Now Norma Knits

Terrier Tuesday -- Safe From The Storm Edition

Hi Everyone,

While Alpha-O-Mine is sitting over there laughing her ass off at this ridiculous article (because she's SURE everyone who gets lost in the woods who DOESN'T have a compass [or a GPS or iPhone or smartphone] is suuuuure to have a magnetized paper clip and a styrofoam cup, not to mention water, tape, and a pen) she says I should get to my blogging, so here I am.

I guess Alpha told you we have a new screened-in porch. It's not all-the-way finished yet, but we all looooooooove it, especially when it's raining. Here I am, outside in the middle of a downpour, and notice how dry I am!

This weekend my Abigail was home, along with her Jeremy. We all sat out on the new porch and watched the thunderstorm with Alpha, and whenever Alpha could get away from the rest of us (she can be anti-social, as you already know), she would put her yoga mat down out there and do her stretches, or read.

It's so AWESOME! It's like being outside, but inside, all at once. And Alpha doesn't need to get all bent out of shape that I might be running off, because I'm held inside by the screens.

Stupid squirrel doesn't know enough to get in out of the rain, though. Perhaps we need to get him a magnetized paper clip and a styrofoam cup....

 

Love,

 

Mr. Jefferies

 

 

Reorg, Part 2

In the home office reorganization, I've tried to upgrade a bit while also trying to be conservative in both money spent and impact to the environment in the form of things recycled, repurposed, reused if possible.

I retired the ancient (but still working well -- just too damn slow for me) Compaq tower computer. I donated it to ReSOURCE, along with some various and sundry other old electronics. I kept the non-interlaced monitor I had, bought a new keyboard and mouse, and repurposed the older 17-inch laptop, to turn it into the new "desktop" home computer.

The original plan was to place it under the monitor stand (which is also a new purchase), where it looked all clean and sleek and nifty and neat, but that didn't work because I have to lift the lid to turn it on. My new rule is to ALWAYS turn the computers off at night in order to save electricity, and so after only one night, I discovered that my original plan was not going to work. It's a big pain in the butt to pull it out from there and lift the lid to push the "on" button, because of the tugging of the cables and such. So it sits on the side.  

This laptop has had nine lives. It was my deposition laptop for a few years. Its motherboard died and was replaced (under warranty). In January 2007, when I first started doing CART at UVM, it was my CART laptop until the hard drive died. I had to buy a new, smaller laptop for CART, but I had the hard drive replaced on this one (under extended warranty) and used it at home. It has a really big screen and is great for watching movies, but it's kind of cumbersome to lug around for CART. Last year the extended warranties all ran out, and immediately (of course) the wireless internet card died. I opted not to get that replaced, and now just use it with the ethernet cable. I hope I have not done a stupid thing here by sending the old sturdy and reliable, albeit slow, Compaq tower away, and kept this one that has had such a checkered past, but it is definitely a big improvement in performance. It runs good old Windows XP Professional, and it isn't used all that much, so I hope it will serve a good purpose for a while.

In my remote CART work, I like to run two laptops simultaneously. There is a lot going on at one time, and my brain wants to go on overload if it's all going on on one computer. Having two laptops set up, doing discrete things, helps me to better compartmentalize. So I set up two:  One for receiving the remote audio and for chatting with my remote student and the A/V team there, as well as monitoring the live stream as seen exactly as my student sees it. The second laptop has my steno system running, and the linking software to send it to the streaming website that my student logs into and receives my CART transcript as it is being written.

See? I told you a lot was going on!

So once again, I have been maybe a bit too minimalist in my setup in the past. I made it through the spring semester, and part of the summer semester, with my two laptops sitting side by side, cables all ajumble, with my prep materials and the class calendar piled around me somewhere, just making the best of it and trying not to trip on anything when I stood up. I knew that I would like it better if one of the laptops was raised higher than the other. Again, it helps to prioritize events, helps me to feel mentally calm and organized.  

In the spring, I handed down my high-volume mega-printer to Abigail, who needed a better, faster, more reliable printer for law school. I (sing it with me) am no longer a courrrrrt reporrrrrterrrrrr, and so I can get by with the other cheap, low-volume, household type of multi-function scanner/fax/printer now. Getting rid of the printer on steroids freed up a lot of space on my work table.

