Telephone Poles and Underwear

Someone, somewhere is making an obscene joke out of that title right now, but these are the random thoughts in my head today.

First. Our friends were sharing a story this weekend where she thought, as she was driving around being a rural vet, that telephone poles are kind of mysterious in their origin. Her question was, are they made from very tall trees that are milled down to the right size, or are they a blend? The husband was telling the story and was all snickery and I thought the answer was OF COURSE they are a blend of wood created to be poles. Umm, apparently not. He claims, and k-ster backs him up, that if you look carefully at telephone poles. they are indeed one tree that was shaped to be the right height and width. I find this very hard to believe but I am too lazy to go google it right now. I have looked at them a lot lately and I really can't tell. I thought I remembered seeing some that kind of looked like puzzle pieces but now that I look, I don't see any like this. I can't believe there are enough trees in the world that are tall enough to make them.

Second. Remember when you weren't supposed to see people's underwear? When it was not nice if you saw someone's bra straps? When did society decide it was OK to see them? Was it when society said women can run in sports bras with no tops? I think that might have been the day. Look around in summer and all you see are bra straps. Some are "fashionable" and are actually meant to be seen and even if they aren't meant to be seen, some women just think it's OK to let them hang out. I remember going to great lengths last century to hide my straps. Safety pins inside the straps of tank tops were one option. Back then, tank top straps were much wider, so that rule at school about how they must be at least 2 fingers wide would have been obscene in those days. They were all qutie wide, as I recall.

I believe it was when I started teaching classes at the gym that I began to allow my sports bra straps to be seen. This doesn't bother me in the least, probably because it isn't like a real bra, in my mind. It's meant to look athletic and often looks like a bathing suit, so it's OK with me. I just don't like to see those white, normal bras, the kind with the circle things just hanging out.

I suppose I am a hypocrite as I am sitting here, wearing a sports bra under a tank top and letting the straps hang out though I am not exercising. I am hot and I seem to believe it's OK because it's a sports bra.

Let's look at the other side. Can you imagine if society decided that men could exercise in public just wearing an athletic supporter? Picture the scene. A man is running down the road wearing a t-shirt, a jock strap and sneakers and socks. I am laughing/retching so hard it's difficult to type. Now picture this. A man decides he'll stop at the grocery after his grueling gym workout. He throws on a new t-shirt, still wearing just the jock strap and sneakers. What would you do if you came down the aisle and saw this man picking up broccoli? I know, a man stopping at the grocery is such a far fetched idea, I should have stopped there.

Is there a double standard? In summer, I see women at the grocery all the time in sports bras and shorts. Usually they are very tan and have great abs. Would it be better if the man was very tanned and in great shape when he did errands and exercised in his jock strap?

Think about it and while you do, thank the Good Lord society hasn't deemed that outfit proper. Yet.

Gardening Sensation

When people say they have or don't have a green thumb, I get really annoyed. I am firm believer that the only thing plants need to grow is adequate water and someone to check on their progress. My thumb turns whatever color the substance is that I'm sticking it into and yet I have great luck with plants. I stick to my watering and paying attention theory and then I break all the rules when it comes to gardening. Some call it Going Rogue in the garden. My name is not Sarah, therefore I just call it Gardening.

Recently, I have become a HUGE fan of lilies. Around here, the orange Daylilies(so named because the flower opens for a day and then dies off) are extremely common and I'm tired of them. Someone keeps giving me different types of Daylilies as she thins her supply and they are doing just marvelously despite my bad behavior.

Now here is where I do bad things in the garden and get great results. First of all, there is no rhyme or reason to where I put most things in my garden. Anything that isn't a vegetable goes outside the fence since I don't care if anything eats them. This set of lilies is actually behind just about everything in the garden though they should be up front as showcase. I have to confess that twice I have been given these lilies to transplant and twice I have left them in the bag in the freezing winter and then tossed them into the ground in spring and clearly, they don't care. They just pop up anyway. I also have no idea which color is where, so it's kind of fun to see what comes up every year. I never water these babies and look what they are doing anyway! My FAVorite is one of the lighter ones that sadly does not look right in any picture we take. It's this unreal ivory color but in this picture it's nothing special. The other light ones are light yellow and are just as nice.


