Woman in the Middle

I have made a number of photos books over the years though a photo site called Shutterfly. In order to make the books, you have to upload your photos to their site. Shutterfly has started a new thing  where they email me on occasion and say “Look what we found for you. Remember five years ago?” This time, they reminded me that five years ago this week we were on a trip to Flagstaff and Sedona in Arizona with Brother Dear. He had already gone through major surgery for cancer and wanted to do a bit of traveling. However, he had no friends who were in a position to travel and didn’t know where he wanted to go. So I took matters in hand and told him we would be taking him to Arizona. We had gone previously and had taken a jeep trip out into the wilderness near Sedona and I was pretty sure he would enjoy that. We were also going to go to the Grand Canyon, as I thought he would enjoy that as well.       

Well, I was right. The jeep trip was a HUGE hit. Here is Brother Dear with our diver after the trip. We sat him right up front by her and he used his good old boy charm to chat with er the whole time. He thought the Grand Canyon was OK (no jeep trip!) but Sedona, oh boy, that was great.

It seems so long ago. Amazing it was just five years ago. Thanks Shutterfly, for the good memory!

BTW, Shutterfly didn’t give me a darn thing to write this post, BTW, there are a lot of coupons out there for their various products, so no need to pay full price if you do use them.

This spring we are having a particularly stubborn duck problem. As I mentioned in a previous post, we had a couple of mallard ducks, as in a male and female, who were very hard to scare out of the pool. We had to resort to water spraying and net waving to get them out of the pool and out of the yard. The ducks very cute and it feels quite lovely to look out the back window and see them gliding on the pool or sleeping beside it…until we go outside and see the entire edge of the pool tile is covered in duck poop and that the pool has turned into a green murky mess. As Hubby said, the duck poop is messing with the pool chemistry. Duck poop feeds the yellow algae that loves to live in So Cal pools.

Hubby spent quite a bit of time last weekend trying to get the pool back to clear status. There was vacuuming and brushing going on (I helped with the brushing) and that continued Monday evening after he got home from work. Just as the last of the daylight was going away, Hubby finally finished. The pool was fully vacuumed and brushed, the filter, which was by then full of algae, was pulled apart, cleaned, put back together, and we had a nice clear pool once again.

Then, just as he could sigh at a job well down, Hubby heard the tell tale flapping of wings. As it was now dark, all he could do was hear them come in and then, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop. Six ducks landed in that clean pool! Six, not just a pair, but three pairs. The original pair must have told the others about that great honeymoon place, our pool, or as I call it now, Chez Duck Love. Yep, felt like we are running a duck honeymoon hotel!

I have doubled down on chasing the ducks away. Our original pair seems to have split up and the male likes to swim in the pool and quack his fool head off, trying to lure a new mate to Chez Duck Love. It hasn’t worked out so well for him. Now we have a pair of male ducks hanging out, or, as Eldest calls them, the Gay Ducks. I don’t think they are gay, I think they are just pals. But, whatever they are, I do not discriminate. All ducks must go!

I went to a meeting last night at a house not too far from my own. They have a pool, too. And the lady who lives there said she saw a duck in her pool, for the first time ever! I just looked at her with pity. Little does she know what is to come, if her house becomes the next duck honeymoon hotel.

The stubborn duck couple, in happier times, before the break up. 

My cell phone has gone missing. I last used it last Saturday evening, according to the online phone log (like I would remember the last time I used my phone?) I didn’t touch it Easter Sunday. Then on Monday morning I noticed it wasn’t in my purse. And that is the story. We looked all over the house and I even went back to the restaurant were we ate on Easter to see it it fell out of my purse there, but it hadn’t.

The phone was old as the hills. But it worked fine and I come from a long line of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kinds of people.  The girls have gone through two or three phones in the same amount of time, and are about to get new phones again. The reason they need new phones is because the ones they have have begun to stop working in important ways. They just wore them out! I think that shows you how much I use a cell phone that mine was still working like a charm after all these years.

