Helen Mathey-Horn's Blog, page 22

Questions for End of January Gardners

Borrowing from Compassion Knit.

*Have you gotten a seed catalog yet? No. I end up not ordering from them so I don’t sign up.

*Are you planning to plant by seed this year? Probably not. Not that much space left for more plants, although the idea of Zinnias might tempt me.

*Are you still giving away zucchini bread made from last fall’s harvest? I didn’t plant zucchini last year (or any other vegetables), but I do have bananas even after making banana bread recently for all my neighbors. And there is another bunch on the kitchen counter that need attention.

*When is the last time someone gave you flowers? I buy myself flowers regularly, every time we shop. This doesn’t give my husband much chance to buy them for me, lol, but he still does occasionally.

*Who taught you to garden? My mother, her sister(my aunt from that side) and both my grandmothers (maternal and paternal). Then later in life my dad started vegetable gardening, so take your pick.

*Are you months from these decisions, as I am, and just clinging to the rest of our blog pals photos of greenery and blossoms? Oklahoma will green up pretty fast, but today looks like snow so any bright pictures of flowers are appreciated. Also appreciated are the carnations on the living room table and the orchid that rebloomed for me (See opening picture).

*Did you know you can get gorgeous anemone in a flower bouquet? I love anemones and when I lived in Europe/Germany would regularly buy them at the Saturday markets.

*Have you ever knitted or crocheted a flower? Not that I can recall. I have embroidered and used flower colors in two different afghans and I have a crocheted afghan a friend made that has ‘flower’ motifs at the center of each square.

This is the time of year that I really need color. Even Oklahoma, which isn’t currently under a blanket of snow, is kind of colorless. Mostly I’m getting my color fix through the birds at the feeder. We potentially could have snow this evening. Not sure I’m cheering for that or not. It does make everything look clean and beautiful, until it is churned up.

Shutterstock picture – not my own.

The ‘Graft’ Blanket

During the Depression (1930’s USA) my father-in-law worked in Oklahoma arranging either federal or bank loans with federal backing for farmers. He would check with a farmer and make suggestions on what he needed or could use for farm improvements in seed, equipment, or animals and also secured the farmer loans for home improvements especially kitchens figuring the wife was just as much a part of the farming process, especially as canning farm produce would have been a necessary activity.

Somewhere one of the families he helped gifted him a wool blanket which they were so proud to be able to give him. He understood their pride and accepted it.

Here it is, on our bed. It still is warm, although the ‘satin’ edging is long gone. We should all be made so well as to still be in use ninety-plus years later.

70 pound dog for scale?

A Day Late and A Dollar Short

Well, a day late for 3 on Thursday.

1) Continuing to crochet my Dahlia afghan in the CAL by Lucy Attic24. I’m behind there also, but only 4 rows which pretty much means I’m on schedule. There is no ‘race’ or ‘prize’ (other than a finished afghan) for speed. I did print out this next week’s directions so as I said, I’m only four (count them 4!) rows behind which is two (count them 2) colors before I begin this next week’s directions.

2) Dog Picture – Pooches They always set up a ‘photo booth’ for the season and of course the current one is a ‘Kissing Booth’.

I’ll lick you for free!

3) An Orchid is reblooming. I think orchids are so cool/beautiful and I often can’t stop myself from buying another one. Then I try to keep them alive after they have flowered. My mother’s attitude to some indoor plants was to ‘treat them like cut flowers’, that is ‘they are probably going to die so don’t even pretend you’re going to keep them alive.’ But when I not only manage to keep them alive, but they rebloom…woohoo!

I have no idea of the ‘name’ or type. I just love the look.

So my late ‘3 on Thursday’.

No Squirrels were hurt in the writing of this post…drat.

The bird feeders are getting a workout today. Temperatures are in the mid/low thirties and we had some snow last night. It is the wet and heavy kind. I think the temperatures and the covered ground have brought more than the normal amount of birds to my feeders.

I’ve seen cardinals (2 males and female at one time), blue jay, titmouse, chickadee, house finches, and I think two types of sparrows, juncos, a woodpecker and a wren. In some cases where I can’t tell a male from a female (woodpeckers and wrens) there might have been more than just one bird, taking turns.

