Category Archives: Personal

Yard work

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I am once again doing some yard work around the house. We have done a lot in the almost three years we have been here, but when you start from probably a half an acre of bare dirt, it takes a while to get everything the way you want it, unless you have won the lottery and can hire a landscaping firm. We haven’t, so we can’t.

I put some plywood sides on my 5×10 trailer so I could load it up with topsoil. It comfortably held about three and a little more scoops, each of which is supposed to be around a cubic yard. The landscape company loads with a tractor. I unload with a shovel. Here you can see the pile of topsoil to the right of the trailer.

You can also see a little pignut hickory tree which I will remove and replace with a Japanese maple that is supposed to be suitable for full sunlight. The bare area will be planted with zoysia, like the front yard, which is to the left of where I’m parked. There is a pine stump to the right of the little hickory. It’s from a dead pine I cut last year. I dug around it and cut some of the bigger roots with my axe, then I chained the stump to my truck and jerked it out of the ground. I have to do the same to two, or possibly three, other pine stumps in this area.

I’m going to spread some of the topsoil over the bare dirt here and in a similar-sized section on the other side of the driveway. Then I’ll till it in and plant zoysia, as I did on the two sections of our front yard.

I also plan to use some of the topsoil to plant another maple next to the house. This is looking across the site of the second maple planting towards my truck and trailer. The gray blocks will be a low retaining wall to level the area where the tree will go.

Some of our bulbs have flowered and some are just beginning to flower. The lillies towards the back of the flower bed have impressive orange blooms. The yellow plants are abelia (I think) and the red plants are barberry (I think). The Japanese maples are skinny stalks that we hope spread their limbs and grow. Japanese maples are slow growers, so we know it’s going to take a while.

I also plan to spread some topsoil around the lower section of our front yard, where I worked a good part of last summer trying to prepare for grass planting. That did not go well, and we ended up with only about 50 percent coverage of zoysia, with a lot of undesirable grass spread through it. When I mow this area, the patchy grass and sections of eroded, bare dirt make for a rough and bumpy ride across a fairly steep slope. Every time the mower bumps, it wants to slip downhill, so I have to angle the mower uphill to maintain a straight line.

I unloaded the trailer Tuesday afternoon. Then I had to run the mower over the lower front part of our yard to try to discourage the weedy volunteer grass so the zoysia I planted can get more established. Then I had to run the mower down both sides of Lavender Trail in front of our house. Our land looks uninhabited from the road; you can just catch a glimpse of the house if you look carefully. If I don’t mow the grass along the road it looks pretty bad. Mowing makes it look more like someone lives here.

Everything was good as I worked. It was cool for this time of year, not even 70F, and the humidity was unusually low for May in Georgia. The mower is self propelled, but I still have to push it. But the weather was so nice I didn’t end up soaked in sweat. I put the mower away, walked over to the steps into the house and sat down to take off my boots. That’s when the stabbing pains in my knees started. That’s the new normal for me and my knees. Once I’m sitting down, my knees don’t hurt. If I sit more than about 20 minutes and then stand, my knees hurt. If I walk for 20 minutes, or two hours as I did Tuesday, my knees hurt when I sit down. Some day I’m going to have to do something about that.

A trip out West

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Zeke and I drove out to Denver and Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago to visit friends. It was kind of a semi-spur-of-the-moment trip. We ended up leaving at around 5 pm on a Tuesday, planning to arrive in Denver on Wednesday. It meant driving late into the night to try to get to the halfway point, which is nearly 700 miles. We pulled over into a rest area in Kansas, which I recognized from previous trips, and spent the night in the back of the truck.

I have a camper shell, and I made a bed with a foam mattress, so it wasn’t as bad as that might sound. Zeke also had a foam mattress. I slept in a sleeping bag, which was plenty warm, and I tossed a sleeping bag over Zeke, so he was warm, too. We got up pretty early the next morning and headed west on I-70. As we drove, I started seeing signs saying that I-70 was closed at Burlington, Co., not far across the state line. I looked at a map and decided to try for Colby, where I could get a hotel that allowed dogs.

