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  • The Shade garden is thriving in the rain

    It seems that one of the most frequent topics of conversation among my friends of late is about how terribly our gardens are doing, and for once I am happy that I haven't been out in the yard digging up new beds and planting tons of new plants because it is mostly the new plants and the annuals that are suffering this year, as well as some of those sun-loving basics.   

    IMG_0673 Luckily much of my garden is in the shade and those shade loving plants are just in garden heaven.

    I may behind on the weeding, and I am certainly behind on clearing out and planting new flower beds, not that the constant rain has helped with that.

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    IMG_0675 Even my black mondo grass, which rarely blooms for me here, as it really just barely manages to survive in my zone, is blooming:

    And the Hellebores that I temporarily planted in pots by my front door in April are still there and still holding their blooms.  I didn't realize that they would retain their flowers for so long, or perhaps that is also a benefit of the cool wet weather.  I'm not complaining, and I am glad they are happy, because the space where they are supposed to go remains a mess of wet soggy, slippery clay, on a slope no less, impossible for me to dig and amend until the ground gets a chance to dry out a little bitIMG_0672 .

    The only things not doing well in my garden so far (besides the roses) who are plagued by the various ills that accompany weather that is too dark and damp, are my tall white lilies, which  have beaten down to the grass with the heavy rainstorms.  Of course they were already leaning over to reach the sun.  I need to move them.  Their original location gets fewer hours of sunlight as the neighbor-we-don't-like has let his slope get a bit overgrown, blocking more of the already negligible sunlight.  I really don't the problem is just this weather or the increasing shade from the neighboring woods, but the Irises continue to do well in the same flower bed.

    IMG_0679 I do however have a new Lily blooming on the slope.  I did plant lilies there years ago, but never managed to keep the blooms on them, despite spraying with Deer Away.  This year I sprayed the last of my Bobbex on the one lily plant I saw that seems to have survived the continuous feasting and it is growing straight and tall and blooming lustily.   It is the first year in nearly 10 that I have seen this lily bloom. I am amazed that it has survived. This yellow Oriental lily is in an overgrown area that I want to fill in with flowers, and I am now thinking of moving the tall Asiatic lilies to this area.  I would think they would do just as well even though they are taller, 6 feet versus 4 1/2.  But I can see they get get sun over a broader swath of the day.  I am already thinking about what can go in the iris bed in their place.  

  • Kitty Pictures

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    Moises is growing to big for his mother's slippers

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    and Tori, is slowly learning to share a room, and perhaps even a sofa, but she still believes she has first dibs on laps.

  • Yellow Roses for My Birthday

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    These beautiful roses came on Saturday for my Birthday.  Unfortunately, my birthday was not this past weekend, it is next weekend.

    When G went to order the roses, he told them the date and was informed that they aren't open on Sunday so they would deliver them on Saturday.  He said that was fine.

    This past weekend the phone rang and someone said she needed to speak to G, it was important, and she couldn't tell me what it was about.  From his end of the phone conversation, and the subsequent arrival of a delivery person at our front door, it quickly became evident what had occurred.

    G had told the florist that my birthday was the 5th.  He was told they would deliver the previous day. Apparently no one thought to mention that they would not be open on the 4th, as it is a holiday.

    When they called, they told him that since they weren't open on the 4th, they thought they would deliver the roses this past Saturday instead.  He said it was okay.  I might not have been so generous.

    Now I think there was a double mistake here.  If the florist was going to be closed on Saturday the 4th, they could deliver the flowers on Friday the 3rd, and that would have been acceptable.  Having a birthday next to a major holiday, I have long since learned to accept these minor inconveniences.  But I think someone messed up again, and ordered the roses early.  If they weren't able to order the flowers for the proper time, they should have told him before they placed the order. Since they had the flowers in the store, and they obviously could not hold them another week, they tried to cover-up their mistake and deliver them early.

    What if I needed flowers for a party, getting them a week early would not be acceptable.I used to love this particular florist, until the proprietor decided to retire and sold the shop to one of her employees.  Since then this kind of mistake has become far too common.  G thinks he will have to be finding another florist.

    But I love having the flowers anyway, they are large and glorious and fill my office/sewing room with their perfume.

