Merry what?

I’m not that big on holidays – although in the past, I’ve loved cooking for them – and christmas is no different. I’m also not really good about birthdays, either. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy them per se. I’m not the Grinch, after all. I think once some people (like me) reach a certain age and a certain level of having stuff, I’d rather just take a pass. This most recent thanksgiving, I did take a pass and only made some food to go to the place, without taking myself to the place. Some of that was because I’d have had to wear a mask while I sat and watched other people eat since one, groups of people + kids = germs, and two, I can’t eat like a regular person. So, best to avoid the whole thing. They all had fun, I enjoyed the quiet, and everyone came out a winner.

This year, I even toyed with the idea of not bothering with a tree at all, but (as my mother rightly pointed out) I do have a very young nephew and an even younger niece, and the holiday is for them anyhow. I had to get a followup xray, and after that, I popped over to the Home Depot near it only to find they didn’t have a single christmas tree there.  I did, however, find that they had a very good assortment of citrus trees available. THAT got me excited. I’ll be heading over there to pick up several of them and bring them back to the ranch.

The tree: luckily, it not only ’tis the season for christmas trees, it is also the season where stores are trying to dump their christmas stuff, from trees to wrapping paper to lights. Now, we have a tree that will last for many years – probably well past the time of my own demise – and real tree prices being what they are, will pay for itself next year. It even came with lights, although one is broken in its socket, so I need to do a bit of DIY and get that light out of the socket and get it replaced. It looks pretty good, for an artificial tree. I’ve had them here and there over the years, and christmas tree technology, such as it is, has improved a bit.

Sparkling!

What else is happening at the ranch? Not a whole lot, since your humble narrator has been forced to the sidelines for much of the year. The year has been horrendous in the beeyard, and I’ll be lucky to have three hives when spring/summer ramps up next year. My internal odds are telling me I’ll probably only have one. I did order package bees, with queens, from a place in Georgia, and they’ll likely arrive in May sometime. I’m hoping 2018 will be much less disastrous from a health standpoint, and I’ll actually be able to manage them better in the coming year than I was this year.

The gardens lie silent, waiting. I still haven’t put together a seed order, but I plan to do that over the next couple of days. For 2018, I’m just going to (trying to) stick to core staples and not get a bunch of new/exotic stuff. We’ll see how that works out, because anyone who gardens knows seed catalogs are like crack.

Speaking of the health front, as of yesterday, my latest round of pneumo has hit the road finally and my lungs are totally clear. This time, six weeks to clear. We’re not loving that. Goal for 2018: unsubscribe from that crap. I’ve been wearing a mask when I have to go to places like the grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Anywhere there are a fair amount of people, and those people are touching everything, the mask goes on.  It also keeps me from touching my face while I’m wandering around, and when I get back to my car, I have to wipe my hands down with those germ-killing towels before I can take off the mask. It’s kind of a pain in the ass way to live,  annoying, and probably looks strange to people, but it beats picking up some random bug somewhere thanks to a compromised immune system. Another point: I’m planning to have the feeding tube removed in early 2018. I weighed in at 122 with all my clothes/boots on at the doc’s office, which means 118-119 without them, and that’s about where I was around Halloween 2016, before the first round of pancreatitis hit. It’s enough to give me a bump in the reserve I need in the event I do pick up some malady, and enough that my gastro guy will agree to pull out the tube.

All the news that’s fit to update! Until next time, peeps: be well. And be safe.

Wait a moment!

Me, crushing up a Tums from the “assorted fruit flavor” bottle to mix with some water and swallow down thanks to the sheer amount of food I’m trying to get in myself:

According to the bottle, the green ones are supposed to be lime. I’m not terribly sure about that, and they may indeed need a little ripening.

Speaking of green things, I encountered this guy/gal one afternoon, hanging around one of the plants on the front porch.

“Ugh. Humans.”

Now, there are lizards all over the place here at the ranch. Usually, I just say hello to them or gently urge them to get out of the way when I’m trying to do something. This one caught my eye because of something I saw on its tail.

Green lizard with a forked tail
“I didn’t say forked tongue, I said forked TAIL.”

To be more accurate, it wasn’t something on its tail, but the tail itself: it looked as though it may have injured its tail at some point and this is how it healed.

It was pretty chill about the whole thing, to the point of allowing me to invade its space to have a better look.

Chilled out lizard
“It’s cool.”

After our little chat, we parted ways, as of course it had things to do, just as I had.

The fact that we even have lizards and frogs and squirrels and birds and snakes around here is directly related to all the backbreaking work I’ve done on the property over the years. When I first moved in, there was no grass, and there was no soil in which most things could be grown. It looked like a house plopped down on a white, fine sand beach. The builders had scraped all the topsoil off and sold it – that’s what they do. With a lot of rehab, the ranch has really come to life in the critter category.