The weather got worse as we drove. This is what we were driving into.

It wasn’t snowing, but the wind was blowing. I saw two tractor-trailer trucks on their sides, blown over by the wind. I still didn’t realize exactly how strong the wind was until we got to the hotel in Colby, and I could barely stand up whenI got out of the truck. The wind took one of my gloves out the open door, and it flew away into the distance.

My phone’s weather radar app showed what looked like a hurricane just east of Denver. I have never seen anything like that outside of an actual hurricane, and I have never experienced a steady, high wind like that. Denver was getting blasted by the wind and a good bit of snow. A lot of people got stranded on I-25, especially south of Denver.

Anyway, the hotel was pretty swanky. Here’s the pool.

That’s dirt, not ice.

The hotel was actually OK. The only problem, aside from the fact that an idiot had tried and failed to hook up the TV to the cable outlet, was that Zeke was constantly whining at the door to go outside. Going outside was not a pleasant experience. The next morning I checked the Colorado transportation web site, which said I-70 was still closed. Checkout time approached and passed, and the interstate was still closed. I walked Zeke across the parking lot and down the street a short way. I found my errant glove beside the road. I drove around a while to kill some time. The wind was still blowing hard. How hard was the wind blowing? Hard enough to blow the stripes off the pavement.

I-70 reopened around mid-afternoon. The highway was almost completely clear of snow, with only a few icy spots. There was almost no snow to be seen, on the road or off. I guess it all blew away.

Zeke and I arrived at the house of my friends Errol and Cookie, who I have known for many years, just in time to meet their daughter Debra, who I have also known for many years, and go out to dinner. Her husband and son drove separately and met us at the restaurant. We left Zeke with Errol and Cookie’s two dogs, who had access to the fenced back yard through a doggie door. We had just sat down to eat when I got a call from a Denver number. I almost didn’t answer it because everyone I know in Denver was sitting at the table with me. But I answered, and it was a good thing I did. An extremely nice young woman said that she had found a pretty white and brown dog running across a busy street near my friends’ house. Zeke had climbed a low section of the fence and escaped. He escaped again the next day, but we caught him before he could make for the highway.

My friend’s brother Tom, who I have also known for many years, lives in Edgewood, NM, just east of Albuquerque. He had eye surgery scheduled for the next week, so my friends were going to drive down to help out. It was a good opportunity to see Tom, who I had not seen for several years.

Tom lives in the house he built within sight of I-70. It consists of a house facing a studio across a sunken patio. This is a view from the house towards the studio.

If you look carefully you can see a bust of Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Here’s a closer view of the bust, which Tom did.

As you can see, Tom is an artist, among other things. His studio is not where he does his sculpting. That he does in his living room. His studio is for making videos. Tom is very involved in the politics of Edgewood, which apparently has more than its share of small-town political funny business. He makes videos to publicize what the mayor and council are doing. It makes the city officials mad.

Tom also keeps a couple of sheep on his property, mainly for the ambience.

We ate green chile cheeseburgers a couple of times, but, unfortunately, no Mexican meals. On the other hand, Tom prepared a couple of quite nice, well-presented dinners, befitting someone who went to Europe for cooking classes.

I couldn’t stay for Tom’s eye surgery. Zeke and I left on Wednesday, heading east on I-40. We stopped that night at a rest area in Arkansas. That rest area was also familiar to me, as I have spent the night there in the back of another truck on a number of occasions.

I saw a lot of windmills on the way out to Denver, and even more on the way back east. There are scores visible from the highway west of Amarillo, and more on the east side. The land is flat there, and, as we found on the way out, the flat plains experience a lot of wind. They are impressive during the day, but eerie at night. At night I could barely see the towers against a cloudy sky. The spinning blades made them look like tall stick men waving their arms at the passing traffic.

We got back home around 9 pm on Thursday. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but when I went to bed that night, I was asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, and I didn’t move for seven hours.