  • Terror in the makeup aisle

    NMC074C_mn I needed to replace a lipstick and I went to the mall yesterday.  I was thrilled to have a couple of hours available to myself just to wander around, although the local mall is mostly disappointing.  I did need to stop in Macy's to replace a favorite lipstick (Chanel Sirocco) but they were out of stock.  Still I am admittedly rather fond of lipstick and took the opportunity to look at other colors. I had noticed the sales representative when I asked for the desired shade, but really wasn't paying attention to her (mistake #1).  She came over with two new colors, that she said would be lovely on me.  She convinced me to try both on my hand, telling me that I really needed more warmth on my face and the colors I was wearing were all wrong for me.  I liked the both, but I worried that one was a little two warm, it looked very orange in the glaring yellow light of the cosmetic counter, so I said I needed to go outside to look at  them in the sun.  I probably should have used this opportunity to escape, but I really did like both colors, she was right about the warmer one, and I will wear it with certain things, but the one with more pink is the one I will wear the most, so like a fool I went back.

    I don't know what it is about the cosmetic counters that brings any lurking feelings of inferiority to the fore, but I should have seen it coming.  I went back, and I tried to ignore the chatter about what the sales rep had for lunch; I wasn't really interested in whether she should drink a caffeinated diet soda on afternoon break or try diet green tea, or decaf soda.  Apparently she is trying to get off caffeine (why?) but feels a slump in the afternoon (don't we all?).  I don't know what it is about my face that makes me so approachable, that everyone I meet thinks they can just come right up and start telling me about the chicken mcnuggets they had for lunch and what-have you, it must be the wide silly smile and the big round cheeks,  the hollow eyes.  Really my smile is more like Ronald McDonald's than just about any chic elegant role model you can name.  

    And I suppose that is precisely the problem.  It doesn't matter what I wear, and I've done the whole uptown-girl, polished thing, I just can't pull it off.  As soon as I smile it is all over, and I always smile, or laugh, or (even worse) just plop myself down on the floor when there is no chair readily available.  Whatever it is chic is not my number, but that doesn't mean that I am not secretly a little intimidated by those who seem polished and pulled together.

    And I looked up at her face while she returned my credit card and I realized that she looked like she had replaced her head with a life-sized Barbie doll.  Despite this, despite the fact that I would rather look like a person than a plastic doll, I left the mall thinking that the deep circles under my eyes were far to noticeable even as I acknowledged this was because they put the mirrors so low that you have to look down at them, all the better for seeing any sagging under the chin and bagging under the eyes.  And although I started out thinking my new messy haircut with the wonderful layers was just perfect and cool and hip and I left thinking it was sad and messy, just as I was sad and messy.  I was ready to go home and bury my sorrows in a vanilla latte.  But I did not go home.  

    I went to another boutique, not in that mall, one where the lighting in the dressing rooms is much more flattering, to try on a blouse I had ordered.  The blouse was awful.  It looked great but it itched like crazy, I felt myself shrinking up inside trying to pull away from the fabric the instant I put it on, as if my skin was trying to withdraw into my body just to avoid contact with that fabric.  I am not sensitive to wool or most things, but give me cheap silk organza, actually any kind of  silk organza but the finest tightest weave, and it drives me crazy, just crazy.  However I tried on a jacket that I saw in the store, and it was perfect.  The style was perfect the fit was perfect, it made my hair look good again.  In short that jacket was just right for me.  Technically it is for the fall season, although I could have worn it out of the store yesterday and been perfectly comfortable.  

    By the time I got home I was myself again, and I knew that my intentionally mussed hair was perfect for me and my intentionally mussed personality and silly, wide-eyed smile.  Sam and Tori greeted me at the door, and as I walked in the house, G rose from his chair and Moises came barrellling across the room and took a flying leap at my knees.  I happily sank to to the floor and greeted my family and realized I had found perfection.

  • Chocolate and Coffee for Breakfast

    I had chocolate and coffee for breakfast this morning.  It is the antithesis of everything I know about a good breakfast but it certainly works for me today.  

    I was up at 1 AM, 3 AM, 4 AM, and again, finally, at 6 AM.  The air-conditioning service team has just pulled into the driveway; we always have our annual maintenance after cottonwood season rather than in the early spring.

