Dreaming of Spring...........

I bought seed packets of roma tomatoes and a steak tomatoes.  The jade plant had excess water in it and I had drained some of it off the pot while at the store. Whoever waters the plants there goes beyond over watering.  So when I got home the seed packages which were in the same sack as the jade plant were soaked with water. The soil was so saturated that more drained out into the sack.  I am hoping that it didn't absorb completely through to the seeds.  I am thinking I will plant them inside late February this year.   I want to put a light on them this time to improve their growth. I am tired of putting out struggling plants as it stretches out the maturity time.

I was reading a blog about how to set up a new planting area.  I think I will try the process of placing newspapers down on the ground and putting soil on top of them to get the weeds and grass destroyed.  My problem this year will be that the frost line is 27 inches down and it will take forever to get soil thawed. I also think that I should have done it in the fall so that the winter would help to kill off everything.  I will probably try it anyway.  This small flower garden really isn't there anymore and I will let it grass over completely.  I usually planted my zinnias in this spot.

My two large pots of agapanthus plants are in the basement keeping warm. When I go down into the basement they are green and healthy with shiny leaves basking under the basement light bulbs. I have decided to plant out one of the pots of plants into the ground this spring and see if I can get them to bloom.  I know they are a southern plant and they grow wild in California.  I will thin out the second one and put half of it into the emptied first pot.  I know someone who would like a start of this plant and we will have to work on that happening.

As you can see my theme today is of things to happen in spring.  I am almost in mental overload of dealing with snow, ice and the very cold temperatures.  I will snap back into reality when I go to get into the car this afternoon after school. 

I am in the resource room again today.  The teacher's husband fell from a ladder outside last Sunday and broke some bone in his back.  He is my age and I am sure healing will take a while.  I bet his wife will be back to school on Monday, once they get him into a rehab home.  I have Saturday off and we will be home as the southern snowstorm is coming our way.  We have food to eat and as long as the electricity is on we will be fine.  The thought of being home all day sounds pretty good even though I did have last Tuesday off. I am suppose to be retired but that is a laugh.

I hope you all are doing well out there.  I know that Georgia is suppose to warm up and I know that Minnesota probably has not had a thawing day yet. The east coast doesn't stay the same for very long hot or cold.  I bet Florida is still warm and Texas is always fluctuating.  Thanks everyone for stopping by today.

Buy green with green......

I was at a Lowes the other day and I  always check out their clearance shelves of plants.  In most cases the plants need to be tossed.  In some cases the plants are the last two or three of the kind and they want to clear them out.

I haven't had a jade plant for awhile and I was trying to decide if it would survive the cold while I was in the bookstore.  I decided I could as it isn't that fragile of a plant. I double bagged it and left it sitting in the sun in the back seat.

I do really get disgusted with companies that are so big that they can get their small details done correctly.  When they say it is a sale, mark it as a sale and then the scanner charges you full price it is frustrating.  It was a 3 dollar item but for some reason it came to almost 6 dollars.  I didn't notice as I had a bunch of small items that I was buying with it.  I bought some seed for planting......tomato seeds.  I can forgive the three dollar mistake but two signs with the clearance sign and the tag should have mean that it all will work.  I shouldn't have to watch every single item while going through the line like a crotchety old man.  I guess I do unless I want to not actually get the  sale price.   The ceramic planter and the plant is worth the price I paid and I will use it as a container for other plants as the jade plant gets to be too large for the pot that it is in now.

Storage boxes are easy to find in my store room as I kept all of my Dad's old cigar boxes.  I found boxes like these full of important papers and others in which my mom had stored excessive amounts of costume jewelry.  I found them with nuts and bolts and grease items from the shop.  I always liked having the boxes around when I was a kid.  My dad did smoke a lot of cigars so we had lots of boxes to play with and build with as toys.

After all of that I might mention that we use a couple of them to put the small village parts into after Christmas.  We have only two houses left to put away and then finish the small stuff to have all the things cleared out of the dining room.  I do have to  carry all of it upstairs as it is all sitting on the dining room table right now.

I was traded today from a resource room teacher to a history teacher.  Migraine headaches pop up and the teacher has to call in at the last moment leaving the secretary finding people to cover things. I don't like large classes but can handle them so I got the reassignment when I arrived this morning.

We had a light dusting of snow this morning but it wasn't rain and ice.  We are hovering around freezing now and low 20's is the coldest that we are going to be for a few days.  The local stations started a thing on the morning news to share the weather every 10 minutes.  The others now, in trying to be better than the first one to do it, now shares the weather every 5 minutes. It is weather overload but the time I am ready to go to school while trying to listen to news.

I hope we all warm up soon and everyone is keeping safe.  Thanks for stopping by today.

It Is Gone.......

