Cosumne Gal

There were a lot of sticks on the porch this week. They were left over when the House Wren continued stuffing sticks into the bird church door.


Maybe I should just paint a sign: Worshippers Not Welcome Here.

What a grumpy, anti-social little bird. The skinny house, in the meantime, is still being furnished comfortably.

Yesterday as I sat at my desk, glaring out the window at the gray day and wishing for even half a ray of sunshine, I saw something weird moving around on the porch. It looked like a flying stick. It was actually a flying House Wren, a tiny little bird, with a fairly large stick in its beak.

You can sort of see it on the steps in this picture that was taken through a (dirty) window and a (dusty) screen.


That little bird struggled for 5 minutes to pick up the stick and carry it away to the bird church. I could see the bird working, but couldn't get a picture of it turning the stick sideways and shoving it through the hole. It finally succeeded and flew away, so I went out and took these pictures.


See the stick, sticking out of the hole? I pulled it out to measure it.


It's seven inches long. I think an equivalent would be if you or I tried to carry a pole vaulter's pole in our mouth and poke it through a porthole without using our hands.

A while later the House Wren came back and poked a few smaller twigs through the hole in the skinny house.


It also added some fluffy bits and spent quite a bit of time arranging them. I think the bird is planning to use the skinny house, but wants to make sure nothing is able to use the Bird Church. House Wrens don't like to have neighbors living too close to them. I understand the sentiment.

This is California, so I know the sun will eventually come out and roast us all to a crisp. But so far it has been an overwhelmingly gray spring. It's not just my lukewarm attitude, folks. For example, even though the flowers are blooming, they aren't very cheerful about it.


OK, so some people call this a funeral lily, so I guess you can't expect it to be cheery.
But the flower below is a clematis. It's 2 years old and this is the first time it has bloomed. I babied it and protected it and fertilized it, expecting a riot of color. What I got is a delicate lavender that just looks dull on a gray day.

 Even the daisies don't have sunny faces.

 The dogwood seems like muttwood.

 The brightest flower in the garden, a yellow ranunculus, needs some sun to make it shine.

I haven't ended my blog, despite the message you might have gotten when you checked in. There was evidently a problem with my Google account. Internet pixies I think. I haven't posted for a while because my life is just going through an intensely dull period. Nothing worth writing about. Also I gave up drinking coffee and find that even multiple cups of tea do not cause me to be inspired.

Be back soon.

Today is drizzly, but the past couple of weeks have been really nice in our little farm valley. I have 14 camellia plants - a few of them the size of small trees - that are really heavy with blooms this year.




Sure, they make a mess when the blooms fall, but that's a mess I'm happy to accommodate. Here are some of the flowers.




The dogwood is also blooming. I still have a few seedling dogwoods growing, if anyone wants to plant their own heavenly cloud of white.


In the back yard, the lilacs are out in full force. I have 6 newew hybrid plants that each have a bloom or two this year, but my favorite is always this plain old-fashioned purple one.


The tulips are also blooming. The ones Susie and I planted late are even up and doing fine. I didn't get anything planted between them to cover the bare dirt, but the tulips don't care. This one almost looks like a peony.


The tree cutters damaged my drip line a couple of months ago, so Adam (who installed it originally) came out and did a tune-up. Adam is Melanie's significant other. Melanie is the lady who shares my office.


Adam is a master woodworker. Not a cabinet-maker, but an artist. He's also very good at trivia. I know this because I got to fill in on a team at Trivia Night last week when some of the regular members couldn't be there. The teams meet at DeVere's Irish Pub. Here I am with Michelle. She also works with Melanie and me.


This is Melanie and her neighbor, Angela.


And this is the star of the show, Adam. He answered most of the questions for the team, though the rest of us tried.


Melanie, Michelle and I especially agonized over the anagrams. We think we're pretty smart because we work with words every day, but we weren't even close. Most of the teams I saw were in their 40s. I don't see how a younger team could compete very well because a lot of the questions involved things that happened before their time. It was a fun night, but not something I'd do again. It's a brain strain.

Fixing the drip system was one thing on my "To Do" list. Another was to have the living room carpet cleaned. I did.


It looks almost as good as new.

So, it has been a sunny two weeks, and I've accomplished a few things. But it has also been a very hard time. The day after I posted the picture of Pensive George, he disappeared. Bob and I have scoured the neighborhood. I check the animal control web site every day. I called the carpet cleaning fellow to make sure Georgie didn't climb into his van. I made flyers and posted them. Bob says, "Coyotes can't read posters." I fear he may be right, there isn't a trace of the little guy.

Coyotes haven't been a problem for us before. Unlike raccoons, coyotes have stayed out of the yard and have never bothered the chicken cages. They keep the jackrabbit population in the valley under control, which is a good thing. Georgie never strayed very far from the house, though, and didn't stay out long, so at least one coyote must have gotten bolder.

This the first Wednesday in ages that I haven't had a doctor's appointment. Today I'm home making big messes in the house.

I have two fellows here to install a new whole house fan. If you don't have one of these, I'd like to recommend one. We don't have air conditioning in this house, we have a big fan in the hallway that draws air through the house and out through the attic. There are vents in the roof that allow the air to exit. So in warm weather, we open the windows in the evening and let the fan run all night (adds about 30 cents a day to our electricity). Cool air is pulled in. In the morning we turn the fan off and close the windows. The house is very well insulated, so it stays pretty cool all day even when the temperatures are past 100ºF.