Our dog for a day

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Sometime around a month ago we started seeing a black dog on Fouche Gap Road. It seemed to be a German Shepherd, but it was hard to get a good look because the dog was so skittish. It was another abandoned dog, just the latest in a long line of abandoned dogs.

In the past we have taken these abandoned dogs in and found them new homes. This time we couldn’t because the dog would not come close enough to touch, much less take in. We saw him (or her) here and there around the mountain, often in front of a particular house, sometimes far down the road, and occasionally passing through our yard. It spent a lot of time at that particular house, so one day when I saw the owner outside as I walked Zeke and Sam, I asked him about the dog. It turns out they didn’t want it and were trying to get animal control to pick it up.

We expected the dog to disappear soon, but still we kept seeing it.

The dogs and I saw it fairly often in the yard of the house where it seemed to be staying. I always spoke to the dog, but it only stared. Usually it ran down the driveway barking at us after we passed. I didn’t take it seriously.

A couple of people spoke to me about it. They had tried to approach the dog without much success. As the weeks passed and the dog didn’t seem to be losing weight, I assumed the people in the house where it was staying had decided to keep it. I didn’t think they were being very responsible by letting it run loose, but, I thought, maybe they would bring it inside eventually.

I wanted to meet the dog. I thought that it might be a little more trusting since it saw me with our two dogs, but it never approached us.

I had given up on ever touching the dog until Monday. Monday afternoon Leah and I were outside when the dog came up the driveway. It was very wary, but obviously wanted to come closer — to Leah, not me. I sat down facing to the side and avoided looking at the dog. The dog carefully approached Leah until she could pet its head. After a minute or so, the dog was close enough to lick Leah’s face, and we decided to give it some food. I went in and brought out a bowl of Sam and Zeke’s food and put it down halfway down the drive. The dog stood in the woods and barked, showing some nice, white teeth. It sounded pretty aggressive, but it wasn’t. It was more like the line from the Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor movie “Stir Crazy” as they walked into a jail holding cell filled with big, rough-looking criminals: “We bad, that’s right.” It was pure bluff.

But eventually the dog came up and started eating slowly. I sat down not looking at it, and it approached me. After a few minutes, it was licking my face.

And that was it. The dog, which was a female, came to me and Leah readily. She wriggled and pawed at us and licked our faces. It was obvious this dog had been looking for someone to save it.

Here she is with Leah.

She’s a beautiful dog, obviously with a lot of German Shepherd, but not full-blooded.

Her head looks the most like a Shepherd.

She disappeared Monday night, but by Tuesday afternoon was back in the driveway. I fed her again and let the dogs meet her. After a little meet-and-greet, she started running big laps into the road, up the driveway and into the woods. She had more energy than she knew what to do with. I let Sam off the leash and they chased each other around the front yard.

I had found a number for the people where she had been staying and found that they did not intend to keep her and were, in fact, not feeding her. They had called animal control multiple times but no one had ever come. So, we thought, she must be starving.

Leah and I both said we would love to have her. She looked to be settled in, hanging around the garage door when we went inside, and coming up to us excitedly when we went back out. But with two dogs and five cats, it was just impossible. So I posted on a local Facebook group, looking for her owner or someone who might want to adopt her. I seldom use Facebook, so I was surprised to find an earlier post where people from the area were talking about the dog. At least three other people had been feeding her, but no one had been able to get close enough to her to do anything.

Within a few minutes after my post, someone in the area said he wanted her as company for his current German Shepherd. We arranged to have him come up and meet the dog, and they seemed to hit it off. After a half an hour or so, we loaded her up (unwilling as she was) into his car and they drove off. Once in the car she seemed to be okay. I gave her a dog biscuit and she took it, which means she wasn’t too upset to eat. A little while later Tuesday afternoon he texted us a photo of the dog inside his house, eating with his other Shepherd.

All in all, it was about as good an outcome as anyone could have asked for. She went to a good home with a guy who seemed to be a good dog person. We couldn’t keep her, could we? How could anyone get attached to a dog within 24 hours of meeting it?