Barney is glad that the Christmas tree is out of the bay window. I didn't work yesterday so I brought up all the boxes and it was taken down.  Two days before February it happened.  My wife said we could just get some valentine decorations and put them on the tree, then we could procrastinate a little longer about it. Barney didn't like the tree as it was limiting his space when he circled the coffee table. We didn't put things back right as we normally do. We have the love seat in the bay year round but we thought it would be nice to put the wing back in there for now.  It was easier to put the chair there than dragging the loveseat into the space.

All of the Christmas decorations are now down in the living room. I took soldier boy back up stairs.  He doesn't have to live in the basement as he seems to be too fragile for the conditions down there. Having the decorations really didn't bother us but I didn't get called in yesterday so it seemed right that we get it done.  Spare time can be the work of the devil if you don't keep busy.  I have heard that before somewhere.

I finally brought the spare container of shiny brights up from the basement and I now see why they were placed down there.  My mom had a box of these in the crawl space of their house and the moisture had effected the surface ot them.  They are flaking leaving glitter like material behind.

Another task off of the list.  The flaking baubles will be better off stored in the jar.  As you can see the jar isn't quite big enough to work for this size of decoration.

A person came by about having me do three framing jobs and right after she left we headed south for the bookstore. We hit the Christian bookstore and Lowe's and then we were at Barnes and Noble at the Jordan Creek Mall.  It wasn't busy and we could even find a parking spot very close to the store.  That never happens to be able to park close to anything.  It is a busy mall. 

I am back in the classroom today as a resource room teacher.  Kids seem glad to come in here and get extra help.  They also welcome the idea of getting out of the regular classroom.




We are to get up to 34 degrees F. today.  It was -4 when we got up this morning.  Our temperatures are going to shift to be a little bit warmer for the week..  Thanks for stopping by today. Stay safe on the ice and or snow, wherever you are living.

Torpedos.........

I dug around in my junk shelves and found another torpedo shaped canning jar.  I have a set of shiny brites that are somewhat damaged with flaking colors that I wanted to bring up from the basement.  I thought it would be good to find another jar in which to put them. The photo doesn't let you interrupt its size but I believe it is a quart sized jar.

When my dad tore down an old abandon house he also took down an old Model T garage.  He didn't have a use for it as he had a two car garage and it was too narrow for a modern car.  Inside that old garage were a lot of those torpedo jars along with the glass topped lidded ones.  I found some of them in the two car garage when I closed down the estate. My parents moved them to the new garage.  Some still had spoiled food in them and most of them fortunately were empty. I am sure they gave a lot of them away but there were glass lidded one in the house for my mom's plastic flowers and I of course kept them.  I think I still have one of the jars with the plastic flowers still in them.

I am not versed on the sizes of these containers so a blogger friend out there will have to help me out with this.  I think maybe the small one must be a quart sized jar and the next size is a two quart size.  I will wait for others to tell me as I don't want to empty the larger one and do the water comparison test.  I will get to the filling of the empty jar soon and maybe will take another photo.

During the summer I found this tossed in the garbage.  I don't know who's garbage but I couldn't let it go to the landfill.  I actually had picked up the book at a bookstore to look at it.  I like to look at illustrations of kids books and I like the pirate theme.   It is a cute book of a girl that tells the story about going to pirate school to learn how to be a great pirate.

As you can see that it is a fun book.  The one pirate is being pulled in the water on his skis. The little girl is in the water in the foreground.  She learns various things about being a pirate including the sounds they make. I guess it was suppose to be like a pirate summer camp.

The little girl, Maisy Pickles, does graduate from her school and she is well pleased.  I will have to share the book with my grandson some day probably in four or five years.

I will need to venture out and fill the feeders again today.  It was -9 this morning but the wind has stopped. We will warm up to 14 degrees F.  which will seem warm after what we have experienced. I didn't get called in today so I will be busy doing all those odd jobs that I still don't have done.  I can't do anything with the sidewalks as the day we had melting created water puddles.  Now with the deep cold my side walls are like frozen rivers or lakes.
 
Thanks for stopping by today and do stay warm and safe.

Warm Colors.........

It is so cold again that any view of warmth is welcomed.  We went from 40 degrees F.  to -5 degrees in about an 8 hour period.  It was -5 degrees this morning and school was delayed 2 hours.  The wind makes it unbearable with 65 mile an hour wind.  Most of the worst winds were at night and the wind has died down a lot now. A high of 3 degrees F.  for today will keep us bundled with warm clothes and coats.

Thanks for stopping by today.

Dreams Of Colors To Come

 

Thanks for stopping by today.  I had to stop you from dreaming in color and bring you back to reality.  So sorry to do that to you.

Finding White.........

Tired of dealing with the cold and the white snow I decided to go archive digging to find different white things that are not snow.

This was a bloom on a goosenecked gourd plant.  I didn't succeed in growing the gourds but I did get great photos of the blooms.