To be honest, until today when I wanted to call and ask Hubby if he wanted me to bring home lunch, and I couldn’t, I haven’t really missed my cell phone. I don’t look forward to learning yet another new piece of technology. But maybe it will push off Alzheimer’s another few months!

I will probably discover the old cell phone in a weird place int eh house about the time I get the new one. That is how life works for me!

Hope you are having a great Saturday!

Who needs YouTube when you have cats? I don’t need to find videos of cats doing cute and funny things. I LIVE with cats doing cute and funny things!   Here are a few recent cats photos of my silly cats.

Cloud, eating out by the front door.

This next photo was taken just a second later. Nox, inside the house, watching Cloud eat. We always wonder what is going through his mind when he sees the free ranging cat. He and Lumos never hiss or anything, they are just very very curious!

We have a flat of grass by the back door for the cats to enjoy. I fully admit it has died. I only seem to be able to keep it alive so long and then it turns up its toes and dies. But the cats don’t seem to mind. In this photo Lumos is half on and half off of it, taking a little nap. How that can possibly be comfortable, I have no idea.

Speaking of grass, Nox likes to make a like a little loaf on the grass, and look at the great outdoors.

Lumos, trying to defy gravity and make like a cute cat on top of the washing machine. A second later he almost fell on his noggin, but he managed to catch himself.

Hubby was getting clothes out of the dryer and Nox had to hop inside and lay on the last piece of warm clothing. Silly cat. Don’t worry, they rarely get in the dryer and we check just to make sure it isn’t occupied before we use it.

Happy Easter to all of you, and may the blessings of Spring be yours! (Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, and then may the blessing of autumn be yours!)

This was the inside of my beautiful 103 year old church this morning. Colorful ribbons and a highlighted cross.

It is spring, and flower shows are popping up everywhere! On here way to work (on a Saturday, ugh!) Youngest Daughter saw a sign for an iris show just a few minutes from my house. I decided to stop by after a little shopping trip, and I am glad I did. It was a small show, but the irises were so pretty and I love the smell of them as well. I took a few photos to share, of course.

This was the overall best in show winner. It isn’t quite clear from my photo, but all these blooms and buds are on one iris stalk. 

I am always amazed by the two toned iris flowers. They are so beautiful!

My favorites are always this pretty pink/peach color. I just love the delicate color. It is funny, but this bouquet also is using horsetail, which I have been trying like heck to get it out of my yard, because it is very invasive.  

There were quite a few beautiful bouquets, featuring irises of course. 

Youngest Daughter has a friend who happens to live and work in the Los Angeles area. The friend recently lost her two roommates for various reasons (one was off to medical school!) and had to find a new place to live. She is a college graduate but has one of those jobs that requires a degree but pays poorly.  So she had quite a hard time finding a place, finally settling on a room in a house with three young men. It just so happens that the three men have their own production company. However, they must not make much money, if they have to take on a roommate. People struggling to make their dream come true in movies and television. You can’t get much more Los Angeles than that!!!

Another reason I know it is spring here is that the mockingbirds are back. They must have a nest in our backyard yard somewhere, but we don’t know exactly where. They are constantly about, making noise to try and warn us away from the nest or distract us from the nest. They are squawking all the time at us, at Cloud, at our cats looking out the window, and I have to admit I am tired of hearing it.

I miss the crows. Ever since West Nile hit our area, we haven’t had as many crows. This came home to us when a snake was killed by a car right in front of our house last week. Normally, in the days before West Nile, the crows would have dealt with it. But, unfortunately, there wasn’t a single crow siting. Someone with a strong stomach  or Animal Control finally removed it. Meanwhile, I miss the crows.

