Gulag Garden - Autumn Approaches

Future Tomatoes - Assuming the crop doesn't fail

Hurrah! My tomato crop is plugging along nicely. I started some heritage tomatoes from seed in the kitchen. Out of five seedlings, I have two plants that were stubborn enough to thrive despite of my so-called 'help'. It's a bit late for starting tomatoes, but heck, this is the Central Valley so the weather is still on my side. I might still get a few 'Black from Tula' , that is, Russian black tomatoes , out of this.

Wine Barrel Planter with my entire crop: 2 Tomato Plants - Cornered in a 'Tomato Cage', Planning Escape

I put pine cones in my planter containers to keep Rum-kitty from crushing down the plants, constructing himself a comfortable & thoroughly 'green' kitty bed (the little bugger).

[Management understand some believe Ms. Miller was inordinately mean on the topic of the current Alaskan Governor, Sara 'Legs' Mini-McClain. In Miller's defense she wishes to point out that even Alaskans aren't too crazy about the [explicative] Alaskan Governor.]

Amnity... Fair Oaks Horror and Other Events

What Godawful HORRORS kept me away from my blog, lo, these couple of weeks?


Current, National Crime-Against-Nature: Sara 'Legs' Mini-McCaine; 'she who makes wolf cubs cry'*

*click above to see why the cubs cry

1. Got my hair touched up (i.e., braided, crocheted, whatever). Am loving my hair now for the first time in decades. At work today someone said, 'Oh your hair is so adorable!' I prefer to think the comment was sincere & uninfluenced by alcohol or illicit drugs.

2. Spent an entire weekend disassembling & dragging my chest of drawers into the living room; it was desperately in need of an overhauling. As usual with my carpentry projects, several trips were necessary to Home Depot. Suspect I'm the sort of customer known to H.D as 'bread and butter'. Nothing too expensive this time, just nails, little drill bit thingmabos and such. Am LOVING ♥ the results of the dresser overhaul; once again can experience the joy of opening a drawer without it careening to the floor.

3. Last weekend friend Barbara was here for a visit. She went to Napa for lunch with her sister Suzi, then on to see her father in Fairfield. Then she was here for the weekend. I visited her father on Labor Day while on my way back from hair 'braiding' appt. in Suisun City. First time ever that Hans did not recognize me - very sad. He was very agitated and cranky in general. But, as it turns out he was very ill. His kidneys were shutting down and a few days later he wound up in the ER. Amazingly enough, they balanced his meds and such, and now he's OK again. Barb saw him and he was still a bit confused - at least she thinks he was, hard to tell.

Barb and I had a nice visit. Spent loads of time yakking; hey - it's what we do. She's back teaching again at a new school. I had to laugh, she, just like me, gets behind on stuff. On Sunday morning after stuffing our faces with fresh waffles n' blueberries, we chattered while she worked on two months worth of bills and stuff she brought from home. Don't you hate when you have to do that sort of thing? the old bills, not the waffles, the waffles were heavenly...

And now for the macabre...

4. I survived living in the house of the Amnityville Fair Oaks Horror!

Forty-third fly down on the right - "Help Heeeeeeelp meeeeeeeee!"
They came from HELL... out of nowhere - one day after work, I came home and they were just THERE... hanging around the living room window. I suspected Rum-kitty may have dragged in a deceased 'play toy', but I could find nothing, and there were no mysterious odors anywhere in the house, i.e., in corners, behind furniture, etc.

Barb was, 'ahem...' lucky enough to observe the tail end of the invasion. As a former insectologist she ID'd the flies; no ordinary house flies, but cattle spooking, carcass chewing, horrifying - BOT FLIES from HELL! She divined some wayward rodent died in my attic, causing a hatch of Bot fly maggots - in the deceased rodent - after which post maggoty, newly transformed Bot flies entered my house through the ventilation system. UGH!

Feel free to gag here a bit.

The EV-IL flies drove me dingy for a week but they're all dead now. No funeral. No condolences. Send flowers if you are so inclined.

A Mini Mini-Break

Yes indeedy, I did ignore the opulent gas prices and point the Honda north for a drive through the Avenue of the Giants where the Redwoods tower, on to the north coast for my annual visit with northern buddies.

Scaresly made any stops on the way north. Instead of the scads of wild Dwarf and/or Roosevelt Elk, there was only this one Rooseveldt stag, traveling - well, he was traveling stag (his pun, not mine).

He was mowing his way across someone's front yard; a BIG boy he was too.

Crescent City is just a hair short of the Oregon Border. I picked up some Thai food and dashed over to my friend Inez. We had a chatty picnic in her back yard - I'm talking Olympic quality chatting here - and when the sun dipped below the pines we were tucked into our sleeping bags (seen the background of the photo below), watching bats flittering around as they chased moths and other bat dinner selections.

Inez having a rest

Believe it or not, in Olympic chatting, Inez would take the gold and I'd be slinking home with a bronze, at best. Inez is a teller of tales and this go-round she told me what has happened to her since she left her last job - a stunning and facinating story that I asked, no, demanded she write down for a book. Honestly, chatting doesn't get any better than a chat with Inez. She writes Gopher Gulch for Crescent City's paper, the Triplicate. I added her nook to my links list.

Next morning we ate creamy rice pudding for breakfast, watching the wild birds squabbling over birdseed on her front lawn. Then I was off south to Eureka.

In the Eureka area, in the eensie little hilltop town of Kneeland I visited my friends the Aggelers; Jennifer & Rick, daughter Carolanne (home from the University of Utah for the summer). She's working the summer as her Mom's 'girl Friday'. Jennifer is a lucky duck who works out of her home doing captioning and such, while Carolann is her brilliant technical 'nerd' and I mean that at the highest level of the meaning. While I was visiting, daddy Rick was bulldozing, flattening a slope behind Carolann's cabin where one day Jennifer tells me she hopes to house yaks! I'm pretty excited about those future additions to their critters.

It was a nice visit and I got to meet the newest, unexpected member of the clan, who hasn't even got a name just yet. Jennifer spins & knits and has angora rabbits who generously supply her with nice soft angora wools in several lovely colors. Anyway, Jen's oldest bunny is 9 years old and that is VERY old for a bunny. Just about the time Jennifer was expecting the old gal to give up the ghost, what did the old hunny-bunny do? She dug a nursery den, lined it with straw and bunny wool and had a kit, that is, a baby bun-bun.

You can see the little darling in sitting in his favorite spot, right on his mama's back. He is all black checkers on a field of white. Isn't hims cute? I'm voting for him to be named Checkers.

While at Jennifer's I picked up my long abandoned Baby Wolf loom. I've missed it and have high hopes this winter of producing a scarf or two or even something more daring. What would that be - a placemat?

This little Common Murre was California surfing

Cowabunga!

Rad surfing in Crescent City Dudes, Dudettes!