My parents always had a feeder (or two) in the backyard. With the large plate glass window in the kitchen looking over that part of the yard it was a great set up for bird watching all year long. It was ‘free’ entertainment if you don’t count the cost of the seed.

The unwelcome visitors were the squirrels. My sweet aunt battled them at her feeders every way she could think of. Even bought (or was gifted for Christmas) a ‘squirrel proof’ feeder that closed down when the weigh of a squirrel landed on it. They ripped that shield back. Yes, no love lost on squirrels.

My dad set up a ‘spinner’. A turning pole with a weight on one end and screw for securing a dried cob of corn on the other. The squirrels would run up it and their weight would ‘spin’ them right off…until it didn’t. Some squirrel started clinging tight and riding it out, spinning like crazy and gnawing away at the corn cob. It was pretty funny to watch and the squirrels were only paying back in amusement for what they ate in bird food.

I have squirrels here, but with a cat and a dog, they are pretty cautious about time at the feeders. The dog would love to get one and the cat would be game also. But as I mostly see birds at the feeders I don’t begrudge the squirrels some of the food.

What’s a winter snow day like in your yard?

Yes, we would rather the world didn’t have squirrels, thank you very much.

When the Red, Red Robin

What the heck? There was a robin in the birdbath this morning and way too early, I think. It could be a male headed north, they do leave earlier than the females, but…January 8th?

Climate change?

Very disturbing to me and I don’t know a reason why.

(Temperatures were in the low 30’s and the bird bath is ‘heated’ for the winter. I unplug it once the season changes so I might have been the only ‘open’ water it could find in a backyard.)

Now I’ll be keeping an eye out to see if there are others around. And I’ll check “Journey North” to see what others are reporting.

Internet photo – not my own

Insecure Writer’s Support Group

January 8 question – What started you on your writing journey? Was it a particular book, movie, story, or series? Was it a teacher/coach/spouse/friend/parent? Did you just “know” suddenly you wanted to write?   My awesome co-hosts for the January 8 posting of the IWSG are T. Powell Coltrin, Victoria Marie Lees, Stephen Tremp, Renee Scattergood, and J.H. Moncrieff!

In high school we had an option for an English elective of “Creative Writing”. I signed up. I think I already had stories in my head, ideas for Star Trek episodes and such.

So I had this novel idea (idea for a novel?) about a future earth/US and people rediscovering technologies lost in some disaster/catastrophe. It got started but never finished. It was fun world building a culture that had been lost. How would descendants figure things out? The same idea is in a more recent book I’ve been working on, now that I think about it.

So things just ‘sat’ for a long time, although I did daydream stories. Then I was at my parents’ home one summer (as a teacher – summers off) and was reading three paperback books a day (romances – talk about potato chip reading) during a family trip to their property in Wisconsin in the woods and after three days of this I told my mother I thought I could write something as good as I was reading.

Her response was…”Do it.”

Back at her house I used Mom’s computer while she was at work and hammered out a book. It’s been transferred from one storage format to another about three times (if that will give you an idea of how far back we are talking). It has never been published, but when I went back to the ‘day job’, as my father would call it, I started spending my nights writing. It wasn’t until about three years ago that, thanks to my daughter-in-law who gave me the next ‘poke’, I got into e-publishing.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Here are two of many.

Why is it only the 6th?

I keep looking at the calendar and I swear it has to be further into the Month of January than the 6th! Christmas and New Year’s seem ages ago. Is this like the time warp that occurs every February, which has to be the longest month in the calendar year even though it only has 28 days most years?

What have I done in the last week? Read some, cleaned some, cooked some, yeah, pretty much the normal stuff. So why do I feel like I’m caught in “Groundhog Day”?

I did start on the CAL(Crochet-a-long) that Lucy of Attic24 has started. I’m about 3 notes in out of 15 so I’ve got to get a move on it. She puts out 15 steps per week.

I love the colors! I crocheted her afghan from the ‘Sweet Peas’ pattern last year and I have an afghan in nasturtium colors my mother made and with the dahlia colors in this year’s afghan I’m going to have a room of flowers. That’s okay by me.