    I think it is going to be a long, long day.

  • It seems I use my Ipod mostly to listen to new music

    One day last week I was listening to a friend's music collection as she shuffled it from her Ipod and I wondered why I never managed to get around to ripping my CD's to disk so that I could play my own music.  But when I got home and started to re-examine this idea I got all bogged down in my own conflicted feelings about music formats and the what, when, where, and why of my own interests in music.

    And then it struck me that although I like the idea of having my music available on an ipod, what has really happened is that it has become a tool for me to use to explore, download, and listen to new music and that this has become very important to me.  I've never been good at making a decision about music, of whatever genre, and the ipod has provided a fabulous tool for exploring whatever music may capture my fancy.

    Most played in the past week:

  • Reading Update

    It has been a long time since I did a book update:

    51aVhIoIycL._SX106_ The House of Dimon by Patricia Crisafulli.  Was not particularly good but I gave it an okay rating on Goodreads because it was a quick reading and interesting reminder that all is not what it seems on the news and from the mouths of our legislators.  Ms. Crisafulli writes with almost breathless adoration and there is little in this book that is not available from clippings in the WSJ, other papers, and company reports.  Still it is timely, a quick read, and a  reminder that not everyone was so caught up in the finance bubble that they were blind to the risks and excesses taking place. 

    I found it timely just as a reminder that intelligent people don't have to believe what is coming out of the mouths of businessmen whose companies are in trouble, or in fact, the Government, which thinks it is doing the country a favor and covering its own ass.

    51v46sUYy2L._SX106_ I had been waiting to read Elizabeth George's Careless in Red, waiting for the mass market paperback so that I could add it to the collected Thomas Lynley stories on the shelf, and I snapped it up as soon as possible and plunged right in.   First off, I can only say that Elizabeth George's portrayal of Lynley's grief is spot on.  It seems that she has a good handle on how people experience grief, and also on the personality of her character, because Inspector Lynley's grief over the death of his wife, and the way he experiences it and copes (or fails to cope) is so completely sympathetic and convincing.  

    I found this novel very satisfying and well researched and quite fun to read.  I had a few quibbles with some of the characters, but there are many characters, and the main ones were beautifully realized.  An enjoyable read that I am happy to have added to my collection.

    51-oVEUbT0L._SX106_ I reread two books in May, Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity is always a favorite for dipping into when I have a few moments and is still enjoyable.  I also used her recipe for flapjacks although I had to modify it slightly to work with the type of gluten-free oats I am able to find locally.  I now have a yummy sweet treat for those moments when I just am overcome with a need for something sweet.  For my purposes, her variation on the classic worked better than those I found on the recipes I found on the web.  I wasn't looking for the recipe, it just cropped up at the right time, and I am grateful.

    263fb6742875a0c592b37634377417941414141 My copy of Peter Gay's Weimar Culture was given to me by my father when I was in high school.  I read it at the time, but it was perhaps a little more scholarly and dense than what I was looking for at that time.  I read it again in college and then I appreciated the fact that it although it is quite scholarly there are times in the book when it is quite imaginative and gripping, unlike many historical tracts I had to read for coursework.  I read it again this time after encountering a quote from Mr. Gay in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise which I am still reading.  I was happy  to read the book again and it reminded me of aspects of Weimar culture that I had forgotten, or missed the first time around.  Well worth rereading.

    13745443 Most recently, I finished reading Sarah Water's The Night Watch.  I truly enjoyed this book. The writing is precise and perceptive and the dialo g is just beautifully done. Too many "period" novels end up sounding like a set piece or a play but these characters just sound like themselves, the worn, sad even, marginal characters they are. It is not a novel filled with lush melodramatic scenes and prose, and although the slow revelation of the characters works like a mystery, opening with the sad aftermath and then revealing the beginnings, it does not have the pace of a mystery novel. The writing is rather austere, fitting for the period, and the characters, and reminds me more of Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Bowen, although the comparison is not direct, more in the general attitude of the prose.