Et voila!

I was able to accomplish this without spending any new money. That riser or stand, or whatever you want to call it, was a part of the other desk where the "home computer" resides (which is right next to me in my home office). The old tower computer used to sit on this thing, on the floor. I just put it on my desk/table for my second laptop, and there's room to organize other stuff such as the wireless router and the Netgear box I have for splitting the ethernet cable into four, and other stuff and nonsense like that. Awesomely better!

I got rid of some other superfluous things, such as my older iPod...

...that I never use since I replaced it with one of those wonderful little newer Nano ones, and my older digital camera. I sold them both at Gazelle. $24 for the camera and $31 for the iPod. Not a lot of money, but something for my troubles, and it gets it out of my space and gets to someone else who can use it while it still has some useful life left in it. I've still got unopened boxes of 3-inch diskettes and other old crap to get rid of, but I'm chipping away at things. 

So now I'm all ready for my fancy new chair and Happy Place Headphones to arrive, and then, BRING ON THE WORK!

In the process of all this, I stumbled upon something that made me a little bit weepy with nostalgia:

Is There Anything Sexier?

The architect that we hired all those years ago to do two things -- mirror-image the design that I found in a magazine so that it would fit the topography of our lot, and design us a screened-in porch -- was the biggest waste of money we have ever spent.

Oh, man.

Sadly, that statement is not accurate, because wasting of money we have been quite good at. But stick with me here and allow me the rhetoric, because honestly, he really sucked. I mean, he did the mirror-imaging just fine, but it turns out that my builder said he could have just done that without me hiring the architect to do it. And the one other thing we wanted was a screened-in porch on the back of the house, and the dope architect (and by "dope" I do not mean it in the modern slang sense of the word, but in the traditional way) insisted that we should build a sunroom instead. His words, "Put it this way: You'll either do it now, or later."

So we fell for it. And you know what every couple since 1985 who fell for building a sunroom in Vermont has learned? Building a sunroom in Vermont is right up there in the Top 10 Stupidest Things You Can Do. I won't go into all the reasons why, because honestly, I AM JUST SO OVER IT.

Because now, 24 f^%king years later, after sinking untold thousands of dollars into trying to repair, rebuild, rethink, repurpose that g88damn-piece-of-**** sunroom, we are building.... guess what.... a screened-in porch (with an attached airlock/anteroom thingy). 

Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight than a blue sky over the rafters of a new screened porch?

Me either.

Man, I would like to send that architect a bill. Or let Mr. Jefferies leave him a deposit on his doorstep or something.

 

It Was A Social Media Vacation

I took a couple days off and withdrew from the world, from social media, even from Mr. Jefferies. He was not amused. He was pretty damn glad when I got home, I'll tell you that. 

While I was gone, some carpenters were working on replacing and repairing and releveling parts of the deck. Ahhhhhh, it's all clean and straight and white and beautiful.

Mind you, they are not finished all the work yet. But at least this part is finally done. I've been waiting for this for a lonnnnnng time. I just can't stop gazing at it. 

I also came home to find that the beautiful Stella D'Oro daylilies are open and there are pints of blueberries to be picked and broccoli to be harvested, among other things.

(The netting keeps the birds away.)

A lot of beautiful things can happen in a couple of days.

All this helps me to find a little bit of zen and keeps my mind off the fact that I also came home to find that the Japanese beetles are having a convention an orgy on the asparagus ferns. 

Fuckers.

zzzzzzz.... what? Oh, Wait. Did I Already Say That?

It's taking me a bit longer than I expected to get back on my feet. I'm thankfully not sick -- just tiiiiiiiiiired. Lucky for me, I do have the luxury of getting some extra rest (I had a 2-hour nap yesterday), so hopefully I won't get sick.

I got a wonderful package from Marianne the other day, and in it was a note on this paper:

....and yes, I feel exactly like that. Beet! I mean: beat! 

