So Much Rain!

               Rain! 

               We’ve had so much rain this past week our pond is spilling over the bank.

The Kipps’ yard is flooded.

            And the Susquehanna has left her bed.

Saturday, when the sun came out and it was warmer, the girls soaked up some vitamin D.

The rain kept me in most of the time but that doesn’t make me sad. I love the house my handsome mountain man built for me. I don’t always like all my clutter and think someday I’ll clean it out, then my sanity returns. I decide I’ll let the kids get a dumpster when I die.

Peg’s Pain Palace, my exercise studio, has a new student. Beth, a young gal from my church comes almost every day after work and does a video workout with me.

“I hate housework,” I told her as we walk through the house to the studio. “Just kick the dust bunnies out of the way.” At the end of the first week, I told her, “And I’m not going to apologize for it anymore.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” Beth, a kind and gracious young lady says.

Beth is also the lady I’m making a porch sign for. I designed it with the elements she wanted and sent her preliminary designs for approval.

Those three simple words, I designed it, don’t sound like the hours they ate up, do they?

Printing the patterns can also be time consuming. It’s a lot of trial and error until I get the size right. Then it’s time to transfer the pattern to the prepared board. I enjoy some parts of the process more than others and I told my peeps in a morning love note, “Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do.”

That’s a good mantra and not one I came up with on my own. I first heard it a hundred years ago from my old boss at Curves. She was telling me that’s what her son says to his young daughter when she doesn’t want to do her chores. And if you Google it, Denzel Washington comes up.

I’m sitting at the table, an earbud in my ear, listening to a podcast, working on the sign when an overwhelming feeling of happiness washes over me. I grabbed my camera and took a picture of that moment.

Once the lettering was done, I moved on to the graphic.

The picture she wanted had a fade out effect on the soaring eagle and cross.

I worked on the field of blue first and as soon as I got to the wing, I knew it was an effect I’m not skilled enough to achieve. I decided to go with bold colors which I think will work better for a porch sign anyway. I’ll probably go back and make the faded out blue more bold — unless Beth tells me to leave it.

I do a lot of printing, and not just patterns for porch signs. I print pictures for the Life At Moxie board at church and I print my letter blog. There are other incidentals as well, but those are the main ones.

From the time we bought the Epson eco tank printer in July of 2020 until this week, I’ve printed somewhere around twelve thousand pages. I got a message on the printer saying my ink pads were nearing the end of usage life. I Googled it and found out the printer will stop working. I found out I can remove the pads, rinse them, reinstall them, and purchase a new usage counting key for ten bucks.

Mike doesn’t always take the cheapest way out, especially when it comes to me. He thinks I need the best. “That’s why you have me!” he kids. “The printer is old and you use it a lot. Something else is bound to go wrong with it. Let’s just get a new one.”

Three days later Fed-Ex shows up at the door with a brand spankin’ new Epson EcoTank printer. And bonus, it uses the same ink as the printer I had.

“I’m going to use the old one until it quits,” I told Mike. “There’s still a lot of ink in the tanks.” You can see how much ink is in the tanks through the handy-dandy windows in the front of the printer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until I got an ‘end of usage life’ message and the printer wouldn’t work anymore. “I bet I can take a syringe and draw the ink out.” I’m not wasting it if I don’t have to.

I Googled it and found a video of a gal who put any empty bottle on the tank and turned the printer upside down. Now that was a great idea!

I was afraid to try it by myself. I was afraid I’d flip it upside down and the bottle would fall off. Luckily, Mike was willing to help me and it worked like a charm! I got to save all that ink.

“What did you do with your old printer?” you ask.

I bet you think I’m gonna say, “Put it in the wayback with all the other ju— treasures," but you’d be wrong. Epson has a recycling program and they will even pay the shipping fees. I went on the website, filled out the form, and printed a postage paid slip. We packed it in the box we took the new printer out of and off to Fed-Ex we went.

The shipping office is on the edge of Wysox with the train tracks right behind it. Mike pulls up and tries to figure out what this graffiti is saying.

“Bad news from,” was all we could get.

Inside the office we were greeted with a bright and cheerful, “Hello! Do you need a label for that?”

I was surprised she got up from where she was helping a woman to wait on us. I thought we’d have to wait, but was glad we didn’t.

“Nope. We have one,” Mike told her.

She moved to the shipping station and started punching numbers in.

          I had my camera around my neck. That won’t surprise many of you. “What do you take pictures of,” Crystal asked.

          “Nice people like you!” I told her.

          She smiled for me.

          “How do you know she’s nice?” Mike asked, joking around.

          “I can just tell!” I said.

          From the other side of the room, a voice pipes up. “She IS nice! I should know, she’s my daughter!”

          I turned my camera and mama mugged for the camera, too.

          After dropping off the old printer, we continued on to Sayre for a little shopping.

          I didn’t take a lot of pictures because it’s a road we’ve traveled many times.

          The eagles’ nest. There was a lady there taking pictures.

          “Do you wanna stop?” Mike asked.

          “No. I’ll just snap it on the fly.”

          And that’s what I did.

          And speaking of eagles...

          My best girl, Joanie, was on the way to work one morning this week and happened upon an eagle that was working on a deer carcass. She got some fabulous shots and gave me permission to share them with you.

          Then on the internet news Saturday morning, Mike sees they’re offering a five-thousand-dollar reward for someone who shot four bald eagles in Arkansas. If you’re convicted of shooting one you could get a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine and two years in federal prison. Although they are still federally protected, they were removed from the endangered list in 2007.

