Miscellaneous Monday

Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.
— Henry Ward Beecher

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Miscellaneous Thoughts:
Give me a home where the buffalo roam and I will give you boredom and isolation.
Want to go to Mars? Spend a week in Red Rock Canyon.
Blueberry muffins last longer because you can't tell when they're moldy.
I came in piece, please assemble.
― Kalifer Deil

Normally when I really don’t have much to talk about I just skip this post altogether, but I didn’t want to do that. I may not have something interesting enough to write an entire post about, but I have a bunch of little stuff.

First we have the weather. How crazy has this been?

We’ve had record breaking heat and insane humidity for a couple of weeks now. What rain we were getting not only did not cool things down, but served only to make the humidity worse. How hot was it? Even the squirrels were melting.

Saturday morning we finally got rain that took the moisture out of the air instead of adding to it. It lasted well into the afternoon but then the sun came out and the temperature dopped as well. That night was the first one in weeks where I could have the windows open and the air conditioning turned off.

But seriously, what’s up with the weather? It seems as though if a place isn’t getting record breaking heat, it’s getting forest fires or floods. Sometimes back to back. Nova Scotia went from wild fires to flooding in the space of a heart beat. I hear Florida is so hot, the temperature of the ocean there registered 100 Fahrenheit. There’s concern that the heated water is going to kill the coral reefs. Death Valley reached 138 Fahrenheit. Where's it going to end?

Penelope has had a couple of run-ins with the hubby, but she still comes to visit in the mornings. She was a little stand offish at one point, but she got over that pretty quickly. Usually the squirrels and birds fight over whatever she leaves in her plate. She doesn’t leave much though, so this morning I took pity on them and filled the bird feeder, leaving some peanuts in the shell on the patio.

The blue jays weren’t interested in posing for me, they were more interested in food and wouldn’t keep still.

The cardinal also wasn’t interested in posing, and took off as soon as he saw me with the phone.

And later in the morning I caught this guy doing his acrobatics to reach the seed in the feeder.

And one morning a few weeks ago I caught this guy on the telephone pole. He, also, declined a photo op, and kept circling the pole as he pecked away.

The kittens are still growing. We figure their birthday is mid-August, so I’ll probably wait a couple of weeks and do a proper post about them then. But in the meantime, to give you an idea of how much they’ve grown . . . here’s a picture of Dinsdale as a kitten:

And here’s a more recent picture of him:

And they’re still growing! They’re certainly not babies anymore.

Blueberries were on sale last week, so naturally I bought some and made a batch of blueberry jam. It takes eight cups of berries to make a batch of jam, and I didn’t realize the pints held about a cup and a half of berries. So I ended up with four cups extra. Now, I could have just made a batch and a half, but where’s the fun in that?

After doing much research on the internet to see what fruit paired well with blueberries, I finally settled on peaches, so my second batch of jam was a spiced peach and blueberry jam. This makes six different kinds of jam I’ve made so far this year.

Aside from making jam, I’ve also been working away at my stitchery, but nothing that’s finished enough to take a picture of. And of course I’ve been looking after the granddaughter. Only a couple of days a week so far, but this week I get her every day.

There are three secrets to looking after her: crafts, the pool, and Disney+. I’ve got it covered, easy peasy. :-)

Fire and Water

One of the pitfalls of having central air conditioning . . . it’s grey and dismal outside, and it’s nice and cool inside, so it’s easy to assume that it’s cool outside. So when you set foot out the front door the humidity hits you like a fist in the gut.

And here’s something new . . . I was sitting in my office yesterday and thought I smelled smoke. It was a little early, but probably one of the neighbours was burning garden detritus. But no, it was not. It was hazy all day and I later learned the haze was smoke from the fires in northern Ontario. Seriously?

It kind of boggles the mind that we could be so divided, weather-wise. The west (and apparently the north) is on fire and here in the southeast we’re drowning. We’ve had so much rain the hubby has had to take water out of both the pond and the pool a couple of times.

But while I might not be enjoying all this wet weather, the gardens sure have. Every gardener I know is amazed at how well their gardens are doing – how prolific the blossoms, how big and bushy the vegetables. This is the snow pea fence, the snow peas my neighbour plants along the fence so we can pick what comes through on our side.

The picture was taken last week, and already the snow peas are done. Because of the rain I wasn’t able to get out and pick them, and now they’re too big. All we can do is let them go to seed for next year.

This picture of my vegetable garden was taken last week as well.

