Helen Mathey-Horn's Blog, page 25

Arggggh!

Well, now it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day”!

As many sober, somber days of remembrance there have been in this month it is time for some levity. So “Avast, me mateys, and like a pirate talk!”

This day was created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers, of Albany, Oregon, U.S according to Wikipedia. So drink some rum to their creativity. How many people can single-handedly start a new holiday that has nothing to do with Presidents, one-date events or family, just the fun of talking like a late Elizabethan scallywag.

I’m sure you can find some rules, or rather ‘guidelines’ to follow. Here ‘arr’ a few.

So as the weather is not yet cold enough (not even cool) nor is Halloween on the horizon to ‘shiver me timbers’ might as well try your best ‘argh’ and fracture the current English sentence structure in the name of fun.

Best be getting on with it, Matey.

9-18

If the other day’s post was 9-11, then I guess I do one for 9-18.

918? The area code for the northeastern corner of Oklahoma including Tulsa. Downtown has an area with a large 9 and an 8 with a gap between for you to be ‘the one in 918’. It’s a cute idea and a lot of people have their pictures taken as the ‘One’ in ‘918’

So Happy 918 Day, Tulsa!

9/11

I hadn’t thought about writing anything today, but saw on facebook several references to 9/11 and it jogged the ‘Where were you?’ thoughts.

I was in Wuerzburg, Germany. My classroom was across from the supply guy’s office. School was out (because of the time difference it was 3:00ish PM), the kids had gone home on the busses and I was prepping for the next day. Walked into the supply room to ‘chat’ and probably look for something. The guys and gal that worked/hung out there were watching their tv, which was kind of strange as they usually didn’t.

Burning tower and a second plane hit. OMG Of course nobody had any clue what the heck was going on and it was unsettling. That is too mild a word.

I emailed my husband that I wanted to go home. We left for our house in a German neighborhood. When we got home, I literally battened down the hatches. The windows all had rolladens which roll down to cover the windows and the patio doors. I’m not sure I even turned on lights (not that you could have known with the rolladens down). It seemed right to sit in the darkness.

School was cancelled for the next day as the military tried to figure out their response overseas. When we finally did go to base we went through the front gate and to do that we had to go up a hill and there piled high and spilling onto the street were flowers and notes from the German community for the Americans. I hadn’t expected that. I don’t think the rest of the Americans had expected it either.

Shock, sadness, then the realization that there was support.

Black Swallowtail!

A few weeks ago I thought I saw a monarch caterpillar on parsley and brought it in along with what was left of the parsley and added a leaf of milkweed. A few days later I had a chrysalis, but it was definitely not monarch. So a quick search of caterpillar and chrysalis came up with black swallowtail.

And if you look at the picture from the internet you see it is on parsley, duh.

Well, it did form a chrysalis which was ‘horned’ and green and today it emerged. Confirmation on it being a black swallowtail.

I set it out on the goldenrod and short time later it was gone.

Insecure Writers Group – If you could…

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?”

Well that didn’t take much thought and although I know an answer, I’m not sure if the book/story will ever get written.

Do you have the kind of imagination that sees something and then wonders if you are really ‘seeing’ or is there something else going on. Okay that’s kind of a weird way for me to state what I’m thinking of so, lets get into the story of the story which was never written, but should be.

During the 1990’s I lived near Pisa, Italy. Actually the town was Tirrenia and I had with me my small son, not sure if he was even kindergarten age at this time. Being single with a single child means that child needs some activity and so we would often go to the beach in Marina di Pisa, the village/town where the Arno River (flows through Florence and Pisa) empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had just installed HUGE rocks along the sea side to cut down on storm erosion and small child thought they were great for climbing on and conveniently at the point where the Arno meets the sea there is a bar. All bars in Italy are family/tourist friendly. So you can get alcoholic drinks, but most people are there for the coffee or soft drinks, or ice cream.

Back to the story. One morning, a Saturday or a Sunday, I took my energetic son down to that bar, parked the car and let him start clambering over the rocks as I walked on the sidewalk edging the breakers. In places enough sand had washed into make ‘tiny’ beaches. At one spot there looked to be ‘fabric’ washed up and mostly buried by the sand. Imagination kicked in…”what if you went over to the spot and pulled on that fabric and discovered it was part of a dress and it was still connected to a body?”