I can hardly get out of my own shadow. I did manage to accomplish a few things yesterday:

1) I archeologized (Yes, that is a word. Because I say so.) my pantry a little bit yesterday and got rid of the big tubs of drink mixes that were either a) all clumped together in a solid mass, b) had use-by dates at least five years ago, or c) both.

2) Ditto with some ancient magazines.

3) I found a place for a new old table we bought the other day while campaigning. (Campaigning does have its good sides.)

From Vallee's Den of Antiquity in Grand Isle, VT.

4) I watered my houseplants -- the few that were still clinging to life after being ignored for five or six months.

5) I wound up this ball of yarn:

And then I collapsed. 

P.S. This just in:  The complete Grand Isle County voting results are now posted on The Islander's website.

 

Collections, Continued -- Vintage Citrus Juicers

By popular request after I mentioned it in passing in a blog post a while back, Mr. Jefferies and his rubber chicken would like to present David's juicer collection, which was increased by one on my trip to Nova Scotia.

The one I got him in Nova Scotia is No. 2 from the left, 2nd row from the bottom of the photo. It was the most expensive one ($24CDN; the guy took $20) in the shop we visited, and it is different from all the others I've seen, in that the side design is concentric circles going up the side. Quite pretty. These are working juicers, I guess you'd say, which makes this collection unique from all our other collections which just sit around and collect dust are on display. They are in my regular cupboards, and when I juice lemons, which is quite often, I just grab one of these and use it, and either rinse it or throw it in the dishwasher. They're not babied in any way, or put on display. This is largely due to the fact that I can't figure out how to display them.

What compels a man to collect such a thing as vintage citrus juicers, you ask? It's a mystery I have yet to solve.

A Visit Home

One of the nice things about having a husband who is campaigning is that it gets us out a little more. Yesterday was one of those picture-perfect days to visit that most picturesque place where I started my life, Isle La Motte, Vermont -- which just happens to be in the county where he's campaigning.

The beach at St. Anne's Shrine, maybe a half mile from where our house was:

The two-room schoolhouse where I started school:

The view behind our house:  As a child, I did not know the lake was there! Can you believe it? All I knew about was the field that my father had planted with alfalfa for his cows. A bouquet of alfalfa was the gift that my mother suggested that I bring to my father on the last day we went to visit him in the hospital before he died. "He's so proud of his alfalfa," she said. 

I remember after some period of time, she had to come around the corner of the shed to find out what was taking me so long. I had about mowed down half the field by that point, I think. I was trying to find the tallest pieces, you see. Every time I'd break one off, well, the next one that was still standing looked taller. 

He died of myocarditis -- probably of viral origin, though they really didn't know much about it at the time -- at the age of 28. I was five, and I was the eldest of four children.

The library:

Mr. Jefferies watches David walk into the firehouse:

My paternal grandparents and my father are buried in the Catholic cemetery:

My father had been a Navy man, so in addition to his granite headstone, there is another flat stone commemorating that fact, and the VFW has put up a little flag near his headstone, as well. Laura H. is my mother.

 

For The Birds

Is there no end to bad punny blog titles? I believe the answer to that is yes. But I hope you paid close attention to the question, as it was quite tricky. 

Anyhoo, yes. Birds. Very important part of the garden. And life. And beauty. And entertainment. And to irritate Mr. Jefferies. He loves to come out the back door and peremptorily bark and chase even the phantom birds that might be on the pin oak enjoying their suet and fruit and meat. And when the huge crows fly by, he anxiously looks up in the sky out of the corner of his eye. Something in his DNA says, "Um. WTF?" As I said, entertainment. But if one of them even TRIES to swoop down and take him for breakfast, I'm getting a shotgun. I'm not kidding.

I love the birds. I especially loved the little brown sparrows that used to come along and melt my heart by picking up Vincent's (my dear departed Bichon Frise) hair off the grass when I cut it. And I especially love hummingbirds. And I especially love the little black birds with yellow beaks (I don't really know what they are) that come along in droves and walk like little British regiments in formation, Hoovering all along my lawn, quickly eating (I assume) hundreds and thousands of insects. 

