A Calm Before a Storm?

I was beguiled this morning, when the rising sun's rays first hit this little branch outside my studio window.

Plays of light and shadow fascinate me. The power of the sun to bring to life the beauty of an otherwise annoying and objectionable bush is amazing.

There was little breeze at all this morning, and zero when I went out to exercise the horse around 10am. The flies, both in town and out at the ranch, were horrible, diving and bashing and landing heavily. As soon as the sun was up, the miserable creatures were hitting my studio window every couple minutes with a loud "Donk!" sound. At the ranch, even though I'd sprayed insect repellent on the horse and on me, the flies kept us twitching and swatting. They know.

In two days, the temperature will be thirty degrees cooler. Flies don't like that, so they get in all the shit they can before it happens. My joints have already started to ache, and now there is just a little steady breeze springing up out of the northwest ... this one may be a nasty weather change. That's a big differential to adjust.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate the wind?

Nice, Busy Day

Roses in the first full light of day are simply dreamy.

This variety is called "Just Joey" and I love it.

That's it, that's all for today.

Except that I had the best conversation with my mother this morning in five years. When she's not being a bitter old woman, she's fun.

Achoo! Well, now you know she has a pair!

I did mention in the previous post that I aggravate myself by buying Vogue once or twice a year.

Why do I do it? At over-fifty, I'm certainly not going to be trying to wear any of the clothes I see on the young models; indeed most of the styles in the magazine could be used as threats against me: "Give me all your cash or I'll make you wear -- this!" Maybe it's a way to touch base with the current trends so that I know ahead of time just how eccentric I'm going to look compared to the general populace...

But wait. Is the general populace really going to go to their company Christmas party looking like this:
This is by designer (store, company, whatever) called "bebe."

Oh, yes, I can just see the company receptionist slithering across the floor to make small talk with the girls from Accounting.

Or maybe the CEO's wife ordering this designer dress in a size 16.

I have to introduce you to someone, though. Her name? I just call her La Tante Marie, and she's been with me for ... more than 30 years, I think. I haven't drawn her in all that time and she's a bit irritated with that.

La Tante Marie says that she is from Paris. I don't know what she does for a living, and I really don't want to ask. I know that she can be irritable if disturbed for small things, but she is an opinionated character, with an earthy sense of wisdom. Well sometimes.

She's a free spirit, okay? Anyway, upon seeing this photo from Vogue, La Tante Marie says,"But of course I can see this image. It is of the drunken girl from the club Zut Allors! and she is in the hallway by the restroom looking for the back from her trashy earring. At least that is what she has told the manager who wishes to send her back to her protector in a taxi for being a trip hazard.

"To me, it looks as though she has taken a shower with someone who has so little respect for her that he has let her put her dress on backwards before shoving her out the door.

"This is not style, this is stupid."

Who am I to argue with La Tante? No wonder the pic bugged me so much. Oh, and please don't mention her thick French accent. She refuses to believe she has one.

Do you think Laura Bush will bite on this fashion for the holiday season? Weapons of Mass Destruction!

There Is Still Everything Else

The end of August and the beginning of September are just flying by.

Blogging has been difficult for a while. When life seems depressing, I'm inclined to just not mention it. It's far more fun to write about toads with Global Positioning Systems, or write about flower pictures -- or even rant about the latest issue of Vogue with which I've tortured myself.

This sunset on September 3rd was unusually spectacular, and of course, I really couldn't take a good pic of it as we were zooming along in the car with fifty million jackasses on our tail, all of whom were more intent on going 60 in a 35-mph zone than in appreciating the glory in the sky.

My mother and father taught me to stop and look around me to see what life was about. I've tried to remember that, and I'm trying harder than ever to remember that life is about the air we breathe, the miraculous nature of our existence, the love apparent in the intricacies of creation ... but it's been heavy going lately, because my mother has stopped practicing what she preached.

I downloaded Skype, which currently allows me to call free of charge to any phone in the US -- and thus allows me to call Mom every morning at 6am. She's 81 now, and still maintains by herself her 4-bedroom house and property. Well, except for mowing the chunk of land where she and Dad had their nursery business. A friend of ours mows it every few weeks, which is good to know, as the property is on a hillside and pretty tough to traverse on Mom's huge riding mower.

Mom has refused to call me for about 18 years, because I got an answering machine to pick up if I wasn't home. Well, now, she has called me a couple times: to tell me that my father died, to let me know my sister was in the hospital, to ask me to bail her out of some scam she'd got herself into. Three times, is that it? Yep. We wrote letters instead, and I'd call her when my worrying about her became overwhelming. This past spring she stopped writing back.

So anyway, the Skype thing is timely, I suppose, because Mom certainly sounds like she needs me to check on her every day. She's withdrawing from life bit by bit, retreating into memories that are more like dreams, with characters changing roles and voices, time slipping backward and forward. I don't know how she's managing to keep up with the world, frankly. I just say "Good morning, Mom!" and then listen for the next hour or more to the same memories, complaints, regrets, and bitterness ...

Bernie reminds me that the person I remember from 20 years ago is already gone.

Caught in the Act

Yes, this toad has got to have a Global Positioning System on board.

There he was, just floating as happy as can be in the swimming pool again. I'm not even surprised by this silliness anymore. And I got the impression the toad wasn't surprised by me approaching with the net, either. I just slipped it under him and lifted, and draped the dishtowel across him so he couldn't hop off while I went through the house.

I set him on the rocks beside the fish pond and got this nice, clear portrait of him.

