Here we have what we jokingly call the Scales of Justice. We aren't a law office, clearly we are a trailer park, but it's fun to look at them here and think we might have to weigh whether or not we think you are worthy enough to park your trailer here. Now here is another example of crazy gardening behavior. The impatien (did you know that they Impatiens, not Impatients?)on the left has been wintered over at school, and as usual, I never gradually bring them back into the sun and they usually fry at first. I just have no patience for that! This is the result of being repotted and cut back. No harm done.

I'm a native girl at heart, so I'm letting native things (except that #%$*%ing poison ivy) grow in my presence with abandon. This is milkweed, though someone tells me it looks like bamboo with its joints and height. The height of these is nothing compared to some I've seen. These are about 5 feet tall but I've seen some closer to 8 feet. These flowers will become the milkweed pods that most people are familiar with. They also smell quite nice, though k-ster disagrees, and my favorite part is they bring the bees. I like bees in my garden because they do good work!


Finally, you might say I have a knack for geraniums. These things are amazing. Did you know you can just cut them off at a joint, cut the leaves back a few inches, shove them in the pot and you have another whole plant? Another rogue move, I just keep breaking them off (who has time to get scissors?)and sticking them in pots so now I have many colors in one pot. I bring them into school in the winter where they go absolutely crazy in the sun and then never have to buy new plants. I think these might be 4-5 years old in some pots. They love to be cut back and they are so easy to repropigate. There's Miss Thrifty coming out again! Why buy new plants if you can just keep the old ones going and regenerate them???



 
Linking here

Won and Lost

Which should I start with. I guess the WON. I have a laptop that I won in April, something that blew my mind, and I needed to get all of my itunes music from my old desktop to the laptop. As much as I do like Apple, though the only item I own is an ipod, I am rather aggravated with them about itunes. You can have up to 5 computers registered with your ipod. However, every time you want to sync your ipod with one of those computers, it has to erase what's on the ipod and replace it with what's in the itunes library for that computer. At least, this is what happens to me.

So, after fooling around trying to move my music from the desktop to my laptop and having no success, I broke down and looked it up online. From Apple itself, there is a site apologizing that it's not possible to move the music simply. Even with homeshare, it only transfers the music you bought. A major portion of my music was ripped from CDs over the years. Most annoyingly, I didn't want to have to redo all of my spin playlists. I read the directions about how to move the music. At first, I thought I could use my ipod to transfer the files, once I read about how to do that, but after hours of downloading to the ipod, it turned out to be too small. I thought I could just upload what I had downloaded and then go back and get the rest. But then I wasn't sure what had and had not dowloaded. And then I did something that made every single song on the new computer list 4 times. And the irony is that a lot of k-ster's music that I don't like is what managed to transfer. Limp Biskit times 4 isn't ok with me.

I finally realized that if I used a device with a bigger storage space, I could just do it all at once and stop messing around. Enter this fantastic external hard drive that I won with the laptop. It can hold the entire universe, I think. So, I threw away the mess I created on my laptop and stripped itunes bare. Then I downloaded the giant file from the old computer and uploaded it to the new one. LO AND BEHOLD, not only are all the songs there, they are there just one time each, ALL of my playlists tranferred as well as things like the number of times a song has played and when it was entered into itunes. I am amazing. So there, itunes, I WON this round. It just took me a few days to realize how to streamline it in case I have to do that again.

