna do that. Mine works fine. So, I send them dissatisfied customer emails from time to time.
“The software was discontinued because Adobe stopped supporting the programming that was used to create Craft Room. So, we were forced to create a new computer program, which we did with Design Space. However, the programming on the older machines could not be upgraded. As will eventually happen with all computers and machines, technology simply advanced beyond its capability.”
And they offer me $50 towards a new machine.
I think it’s BS and they could keep the Craft Room open if they wanted to.
But, I’m not bitter! And I’m not gonna dwell. I’ll just keep using mine as a stand-alone machine until it doesn’t work anymore.
The ladybug came out so stinkin’ cute! Since my beautiful friend Jody gave me the coil stock, I thought she should get the first one. My only problem was I didn’t know where she would hang him so I didn’t know how to attach a hanger.
“You could put a screw through it,” Mike suggested.
I hated the thought of marring his beauty. “Let’s let Jody decide.”
And I took her some of the tin can flowers I’d been making too.
“I think I want him on my greenhouse,” Jody said.
We visited for a while. Jody told me that her Michael had improved the spinner I’d given her. “Show me what he did.”
It really is a much better way. The big ones are just too heavy for the way I was putting them together and they tended to droop. I decided to bite the bullet and buy the stuff to fix Miss Rosie’s spinner and my big one too.
After we left Jody’s house we stopped by beautiful Joanie’s house and “Peg’d” her. Mike stood under a dripping gutter to put these where I was sure Joanie would see them when she came home from work. Right on her carport post.
“I’ve been Peg’d!” she posted on Facebook that evening and she loves her new flowers. I told her to be careful when she moves them because they can be evilly sharp, but she thinks she might leave them right where they are.
To buy the nuts, bolts, and washers to fix two spinners set me back $5.50. Not a great amount, until you start multiplying it by 6, 8, or 10. I hate to sound like such a cheapskate but I give almost everything I make away and my budget only goes so far. The other way I was making my spinners spin only cost me about 15 cents. Much more doable.
“This is how I told you to do it in the first place,” Mike pointed out as he put it together for me.
“I know,” I agreed.
Mike is working under a handicap here. Poor blind Macchiato. When he hears Mike on the patio, he wants to sit in his lap. Even though he was in the way, Mike didn’t have the heart to make him get down.
On one of my morning calls to that feisty red-headed beauty, Miss Rosie says, “You’re gonna be sad when I tell you something.”
That last time she said that was when they found Anon dead beside the road. In my head I ran through our cat list but none were missing as far as I knew.
“Okay,” I said tentatively. “What?” To myself I’m thinking, I can handle this, and took a deep breath.
“Whatever’s been coming around and taking the suet cake out of the feeder at night knocked over the Oriole feeder and broke it.”
Not too bad of news. “I can fix it,” I said hoping it wasn’t the glass that was broken.
“Would you? I hate to ask.”
“Not a problem at all,” I assure her.
We stopped and picked up the feeder on our way home from delivering flowers and a ladybug and I was relieved to see the glass wasn’t broken. I’d just have to re-silicone the pieces back together.
“Once it’s been siliconed you won’t be able to get it to stick again,” Mike tells me.
I decided to change the design. I had two skinny pieces together and maybe it just didn’t have enough meat for the silicone to grip. I added a couple of larger pieces between the two, scrapped as much silicone off the old pieces as I could, and hit it with sandpaper for good measure. It seems to be holding just fine but Miss Rosie will have to let me know if it falls apart again.
And I made my second giant ladybug of the week.
Then I had a Rosie day. We took the ladybug and the repaired Oriole feeder down to her and fixed her big spinner too!
“How did you hang Miss Rosie’s ladybug?” I know you wanna know.
I siliconed a wire on the backside and Miss Rosie has a hook she hung him on.
I can’t tell you how happy and excited I am to make beautiful things that my friends and family love to get.
One more thing before I move on. The Kipps have been using grape jelly in their Oriole feeder and Lamar finally saw an Oriole at it the other day. It’s taken them a while to find it and we were starting to wonder if they ever would.