A white gazebo that sits on the shore of Bar Harbor, Maine.  This was taken on the day that our youngest son was married. The reception was at a great breakfast at a fancy hotel in the bay.

Two sunfish sailboats having a good time on the water.  The sails of this kind of boat can be purchased in different colors or with stripes. For some reason these two were both white.

White zinnias are great to see.  I plan to buy seed this year and plant mine early this year as I missed out last season of not having any blooms.

This is a watercolor painting of mine that includes white birch trees.  I painted this one summer while in Minnesota.  The good thing is I sold it and it is in California.  The bad thing is I really liked the painted and I wish I still owned it. 

White ceramic puppies are all that is left from a set of five or six dogs.  The pieces belonged to my Grandma and my mom had them for years.  Eventually a brother of mine had an accident with the "what not" shelf and the two larger adult dogs and one or two of the puppies didn't survive.  I am still very happy that I have two of them left.  I believe the adult mother and father dogs had painted on black collars.

My final white archived photo is one of my little helper.  When I work at the dining room table, Button must be nearby. I learned to set him on a chair next to me and he is feels better that he is as close as possible.  Normally he curls up on the chair and takes a nap while I sit at the table.  He sure did need a haircut when the photo was taken. 

We ventured out to the bookstore this morning in 24 degree F weather, full sunshine, and a large amount of wind.  Of course the wind made it miserable.  A blizzard warning has been announced for the county above us and the county to the east of us.  I guess it will stay within the county lines and we won't need to worry.  Sarcasm is everywhere.   This afternoon we have an invite to the neighbor lady's house to share a meal that she has prepared.  I can see a nap in the future later in this day.  Thanks for stopping by today.  

Finally Friday.........

The sparrows are back eating at my new batch of birdseed.  The woodpeckers still come for the suet but it was too cold the last two days as no one was feeding.  We warm up today to a remarkable high.

 

While finding things to shoot in the cabinet above the buffet I found this little pitcher.  I guess my mind is taking a break as I don't know who  owned it before me.  I can imagine myself pulling it out of my mom's china cupboard and that probably was where I retrieved it.  I just don't know. I do know that mom worked as a county worker going into homes to help elderly and she would be given gifts once in a while like a dish or pitcher.

When I go to a convenience store to buy milk in our town I expect to buy a large amount. They have beer coolers and have a dedicated room in which you walk into it and can pick out what you want by the case.  Milk on the other hand has been reduced to being only a couple of kinds and if you want nonfat it will be in the gallon size.  The entire time, while that gallon lasted, I would pour our milk into a glass pitcher so I wouldn't have to lug the gallon container back and forth to pour on to cereal. I think it is a nice practice and will continue to do it even if I have only half gallons of milk from regular grocery stores.  In our household we drink very little milk so the last four or five inches of milk is soured before it is used up and we have to replace it. 

You can see the fox painting on the wall in  which I just hung a couple of days ago.  I helped my wife pack it this morning and this afternoon I will ship it the New York.  The person who bought it just clicked on the buy it now button, paid the bill, and never said a word.   Usually a buyer sends a note to verify its availability and sometimes gets a feel of what the artist is like before they say they want to buy it.  This time it was sold over the net during the night, no questions asked  and we needed to ship it fast. My wife sent a note to the buyer and still no response.  When the buy sees this work in person I bet my wife will get a note.

We figure if we keep the shipping time down that the customer might not hesitate to do some more shopping.  One time my wife sold a painting of a fox and by the time the transaction was completed the preson went ahead and bought two more fox paintings.  Three paintings of foxes  in one shipment.  I was happy for my wife as the art business can run in the wave of bulls and bears in the stock market.

 I just keep dishing these things out don't I? This small dish comes from a very nice china set of which I only have this one.  The story of how one dish gets isolated from the set or placed in a garage sale would be interesting.  I know the time my mom took, helped herself to, a blue willow plate from a set of Grandma Burgus' when they were closing down her house.  I suppose in some way that is one way that they get separated.  I do know the blue willow was old but it still was only made in Japan, a replica of the real thing.


Speaking of a replica, I am a study hall teacher replica today.  It will be a long day with only a lunch break.  They book this guy in this positon with a full eight period day, give him lunch, and then pay him very little because it is considered babysitting.  Whatever it really is the class system is well and working in the school systems of the United States. I am still at the bottom of the caste system below all other employees.  I guess visitors, outsiders, can't be trusted or paid much for the job they do as they come in to save the world because someone is sick.

It is to warm up today after these last miserable days of cold.  It is short lived and the colder than cold weather will be back soon.  We are trying to get out to a bookstore sometime soon but we dodge so many things including the weather that we may not make it.  I hope everyone is staying safe and warm among my blogging community.  Thanks for stopping in today.