Everything is even bigger now and I’ve already picked enough beans to last us a couple of weeks. Not only are the tomato plants covered in blossoms, I’ve got tomatoes forming. Who knew my neighbour (who generously planted the garden for me while I was in the hospital) gave me roma tomatoes as well as several other kinds? And tucked under the tomato plants are peppers, with actual peppers on them!

The valiant little cherry tomatoes the hubby likes to plant on the deck are starting to show fruit as well.

So if nothing else, we’ll be eating well on beans, peas (the kind you shell that are also growing on the fence), tomatoes, and peppers. That is provided I don’t mind harvesting in the rain.

How is your garden growing?

Double Happy Holiday!

Okay, so I’m a little late with Canada Day, which was Thursday, but Independence Day was only yesterday. There were a few fireworks Thursday night, not a lot, just a few, which was okay. But Saturday night the idiots behind us were setting off very loud, very bright fireworks at 1 a.m.! This is a quiet neighbourhood, and there are a lot of retired people and people with small children. There’s also a by-law making it illegal to set off fireworks after 11 p.m. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was annoyed by it.

I’ve been trying to get out at least once a day, but it’s not easy with the weather. While western Canada is so hot it caught fire, we’ve been pretty much grey and damp. On Friday we had a thunderstorm that lasted for hours – very unusual for us. The last couple of years our thunderstorms would be a couple of claps of thunder and that would be it.

The grandbaby graduated from senior kindergarten and in the fall she’ll be starting grade 1. Where has the time gone? It seems like just yesterday I was changing her diapers.

At least I get to see her a bit more now. Things are opening up a bit in Ontario. We got together for a barbeque on Father’s Day, and she and Grappy had a swim in the pool. And I got to babysit her while her mother waiting in line at a pop-up clinic for her second COVID shot – the hubby and I got ours the day before at a different pop-up clinic.

And even if things get locked down again, the grandbaby won’t be too bored. Is it only a week ago? her parents took her for a drive to see a litter of kittens and let her pick one for her very own. Meet Spectre, or as he’s usually called, Spec:

That last picture is taken through the door to the daughter’s home office, where he stayed the first couple of days to keep him apart from the other animals until the vet can check him out. He’s a really mellow little guy, and really sociable. And really LOUD. He’s got the run of the house now.

I give it a week before he’s running the house. LOL

Monoculus Monday

monoculus ~ one-eyed person

I hate the time change. I don’t care if I gained an hour of sleep this time, tell it to the cats. Going to bed at “10 o’clock” instead of 11 is fine, but I’m waking up at 5 instead of 6 and as soon as I stir the cats think it’s time to be fed.

Since I’m pretty sure I go off on a rant like this every time the time changes, I’ll spare you this time – you’re welcome – but I don’t make any promises for the spring. LOL

You know how most places get several days of sun or sun and cloud and only a day or two of rain? We’ve been getting unrelenting grey with wind and rain for several weeks now, and if we’re lucky we get a token sunny day in there, but only one.

So what gives? Is it all the hurricane activity to the south? Global warning? An alien plot to drive us all crazy? Inquiring minds want to know!

I tried doing a Google search for answers, but mostly what came up was stuff about the stock market. The most interesting link I found was for a place called Gloomy Lake in Ontario. It’s way over to the west near the border between Ontario and Minnesota.

So then, being easily distracted the way I am, I started searching for information about Gloomy Lake and I have to tell you, there wasn’t much.

Then I got sidetracked by a site that claimed to offer the most depressing places in the world, so naturally I had to take a look at that. And yes, Gloomy Lake was on the list. I think, however, that the places on the list were chosen for their name only because it was filled with things like: Depressed Lake, Sad Lake, Disappointment Island, Unfortunate Cove, Crying Child Island, the Sorrow Islands, Spiteful Geyser. . . you get the idea.

And just so you know, these are all real places – I looked them up. :-D

After wasting way too much time on that (okay, so I had to force myself to stop, but I’m pretty sure I’ll revisit the search at some point) I tried to search out images for Gloomy Lake and again came up empty. There were lots of images, but none of Gloomy Lake itself. I even tried looking up satellite images, but they weren’t helpful either.

Maybe one of these days – like in the summer when we have nothing better to do and a lot of time to waste – the hubby and I can take a road trip to Gloomy Lake so I can take my own pictures. In the meantime, here’s one of the images that came up for my gloomy lake search.

Looks pretty good for a gloomy lake, don’t you think?