>>>*<<<
The flowers are pooping — err, popping out all over the place!
My Spiderwort gets prettier every day!
My Chinese Lanterns are flowering.
The English Plantain is flowering. This one has a Hoverfly on it. Some people call them Sweat Bees but they aren’t bees at all and don’t sting.
I was shooting the Hawkweed and caught this red thing, which, I don’t know what it is. But I thought it was a pretty picture.
Here’s the Hawkweed.
I saw my first Oxeye Daisy this week! I love the Daisies!
Mike and I sat on the patio and watched a doe with her twins down at our pond. She grazed while the kids chased each other.
This is a Soldier Beetle.
He’s on Curly Dock and it’s loaded with Black Bean Aphids. Guess what Soldier Beetles eat.
We did a couple of little jobs around our mountain home.
We lost a cherry tree. It bloomed last year, got a few cherries, then died. Looking at the trunk, you can see a bunch of little holes. I’m guessing we lost it to an insect.
We took the fencing down and mowed the tall grass and young Black Locust trees that were growing there. At some point we’ll hook the tractor to the dead tree and yank it out of the ground.
Every place you go around here, there are huge Rhododendron bushes just full of flowers!
Mike is a little bit jelly.
We planted a bunch of Rhodies years ago and we only have one surviving, and it’s not very big, the flower cluster don’t get very big, and they don’t last as long as these others seem to.
“Is it a different variety?” Mike asked but how would I know.
We made a shopping trip to Tunkhannock this week. In the Walmart store they had an automated floor sweeper. Mike was fascinated with this thing and watched it while I made a few side excursions into the craft aisles.
When it came upon people standing in the aisle it would stop and go around them.
“Let’s go down to that nursery and get a couple of Rhodies,” Mike suggested.
Creekside Gardens is an awesome place with lots of pretty plants and tons of primitives — and they have an inside fountain that is just huge!
“Do you have any Rhododendrons?” Mike asked the gal that came to help us.
“Not really. We had a few in the spring but they’re gone. They’re kind of a common plant and my husband and I specialize in the harder to find stuff.”
From there Mike picked her brain. Rhodies are hardy. Easy to grow. Fast growing. “They’ll survive just about anywhere,” she said, ‘if the soil is halfway decent.”
I don’t know a lot about garden flowers but I know that without enough nutrients they won’t bloom as much or even at all. In conclusion, we’re guessing we have really bad soil. No surprise there since we live on an old commercial site and it’s mostly gravel.
I thought her mailbox was pretty cool and Mike had to backup so I could take its picture.
Across the road a big beautiful house.
The road it was on dead-ended at a pedestrian bridge with a church on the other side.
Mike waited in the car while I walked across.
This place, right on the creek, is huge! Maybe a hotel at one time? Now it’s apartments.
At home, we see our snapper is back. When it was gone, we checked for eggs again but didn’t find any.
Mike got his tractor out and turned the soil on the side of a pile of dirt. This pile came to be here when we were looking for a sewer line and it never got moved.
Nature reclaims.
It looks like decent soil but we still supplemented it with fresh topsoil that we bought and a bag of Miracle Gro garden soil and planted the Rhodies here.
“Sure. We haven’t been out there in a while.” I was looking forward to seeing what wild flowers were growing beside his lane.
We got on the golf cart. “Did you hear that?” Mike asked.
“I didn’t. What?”
“It made a funny noise. I hope its not going out.”
Famous last words, right? Not far down Vernon’s driveway the golf cart stopped. Dead. No forward, no backward. I walked back to the house and got the tractor and we towed it home.
We’ve used the heck out of this golf cart for a lot of years and really miss it.
“I’m pretty sure it’s the centrifugal clutch,” Mike said and he doesn’t want to fix it.
It’s on our agenda to find someone to repair it next week.
Let’s end this week with a random collection of road pictures.
I had to laugh when I zoomed in on the sign on this front door. Do you know what it says? It says, “DON’T SLAM DOOR!”
I bet if you do the house will fall down.
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