Now, the lost. I just about lost my mind at lunchtime. I was registered to take an online grad class through a college that's about 1.5 hours from here. I was psyched to find an online French Immersion class and wondered how in the world it would work. I figured there'd be lots of Skyping. The class is supposed to start tomorrow and TODAY I got the email explaining that there are 4 face to face classes. WHAT???? I went right to the booklet and it says NOTHING about anything on campus, nothing face to face, just that it's online. I can't go tomorrow or next Friday so there is no way I can take this class. And this was the one I needed to move over on the pay scale. I am sooooooooo mad. I wrote back to the person who sent it, who I am sure isn't the person responsible, and gave her a piece of my mind. Then I wrote to everyone that was on the address list and asked them if they are as surprised and annoyed as I am. What if I didn't check my email today? So, I LOST a little of my mind and the opportunity to rake in the big bucks this year. We have a pay freeze for this year because the town won't vote for an override. Yes, in this little haven where we live, we still have town meetings and things actually get voted upon. Insignificant little things like school funding.

So now I can use my swanky laptop that I won to try to look for another class that I can do online or closer to home. So annoying.

Pepperidge Farm Remembers

Do you remember the commercials for Pepperidge Farm cookies and Goldfish and things? They had an older man from somewhere in New England that would say "Pepperidge Farm Remembers" but it was more like "Pepperidge FAAAAAM RememBAHS" because he had that crazy accent.

I thought of him this morning when I was driving and saw this.

My first thought was that when he sped up all of the boxes of Goldfish would be headed my way and I'd run away with them. Actually, what caught my eye wasn't the actual fact that the door was open, but the driver was clearly having a conversation with someone was GESTURING (I put this in caps so you could see how emphatic the gesturing really was). I was trying to see his passenger and thought "is there even a seat for a passenger in a truck like this?" and as I was peering through the back door, I realized it was open and shouldn't be. I'm also pretty sure there wasn't anyone else in that truck.

After all that thinking, the light turned green and we were off. Nothing came crashing out as he took off. Then we slowed a few times for traffic and I got so close once I debated yelling "sir, your door is open back here" but I figured he wouldn't hear me or realize he was the sir to whom I was speaking.

My final thought, and why I took the picture, was the irony. Do you see the word REMEMBER on the left door? We'll never know what to REMEMBER because the driver didn't REMEMBER to close the right side door! I wonder if he drives around with the door open to aid in cooling the vehicle. When he got to his next stop, did he wonder why the door was already open?

This reminds me of a lady from when we were little. She was this really nice, tiny lady from somewhere with a heavy accent and she would sometimes take us to the beach in the summer. How she managed the 3 of us is still a mystery and she couldn't swim, so why my mother let us go is another mystery. She always brought a bag of popcorn and lemonade she made in a Skippy Peanut Butter JAR WITH A METAL LID!! Do you remember those? Glass peanut butter jarss???? And who would think to put lemonade in one?

Thank you http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/

Anyway, the point of this little story is that she had this crazy hatchback, brown car, and I can't even tell you the make of it but it seemed huge. We were leaving the beach one day and in the flurry of activity, she didn't close the hatch. I thought this was truly the funniest thing in the world and every time my sister tried to tell her, I would cover her mouth so she wouldn't tell. Riding down the road with the hatch open was hysterical to me and I have to admit I'm kind of chuckling as I write this. As we pulled into the yard, we hopped out the back. The poor lady just couldn't understand how we had already gotten out of the car. By now we all thought this was the funniest thing ever.

I wonder if the Pepperidge Farm delivery man had the same wonder she had? If he had arrived at his next stop with NOTHING left because it had all fallen out, would he have understood? Would he had been mad? Would I have flagged him down long before all of the contents of the truck fell out? Surely not, I would have been laughing too hard to tell him!

Poisonous Natives

This picture can only mean one thing. It's poison ivy season. This is an old remedy that helps a little when it's oozing and you're not willing to go to the doctor yet. It's just baking soda in water and you put it on and let it dry. It's supposed to pull out the ooze and help it to dry out. I don't know how much it works but it takes forever to dry. I like to put it on while I'm in the outdoor shower since I know I can get it all over the place and it won't matter. But then I have to stand in the shower until it dries and that can get boring. Today, I read the whole newspaper before it dried.