Meristic Monday

meristic ~ divided into parts or segments

I had all kinds of wonderful things to share...in my head. But now that I’m sitting here at the keyboard they’ve pretty much vanished without a trace. Ain’t that always the way?

It was a pretty up and down week last week. Most of our lovely snow has gone, except for where it was piled up on either side of driveways and mounds left by the snow plows along the roads. What’s left is not pretty snow either, it’s that dirty, crystallized stuff that hurts when you kick it.

As a result of all that rain and melting snow we got, there was a lot of flooding, including our basement. We’ve always had a bit of a water problem in our basement, but over the years the hubby has worked both indoors and out to alleviate it. Now it only gets bad in cases of extreme water, which we had last week.

You’d think with the unseasonal warm we’d get more sun, but alas that is not the case. So instead of being cold and miserable, we were warm (and wet!) and miserable. The forecast is for the warmer temperatures to continue for the next couple of weeks but to be prepared for a winter storm.

Now that I believe, coming from the weather network. The general rule of thumb for my neck of the woods is to expect snow through the middle of March. The March Break is usually good for skiing. And even Easter has been known to produce a flake or two. I can remember some truly magnificent storms when I was a kid, one in particular in April.

People complain about the cold snow now, but this is nothing compared to what it was 30 or more years ago (thank you global warming!). There was more snow and cold, the kind of cold that froze your nose hairs when you breathed in, and the moisture from breathing out froze on the scarf covering your mouth....and less complaining about it. We just took it in stride - it’s winter, you gotta expect cold and snow.

But there also was no internet back then. No obsessively checking a weather app to see what the temperature is, no logging into Facebook to whine about it. I wonder if we’d feel as cold if we didn’t know what the temperature was?

It’s kind of like getting into the pool in the summer. We have an above ground pool. The hubby uses it a lot in the summer; me, not so much (okay, rarely). But sometimes on a warm day I’ll stick my hand in the water and it feels nice...until the hubby checks the temperature and tells me it’s only 74F.

Nope, changed my mind. Not going in. But I might have, had I not known the water was colder than I like (I prefer 78 to 80 - doesn’t seem like a big difference, but it sure feels like it). Maybe not knowing the temperature would be better for us all.

Next time you want to check on the weather, try looking out the window instead of at your weather ap. You might enjoy the day more.

Wherever you are, stay warm and dry.

Macrobiote Monday

macrobiote ~ long-lived organism

The problem with a long weekend is that I tend to lose track of my days. Yesterday was a holiday for most people (Family Day for a lot of Canadians, President’s Day for you Yankees) and it really felt like Sunday to me. Which means I’m still late with this post, but at least you’re getting it. :-D

The good news is that the Super Mega Death Cold From Hell has been reduced to a sinus cold (which may or may not be an infection, I’m giving it a couple of days to decide), and my back is pretty much okay again.

The bad news is, my energy resources are depleted. We’ve had a couple of weeks of mostly grey weather, and the temperature has been rising. Yesterday and today are rainy, and the forecast is for more of the same for the coming week.

Blah!

Two weekends ago it looked like this outside:

Then we had a week of on-again/off-again snow and last weekend it looked like this outside:

And no, I did not take that picture at night. That’s how dark it was, but there was lots of snow to compensate. However, this weekend it got mild and rainy, and now the deck looks like this:

Sad, isn’t it? They say winter’s not done with us yet, but I checked out the long range forecast and over the next two weeks the temperature isn’t even going to go down to the freezing mark, so I have my doubts.

In the meantime, I think the grandbaby sums up my opinion of the weather nicely:

Muscid Monday

muscid ~ of, like or pertaining to house-flies

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who’s in the midst of moving her office across the hall, but I don’t like change. I’m not talking about change in general, like moving furniture around or the changing seasons, I mean changes that serve no purpose like the renovations our local Wal-Mart is currently undergoing where you can’t find anything, or Doctor Who changing the opening sequence (and just lately changing to a female doctor), and the Weather Network changing its website so it’s incomprehensible now.

I check the weather several times a day - I don’t know why, it’s just some kind of mindless obsession. The temperature has been so up and down lately - I find it comforting to know what to expect, and whether or not it’s safe to wear my suede books or if it’s going to be too wet out. I HATE the new layout of the Weather Network so much that if they keep it, I’m switching to Accuweather.

Progress on the Great Office Shuffle kind of ground to the halt last week. I didn’t really have time to deal with the futon, and I couldn’t really move forward until it was out of there. The hubby and I tossed around a few ideas about the inserts I wanted for the top two desk drawers - they’re not deep enough for files, but they’re too deep to just hold random stuff.