The toad hopped into the water, and as the fish came up and poked at him, tried to scramble out. He managed to get into the new spreading plant, and settled down. Will the toad stay in the pond? Probably not.

Will the toad return to the swimming pool in record time? Most likely.

The Mysterious Snowberry

There was a shrub on the north side of my parents' house that grew white berries in the summertime.

Not only did I not know what it was called, I never saw such a plant again -- until last Monday, at a florist shop in the Ferry Building in San Francisco.

Symphoricarpos albus is the name of the plant: Snowberry. That's a simple enough name for a berry that's as white as snow. (The ones in this picture were probably grown in the sun, and so have a rosy blush.)

I was fascinated by the shrub as a child, admiring its waxy white berries, so unique in my world. Such a lasting impression snowberry made in my mind that I gave it a mention in Dreamer, my first book, when Sully talks about filling up the empty spaces in her life after her best friends move away.

Once I had a name for the creature, I looked it up on line and in my Taylor's Encyclopedia of Gardening (which, incidentally, also got a mention in Dreamer). None of the sources have much to say about Snowberry, except that it is deciduous and bears white fruit ... at least not much that agrees. One source says that the berries are edible but bad-tasting; another says that the fruits are toxic. Taylor's skirts the issue and says neither "yea" nor "nay." Taylor's does say that the plant doesn't grow taller than three feet, but other sources suggest it can grow as tall as nine feet. All of them casually mention that the shrub proliferates by suckering -- which means that if you plant it in a reasonably kind location, it's going to take over everything. Maybe that rude habit is why one doesn't see them often.

The shop where I saw the branches of snowberry is called Oak Hill Farm.

They purvey a lot of beautiful and interesting bouquet components there; in this arrangement, frankly, the only plants I recognize are the pinkish-purple pompoms of gomphrena (although that's the longest-stemmed gomphrena I've ever seen) and the bare stems of a corkscrew willow.

Not that they don't have "regular" flowers -- this display of zinnias caught my eye immediately, making me wish I'd followed through with my Spring resolve to plant zinnias in my garden.

And from the sublime of the flowery beauty, I now descend to the ridiculous: taking a break to let Howie outside, I walked past the pool and saw -- oh yezz, again -- THE TOAD.

Time to get the net and the toad-cloth and try once more to convince the beast that toads live in a fish pond, not in a suburban swimming pool.

Coleus Portrait

Most of the time, the humble coleus is used as a "background" plant for setting off spectacular flower groupings.

In a mixed pot of impatiens and alyssum, coleus adds texture and contrast. I've seen them tucked in with geraniums, asters, dahlias, celosia ...

I have a half-barrel planter that gets just a bit of morning sun, and each year I pack it with a dozen coleus -- nothing else. I like to savor the unique patterns of color. Not one leaf is exactly the same as another.

These particular plants were about to be tossed at the nursery where I got them. They'd grown leggy and unlovely from overwatering. But I knew that they'd straighten right up in the proper environment. And they did.

There's a tiny little blossom forming on the top of the tri-color coleus -- that means it's time to pinch off the tops of the plants so that they branch out and put all their effort into their beautiful leaves.

My coleus barrel will give me color in the garden until the season turns frosty; by then I'll have taken cuttings, put them in water to root, and started some plants for indoors.

Nice plant, and looking good in our perfect, perfect summer weather.

New Fish and Old Toad

They're rather hard to see in there, but in that bag are Bernie's two new calico lady goldfish.

One has a redder head than the other; they haven't been named yet. We thought once they were put in the pond that they would disappear into the deepest part of the pool for a while ... but they didn't. They joined up with the rest of the fish right away.

This morning I checked on them, and they came up and swarmed right along with the rest of the moochers, though they didn't eat anything. That's okay. As long as they survived the night, we're good.

Speaking of survivors, I was weeding and trimming tomatoes when something scuttled away from my hand. It was a toad, can you imagine that? Indeed it was the small toad I transported the other day. Good choice of habitats, Toad. Eat up all those slimy slugs!

Return of the Toad

Guess who sneaked into my swimming pool again last evening?
Lassie, the incredible homing toad!

Cat Pics

This is "Cat."

We were in second grade when we met, and stayed good friends through high school. Just before adolescence -- that is to say, just before we lost our minds -- we viewed with some contempt the older girls' frantic rush to pile makeup on their young faces. We teased each other, drawing cartoons depicting each other in excesses of hopeless cosmetics.

I think the cartoons started when we were in sixth grade; I'm not sure anymore. We were already "Cat" and "Sand," though no one else seemed to be able to get that through their skulls.

Cat's portrait (kind of like a press release picture) shows a degree of sophistication in the artwork compared to the earliest "Cat Pics," but my signature still looks a little timid.

I drew cartoons of her and she drew cartoons of me. We drew them in class, at home, at recess; we drew them on drawing paper, math homework, the back of graded assignments. We thought those cartoons were hysterically funny.

Along with the catastrophic (get it? "Cat-astrophic?") makeup, a recurring theme was eyesight. Both of us wore glasses and were blind as bats without them. In this early masterpiece, Cat forgets her glasses and wanders out into the world.

There's a lot of line in this cartoon, and the shadow amazes me; My cartooning style now is very spare.

Word balloons were still developing; a lot of extraneous detail can be seen. A dog at a fire hydrant shows its teeth at Cat -- this signifies an unspoken insult that she was so ugly that even a dog didn't want to be around her.

Unwitting homeliness was part of Cat the character, too, though that is less of a factor in this cartoon.


"Z - O - O," spells Cat, and thinks it says "Hospital." In the early Cat cartoons, Cat was pretty dumb, too.