When the economy was better, all my neighbors covered their lawns with chemicals, but we've always used either no lawn fertilizer, or organic, and those armies of black birdies would come to our lawn and nobody else's. I rest my case about organic. Now the economy is tight, and nobody around here is spending the money to buy their Scott's (or whatever) poison fertilizer, so the birds are branching out a little to their yards, too. But they are still here, and they are really adorable and fascinating when they do their thing like that. Wish I could get a picture -- or better yet, a video -- of them when they are in action. It's really quite something to see.

Hummers eat loads of bugs, and so do the other birds, so they help the garden. I want to have them here. I have lots of natural food for them -- I have pine trees from which they eat pine nuts; I have lots of seedy-headed flowers such as black-eyed Susans and Echinacea and sunflowers later in the season, I have nectar-giving flowers for the hummingbirds. I feed suet cakes now year-round. The birds love it. I used to feed seed, but had problems with it attracting rodents, so I gave that up. I find that the suet cakes attract a much wider variety of birds than my seed feeders ever did, too. In the suet baskets, I also put meat trimmings and stale bread and fruit. It's fun. And I need another hobby. There is always room for one more hobby.

Suet cake.

I'm hoping to attract Orioles back to my yard. I haven't seen one in a few years, but used to have them. They like oranges and other fruits.

 This one had steak trimmings in it, but not for long. It was very popular with the meat-eaters.

And water -- birds need water. The little birds love the water shallow. The robins and other large birds like it to be a bit deeper. So I have fashioned little water stations all around my yard, and it's wonderful to watch the chickadees and goldfinches stop for drinks up near my vegetable garden as soon as I refill their little puddles, and it's almost even better to watch the mama robins take their daily elaborate baths in the deep birdbath in the front of the house.

This one is flat and shallow and holds only 2 cups of water. The wee birds drink from it.

This is a deeper one. The robins have bathed in this for about five years now. 

Just an old saute pan I found in the basement, with a rock in the middle for little guys to step on for taking a drink or having a bath.

An aluminum lid turned upside-down. This is everybody's favorite, including Mr. Jefferies' for a drink when A. Alpha is spending too long outside without taking a break to go inside where his regular water bowl is. I keep this one impeccably clean, because he does like to drink from it.

Fixing Things (A Little Bit) or "I Might Have Overdone It Just A Little Bit Yesterday Afternoon"

Man. The yard is a mess. I have spent a good part of the last three years -- at least -- walking around with blinders on about the front gardens, because all my focus has gone toward the food garden in the back. That's all I really care about anymore. I don't even see the perennial flowers that I spent 20 years acquiring and nurturing. They used to be the apples of my eye, but I truly couldn't care less about them anymore. 

I resent the mess. I resent the work that it takes to keep them up. I resent the people who told me years ago, before I knew anything about flower gardening, that perennials are low-maintenance. They're LIARS. BIG.FAT.LIARS and miscreants! Perennials are CONSTANT constant CONSTANT maintenance, particularly when your yard has become engulfed by that miserable horsetail weed. Once that thing has taken hold, it is impossible to eradicate. 

And I don't mean difficult or improbable. I mean impossible. Literally. There is no herbicide that will kill it. It propagates by spore, by cuttings, by runners. It lives through frost, it tunnels under rocks, it tunnels under and eventually makes its way through landscaping fabric. Plastic? HA! If you dig it up and you drop a microscopic speck (which of course you WILL), in a crack in the concrete, it will propagate. If you burn it, it will laugh in your face. It makes mint look like an impotent and naive wannabe.

Get the picture? 

You think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. 

It is estimated to have been around 30 million years. Just stop for a second and let that sink in. 30 fuckin' million years. You think a little RoundUp is going to faze it? Pshaw!

It was around at the time of the dinosaurs and it will be around at the time of Wall-E. In fact, I'll bet you 30 million dollars that that little freaking green thing that they were so excited about at the end of that film will prove to be a sonofabitching horsetail. Mark my words.

You've probably gleaned by my rant so far that the horsetail is already rearing its ugly head in this year of our Lord 2010. If that is not a sure sign of spring, I guess I don't know what is. Of course, the horsetail is not the only weed that has overtaken the perennials. Oh no, there are plenty more. But the others I can (sort of) deal with. The horsetail just makes me want to set myself on fire. 