I never did ‘check’ to see if there was anything but fabric, but I still think the setting and idea would be a great mystery story, especially if the luckless person who investigated the cloth, in the public place, turned out to have a connection to the dead body and therefore a suspect.

So I should go back to that bar on the confluence of the Arno with the Tyrrhenian Sea and write this book?

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Linked here

More writers’ ideas here.

Gathering Place – Photos

I love flowers!

Tulsa built (with the help of Kaiser Foundation) a fabulous park known as “Gathering Place”. Our family seems to want to call it The Gathering Place, but the “The” is not really part of its name.

It sits on a stretch of the Arkansas River just about across from our neighborhood. That is if you went to the end of our street and veered a little south you would be there.

We can walk there, which is nice.

They have an ice cream/pastry shop on one level of the main building. We decided to stop into day and as it was a little overcast I thought it might be a good time to take a few pictures of that part of the park. This is a drop in the bucket for all that is possible, but I like their ‘engineered’ wetland area.

Water Lilies



Cannas and Pickerel (the spiky purple)



A ‘milkweed’



Sumac



Also Sumac…just not as ‘ripe’.



Gaillardia or Blanket Flower



Cardinal flower (lobelia)

The one I did not take a picture of was the pink primrose.

This is not my picture…Thank you internet.

Except for the white waterlilies a lot of reds and pinks!

And that makes a happy/sad end of Summer

Dog Days of Summer

Well, time is slipping away. At this point I would (in the past) have been thinking fiercely of what I was planning to do during the school year. Also getting set up and getting over jet-lag from the 8+ hour flight to which ever country I was teaching in.

This summer seems to be the summer of the ‘dog’. Apache has developed a limp. She limped when she was a pup, when we got her from the pound. A result of malnutrition before we got her. She was found in a field so who knows what she had to eat before she landed in the pound. The vet recommended a ‘joint diet’ (Hills if you are interested.) and the limp cleared up quickly and we became believers of proper diets. But now four years on, still on the joint diet, she is starting to limp, which seems way too early to be an old age thing.

Vet says arthritis in her elbow and probably shoulder joints. (Aside to parents…nutrition has a life-long effect.)

So today, Apache got laser-therapy.

What? Really? Yes, just aim that thing at the area you want to treat, move it around and apparently it helps with joints and such. It will take more than one visit. And apparently it can work on humans in the same way…can we try my left knee?

So, treatment…1) lose some weight (yes in common), 2) pills for inflammation, and 3) laser therapy. Also keep her from ‘jumping’ around too much. Since she likes to get on our bed I guess, that is out. It’s not so much the jumping up as the jumping down.

And price…well, we won’t discuss that. As a friend said to her mother after her mother found out how much she was spending on her cat’s health….”I would do the same for you.” Which brings me to my final thought…

How a person treats their animals is the best sign of how they will treat you.

The Airport Game

I think my mother started this. One of those time fillers that means absolutely nothing, but bragging rights.

How many airports have you landed or taken off from?

I think I count 71.

None in central/south America and none in Africa. And strangely none in Canada, although I’ve flown over it a lot. I’m not counting multiple landings/takeoffs from the same airport…looking at you Frankfurt and Pisa. However if there are two airports in a city or they had one and built an newer one and you’ve been in both that counts as two, ie Denver. If the plane landed between your starting city and your ‘final destination’ you may still count any airports between the two even if you didn’t get off the plane. You may also count county airports if you’ve been up in a plane at one.

New York (JFK and LaGuardia), Newark, Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis, DC (National and Reagan),Seattle, Anchorage, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson, Flagstaff, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas-Ft.Worth, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Denver (old and New), Salt Lake City, Boise, Minneapolis/StPaul(1), Milwaukee, Cedar Falls(Cedar Rapids?), St Louis, Detroit (old and new), Logan(Boston) I think that’s it for the US.

Frankfurt, Hahn, Rhein-Main AB, Munich, Hannover, Hamburg, Lakenheath, Paris-Orly, Paris-Charles DeGaulle, Dublin, London Gatwick, Milan (Malpensa), Rome (Leonardo diVinci Fuimicino), Florence, Pisa, Palermo, Istanbul, Xian, Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo (Narita), Iwakuni AB, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Haneda (Tokyo), Yokota, Yokosuka, Hokkaido(Misawa AB), Daegu, Busan, Seoul, Christchurch, Auckland

It’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten one or two. And I’m pretty much over flying, except it is the fastest way between two points.