As an added bonus, the sound of the fan is white noise. I get addicted to it. In the fall I find myself turning the fan on before I go to bed, even though it's chilly outside. I just pull the down comforter around my face and snuggle down. It's wonderful. Bob and the cats do not agree.

Anyway, last fall the old fan started to fail.

I can hear the installers talking from where I sit. The first thing they notice, upon accessing the attic, is that there had been a fire in the house some time ago. Yep, it happened when my dad and his brothers were little boys. Their woodstove caught the attic on fire. They were able to put it out, though, because their father had insisted on big pipes and hoses when the water system was put in. Every time someone goes into the attic, it's a reminder that my family has been here a long time. I love it.

The guys are also complaining (good naturedly). The attic is hard to access. That's because there are two levels of ceiling. The original high one and the newer one my mom put in. There is still a high ceiling in the living room, but the rest of the house has standard ceilings. So there are two layers to saw through. They're grumbling that the old fan was put in to STAY. Well, of course. When you've lived in a house forever and intend to stay there, you don't do a half-assed job. It must be much easier to install things in a new, flimsy house.

I hear the same grumbles from electricians, floor installers (the rooms aren't square), the roofer, painters –  almost anyone who is hired to do anything. There are special grumbles from the plumber. The last one I hired probably won't come back. That's okay, we'll manage.

People get into the habit of expecting that life is supposed to be perfect. You cannot maintain that attitude if you live in an old house in the country.

Last week we had the living room carpet cleaned. I'm taking advantage of having the furniture out of the room to paint the trim. New windows were installed 10 years ago and the trim was never painted. I'm a piss poor painter. I can't even get that blue tape stuff up straight. I splatter paint everywhere, I get it in my hair and on my glasses and clothes. Imagine hiring someone who has muscle and mobility issues to paint in your house. That's me.

Luckily I don't expect life to be perfect.

My house is often full of "kids" - Bob's friends. They're mostly over 25, but are still kids in my mind. Anyway, if something is out of place on a weekend morning, I just assume that one of the kids left it that way.

So when I went to take a shower and saw a purple, smudged drawing on the shower floor...


I assumed one of the "kids" had left a message for Bob. I had to bend over quite close to see what it was.


Hmmm. Looked familiar, where had I seen that before?

Oh yeah! On the bottom of my own foot! The nurse did say that marker would wash off easily. Evidently you can also make prints with it. I may have discovered a new form of printmaking, draw on your foot and stand on a piece of damp paper. You could make greeting cards or something. Much easier than carving a potato.

When the lilacs are blooming I most despair that some people were not meant to live on this planet.

Some people have noses that keep them from enjoying the finest things in life. The smell of lilacs and cuddling a kitty are two that come to mind.

Several years ago a new family moved into our rural neighborhood. That didn't happen often, and mostly none of us liked it. I decided to buck the trend and try to make them feel welcome, so I picked a huge bouquet of my flowers and went knocking on their door. The lady of the house almost slammed it in my face. She peeked out and said, "Get those flowers away from here, they'll make me sneeze!"

So what in the world was that family doing in Sloughhouse, where we are proud of our dust and pollen? Not much, it turns out. They stayed inside their house a lot and finally moved away.

I'm so glad MY nose loves lilacs. I intend to enjoy them profusely this week. I just won't take a bouquet to work.

The back yard, March 25.

The back yard, April 2.

The old lilacs took advantage of 2 days of sunshine to start blooming. How can they grow so fast?


This white lilac is at least 50 years old.


There are lots of other things blooming in the yard this morning. All of the camellias are covered with flowers. The dogwood tree, like the lilacs, just had buds last week. Today it is gorgeous with blooms. The tulips that Susie and I pushed into the cold December ground two months late are making a valiant effort.

I'd be out there taking pictures except it's cloudy again. The sun has only been out during the week, when I'm inside at work. Also, the carpet cleaner guy will be here in a little while and I'm still trying to drag furniture out of the living room. You know your carpet is bad when you're embarrassed to even have the cleaning guy see it. I hope it comes clean. If it doesn't, it's out the door.

This isn't what I'd planned to do. I had spent a couple of days thinking of a really elaborate joke to pull on my foot doctor. It involved stuffing a sock with cotton and leaking iodine through it to look like blood. It was almost more appropriate for Halloween.

But yesterday I discovered that I had to have an x-ray before my appointment with the foot doc. I couldn't figure out how to pack all the props I needed and get them in place in the short amount of time I'd have, and how to do it at Kaiser in plain sight of the other patients in the orthopedics waiting room. So I just gave up, decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

Then I ended up in an exam room waiting for the doc. And waiting and waiting. His nurse stuck her head in and asked if I wanted a magazine. "No," I answered. "But do you have a marking pen?" She brought me the kind they use to mark your body before they cut on it. And then stayed to see what I was going to do with it.

The nurses made bets on whether the doc, who is a very somber person, would even crack a smile. I kept the artwork out of sight while the doc checked the right foot. When he asked to see the other foot - the one he prefers because he gets to hack on it - I held it up for him to see.


I did get a smile. It was worth it.