We toyed with the idea of putting a removable piece in that could hold some kind of basket, but I didn’t like the idea of a basket. I saw a wooden cutlery insert that would have been kind of cool with all its little compartments, but it was way too big. And I found a wooden crate-like container that turned out to be just a tad too big. So the hubby made what are basically removable wooden boxes to fit in there which doubles the usefulness of the two drawers.

It’s so nice to have a hubby that can make stuff like that. :-D

Getting rid of the futon took a lot more effort that I was counting on, starting with cleaning the cat hair off.

The cheap “white” blanket that was covering it went straight into the garbage. There was really no point in trying to clean it - not that it would have ever come totally clean. Our vacuum cleaner wasn’t really up to the job so I literally pulled wads of cat hair off the mattress first, then used a lint brush - stopping every couple of strokes to clean it off. What a pain in the butt!

Once I got as much cat hair off as I could I manhandled it from one end of the house, down the hall, and up the stairs, cursing and swearing all the way. It wasn’t that it was heavy, it was just bulky and floppy. Then I discovered that it wouldn’t fit under our bed, where I’d planned to store it. It’s not that there wasn’t room, it was because there’s a leg right smack in the middle of the bed frame. And the guest bed is a super single while the futon is a double, so it couldn’t go under there.

By this time I’m hot, and sweaty, and really, really frustrated, and I’m sitting on the doubled up mattress (I tried folding it over to go under the bed and it was too thick for that) eyeing the closet. The guest room was formerly the daughter’s bedroom and has a closet that is pretty much the width of the room. Inside there’s a few boxes of toys up on shelves, some clothes hanging up for storage, and a chest of drawers. And now, there’s the futon mattress between the chest of drawers and the back wall. Later on the hubby took the frame apart and the pieces are stashed safely under the bed.

That was Saturday. Sunday I should have been able to get things moved around and a start on setting things up, only I took a friend out for a birthday lunch and was gone a LOT longer than I’d intended. Isn’t that always the way?

There’s an area rug in the room that I didn’t want to get rid of but I didn’t want under the desk, and this is where I finally caught a break. I was able to turn the carpet and it fits almost perfectly wall to wall at one end, giving me bare floor in my desk area, and carpet at the other end where Romi’s chair is going to go. Nice!

This week ... setting up the desk and getting organized. God help me.

Micrurgy Monday

micrurgy ~ dissection under magnification or under a microscope

Another somewhat uneventful week, although not quite so uneventful that I need to stoop to using one of the blog topic generators to get this post done.

The weather is starting to get me down. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to look out and see all the green this time of year, but it might be nice to actually get out into it once in a while.

Last week pretty much alternated between sun and cloud, mostly cloudy, with a spat of rain thrown in. Actually, come to think of it, there was a lot of rain. Enough so that I didn’t have to water my wild flower seeds and they’ve started to sprout.

But there were two things that remained consistent throughout the week, and that was the wind and the cold. Being right on the edge of Lake Ontario, it’s not unusual for it to be windy, but we’re talking excessive wind here. Can’t keep the plastic adirondack chairs upright kind of wind.

And cold! Saturday was one of the nicer days - the sun was out at least - and when I went out on the deck to sit before supper, I was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and socks and shoes. Not what one would expect from almost mid-June.

One of the things all this excessive wind did last week was take out our cable for five hours one night. It kind of freaked me out at the time - we recently bundled our services so I had no internet, no television, and no phone. No way of contacting the outside world if something had happened. And it was a dark and stormy night.

But the up side to it was that it was incentive to learn how to us the TiVo we have. Apparently, you don’t need your cable to be working to access shows you’ve recorded on your TiVo - too bad I only had two one hour shows and one movie on there during the outage.

However, once our cable was restored I started checking our channel grid and almost immediately found four movies to record, one of which was one we’ve been dying to see for ages now, and I’ll be reviewing it on Wednesday. The TiVo is a nifty little device.

Honestly, I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as the TiVo goes. I can record a single show, or set it to record all of the episodes in a series. AND I discovered that you can record up to five shows/movies at the same time! How cool is that?

Okay. Yes, I know people have been recording off their TVs since the invention of the VCR, and most homes today have at least one PVR or access to Netflix or whatever. But we’d been using the same cable box for the last 10 or 20 years. It was so old we couldn’t even access On Demand. So I might be forgiven for waxing so poetic about my new best friend TiVo.