The Serendipity of Research

In the 1990’s when my mother was researching the local library’s microfiche files for old newspaper accounts of doings in her childhood village for a book she and her best friend were putting together…(How’s that for an explanatory phrase?)…I happened on a small newspaper tidbit which I wish I had taken time to print off.

I don’t even know how I happened to see it or where it came from. I don’t recall it being something local. It sticks in my mind that is was from a more easterly state (than Illinois) and I want to say something like the 1860-1880’s time frame.

I will try to give you the gist of the story.

There lived in a village a woman who would have been called in her time a ‘scold’, mean-tempered and mean-worded. No one liked her and they doubted she had ever set foot in a church or had any intentions to so. She was the most obnoxious woman in the village. There also lived a very pious man who one day asked the woman for her hand in marriage, which greatly surprised everyone, and further more, she agreed which doubly surprised the locals. So they were married, but the woman went on much as she had and the husband was quiet, considerate and put up with her behavior.

Finally someone in the village found the nerve to ask the man ‘Why did you ever marry her?’

He explained that he figured that bearing her abuse on earth would garner him a place in heaven.

Word of what he had said got back to the woman whose reply was, and this is what I remember clearly, “I’ll be no man’s pack horse to heaven!” And from that day was a changed woman and a dutiful wife.

Get to heaven on your own merits, buddy!

Isn’t that a story waiting to be written?

Hummer!

Not the four wheeled kind.

Hummingbirds are such unlikely creatures! From their jeweled attire to their top gun fighter pilot maneuvers and behaviors. They are (with toy poodles) one of those small animals that you are really glad that they are small. Can you imagine their energy and aggressive behavior in something the size of sparrow or worse hawk?

Even so I am so glad to see them using the flowers I have planted and feeder I maintain. They are magical and fearless and should only exist in fiction it seems.

My parents loved hummers too. The statement, ‘Hummer!’ even quietly said, would stop conversation and all eyes would turn to the kitchen’s picture window to look at the feeder on the other side of the porch.

They also maintained feeders at their trailer in Wisconsin, while they were there, and often mom would stop washing dishes, or whatever had her at that end of the trailer to watch them come up and use the feeder.

When things would really ‘heat up’ as probably chicks were being feed, the battles around the feeder were quick and apparently bloodless but most definite.

Husband and I stopped in southern Arizona one summer at a town named Patagonia (not the one at the end of South America). There is (should be changed to was) a person in town that has at least ten feeders up, across the back of their house. They let people walk in and seat themselves (chairs and a shade tent are provided) and watch the ‘hummers’, not just the Ruby Throated which is the common one through most of the US. Donations towards sugar to make the sugar water were gladly accepted. (Love the internet, just found the place. Apparently the homeowners are gone but their feeding stations are still maintained.)

I don’t know which was more entertaining, the feisty hummers battling for the best position/feeder or the ‘watchers’ calling out a type of hummer and the post it was at. (Each post had a number above it.) So…”Calliope on number 3″ All binoculars would swivel in unison.

Not really any different than my parents’ backyard feeder except in quantity of feeders and kinds of hummers. I wish my parents had made a trip down there. They would have loved it.

When I think of my dad, he was kind of gruff at times. Not necessarily a ‘hugger’, not that I didn’t feel loved, he just showed it in different actions than hugs. He did love my mom and they both loved nature. I think it was the growing up on a farm kind of love of nature.

Not my dad’s but this gives you the idea.

One of the ‘found’ items he brought into show her one day was a branch from a cherry tree on the back of their acre lot. It contained a perfect hummingbird nest…fledglings had flown. Mom found a narrow wood box (who knows where) and lined the back with some flowery paper and they put the branch in there along with a finger puppet hummingbird I had gifted them with at some time and (I think) a newspaper article about hummers. This was hung in the kitchen in a spot that the kids and grandkids could enjoy it.

Wish I knew where mine are nesting. But I’ll settle for the feeder sightings…Hummer!