How did I get it, you ask? I've known for many decades what it looks like and I know I have to stay away because I get it just by looking at it. I have a theory. I found this great, organic stuff called Burn Out that has clove oil in it and supposedly messes with the oil on the leaves and kills it. It works very well, especially if the area happens to baked in the sun all day. Within days it's dead as a doornail. By theory is that by spraying this stuff on the leaves, it makes the poison ivy oil go into the air and I breathe it in. This is the second summer I have used this stuff and the second time I've had it about 3 days later. Always in a place that even if I touched the plant, I wouldn't get it here. Like my waistband! I am certain not to touch the leaves and I use gloves but somehow I still have a little bit, just enough to be annoying!

Last summer, I had to go to the doctor to get some prednisone but I really don't like to do that. Hopefully the baking soda paste and calodryl will keep it all at bay.

Uhh Is There A Problem, Officer?

Today was an outrageously hot day, hotter than we consider normal around here, and since it was a holiday (observed) we lolled around all day. Most of it was spent on the hammock or in the circus chair (see yesterday's blog)in front of the house. Well, it's actually a side lawn, but you get to see all the action from the street, my parents' house next door and anyone who drives up the driveway.

After a pretty uninteresting day, k-ster even said how quiet it was, I went in to make supper. He decided to wash his truck in on the back lawn. We apparently can wash cars on lawns, but not take showers on them, in these parts. He came in snickering, asking if I was watching the show. The SHOW was 2 cruisers pulling over a car on the street, right between our houses. Not wanting to put myself in harm's way, I tried peeking out windows, but every window gave me a different view but none of them with the WHOLE view. So, I finally snuck outside and hung near The General so I could see and hear what was going on. They were making the people in the car really sweat it out, I could tell, when the two officers stood at the back of one of the cruisers and chatted. A third cruiser, this one with no lights on, had to join in the fun and now 3 of them were standing around, shooting the breeze, while the people in the car were gawked at by every passer by.

THEN, my father drove up the driveway and came upon: k-ster washing his truck, me lurking by The General and 3 cruisers with a pulled over car. His reaction, typcial of my father: What the hell is THIS? to which I replied, I have no idea. I still didn't know if the people in the car were masked bandits, drug runners, pimps, or just blew off a stop sign, so I was still lurking. I look out in the road and now my father has stopped traffic while he "chats" with the police officers. I guess this was not an urgent stop.

Eventually, I made my way to the circus chair for the best view and watched the driver get out and talk to someone on his phone, mentioning that the registration had expired. OOPS. And I was entertained because he had to keep repeating himself, due to the suspicious dead zone we have here on the compound. I soon tired of this boring traffic stop, was finished marveling that 3 paid officers were standing around chatting on my parents' lawn because these fools were driving an unregistered car, so I went back to cooking. The 3rd officer took off for some urgent call and after a while, k-ster said 2 of the 3 people in the car took all of their gear and walked home while the driver stayed to see the car get towed. Eventually the 2nd cop left and then there was one.

And then I realized this cop is why my father could never be a cop. Instead of being a mean, scary cop, he was chatting up the driver. They were becoming best friends while waiting for the tow truck. Then the cop says, Come on out here and let me show you, which in a movie would mean that the guy would be taken down and thrown into the car. Instead, the cop must have wanted to show him something really nifty on his laptop that they all have in their cars, because the cop got in the driver's side and the guy leaned into the window of the passenger side and proceeded to be entertained/amazed/in awe of whatever it was that the officer had to show. This is JUST what my father would have done. In fact, since we currently have firetruck in the yard to be delivered somewhere tomorrow, I am quite surprised my father didn't invite all of them to come and look at it while they were waiting for the tow truck.