(The real Cat was not dumb at all; had she been interested in higher education she would have made a great mad scientist.)

The angle of Cat's neck was a veritable pinnacle of visual humor.

So Cat goes to see the ape and near-sightedly thinks the ape is her Aunt Clara. The message is that not only is Cat dumb and overly made-up and can't see for crap, but also that her relatives are probably ugly, too.

Note the numbering of each frame to help the reader follow along correctly.

Also the tin-shaded lighting -- we saw that every day.


The ape roars at Cat, but Cat sees nothing unusual about it. Is Cat that dumb, or is her Aunt Clara that unpleasant? The cartoonist allows the reader (the real Cat) to ponder the insults, any or all.

The final sight gag is that Cat's feet are pointed in the wrong direction.

I saved all the Cat Pics, treating them with far more care than I did the other drawings I made. When I was old enough to get an allowance, I bought a lockbox for the cartoons. Only one was lost: a classic about a beauty salon hairdryer that blasted Cat into orbit.

They're still precious to me, and I plan on scanning them all and getting them into a book through Lulu.com. Crude and obnoxious, the cartoons -- especially the early ones -- remind me of a little girl who wasn't afraid to draw outrageously and constantly. I could use her coaching now.

A World Around Us All

It's a good thing now and then to take time out of one's crazed duties of shouting outrage and foisting herbal remedies on people.

Slowing down and letting the world revolve on its own, I had the opportunity to see this little butterfly resting by the side of the water garden. None of the legs we can see has a watch on it, and I can assure you the bug was not tapping any of his feet wondering when the mailman was finally going to get to his street.

Sometimes I encounter people who barely know that they're alive. Or maybe it's that they don't know that the rest of the world is alive. Which ever condition it is, they hurry along unmoved by rainbows, birds, or the sound cottonwoods make in the wind. They can't take the time necessary to stop and use their senses of touch and smell to discover the first warm breeze that heralds the end of Winter. Silence unnerves them, and they have no sense of themselves in the real world.

Life can be so beautiful.

I don't see too many sunsets like this in the summer -- no clouds, generally. But the weird weather patterns brought a few for a visit, and the glory was certainly worth running outside the house to see, to savor before the light was gone and the sky faded.

Panda Antivirus Internet Problems -- Dirty Deal

This past Spring I installed Panda Antivirus to replace Norton, with which my machine came originally, and which allowed a horrendous virus to infect Bernie's computer and which offered "solutions" that did not work in the teensiest least.

I liked Panda. I liked what I saw of its track record, and that it cleaned up my machine very nicely.

However, over the course of the last few months, I noticed that my computer wasn't keeping up with me in Photoshop -- hence the purchase of the new Big Graphics Machine -- and was getting slow on the Web. But I wasn't worried, until last week, when I was chatting with Filthy Pikers on AIM and found that I could no longer access the internet. No sites, no favorites, no links -- but I was still chatting away on AIM. Funny thing that, especially when the AOL links to news worked.

For the next three days, I fussed with my computer, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, unable to access the internet at all. The new computer worked fine. I tried using a network card for a backup wireless connection, I tried turning off the wireless router and cleaning it, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and uninstalling and updating browsers ... nada. I was ready to take my laptop in to the computer store and have them pull it apart and look at the wireless hardware.

Okay, it wasn't Firefox after all, because after a short time, IE started doing the same thing. And then Trillian. And then AIM. But not at the same time ... they only failed when I started to use them to get internet connection. What on my computer was running all the time that could affect all those programs as I began to use them?

Why, Panda Antivirus.

I googled "Panda Antivirus Problem Internet" and promptly was directed to a gamers' site where some gamers had had exactly the same problem. There was even a solution there, with step-by-step instructions on how to customize Panda to allow access to the net.

Seems like in July, Panda's automatic updates included a feature that denies contact with the internet unless you specifically know how to go into its innards and change settings ... for every freakin' program that needs to communicate outside your office. Oh, and they didn't bother to tell their customers that.

After three tries, I was back on line, and my Firefox was reinstalled (God, I hate Internet Explorer, 7 or not) and I began to check into other antivirus products.

Now, did I say I charge $50/hr or $30? Either way, the amount of time I spent trying to track down the problem and fix it cost four times (minimum) what I paid for Panda.

Now that Panda is gone, my laptop is once again lightning-fast -- I didn't need to buy a faster computer after all.

Fine. Now I have two fast computers. And an antivirus that doesn't slow them up.

Let me make one last comment in computerese:

PANDA ANTIVIRUS SUX.

Look! Let's Go Fishing!

At long last, water garden!

We braved the heat when it was at its least in the morning and mortared in the first course of flat rocks around the pond's edge. They hold the liner in place, and hide the homely black rubber.

This first picture is the front of the pond. A brick holds in place two stones that ended up a little more sloped than we'd intended. Once the mortar was set, the brick disappeared.

Bernie had been toying with the idea of a waterfall (and still is) but thought that the pond needed the sound of water to make it more inviting. He rescued my chipped frog fountain from under a bush and hooked it up to the pump.
It made a perfect cascade out to the middle of the pond. If you scroll back a few entries, you can see that the frogwater is falling right into where I was digging the deepest part of the pond.

Finally, this is the view from the porch. We'll have a little table out there for cool morning breakfasts with the sound of water and the sight of fish. When this picture was taken, the fish weren't in there yet; they were still in their little fishpond in back of the house. Bernie transported them when the shade came around to the pond. They were unhappy about being moved, but this morning they were swimming around the big pond in a school.

Saturday we'll finish the second course of stones around the edge.