And so, you might ask, why am I feeling so rotten?

Added Wednesday night.

Well, no one asked, but I’ll go ahead and answer anyway. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was picturing us with this dog and thinking no one else could possibly provide the kind of home we could. But, of course, that’s not true. The new owner has texted us several photos of the dog in her new home, and Leah and I are feeling greatly relieved. In one short video clip, the dog is lying on the sofa next to the new owner (shot from the owner’s point of view). He scratches her head, and puts her head down and relaxes. In another she’s lying on her side on the floor, completely at ease. I think she’s going to be good there.

 

 

Phone vs old camera

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I always have my iPhone with me, so when I walk the dogs, that’s what I use to take photographs. However, its lens is a wide angle. That means sometimes I can’t get the picture I want. I rummaged around and found my old Canon SD790 IS, which was introduced in March 2008. That makes it more than 10 years old, an antique in the digital camera world. But, it is small, and it has image stabilization, so I thought I would give it a try. On Saturday, I took some comparison photos with it and my iPhone. I enhanced the Canon images a little, but not the iPhone’s.

This is a nice maple with red leaves. First the Canon, then the iPhone.

The iPhone image has more vibrant colors right out of the phone, and it looks more like what I see when I look at the scene. Notice the yellows. I’m not positive that the actual scene looked quite like the iPhone image, but I prefer it to the Canon.

Next was a yellow maple, Canon first, then phone.

The iPhone, again, has more vibrant colors. The Canon image seems especially muddy up in the top, right-hand corner.

Next, Canon first, then phone.

Again, the iPhone image has “nicer” colors.

Saturday was a cloudy day, and the colors were muted. It’s possible the Canon images are a more accurate representation of the scenes as they actually were; I’m not positive. I can say, though, that I prefer the iPhone images over the Canon images.

There is a setting within the Canon’s menu system that allows setting a “vivid color” mode. I plan to select that and try some more comparisons. I would really like to start using the little Canon again because the lens allows a little more flexibility in framing images. I’ll try that when I can.

Miércoles

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I have mentioned before that Leah and I go to Los Portales Mexican restaurant almost every Wednesday for a lunch of huevos rancheros, and then on to the grocery store. I have also mentioned that we have done it so often that almost every waiter/waitress brings us a sweet tea for Leah, an unsweetened tea for me, chips, regular salsa, burrito sauce and ranchera sauce, without our having to ask. Then they ask, “The regular?” And then they bring us huevos rancheros, which mean ranch eggs, which means fried eggs. We get them with the yolk runny and the edges crisp.

Here’s Leah enjoying lunch.

The sauces are, from left to right, burrito sauce, regular sauce, empty ranchera sauce bowl, and full ranchera sauce bowl. One taste of the ranchera sauce and we knew we would need a second bowl.

Here’s a closer look at the ranchera sauce.

Seeds! Chilis!

The burrito sauce has onions.

And here I am, also enjoying.

I managed to eat my entire meal without getting any stains on my shirt.

Way, way back, we started with just regular sauce and ranchera sauce, but the ranchera sauce was so often so hot that one waiter suggested burrito sauce. That turned out to be a good suggestion. The three sauces are have distinct and quite different tastes. The regular sauce is close to what you might buy in the grocery store. Burrito sauce is a deeper and more flavorful sauce. Ranchera sauce can be very hot, but it almost always seems to have a nice, sharp flavor, not just heat.

We usually ask the waitress if the ranchera sauce is hot. Today the waitress said she hadn’t tried it because she gets heartburn. So we dipped one little edge of a chip into it and tasted. Oh, boy, was it good. It had a little heat, the kind that shows up pretty quickly on the tongue, as opposed to the kind that seems to burn the back of the mouth as well and get more intense as it lingers. The taste was more piquant than picante. Sometimes we just dribble a little ranchera sauce over the eggs, but on Wednesday we spooned it over them.

Then I added burrito sauce over the eggs. And the burrito sauce was also good. This time it had a roasted, smokey flavor.

We take pleasure in simple things.