Too soon, the tow truck came and took away the car and the driver. So much excitement. So sad for the cop. Rumor has it the guys were yelling out their windows at girls and got the attention of the cops and THEN there was an expired tag on the license plates. Idiots.

I took a picture, but figured that it was probably a bad idea to post pictures of local cops without their permission on my blog. Especially when I made mention of the fact that I have an outdoor shower!

Adventures With Velcro and I'm Off to Jail

I love to be outside but I am a shadeseeker due to my fair skin and constant worry about melanoma. Ironic since I spend so much time outside and every activity that I do, the very reason I get so dirty, happens to be in the sun. So, I'm either always slathering on sunscreen(which we know they will decide is the reason people get skin cancer) or trying to figure out how to be in the shade.

I don't find the fold up chairs that go in bags very comfortable, but I happened to find this one on sale at the end of last year, very cheap, and Thrifty decided it was something I should buy.

Yes, it's a surry with fringe on top! Do you hear circus music?

So, after opening it up and being amused with myself, I discovered that the height of the canopy can be adjusted so that someone of size can actually sit in it. Along the way, I also discovered that the back flap can be rolled up and secured if you aren't trying to protect your back from anything.

Before I rolled it up, I found out the hard way, that the velcro piece that holds it up hangs down inside and lands right on my head. The strap got stuck in the hair on top of my head and I couldn't get it out! It was funny until I realized I really wasn't going to get my hair out. K-ster came and offered to help and tried to pull out each piece of hair as I held the strap so it couldn't catch any more. I think a clump about 2 inches wide must have been stuck because it took forever for him to get it all out and it really hurt! I guess the lesson here is that I will NEVER use the back flap but will ALWAYS roll it up before anyone sits in it. This probably why it was so cheap at the end of last summer.


The offensive piece of @&*(#!!

Now, the reason I'm off to jail. We have an outdoor shower. Really, that's why I'm going to jail.

Exhibit A

The powers that be around here, announced on the front page of yesterday's paper, that outdoor showers are, in fact, illegal. See, they are not connected to a cesspool and if people are using soap, which is what you do in a shower, then the soap is going onto the ground. Where it gets filtered. Which is what happens in a cesspool. All of the sewer goes into the ground in a pit which allows liquids to leach out and get filtered through the soil and the solids stay behind and eventually break down. This was the theory a million years ago, but there are things that get in the way, such as roots, that cause them to fail and then there are problems. But the point is, things get filtered through the cesspool, just as they could get filtered as they go from the top of the ground down to the ground water. Where we live, the drinking water is not far from the surface, so we all basically drink what we flush.

And now they are worried about the fact that an outdoor shower actually puts the liquids on top of the soil, thereby giving the liquids a longer distance to filter, which is even safer than a cesspool. But one of the "experts" said that this is bad because it could harm the environment. True, if 80 people are using the outdoor shower every day. Another expert suggested that a dry well could be put into the ground under the shower. This would have gravel in it and would sort of act as a filter but not as well as the actual dirt in the ground does. And the first expert actually agreed with that because it would make the liquids get filtered too fast, perhaps not actually getting filtered. The second expert said that the amount of soap from an outdoor shower can't be too different from that of washing a car or dog so who cares?

All experts agreed that it would be impossible to start cracking down on outdoor showers. So really, the article was completely pointless.

We use ours almost all year long. K-ster uses it far longer than I do but I will use it if it's around 40 degrees. I love not cleaning the indoor shower.

And just in case they come snooping around to slap the cuffs on me, we've made ours look like a storage area anyway.

Some people make theirs very decorative or they buy special pieces of wood that are designed for outdoor showers and they cost a mint. K-ster just took some old stockade fence and made ours. No fancy. Just lots of room to take a shower. This freaks out some people, because they say it feels like they are taking a shower in a hall, it's so open. I'm used to it and sometimes feel very hemmed in when I'm inside.

So, if I don't write for a while, they've either hauled my butt to the slammer or I'm stuck in my surry with velcro on my head.