But back to the complaint. There should be no complaint, so I’ll shut up. Hope everyone has a great week.

Looking Back – End of the Year Review

Summarize your year with

One photo per month and the first sentence of the first post of the month.

January –

I’ve not been asked that many questions about my writing, so I’m kind of scratching my head.

February –

Yes, I’m a day early, but is it see the shadow and six more weeks of winter, or not see the shadow means six more weeks of winter?

March – In the past I’ve read blogs that do ‘challenges’.

April – As in “April’s Fool”!

May – May 1 question – What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

And….

May – No, this is not an SOS type “May Day”, but a tradition in my family of gifting flowers on May 1st.

(Two May 1st posts)

June – Excerpt my book “Dawning”.

July – Well, my excuse is I was on the road.

August – I lived for 3 years near Hiroshima (Iwakuni – not to be confused with Iwa Jima).

September – For September the prompt/question is – “If you could pick one place in the world to sit and write your next story, where would it be and why?”

October – According to Bing it is Coffee Day.

November – I confess I spend too much time during the day looking at other websites.

December – Can you tell?

That’s my year in review. Thought I had lost my cat, but found her after almost 3 weeks of being stuck in a neighbor’s garage. Quite a bit of travel. Some of it with ‘hazards’. (Looking at you Colorado.) On the other hand it was very pleasant being snowed in at Vail (as long as you have a great hotel room). Also got to Idaho, the Grand Canyon, Pennsylvania and Florida. (Told you it was a lot of traveling.)

I have no idea what 2020 holds. Guess I’ll just hang on and find out.

Happy New Year to you all!

Ending of Another Year.

Christmas is past…still a few family get togethers, but basically past. Gift wrap is in the trash…pick up will be one day off due to CHRISTMAS! Decorations are still up…com’on don’t pull the lights and such down just yet. I could forget and leave them up. Turns out one swag of artificial greenery got left up in the dining room this past year. I didn’t notice it until about September. Obviously we use that room a lot, huh? Well at that point I just left it up…I mean it was closer to going up again than the take down date.

New Year’s Eve is fast approaching, but nothing special for us. I’m not big into partying and it is probably safer to be home that night.

Making resolutions? Nah, either I will change, when I’ll change, or I won’t. I think I made better and more lasting resolutions at the beginning of school years than I ever did on January 1st.

Boy, I’m sounding more and more like a ‘scrooge’, “Bah, humbug.”

Still, I hope the new year brings good things for everyone, individually and mankind as a whole. Not everyone is going to have the ‘good’ in the new year. The bad comes with the good, but one can hope that people will be a little kinder, smarter, far thinking.

Almost sounds like a Garrison Keillor end to Lake Wobegon, “Where the men are good looking, the women strong and the children above average.”

Still, hoping your New Year will be more good than bad, more loving than hate filled, and you accomplish at least some of what you set out to do.

Love.

“Christmas is Coming…

The goose is getting fat. Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat.”

Now I’ll have that tune stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

I love the music at Christmas, from the simple carols to the Messiah. One Christmas I asked for a wood recorder for Christmas…I still have it. Another I asked for a copy of the Messiah (the paper copy not a cd/recording).

If I were to play that game of what is your favorite Christmas song…

I don’t think I could pick a favorite. There are so many great carols and modern pop tunes and of course the Christmas section of the Messiah.

Let’s see…

“Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabela”, “Go Tell it on the Mountain”, “For Unto Us”, “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”, “Gloria”, (I love singing the ‘second’ part of the runs against the ‘first’ part. It always sounds like a cascade of music.)

Now, do I have the radio on in the house or the car? No, but there is enough in most of the stores to meet my needs. And I could always sit down to the piano and pound out a few chords.
So as Bing would say,

“May all your Christmases be Merry and Bright,

And may all your Christmases be White.”

And if they aren’t, you can do like the Japanese did in the Kitte Mall in Tokyo, flock a fake tree and hang mirrors on strings like snowflakes. Still one of the ‘coolest’ things I’ve ever seen done. (The picture above is indoors.)

And the intro picture is not current. We are not having a white Christmas. But still….