Incidentally, a smaller toad showed up in the swimming pool and was also subsequently plopped into the fishpond. He crawled out immediately and set off down the front lawn towards the trees. I guess if you can't have chlorinated water, there's not much in going swimming for a city toad.

Toy Time

I've been thinking about a new computer for a while now.

Not that my trusty laptop isn't "it" anymore ... I love my laptop, and intend to write more stories and articles and novels on it for quite a while. But I don't think it was ever intended to stay ON from 6am until 8pm or later, continuously. I have a fan under it, but still. It gets HOT and balky after a long day of work in Photoshop.

In spite of my best intentions, I end up using Photoshop a lot. I joined The Piker Press as a writer, in order to keep myself writing regularly. Alas! When not editing and uploading other people's work, I find myself spending time on photos and sketches and -- Photoshop concoctions.

Today I found a machine I could get cozy with, a Compaq Presario with a 200 gb hard drive, and an upgraded 1 mb RAM; plus a Pentium 4 processor and not too many extra bullshit programs loaded on for me to try to delete. I can load my photos directly from my camera's memory card; a little add-on has me connected with that machine to the wireless network in the house. It's quiet, an essential to me, and all that hard drive can store all my photos with ease.

It was a bit of a wrench to my heart to detach my old computer, a 4 gb Micron laptop, from the power source and monitor. After all, the Micron was my little workhorse for writing Time Traveler, and Character Assassin, and editing Dreamer. My friend Tedi Trindle sent it to me in the mail, back when I needed a second computer so that both Bernie and I could be online at the same time. I love that machine, not only because it was of sentimental value, but because it was so reliable. But it can't keep up with all the stuffz of Photoshop.

The new computer is sitting on my art table now, quiet and dark. I imagine it watching me, waiting to see if I will give it an honest job. My laptop, on the other hand, is grinning widely. It's having a drink with me, and admitting frankly, "I'm a writing machine, not an artist."

Tomorrow, the new toy starts its Honest Job.

A Toad in Hand

There is no picture of the toad today, because I didn't have a camera in the pool with me.

109 degrees, and I was just getting out of the tepid pool to return to what would feel like an icy 78, when I spotted something swimming along beside me. Yes, it was the toad. I waded through the chest-deep water towards the toad, thinking it would see the monolithic predator approaching, turn tail and swim like mad in the opposite direction. The toad swam towards me instead, so I held out my hand, and the toad swam to it, climbed onto it, and relaxed.

I stood there a while, thinking captions and lines for the scenes.

"Yup, just went swimmin' with ma toad."
"Sand Swims With Toads."
"Sand and Toad Together."
"The Toad Whisperer."
"Toady In The Water."
"How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Toad."
"Someone is going to come out of the house and think I like this toad."

Eh. What's not to like about a toad who manages to traverse 80 feet of overgrown shrubs, a papyrus labyrinth, a patio cluttered with chairs and barbecue stuff -- and find the swimming pool again? This is a toad with guts. When the heat wave breaks, I may relocate Toad to the river; if I can catch the little toad, I may try to convince him (God, I hope it's a him, I don't want toadspawn in the pool -- yechh!) once again to live by the water garden out front. Maybe by then the water lily will be in there. I could even make a little toad house on the shady side of the pond...

Before the heat got ugly this morning, I was out at the ranch to clean the horse's paddock and take him for a 40-minute hack through the orchards. By the time we got back, the sun was up and hitting the fenceline.

The people who own the ranch planted a "perennial morning glory" on the fence. I've watched it grow, wondering how long they would tolerate the invasive and exponential growth of the beautiful but damnable plant. They don't seem to mind.

Interestingly enough, the color that you see in the digital photograph -- a lovely blue -- is not what the flowers look like. They're purple. Deep, royal purple.

Is that something in the nature of photography that I don't know about, like how I can never get a good focus on bright, bright reds?

I played with Photoshop and color enhancements until I got a pic that looked more like what I saw ... that would be the second photo.

The plant is called ipomoea indica, by the way. If you have a space in your temperate garden that needs everything else for fifty feet covered up and killed, this is the plant for you.

Looks nice on Carol's fence, though.

The Toad and I

This morning, I took Howie outside, and noticed a toad swimming in the pool.

I fished it out and put it in the garden. An hour later I was back outside, and the toad was back in the pool, this time sitting on my pink inflatable raft.

This is probably the fifth time this year I've hauled the toad out of the swimming pool. Today I thought I had a solution, though: take the toad on a journey to the new water garden in the front of the house!

The toad leaped out of the dishtowel in which I had caught it, right into the new pool. It swam across the little pond into a water plant. See? Doesn't that look much more natural? Apparently "natural" not what the toad wanted, because it left the pond in about 15 minutes. I don't know where it went; I'm hoping that the toad is not carrying a GPS with the swimming pool's coordinates on it.

The New Pond

The hole was dug, the cal-
cula-
tions made, and the pond liner purchased.

We waited until the shade of the big eucalyptus in the front yard had reached the pond area, and dragged the huge pond liner to the hole. (See a previous blog entry, named The Making of a Goldfish Pond.)

While the pool filled, I stood in the hole and arranged pleats and tugged at the liner. Probably it was a shitty job, but hey, I never did this before. In hardly any time at all, the pool was filled, and Fourmyle (that cat in the pic above) simply had to sample the rubber-scented water.

When I looked at this picture, I wondered what the heck was the grid that looked like tiling below the water line. Duhh, it was the double reflection from our front windows. Weird.

The rounded rocks are all going to be placed on the right side of the pool. We'll mortar in some select flagstone pieces around the other edges. Then the excess liner will be trimmed.