So, long story short, I have begun to set myself on fire. But it's taking a slightly different-than-traditional form, this particular strain of pyromania. Yesterday afternoon I meant to go to yoga. But three hours after I stepped outside to -- well, I can't really remember what I went outside for -- I shakily made my way inside the house and collapsed. I had apparently gone a little bit mad out there, and started digging and digging and digging -- to Indonesia or Vietnam or Cleveland or something -- searching for every little piece of horsetail I could find -- an activity which by definition is, in a word, INSANE. So the whole setting-myself-on-fire thing? Not even a stretch.

BUT here is one thing I know: Horsetail is happiest if left alone in crappy soil. So surprisingly, if the soil is healthy and rich and CULTIVATED OFTEN, as it is in my vegetable plots, then it's easier to keep ahead of the horsetail. 

Which I WILL BE DAMNED IF I'LL DO to perennial beds, especially after they are all nicely mulched and whatnot, and supposed to be all LOW MAINTENANCE and all. 

Am I rambling? I fear I am. But whatever. I can hardly move my arms. And my elbows, which just BARELY got the All Clear from Cindy The Wonder Therapist, are shouting at me, "You IDIOT! You should have just gone ahead and set yourself on fire and saved yourself some trouble."  

Because, out there with all that digging (and I forgot to mention also the pruning of overgrown shrubs), I dug up a fairly good-sized stump and removed some smaller shrubs and fought almost to the death with a false indigo. The false indigo won. It's still in the ground, and I'm the only one Almost Dead. 

Word of advice about planting a false indigo: DON'T. Don't go getting all tingly in your loins when you see one in full bloom at the jardin botanique de Montréal and rush right home and go to the nearest nursery to search one out. Non, non, non. Do not do it. Or if you do, make sure you KNOW where you want it. Make sure you KNOW it only makes those gorgeous blue sweet-pea-like flowers for about 13 seconds a year, on a day in June when you're probably going to be gone to work anyway and won't even see it in bloom anyway. And make sure you know that it becomes GARGANTUAN and it is almost as IMPOSSIBLE TO DIG UP as the freakin' horsetail. I bet you there was a horsetail somewhere in that thing's genealogy. As long as you know all those things before you put that ring on your finger and you still want to marry this thing, knock yourself out. But don't come crying to me if it strangles your children or gives the neighbor herpes. It's right there in the name: FALSE. 

So where was I?  

Oh, yes. Turning the perennial beds (they're less beds than they are huge amorphous blobs, vast territories, almost as vast as the Yukon -- and perhaps that is one of the problems -- lack of cohesive design, but whatever -- another rant for another day) into places to plant things I care about. As in, fruits and vegetables. 

Yup, Norma's version of The Edible Landscape, comin' right up.

Or: 

Maybe I have just gone a little bit stark raving pyro. 

Nudged

It's great having a guest. It pushes you to do some things in the house that you have thought about, and should have done a long time ago, but just haven't gotten around to doing. Plus, let's not forget, it gives something to blog about.

Gale's recent visit (check out her blog for new photos!) nudged me to give Abigail's room a much-needed decluttering, facelift, and move into the new decade. The last time we redecorated her room was when she was 14 or 15, in boarding school, and was coming home for a long weekend with a bunch of friends from school. I decided the room needed to be brushed up at that point, as it was still very much reflective of middle school, with some remnants of Little Girl Abigail still there.

At that time I did what I almost always do -- decorated the room around one piece of art. In that case, it was a big framed Orangina poster, like this, but with a big white mat and nice black frame around it:

Years ago, in travels to England and France, Orangina was about the only thing Abigail liked about the experience, or so she said. She pronounced it "or-GEE-na," which is kind of a cute memory for me. In those days it was a bit hard to find that drink around here, but we have always been on the lookout for orGEEna for her, so when I was shopping one day and saw this framed poster, I knew it would be a great foundation for her room.