Speaking of birds, since I seem to be on a bit of a bird kick today (when I am not talking about struggling producers in LA) that pair of duck lovebirds that have taken over our back yard are still stubborn cusses. They have made an absolute mess of bird poop all around our pool and are really really hard to scare away. This is obviously not their first rodeo, They know we aren’t going to hurt them. Every time I try to chase them away they go into the pool and just paddle to the side away from where I am standing and yelling and waving my hands. I finally had to resort  to spaying them with the hose today. At first that din’t scare then, as they are used to water, after all. But, finally, they got the hint and flew away. I am sure they will be back, if they aren’t already, to poop on the tile some more.

I had a fun time Sunday going to the annual flower show and garden tour in my area with my friend Chris. Hubby used to go with me, but he finally admitted that. with several garden tours under his belt, he was good for a while. So I enlisted Chris, who loves gardening and all things plants and flowers. This is our third year to bond over amazing gardens and lovely plants and flowers and we do enjoy it! I took a few photos to share, of course!

I love succulents, and here were a couple of big, beautiful ones that were entered into the flower show.

As part of our plan to get the back yard back to beautiful, I want to put in a path to our deck and replace the stepping stones to Hubby’s shop with a matching path. At one garden we toured, they jazzed up some plain brick areas with glass brick and with those little glass stones you use in flower vases. So pretty!

I enjoyed seeing the many creatives uses of flower pots. Here they put this tall pretty blue one in a corner to add some color.

The next few photos are from another house. They filled a long dirt area along a driveway with a “river” of rocks, interspersed with sets of three pots filled with succulents. The interesting thing is that the pots don’t match, some are set on others to give the right height, and it looks great!

I love surprises in a garden like this bunny statue.

I love this potting shelf.

I couldn’t resist a photo of these pretty pink flowers.

I never thought of planting succulents in such a way that they would grow to hang down over a retaining wall.

One of the houses had quite the view. For those of you who live where I do, this is looking northeast towards Rattlesnake Mountain.

When I look at Cloud, the stay cat I feed, I see a mess of a cat, a pet, a domesticated animal. I have to remind myself that in reality he is as wild as the squirrel you manage to feed from your hand, or the raccoons that come into my yard. Cats are just not far from a wild state at any given time, and Cloud has definitely reverted to being a wild thing. But, I can’t help but see something that shouldn’t be wild when I look at him. So, when we saw that he had been in quite the fight and seemed to be a little under the weather, I decided to give him some antibiotics, I happened to have some that had been prescribed to Blackie that we hadn’t actually used.

Now, of course, the second I decided to do this, Cloud began looking like he felt better. However, given his general state of nastiness, I decided a course of antibiotics might not be a bad idea and might prevent abscesses from forming after his fight. Now, Cloud is a street cat and as a street cat I am sure he has tasted some pretty putrid things like dead animals and gutter water. But, apparently, nothing like that compares to the taste of cat food mixed with antibiotics. Two licks and he just sat there for a while, licking his lips and trying to figure out what that weird and horrible taste was. Sigh.

So I bought some tuna and mixed the antibiotic laced cat food with the tuna. Now that was apparently too good to pass up! I am now on day 2 of Operation Get Some Antibiotics into a Cat That Isn’t Even Mine.  I know, you are shaking your head and saying to yourself, “He is yours now, Kim.”  But, you need to understand, he isn’t any body’s cat right now. Cloud belongs to his own bad self. Maybe, with time, he might become a little bit ours, But he will have to decide that himself. Meanwhile, I just try to make his life a little better. Hopefully I am.

Long haired white cats that are mostly deaf are just not meant to be wild animals.

A local animal rescue was having their annual Walk with the Animals fundraiser the last Saturday in March.  The girls and I have been wanting to participate for years, but we only got our act together, finally, this year.  It turned out to be so fun!  Dogs of every shape and size were everywhere! There were also miniature horses, bunnies, miniature pigs, and who knows what else. I got to pet greyhounds (I harbor a not so secret dream of adopting a rescue greyhound) and many a dog gave me a cold nose greeting. Here are just a few of the dogs we saw, and one miniature horse, which was about the size of some of the dogs we saw!