We're done for the day. Looking from the front porch, we can see Fourmyle still sipping from the pond, lots of ugly rubber liner still exposed, and the patient, brilliant
Bernie lecturing Howie on why you should not nudge the arm connected to the hand that holds a highball glass of Muvver's wine.

Good work done today, and this weekend, we celebrate Bernie's 53rd birthday. He is my love, and may he have at least 53 more happy years ... with me.

Learning To Be The DOG

Sitting still for photographs is the most boring thing in the world, as Howie can plainly tell you.

He looked cute before I snapped the picture, catching him in a gaping yawn. Of course, he had his reasons for being less than interested in a photo-shoot: a PG&E man came to the door to do a routine checklist on our electric meter, and Howie was the one who had to bark madly at him. Howie even managed a deeper "big dog" bark along with his tenor "boo-woo-woo-woo." So he was the Tough Protector, and it wore him out.

The camera was out because I've been trying to catch a picture of Howie with his butt-hackles up to show fellow Piker Wendy what butt-hackles look like. The last time I tried to catch his puffy butt (he was after a stray cat trail in our yard) all I got was his tail as he growled past. Today, he was just too mellow after his resounding bellow at the meter man. Nothing I said could rile him up again.

So after his yawn, I told him he was a good boy, and got this pretty pose from him. He's such a cutie.

In addition to telling off the man at the door, Howie notified me when the washing machine unbalanced and began to thump, when my phone rang, when the kitchen timer went off, and when a catfight occurred in the yard next door. And when I turned off my computer this morning, he came diving into the studio -- having learned recently that when I am done with my machine, I'm likely to go do something with The Dog.

Two Tomato Plants

This afternoon I figured I ought to go have a look and see if any more tomatoes had ripened, as I plan to make bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for the evening meal tomorrow.

There were a few. I have two Roma tomato plants in between the shrubs beside the driveway; this year I managed to drum up some gumption and put in an extension from my drip line right to my tomatoes. Apparently the plants liked it.

You will of course have noticed that not all the 'maters are red. I tend to pick them just as they begin to color (they turn red almost overnight anyway) because if I leave them until they're red, the ants get after them. Few things of summer aggravate me more than reaching for a beautiful red tomato and finding the entire back of it devoured and covered by ants.

I grow Romas for their hardiness, bushy habit, and prolific fruiting. But for flavor, I normally buy Better Boy plants. This year, some volunteer plants sprung up from last year's ant casualties among the Better Boys, and on a whim, I let them grow. They are producing a medium-sized fruit on leggy vines ... the first one was ripe today, and I had it for lunch. Heavenly flavor. I could smell "TOMATO!" as soon as I cut the first slice.

Chicken Little said, "The Sky Looks Funny!"

When I looked out the front window this after- noon, I saw that the light was -- how shall I say it -- "funny-looking."

The sunlight on the loosestrife seemed more mellow than I expect at noon; high summer in California makes a lot of colors look washed out in the brightest part of the day.

When I went outside to see, there was a reason for the change in light -- smoke in the sky. The haze that clouded us over was from the Del Puerto Canyon wildfire to the southwest.

The fire started on Sunday evening, and continues to burn. I woke tasting smoke on Monday morning, and today as well. I hope they get it out soon.

In the meantime, I'll enjoy the intensification of color in the yard. These roses were doomed to removal last spring, but we didn't get the roots dug out in time, and of course, now we can't bear to rip out such a beauty. A reprieve in the smoky air.

The Making of a Goldfish Pond

We had a little water garden just off the front porch.

There were some variously-colored fish in it, still small (Wal-Mart fish), and a water lily. A modest little half-barrel of water.

It was so charming that we became incensed and set out to make a larger, free-form pond for our fish to roam in. We took turns digging. Howie got his turn, too, and in this picture, you can see him begging for another chance to dig. He was very helpful in breaking up the dense layer of compacted clay.
While us diggers took needed ice water rests, Lillian tested the depth by climbing down into the hole. Not so dangerous; the soil is so clayey that there's no chance of the sides falling in. To expand the hole, we had to shave slices off with our shovels.

Howie still thinks he should be digging.

Behind Lil can be seen the beginnings of a shelf for water plants to reside in pots. We're thinking the water lily, a zebra rush, a tule reed, and a small-leafed spreading thing that is cute but I didn't take time to learn the name of.

This radically forshortened image of me was taken as I was slicing down to reach the requisite 2.5 feet. I look like I should be playing for the Steelers, and my feet look
teensy. I still have another foot deeper to go.

*Also note the hat so that my shorn head does not sunburn.

We hope to work on the pond some more this weekend, but the temps are predicted to rise into the 100's ... the fish are safe out back in a temporary pond in the shade. They may have to wait another week.

A Visit to the River

On Monday morning, Bernie and I decided to take a walk.

We hadn't been down to the levee along the Stanislaus River since the flooding of the golf course. Jack Tone Golf is now dry, but in a sorry state; the flooding left a large portion of the grass dead. They've been reseeding and tending, but what a mess!

By the east side of the golf course, we spotted these birds. The one on the top branch was obviously a juvenile, still squealing at a parent bird for food. When we got back from our walk, we checked our bird book, but were unable to make a decisive identification.

Howie was lagging behind us, sniffing at a fenceline when we spotted a large turtle. We called How, wondering what he would think of the creature.

He trotted briskly to catch up and then pass us, and only when he was within a foot of the turtle did he realize that what he must have thought was a rock -- was alive! He leaped into the air in startlement. (Bernie and I couldn't help but laugh, shame on us.)