    The plotting is beautifully done, and the technique of having the story move backward in time, works because the author is master of a tightly rendered plot. It all seems to work, and slowly, as one reads the book, beginning in 1947 with the characters that seem normal and yet also so tentative, as if they haven't quite found their bearings, one moves backward to 1944 and 1941, and the characters are further revealed, peeling away the layers of trauma and connection. The story opens with Kay, and one doesn't really realize how much of the story centers around her, that she is the one character that touches everyone, for what one sees initially is an almost empty shell of a woman, a butch dyke who had found her perfect element in the war, acting as a man, driving an ambulance, and now founds herself unappreciated and out of touch with society.
    The story ends with Duncan, and his story is the weakest of the lot, especially in its beginnings. Much is hinted at and never explained. I felt frustrated at the end, thinking "Is this all that happened?" and thought something more was needed. But I also think that this is precisely the story of Duncan, all potential and promise, and lack of execution. Duncan can never live up to anyone's expectations, including his own, just as the horrors of the war brought opportunities that can never be repeated, where for a moment people can throw off their inhibitions and the role society deems appropriate, but it is only for a moment and then the moment is lost, leaving only the aftermath.

  • In the Garden.

    IMG_0616 I did get back into the garden yesterday afternoon after the rain.

    I was slogging through the wet and overgrown front yard, pulling up weeds and attempting to plant a few things.  I had just won a battle with some large woody weed that had decided to entwine itself with one of the re-blooming yellow irises and was wet and covered with mud when Dave, the UPS man arrived with a package for G (my birthday present — although now I have to wait a few weeks to see what it is).

    Dave commented that it had rained 21 of the last 30 days and I added that I had just emptied the rain gauge again and had recorded 13.25 inches of rain since May 17.  A round of mumbling about the weeds overtaking everything ensued.  

    IMG_0615 In the middle of this photo is a shot of a lovely New Guinea impatien that has naturalized itself in my front yard.  I popped it in a few years ago, 5 or 6 I believe, when this little patch by the front door was mostly bare.  

    You can see that it isn't bare anymore, but this impatien has come back every year.  It will bloom a little later in the summer, when it is a bit warmer and sunnier.

    The front of my garden remains a little warmer than most of my yard.  I am properly on the colder end of zone 6, much of the county is zone 5 except for a narrow swath along the Hudson River, which happily includes my yard. A small section of the front yard is protected by the house from the North and West, and also from the harshest of winds coming up from the south west in the wintertime, and I have grown a few plants that are really hardy only to zone 7 here.  Unfortunately this area is also deeply shaded so I don't get many flowers, but there is still a wealth of color and texture from the many shade loving plants that are making it their home — much better than the clay and moss I found when I moved here.

  • Music Monday

    We are having yet another dark, dreary day filled with rains.

    It started out sunny, despite the 70% threat of thunderstorms, and I ran my errands and did my morning chores in hopes that I would get out in the garden this afternoon.  We have had slightly more than 12 inches of rain in the last month, which is unusually high.  To some extent I don't mind as the rain and the shady front yard is unusually lush this year.  But so are the weeds and it has rained enough that I have not been able to keep up with them.  

    Some part of me fears that this lush spring will be followed by an unusually dry July and August; it has happened before, and I am not eager to be out gardening in the heat, so I was out in the yard working and planting a few things until I was pretty well soaked through.  

    51tCfNXODtL._SL500_AA240_ Then it seemed like a perfect time to come inside and listen to Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians.  Although I once would have said that I was not a person who listened to operas (although I attending performances), it seems that I have been mistaken. 

    I ordered the recording of the opera after watching a film about Philip Glass on PBS (GLASS:  a portrait of Philip in twelve parts).  The film was quite interesting, but what I really wanted was to see the opera Glass was composing, and which was performed, while they were filming.  Of course I can't see it now, but I certainly could buy the CD, and I have been listening to it pretty frequently since it arrived in mid May, with the exception of the week that Owen was here.