The room's carpet was already navy blue, and the walls were already a bright turquoisy-teal that coordinated well enough with the poster's table, so I put in some black and white accents, navy blue curtains, and several sets of wind chimes with those same colors, and called it a day. Then after high school was over, and she was coming home for the summer before college, she and I painted the walls an even better-for-the-poster apricot-orange color, moved the furniture around a bit, and it's been untouched since that time. 

I'm not in the mood or position to spend a lot of money on decorating right now. Though I really wanted to do something to this room, I decided that it had to be done on a shoestring -- no changing of the carpet, no repainting, no new curtains. Just a hoeing out of built-up years of crap, a removal of little-girl and high-school-girl and college-girl detritus, some new bedding that would hopefully coordinate with the walls and carpet and curtains, and bringing in some more adult and restful elements. 

Thank you, Bed Bath & Beyond, for having some (tasteful and beautiful) orange/rust stuff this year! And navy blue sheets! And I had to find an accent color that would coordinate with those things, and lo and behold, this awesome juicy lime-grass green was there for a couple of pillowcases.

So, for the cost of a new duvet cover, a fitted sheet, a bathroom rug, and two sets of pillowcases -- and I did "splurge" on a very cool lamp from Home Goods -- cost of 30 bucks -- and "shopping" in my closets and basement, a very fun friend with a creative eye and I transformed the room into a color-rich, warm, and wonderfully inviting adult haven. 

The pictures don't do it justice, and I'm not good enough with the photo-fix software to get the colors quite right, but I figure a little added Yorkie enhancement never hurts.

The duvet cover has a real nice subtle paisley print in it, which is so subtle that it doesn't show in the photos. Mr. Jefferies approves.

Here are a couple of my favorite pretending-to-be-Martha elements -- from things found in the storage rooms. One minute it's dust-covered crap, the next minute it's a decorating element.

An old mantel mirror placed on top of the bookcase, with a vintage vase and a topiary rose thingy that was on a desk in another room, where no justice was being done to it. Here it has much more impact. 

Old jewelry boxes that were received as throw-aways in auction box lots over the years, and that I'd been planning on sending to the Goodwill, look like a million bucks in the now-decluttered bookcase, next to the wastebasket. Well, OK, maybe not a million. But they look better than dust-covered crap. And they're the real thing. Right after I put these here, I was shopping in Home Goods and saw a reproduction of this very thing. Just a fake stack of three old jewelry boxes. I'm clearly a decorator, and don't even know it! 

Stacked vintage suitcases have become a bedside table in front of an antique mirror and near an antique lamp that was moved from another room, where it was invisible.  (P.S. Because I know at least one person who will likely be a pain in my ass about this: No, the mirror is not hanging crooked. It's just the angle from which I shot it that makes it appear so. However, it is an antique and it could use a resilvering, but then it would be "new-fake" looking, so it's staying the way it is.) :P

And I think my favorite thing of all is a matted (but not framed) artsy-fartsy photograph of Abigail taken as part of a project by one of her friends in high school who was a visual arts major*. I had this antique frame in one of my closets. I just nailed it to the wall and put the matted print on the wall inside the frame. It gives the impression that the print is framed, and allows the apricot-painted wall to show around it. It makes the entire piece appear larger and is the focal point over the bed. 

I used this artists' trick I just learned online recently: Don't center the print inside the mat, but leave an extra 1/4- to 1/2 inch at the bottom, to "anchor" it to the floor. So, pretending that the apricot space around it is another mat, I raised the matted photograph just a bit so that it is not centered exactly in the frame. Pretty neat, huh?

Too bad my photos are not as crisp and clean as I'd like. Having spent two days working intensely with Gale, I'm all self-conscious about that, whereas before I couldn't have cared less. Don't worry -- I'm not bothered by it for the long haul. I'll leave the photography to the photographers and the -- whatever it is that I do here -- to me. However, I do feel all proud of myself that I've used a couple of the techniques she showed me to make them a teeny bit more crisp where need be, a teeny bit softer where need be, and I'm probably going overboard on the "vignette" dark antiquey edge. Allow me to play around a little, will ya?

---------- For Katherine, haha:

*At their high school, they had an arts major in addition to their regular prep school curriculum. Abigail's was theater.