Howie circled the creature suspiciously, backed away, and predictably, came to me and sat down behind me, where he knew he would be safe.

I sent him back to "Go see!" and he did, sneaking up on the turtle while I took this photo. The turtle released a stream of fluid. Eww. After that, Howie treated every stone in the road with caution.

The river has returned to normal levels, but the little coves and beaches are quite different, with big trees felled by the flood waters and the sandy soil eroded away from banks. The levee breach that allowed the flooding of the golf course was too far downstream for us to find without venturing into the thick woods of the wildlife refuge.

Keeping Busy

I've been trying to get back to digging in the soil a little.

I planted impatiens in pots, and had them under a tree beside the patio. I used to grow roses in that spot, but then it got too shady when the tree grew. I took the roses out, and put potted impatiens there. They did fine for two years, but now the tree is much bigger, the fir pines we planted on the south side of the patio are huge, and there is simply not enough light there for the impatiens to bloom. Fortunately there's a little recess in the brick barbecue, and they look nice there.

Then there was the big green pot, in which alstromeria had resided, looking lush and beautiful this past wet spring. I'd thought they died. Well, apparently that was their habit, because after their first bloom, they disappeared again. The heck with that. I bought a New Guinea impatien, and some white ones to keep it company. The pot is getting too shady for sun-loving flowers anyway.

It's a start. I've neglected the back yard for a couple years -- ever since we had to cut down our huge eucalyptus that ensured our privacy in our pool. Everything seems so ... well, exposed, of course. But I did find that now that the shrubs along the fence have grown up, there is a nice corner of the pool that is visible from NO neighbor's yard. That's encouraging.

Today flew by, and I didn't get to walk with Howie in the morning. I'd intended to play with him in the pool all afternoon, but I went out to lunch with Bernie (our last weekday lunch!) instead. The wind kicked up and it wasn't feeling much like a lounge in the pool late afternoon, but I did get in and throw the ball for Howie. He decides when he's had enough, and goes to the patio to be dried off.

Here he is, mostly dry, happy to have been playing, with his ball at his feet ... keeping an eye on me in case I decide to throw the ball one more time.

We still get sudden "blue" fits, missing Babe, but we're adjusting.

We're looking forward to a four-day weekend -- barbecuing, a movie, and some writing exercise. And camping out in the tent!

Cheers!

Time Change

Bernie may be seeing a few more of these soon.

Through a fluke in the system, and possibly more than a little prayer, Bernie is unexpectedly going to be able to move to the first shift of operation at his plant.

What does this mean? Well, it means that instead of getting home from work at 4am, he has to leave for work at 4am. It means that instead of sleeping through sunrises and working through sunsets, he'll see the sun rise on his way to work, and watch sunsets from home -- with me.

It means family dinners again. And warm snuggles at night.

Now granted, it does mean getting up at 3:30 in the morning. But being a middle-aged woman, that's not uncommon for me, anyway. Once he's off to work, I'll likely write or edit. I might end up napping at mid-morning, but who knows?

The tricky part is going to be suppertime. I haven't eaten much food at night for a long, long time. But Bernie will be ravenous when he gets home, so good meals will be in order. I'm going to have to learn to take tiny portions, and then EAT EVERYTHING LEFT OVER AT LUNCHTIME THE NEXT DAY!!!! (Bwah-ha-ha!)

I'm cautiously awaiting, and trying not to be too excited over this change.

Look at the Tomatoes on That One!

It's tomato season again.

My Roma tomatoes have been encouraged by the hot weather to ripen. I picked a dozen on Sunday, and another eight yesterday. Monday I was possessed by an urge to fix my sprinkler system, which I did, and then extended it to reach the tomatoes in the front of the house. Fatten those maters right up, automatically! I love the smell of tomato vines, and rustling through their leaves and stems for ripe tomatoes is as good as any Easter egg hunt I ever went to as a child.

Heat Wave

There was a song, a long time ago, called "Heat Wave."

The song made it out that a heat wave was groovy, perhaps even ginchy, in the vernacular of the time. Or maybe it didn't. I never listened to the song with more than half an ear, to be honest. As a kid, I was a linguistic snob, and if I couldn't clearly understand the lyrics to a song, I dismissed it. Did the song even have a melody?

Well, we're in a true "heat wave" now, and the breeze is like standing in front of Hell's exhaust fans. You can feel your skin shrivel after a few minutes.

The indigenous people of this area are frequently shown in old drawings as wearing no clothing. I can understand why. How did they survive without air conditioning? Why, they betook themselves to the river, which, fed by the meltoff of last winter's snow, is still one chilly watercourse even in the hottest bit of the summer.

We were guests at a lovely party today, but the air conditioning was iffy and the nearest swimming pool was warmish.

No clothes and a nearby river would have been preferable.

One Foot In Front of Another

Howie finally ate his bowl of dog food today.

It was the first time since the day before Babe's death that he voluntarily ate anything besides a tablespoon of cottage cheese in the mornings; I was able to tempt him Tuesday with an egg sprinkled with queso cotija, but that was all. Now this is not to say that my little striped sausage couldn't afford to drop the weight -- he does look nicely slim now. But it is to say that Howie has been grieving, too. Babe was his boss, and he took his orders and his tone from Babe.

This evening something wonderful happened. All five people of the family were in the living room once Alex got home from work; even the cat was there. Granddaughter Lillian was throwing a tennis ball for Howie, when he was suddenly possessed of the wild-eyed gallops. He raced from the back door to the front door, and every time he passed a person he leaped in the air and roared. He was grinning like a crazy dog, and attacked Bernie's feet, then John's, then zoomed to Lillian's bedroom and back and almost leaped over the back of the couch. He barked at the cat, and the cat cuffed him vehemently with both paws on the face! He chased the cat around the room and under the entertainment center! In the five years Howie has been with us, this is the first time he was allowed to play loudly and crazily -- Babe simply would not permit it.