    I admit to loving the music of Phillip Glass.  I have loved Glass's music since I purchased a couple of albums in college (Music in Eight Parts, Einstein on the Beach). But I do think I would love this opera regardless of whether I knew anything about the composers previous work.  In this opera the work is unmistakably glass, but there is a greater variety in the orchestration than in his early operatic works and the music and the mood it conveys consistently portrays and reveals the progression of the story.  The voices are almost spoken, narrated even, as if instead of reading a book, or having the book read to us, it is performed for us with the same immediacy that one finds in reading a book.  But of course instead of reading words on a page and imagining, one is listening and the power of the words are joined by the strength of music to convey urgency and crisis.  

    It seems to me that Waiting for the Barbarians stands on it own as a musical work very well and is quite beautiful and effective as music, without the visual stimulus of seeing it on the stage.  Yet I would love to see this opera, not just hear it.  Although given the frequency with which contemporary opera's tend to be performed I do not see this as quite likely.  Once upon a time I would have said I would fly off anywhere to see it.  Once upon a time that may have been possible, but this is not the tenor of my life right now, so it would have to come pretty close to home, and even then I might miss it.  Still, Waiting for the Barbarians joins the short list of contemporary operas I would really like to see someday.  

    Although not at all alike, it strikes me that the other opera on this list is Poul Ruder's opera The Handmaid's Tale which, although not at all like Glass's opera, is also more of a music narrative than a traditional opera.  

  • Binging

    So despite my exhortations to myself after the house-guests left, and the last of the birthday cake, tapioca pudding, and other dessert-like concoctions were finished, that I would settle down and cut out the carbs and knock of the few pounds I had put back on over the last month,  it hasn't happened yet.

    Of course I just should have thrown those things that I didn't really want out.  But I have a complex of some sort about throwing out food, even food I don't really want.  Well that's not completely true.  I have a sweet tooth, always have, and although I can go for long periods without a fix, once my body gets ahold of a little sugar it want's more, more, more.  And even though I don't want to eat more, at least on the rational side of my brain, my little fat cells are jumping up and down saying things like "one more piece of chocolate cake won't hurt", which we all know is the worst kind of self-deception. I should convince myself that eating the stuff is a greater crime than just tossing it.

    But I was doing better. 

    Gfd_fbg_pizza Then we were at the store an G saw these little gluten free pizza's in the freezer case.  And we tried them.

    They weren't bad; they needed to be cooked longer than the instructions specified, and I think they would have been better off put on a hot brick or something to make the crust a little crispier.  We both agree that they are no where near as good as the pizza we used to get from Napoli & Sicilia Pizza; but I can't eat real pizza anymore and G, bless his heart, refuses to go get one if he can't share with me.

    They were probably the best of the packaged gluten-free pizzas I have tasted.  But they weren't so good that they would cure any pizza-craving.  I think the pizza crust I used to make, the first time I was gluten free, before the doctors all told me I was wrong and I went back to bread, was better.  I proved the doctors wrong didn't I?.  Anyway, all this did is remind me that I used to make a pretty good gluten-free pizza crust, one good enough that my non-gluten-free friends actually liked it and asked for it, not knowing it was gluten-free.  And it reminded me that I need to start baking again, but only eventually, because the pizza also started up that little carb-craving cycle, you know the one where you burn through the carbs real fast, then crash and feel tired and loggy and want more carbs.  Really, I might be able to say no easily to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, but carbs are their own kind of crack.

    IMG_0601 And we had other carbs in the house, so I ate them.   G can easily ignore whatever junk food is in the house.  Chips, cookies, cake:  none of these things tempt him and he can ignore them even when they are sititng right in front of him.  Not me.  If there are chips I will eat them.   If I bake something I will eat it, not G, me. 

    We also picked up these little corn and flax seed chips at our local specialty market/farm stand and they are addictively good.  I don't know who the manufacturer is because the store puts them in containers with the store's name on them but they are good:  corn masa, salt, and flax seeds, all fried up and crispy.

    G liked them and ate about a quarter of them.  I finished off the rest of the package.  Not all at once mind you, but still, I ate them. 

    The only thing G can't resist are Hershey's nuggets, and luckily despite the sugar, they completely don't appeal to me.  Besides, they contain gluten, so the fact that we buy 15 pounds of nuggests at a pop is no temptation at all.  G has a 3 to 5 pound a week nugget addiction, but I can look at a Hershey's nugget and see nothing but pain and suffering.

    I wish I could make that work for more of life's edible temptations.