Social media note: another day without twitter. Today I didn’t really even think about popping on to it at all. That’s progress of the good variety.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

Return to discipline

Again.

It’s hard as hell reading about what’s going on in this country today. We all know, and as I’ve said, I try to avoid politics here. But – and I don’t think I’d be alone in saying this, even for people whose political bents are 180 degrees opposite mine – I don’t think there has been a failure in the government of this country larger or more profound  than what we’re seen since January. It’s stressful and disheartening, and it is going to take us years to recover.

That’s one of the reasons I shut down my personal facebook page, creating another profile just to manage a page that I need to maintain. I got tired of the nonsense, and even more tired of realizing how much of the finite time I have left on this earth it was ticking away. The only reason I visit fb these days is to update that page, or to view some funny video someone thinks I’ll find amusing. I can safely say I have not missed it. I had turned more to twitter, thinking I could just scan through it, post a couple of things, and not have it wind up as a massive timesink or add anything bad – like stress – to my life.

Wrong.

Continue reading Return to discipline

Discipline

Lacking. Completely.

Nah, not totally, but it could use a bit of a kick in the pants. I’m in week six of the current pneumonia battle. This one is hanging around longer than the other five times this year. I have however, been busy, both inside and out. Sort of.

The gardens, oh my, the gardens.

It’s almost like I’ve been growing this crap on purpose

That’s the front. The back garden area is bad, too. But I’ve been concentrating on the front because there are things actively growing there right now: peppers, still chugging along – the tabascos certainly, the jalapenos to a lesser extent, and either the tabascos or the cayennes that weren’t chewed to death by bugs, too. Why the or? Because they both start out looking the same, and it’s impossible to tell what is in what frame row without breaking out the original season map I did. I haven’t done that, as it’s depressing to see the season that could have been.

That pic up there is from November 21. I decided to get off my ass and start pulling weeds and get things moving as our “winter” doesn’t last long. I’d rather not have a gigantic list of things that need to be done to get the gardens in shape when I’m tending seedlings and trying to guess what Mother Nature is going to give us in the new year – if it’s a mild winter, do I take the chance and start getting tender things like tomatoes and peppers out, or do I wait until our usual last frost date, that we didn’t have last year? It’s a challenge.

This is what I got done by November 27.

Less crap, more open space and clean!

This is December 2.

Getting there

In the mid left are the remaining peppers, and behind that, the long asparagus bed. At the far, far rear, those are palmetto bushes along the area near the fenceline, not more crap to pull. Those are horrific to deal with when you want them gone, and take my advice: hire a tractor guy/gal or rent something to dig down into the ground and pull them. Don’t dig them by hand. One, sure, maybe. More? Nope.

When I managed to get the frame where the carrots had been a bit clear, I found some carrots that had either happily sat there for months or that were just now germinating for whatever reason – most likely, weed pressure, since I was sowing carrots every other week when spring came. When the hurricanes blew through us, they also blew down many of the taller weeds in that frame (and others), allowing light to get down to those carrots seeds again. There aren’t many, but the ones I found were perfect, and – according to others – mighty tasty.

I pulled more weeds yesterday, and the asparagus row is about halfway cleared. None pulled today, because it’s the time of the year my health insurance company jacks up my rates by 50% and the other options available basically amount to the exact same plan I have now as they relate to premiums plus deductibles plus copays and total out of pocket. This is life with chronic health issues. But, I know the vast majority of people will not have to pay higher premiums thanks to the ACA, so that’s good.

There was also no weed pulling today as I had to go to the car dealership and pick up my car – a couple of recall notices about the airbags, an oil change, and new tires. The service guy who handled it also mentioned other thins they “found” during the inspection – like “the engine is leaking oil somewhere, and to find it [they] will have to drain the engine, put dye in it, and find that, and oh, that will cost a couple hundred bucks just for that”. Really? It’s funny that seems to be a problem when there isn’t any oil under my car on the garage pad where I park. So, no thanks to all of that, and I’ll have my mechanic brother in law look at things here. One amusing note: that same BIL told my mother that one guy there in service was to be avoided if at all possible because he’s a jackass. Guess who handled my car check in yesterday. Yup. That guy, who wants to sell me another grand or so on other things.

**This took me a couple of days to get finished thanks to every day being a Tuesday for some reason – Tuesdays, in our little corner of the world, are batshit crazydays, and usually, they restrict themselves to Tuesdays instead of bleeding into others. But, who knows, this might be a change. It’s pretty quiet tonight, I’ve dealt with the issues that are incredibly time-consuming poking around in client stuff that wasn’t working and have gotten them all solved in some fashion over yesterday and today, and maybe, just maybe, the universe has decided my efforts have been enough to reward me with writing time.

That’s it for now, peeps. Until next time: be well.