I have no idea how many hours of “stuff” I can store on the TiVo, but you can bet I’ll be ready for the next cable blackout!

Maniform Monday

maniform ~ having the shape of a hand

Where does the time go?

Wednesday is the first day of Autumn ... where'd Summer go?? Seems like it was just yesterday we were complaining about the heat.

Oh, wait. It was just yesterday. Or maybe it was a couple of days ago. I distinctly remember the daughter and I in Walmart saying how much we needed a coffee and opting for an iced coffee because it was too hot out for a regular coffee.

And just for the record ... while I love McDonald's hot coffee, their iced coffee sucks. I've been taking my coffee without sugar for long enough that it was kind of a shock to the taste buds how overly sweet it was. Even the daughter, who does take sugar in her coffee, found it too sweet.

Last week was kind of a roller coaster of good luck and bad luck and that's pretty much par for the course with me, but what made it unusual was the way I'd start out a day on a high note and it would suddenly go downhill, or it would start out bad and take a turn for the better. Normally it's just one or the other.

Other than that, it was pretty much a normal week - get up, go to the gym, have breakfast, work on the transcribing, go babysitting, come home and work on the transcribing some more, have supper, and write/edit in the evening. Insert procrastinating and time wasting as needed. ;-)

Saturday I exchanged babysitting for laundry.

Sunday, which is supposed to be my day off, I spent cleaning the house. Or I tried to anyway. I did a thorough picking up on the main floor and even dusted the living room. Then I gave vacuuming my best shot but neither vacuum cleaner was working. The good one wouldn't suck at all - the filters were clean, the canister was empty, the belt was fine, the motor ran fine, the roller was spinning - it just wouldn't pick anything up.

The old one, which was sent to the basement when we got the newer one, would pick stuff up with the long hose, but not via the power pack that you use on the carpets. The roller in the power pack wasn't rolling. It's possible the belt had stretched out or broken, but I didn't bother taking it apart to see.

AND THEN, after all this cleaning and angst over the vacuum cleaners, the extra company we were expecting for dinner called up at the last minute to cancel. And the son in law had a meeting that included dinner. So dinner for six suddenly became dinner for three. *sigh*

On the one hand it was kind of annoying because I could think of a number of ways I would have preferred to spend such a beautiful Sunday. But on the other hand, my house is nice and clean now. :-D

I lead such an exciting life, don't I?

Misocapnic Monday

misocapnic ~ hating tobacco or its smoke

You know, ya gotta love being Canadian. Well, at least I do.

In the space of less than two days I went from needing the fan on in my office to needing my fingerless gloves on to keep my fingers warm enough to type. And I've heard an ugly rumour that they've already had snow out west.

Surprisingly, we did not get a thunderstorm with the extreme temperature drop, despite the fact it rained all weekend. And we're talking torrents of rain. Hard enough rain that the spot over the hubby's chair in the living room leaked. Enough rain that the hubby had to pump water out of the pool.

And yet the first part of the week was mind-bendingly hot and humid. It was so hot that I even got a ride to the daughter's house for baby sitting. The weather people kept promising us thunderstorms to cool things off, but we never got them.

But by Friday it had cooled off considerably, to the point where we weren't using the air conditioners, although I still had a fan going. And then Saturday it had cooled off to the point where not only did I turn the fan off, I also shut the windows.

And now the weather people are saying that the temperatures are supposed to spike again this week. Go figure. ;-)

It was a quiet week last week, as in nothing much going on.

I wasn't even all that busy, except for Sunday. Sunday, as you may recall, is the day the daughter and her family come for dinner. And, it being a family dinner, I like to have a proper meal. It's also a great time to try out new recipes. That way the hubby and I aren't stuck with leftovers that never of us want to eat, but with food prices the way they are these days we don't want to just throw it out either.

This Sunday I tried something called "Stuffed Onion Bombs" and they got a thumbs up from everyone but the baby because she doesn't eat hamburger yet. ;-) I'm not sure where they got their name from, unless it's because they're 'da bomb'! Bacon wrapped yumminess! And they're pretty easy to make too:

Stuffed Onion Bombs

Ingredients:
2 pounds ground beef
1 cup bread crumbs
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
1/2 cup BBQ Sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
3-4 Yellow Onions (med-large)
1 Package of Bacon
More BBQ Sauce

Directions
1. In a large bowl, combine the ground beef, crumbs, egg, milk, ½ cup BBQ, onion, salt, pepper and garlic powder. Mix together with your hands until thoroughly combined.
2. Cut top and bottom off onion, cut in half and peel off skin. Then separate the onion into "layers". Use the larger outside layers.
3. Stuff your Meatloaf mix between two Onion Layers (essentially making an onion seal around a large meatball)
4. Wrap each "bomb" with 3 slices bacon and secure with toothpicks.
5. Bake in a dish with sides (to catch grease) at 425 for approx 40 minutes or until internal temp 165.
6. Add BBQ sauce all over and bake an additional 5 minutes!