It will be interesting to see how Howie develops in days to come. He's always been The Puppy. Now he's The Dog.

He's got a goodly portion of herding genes in his makeup, and I did notice that during his manic spree he was doing his growly roar right beside the rumps of the family members. He is part Queensland Heeler. I hope he's not going to decide to become an ass-nipper. That kind of humor gets old really fast.

I was glad to see him play.

In Memoriam

Babe is gone.

The vet and I looked at his chest x-rays together; she pointed out the mottling that covered most of his lungs. In light of the fact that he'd fallen facefirst into the pool a couple weeks ago (playfully trying to attack me as I swam), we figured the old fellow had pneumonia. A robust round of antibiotics and he might pull through.

His breathing had gotten loud and short over night, not quite panting. The doctor took a blood sample, too, and we were on our way with some hope. Until we were about to leave, and Babe coughed blood onto the floor. Everything slowed down and seemed to stop. I called a vet assistant, and she came and picked up the blood and went to get the vet again. She talked with me for a few more minutes.

She was right twice over. She told me that dogs that are to the point of coughing blood frequently go downhill fast. She told me that there was a strong possibility that he had cancer.

The next day the worst was confirmed. The blood showed numerous cancerous cells, and by evening, Babe had stopped eating and was just lying in his corner, puffing, each short breath counting down the hours.

Today we said goodbye to Babe as he left peacefully, the vet, the vet's assistant, Bernie and I -- all of us crying. The vet has known Babe for 11 years, too.

It was the right thing to do. Nothing makes it easy to have a pet euthanized, though. We let them so deeply into our hearts -- maybe because their love in return is so trusting, so unconditional.

My memories of Babe are pretty much all good. His first run on a long line with Bernie, who underestimated the speed and power of a year-old German Shepherd -- and ended up face-plowing as Babe dragged him off his feet. Babe helping to dig holes for shrubs in the yard, his huge yellow feet moving soil faster than my shovel could. His face wistfully set on the kitchen table as he hoped for a "cute" factor to gain him a tidbit or two. His unflagging optimism.

He was my sweet honey-bunkins.

Bad News

Babe is failing.

The great German Shepherd Dog, who in his prime weighed a lean 100 pounds, has been withdrawing from us, and losing weight and appetite and interest. He wants to sleep almost all the time, and sleeps so deeply that he doesn't notice someone coming to pet him.

Tomorrow I'll make a vet appointment for him; but I think his end is near. It's hard. I remember him best as the tireless ball-player, The Great Communicator who could tell us that he wanted clean water, or dog cookies, or cottage cheese from the fridge, or just Out.

Maybe he'll rally, again. I don't know.

Just so you know, if you didn't read the Press a few years ago, this is Babe's personal song:

Baby, baby,
You're so sweet
You're like the alligator
With the yellow feet!

Baby, baby,
You're so cute
You're like the crocodile
In the fur suit!

We'll see how he is in the morning.

Did I mention that it's hard?

Cheryl Made Me Look Like a Dunce

Cheryl gave me a whack this past week.

She wrote this poem, and it was sexy and strangely alluring, yet disturbing. I was reminded of long, long past boyfriends and of fictitious male characters in my books. We were chatting online, and after I'd complimented her on the poem, she asked me, "Did you know what it was about?"

Deer in the headlights moment.

What it was about? Uhh, wasn't it about some tall seductive person? Wasn't that obvious? Wait, Cheryl is never obvious! Crap! I missed something really important!

I called up the poem and re-read it. Sexxxay, as dear Josh would say, and quite readable ... still, it was obvious I was missing something.

Opting for the deer in the headlights reaction, I just basically said, "Hi! Is there somebody there?"

Pow.

I was run over by Cheryl's tongue-in-cheek semi: The poem was about too-high-heeled shoes.

Me = Road Kill when it comes to analysis of writing, or parodies, or analogies, or whatever the hell people call them when what is written isn't really what it means.

Well, except when I do it, of course.

Stinking Cheryl. Just wait and see if I don't prod people to "Write Fiction Like Cheryl" for a contest again this summer.

Pomegranate Thoughts

Pomegranates.

When I was a little child, my mother told me about the exotic fruit called "pomegranate." At Christmastime, she told me, her mother would buy a pomegranate for the kids to share. She tried to describe the taste of the fruit, and how it looked. I wished I could see one and taste one, her wistfulness was so evident.

But we lived then in a very rural Central Pennsylvania, and pomegranates were a fable, a rumor, a fictitious vegetable.

I was sixteen and daringly going alone to the supermarket to do the shopping when I spotted my first pomegranate. On impulse, I bought one, and Mother was not critical of the purchase when I brought it home. (I wasn't buying groceries on my own money at that point, having no income of my own!)

Breaking into the heavy-rinded fruit was a lesson in itself: we carefully tore back the skin from the blossom-end, exposing gradually the garnet-colored seed-drops in the interior. The taste was less acerbic than cranberries, but more tart than cherries. It was a flavor of foreign lands, of harvests more improbable than peaches or cucumbers. When I went away to college, at Christmas I would buy a pomegranate -- to remind me of my heritage, to savor the vivid flavor that laughed in the face of icy winter.

Globalization brought pomegranates into Pennsylvania stores regularly in the years that followed. We enjoyed every one we bought.