          “Do you want to go through town?” Mike asked when the exit for Sayre was coming up.

          “Sure. I like to look at stuff.”

          Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park.

          On the way home we saw they were doing something with the mountain of ground asphalt.

          “Are they making new asphalt out of it?” Mike wondered.

          Mike got some stuff to work on renovating the apartment. Having no one living there has really made it fall apart.

          Me? I bought something to snack on for the way home. This is a single serving size, right? Actually, I shared with Mike. But I don’t buy them often because I won’t stop eating until I hit the bottom of the bag. Even then I’m tipping the crumbs into my mouth.

          Coming back through Towanda, I noticed someone put up a sign above a political sign.

          “Arrested criminal & felon,” it says. In parenthesis it says, “Google: Connor White Wysox felony.”

          I did a little digging but didn’t find anything.

          In some place where there was a Connor White sign you could see where they tore off the arrested criminal sign.

          Someone nailed the guide rail near the school.

          Speaking of guide rails...

          Miss Rosie called me. “They’re replacing the guide rail in front of our house. Do you wanna take pictures?”

          Does she know me or what!

          We jumped on the golf cart and went to see.

          We went in and visited with the Kipps for a few minutes.

          Miss Rosie had a bouquet of beautiful flowers on her table. She turns seventy-five on the seventh.

          “She’s slightly older than Israel,” her daughter Jenn says.

          Our cute little neighbor gal, Jonecca Robinson, shares a birthday with Miss Rosie. This cutie-patootie is twenty-eight on the same day.

          Here she is with her handsome husband Aaron.

          Thursday evening, during my recliner time, Joanie sent me a picture of a rainbow.

          “I’ve seen more rainbows since we’ve lived in this house than I’ve seen my whole life,” she says.

I didn’t think too much about it because there could be a rainbow at her house and not a rainbow at my house. I glanced out the window and saw the sun was shining and it was pouring down rain. I jumped up and sprinted for my camera.

“I’m going to look for a rainbow,” I told Mike. Who doesn’t love seeing a rainbow and remembering the promise of God that He would never again flood the world.

Out the kitchen door I went. There it was!

I snapped a few pictures and decided to go around to the front of the house.

Stepping out the front door, the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and it was still raining (even if you can’t tell from my picture).

I turned around and there was the rainbow over the house.

The only thing left in my file this week is critter stories. Dogs are critters, right?

          I heard the girls barking and carrying on. I went to see what all the fuss was about. “There’s something on the other side of the fence they want,” I told Mike. I had to get the binoculars to see what it was. “It’s a rabbit!” I said.

          “Is it d-e-d?” Mike asked. He never misses an opportunity to remind me of the way I spelled dead once.

          “Yep.”

          When Mike went to get the mail, he tossed it over the bank.

          On a last trip out before bed one night, Raini runs the fence line like she always does. It wasn’t until Bondi caught a whiff of something and started barking that Raini knew something was there.

          I trained my flashlight beam beyond the fence, expecting to see cat eyes reflecting back at me. I didn’t see anything at first but heard the unmistakable sounds of something climbing a tree. A quick sweep and the flashlight found eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was. If it was a cat, it probably wouldn’t stay there long. After five minutes of dogs barking and the critter not fleeing, I figured it must be a possum playing possum. I went back in for my camera and using my flash, got a shot of him.

          The possum wasn’t the only critter out that night. Just about the time the girls settled down and stopped barking at the possum, an owl would hoot and set them to barking again. In the quiet between barks I could hear more than one owl and they were hooting up a storm. I would’ve loved nothing more than to sit there listening to them calling back and forth, because they were quite close, but the girls made that impossible. I gave up, took a shot of the full moon, and went to bed.

           Wildflowers I saw this week include the chokecherry.

          The pretty flowers of the deadnettle.

          It’s called dead nettle because it doesn’t sting like the stinging nettle. You really don’t want to have contact with the stinging nettle, trust me.

          You can eat dead nettle and there are no dangerous look-alikes. It’s in the mint family but doesn’t taste like mint. The young leaves have a mild, lightly peppered taste when eaten raw and you can put them in your salad.

          You can cook dead nettle for a potherb like other greens and are a great source of vitamin C, A, and K, as well as iron, fiber, and bioflavonoids. Moreover, these leaves also have anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antifungal properties as well as diuretic, astringent, diaphoretic, and purgative effects.

          In folk medicine, dead nettle herbal tea has been used as a remedy for kidney disease, seasonal allergies, chills, and common colds. Consuming this edible can boost the immune system and fight off bacterial infections as well. Lastly, the leaves can also be used externally to stem bleeding and create a poultice to heal cuts, burns, and bruises.

          This little beauty is a variety of speedwell.

          There are twenty-three types of speedwell and most are edible and have medicinal uses.

          This one is creeping Charlie, also called ground ivy and gill over the ground. It has many medicinal and edible uses. It’s high in vitamin C and was used to prevent scurvy.

          Blackie helped me take pictures.

          And with that, let’s...

          “Wait! Wait! Wait!” you say. “Peg, you didn’t tell us anything about the gas well.”

          Oh, right. I didn’t.

          The first thing Mike and I noticed as we were driving up to the site were the smokestacks. Once we got around to the other side, we could see what they were attached to.

          “Let’s go up on the hill for an overview,” I said to Mike.

          No one was working there this weekend. 

          On the way home we saw a turkey. I just had to take his picture. 

And let’s call this one done.