Here's a link to the recipe I sort of used. I pretty much just used my own meatloaf recipe and then followed the directions from there. And because I didn't want my "bombs" swimming in grease, I baked them on a rack in a roasting pan and then transferred them to a glass pan when I added the BBQ sauce. But my advice to anyone trying this would be to use one of those foil pans that can be just thrown out afterwards. It's pretty messy.

If you like meatloaf and you like bacon ... then try them. You'll love them!

My gift to you this Monday. :-D

Magnality Monday

magnality ~ wonderful or great thing

I swear the weather lately is on drugs, and potent drugs at that.

After a pleasantly warm week, Saturday was insanely hot and humid, despite being overcast and rainy. Sunday, however, was incredibly cold and rainy. We're talking "put your jacket on if you have to go outside" cold.

Colour me unimpressed! And apparently this is supposed to be the pattern for the rest of the summer.

So . . . remember how I was supposed to be weeding out books from my office? Well, a funny thing happened last week. I went to the gym on Thursday and a couple of members were talking about these books one of them had to get rid of . . . science fiction books. To make a long story short, she had a van full of boxes of books that were destined for donation to a charity yard sale, but she was willing to let me go through them first. Since her time was limited, we loaded half the boxes (six of them) into my truck so I could go through them over the weekend.

It would have been so easy to just take them all. But two things stopped me. First, my shelf space is limited (which is why I'd been trying to weed out books in the first place). And second, so is my reading time.

And I guess maybe a third thing would be how unimpressed the hubby would be. I'm already fortunate that book hoarding isn't grounds for divorce. ;-)

If I could do nothing else but read all day, I might have kept more that I did. But although I have been making an effort to work in a little more reading lately, it would take me the rest of my life to read all those books. So I showed great restraint and only kept a box and a half.

I get to go through the rest of them today. :-)

And of course just when I have all these new books to read, I pick up another oral history project to transcribe so my free time will be limited for the foreseeable future.

But don't worry, very little of my writing/editing schedule will change. What will change is the amount of time I've been wasting on games and mindless surfing. Who knows, maybe I'll even develop some good working habits for a change.

As mind boggling as it is, I now have nine blossoms open on my orchid's bloom stalk and the tenth one is almost there. The last time I was this excited about an orchid was for this one:

I grew this orchid from a seedling and it took seven years for it to blossom. And I'm really glad I took several pictures of it because shortly after this I moved it from the window ledge to a counter top where it still got lots of light, but it was also in direct line of the cold air coming from the air conditioner.

This is when I learned an important lesson about orchids. They do not like cold air.

*sigh*

Mycetism Monday

mycetism ~ fungus poisoning

Monday again, eh? And so soon, too.

*sigh*

Last week was pretty darned cold. How cold was it? It was so cold we got frost one night and it pretty much killed the hanging plant I got for mother's day last weekend.

Frost! With only one week to go until June. I know Canada has a reputation for being cold and all, but this is ridiculous! I'm just really glad I haven't bought any annuals for my front garden yet. Maybe next weekend.

And in true Canadian fashion . . . Saturday was so cold I was wearing my NaNo hoodie and contemplating turning the heat on, and Sunday was warm enough that I had the deck door open.

I have only myself to blame.

A couple of weeks ago it was so warm that I finally broke down and bought some capris length leggings to wear for my work outs. I wore them once and just about froze when the weather turned cold again.

So then last weekend was enough that I was thinking of transitioning to skirts instead of pants and I got the urge to paint my toenails. They're a nice subtle shade of pink, but they've been covered up ever since the polish dried because it turned even colder than the preceding week.

This week is supposed to start warming up (between rain showers) but I'm not going to take any chances. I'll stick to wearing layers and I'll avoid freshening up my toe polish.

Fortunately, although last week was cold it was bright and sunny, so my orchid is doing well. I have another bud open, bringing the number of blossoms on the bloom stalk to eight. EIGHT! And it looks like the last two buds will be opening this week.

I can't believe I'm going to have an orchid with ten blossoms on its bloom stalk. Just call me the orchid whisperer. :-)