It was only after moving to California that I was able to have a pomegranate tree of my own, and I lost no time in doing so. That orange blossom above is a pomegranate bloom, and the photo below is a fertilized blossom.

Last year, the weather at this time of year was so chill that none of the blossoms set. This year, we're hoping for a few blessed treats when November and December roll around.

By then, the pomegranates will be as big around as large apples, and we'll have a big bowl of pomegranate to challenge the cranberries at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Do Her Eyes Follow You?

This is the cover image for this week's issue of the Piker Press.

I was very pleased with this result, as I've been beating the crap out of myself trying to learn how to use Photoshop effectively. One has to remember that it was only in the year 2001 that I learned how to do Instant Messaging, and only a couple months ago learned how to load illustrations or photos to the Press.

I'm pleased by my progress.

Last week I found a bamboo stake and fixed it in the ground at the far end of the pool. I had a reason for doing so: this year's lovely red dragonfly needed a place to land and survey his/her territory. In less than an hour, the dragonfly that had been buzzing our yard found the pole and alit. So fond of the stake is the bug that I can stand a foot away from him/her and the dragonfly is quite willing to allow me the intimacy.

My husband asked me how I knew to put a stake up for the dragonfly. "When there have been gladiolus spikes in the same place, the dragonflies land on them," I told him. He was a little surprised that I had drawn a connection, not because I'm stupid, but because he'd not thought of making an artificial spike to replace the dug-up gladioli. I could have told him it was a hedge-shaman thing, that we know how the wild things prefer their environment, but in reality, it wasn't much different than knowing that if you want to make changes to an image in Photoshop, the first thing you need to do is duplicate a layer or add a new one to experiment on.

I know that if a bug lands repeatedly on a certain tall plant, a surrogate tall "plant" will be an acceptable place to land.

By the same reasoning, if every attempt at modifying an image is going to produce a mess in Photoshop, just add an additional or copied layer and it will become an acceptable place to experiment.

When I crawled out from my cave under the tree-roots, I saw the dragonfly on the perch beside the water and told him/her, "Thank you."

Letting Go

This weekend is "Spring Cleaning Weekend" in our little city.

All the oversized junk that a household wants to get rid of can be put out on the curb, and for free, an anonymous dump truck will carry the stuff away.

Obvious candidates for "Spring Cleanup" are the roll-down sun-shades from last year that one of the winter storms violently ripped off its moorings and flung to the patio; the disgusting rusted cheap folding chairs that no one wants to sit in anymore; the faithful wheelbarrow that just fell apart last fall with no intact area to repair any more.

The stacks of growers' pots from many shrubs -- I haven't started plants in years, who am I kidding? -- those went onto the growing pile in front of the house. The failed experiment of the push-reel-mower (that "green" solution would have worked if filthy perdition-headed Sears hadn't purveyed such a shitful product, but that's a whole 'nother story); the spunky little rototiller that I no longer have use for, but definitely got my money's worth out of in the past; a broken coffee-maker, a burnt out DVD player, and a toaster whose final review was "Does Not Meet Job Requirements" all garnish the heap.

"Wait," you say, "some of those items still sound usable -- should they really be out on the discard heap?"

Well, yes. Because some of the stuff will actually be picked up by city employees early next week ... but most of it will be picked up by "gleaners" if it appears to be of any use at all.

For instance, last night a Gleaner picked up the rickety footstool I made and upholstered some (more than a decade) years ago. It had been over-used and abused and repainted and I only kept it because the upholstery matched my old rocking chair ... until putting it out last evening because I would never be able to make it sturdy and new again. Today, a Gleaner with an overloaded truck picked up the rototiller, the lawnmower, a baby stroller, and the burnt DVD player. I think they took the toaster, too.

I like the idea of "gleaning." Long, long ago in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, we "gleaned" a wonderful Duncan Pfyffe (sp?) table and chairs from someone's discards and used it for many, many years. We loved it until more pieces began to fall apart than we could fix. That same year we also found a lovely carved wooden chair that served us manfully as a decoration for a long, long time.

We don't need more money, so I hate to charge anyone for our discards. Putting out usable stuff for Gleaners -- I hope they can make money re-selling stuff.

Still, I don't find pleasure in putting out things I've loved, that will never find another home. Especially today, when I took a long, critical look at the woven rocking chair my dad bought at auction, painted, and gave to me when I was pregnant, so that I would have a comfy chair to rock the baby in. He bought it largely because it had belonged to the mother (and grandmother) of his best childhood friend. He remembered playing on it as a child. And it was something Dad just did for Me. That precious gift really started deteriorating this spring, more than 30 years after he bought it and fixed it up for me; one of the rockers broke apart, and the twisted raffia (under layers and layers of primer and paint) began popping on the back and sides, with no hope of repair.

Every time I've ever looked at the chair, what I saw was my father's love. Yet today, the time had come to let that poor, disintegrating symbol of a memory go. I know how much Dad loved me. Still, it hurts like a damn, putting the broken thing out on a pile of discards, a broken, battered, loved piece of old furniture that even the Gleaners won't want.

Summer Colors

I don't know if I've shown this picture before or not.

I just felt the need to see something beautiful, something that nature offered. This plant wasn't planted, it was a volunteer grand-daughter of planted plants of long ago.

Today I spent a lot of hours at the computer, formatting and uploading stuff to the Press. Thus with some stuff, I'm weeks ahead. Very good feeling, but goodness, I feel like I put in a day of it. Tomorrow I'm going to plant some geraniums, I think, and then spend the afternoon floating in the swimming pool.

I love summer.