manofmanycats

They've been tearing up the streets in our neighborhood to install a new metered water system for about three years now? There's the jackhammering to break the concrete for the installation, then they patch, and then after months and months they come back and scrape off the street surface (loud) and repave. In theory. The main street in front of our house still only has the patches, and it badly needs repaving.

The side street has been completed through the repaving, but today we're in our second post-completion jackhammering episode. The first time was a couple of weeks ago, where they opened the pavement around pipe accesses (who knows why?), and then repaved. Now they're back again. WHAT are they doing over there, and why aren't they ever done?

I got very little accomplished this weekend apart from my ongoing project to cull pictures from our 7-8 photo albums. This is because we HAVE so many albums, and also because I haven't been adding things to them since I started taking pictures with my phone instead of a digital camera (about 10 years now). I need room so I can print out some of those cloud photos and add them. I finished albums 2-4, removing probably 160-200 photos from before we had kids. So, that's progress. The next project will be to buy full-sized photo albums for the kids, and move the pictures over from their mini-albums. I made a series of small albums for both when they were little, so they could have their OWN photo books and stop messing with the family ones. We have about 10 of them, and they're taking up a lot of shelf space. Better for the kids to have their own grown-up versions.

TV-wise, I rewatched Barbie recently (still love it!) and finally saw the first Avengers movie. So much Loki! Then we watched Avengers 2, which we also hadn't seen. NO Loki. :( And HalfshellHusband and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2, which was a surprisingly worthy sequel. The fashion was more weird than swanky this time around, though. The tassel jacket! The long, heavy tweed dresses! The runway ridiculousness! But Meryl Streep still looks fabulous. I honestly think that bright silver hair is more attractive than her usual blond color, certainly at this age. It's really striking.

Back to the salt mines now. Not getting enough done this week, just nebulous investigation and idea-rejection. :(

halfshellvenus

The Friday Five
1. Do you like to spend time outdoors?
Oh, yes. Providing I have sunscreen!

2. What is your favorite flower?
I really like roses, but I think it's a toss-up between the blue iris and the stargazer lily.

3. Any favorite warm weather activities?
Biking and hiking, ideally only in warm-ISH weather (it gets horribly hot here).

4. Have you ever kept a garden? If so, what did you grow?
Yes, many times. Tomatoes grow well in this climate, and we have cherry, orange, and mandarin trees. I've grown canteloupe in the past, as well as zucchini (eh). But ever since we moved to this house some 26 years ago, nothing but the zucchini has grown well (and it goes from thumb-sized to baseball bat seemingly overnight). The soil in our garden area appears to be really crappy. :O

5. Do you know how to swim?
Yes. Not in an impressive way (I hate to put my face in the water), so I usually dog paddle or do the breaststroke with my head up. OTOH, I can backstroke for days...

halfshellvenus

I managed to avoid running over a snake today, which is a plus. It was around 83F, and they tend to come out in the heat... and then lie on the pavement in the shade. Most of the time, I wind up running over them because I think they're a stick and it's too late to avoid them anyway. :(

This one was not a rattlesnake, thank goodness. And it was a chonk! Wow.

I also saw some turklets. It's that time of year! These were young enough to be cute (which doesn't last long). And I spotted the aftermath of a fish hoping to chomp a black butterfly that was hovering over the river.

Being early May, the wild grape buds are out. They have a sweet, peppery smell that is nothing like actual grapes. The cottonwood trees are also releasing fluff into the air, and that can come and go for a month depending on how often we transition back into winter weather. Soon, squirrel mating season will be running full tilt, and I'll have something else to dodge while biking out there. But in the meantime, I hope the sweetness of spring lingers a little bit longer. :)

adoptedwriter

Most Excellent:

Fuzzy1 passed her 1sr 2 grad school classes: Bio-statistics and an anatomy class Basically 2 “weed-out” classes. Glad that’s behind her and gives her confidence going forward.

Good:

Kitties are all well.
Fun Sister-cousin group chat last weekend on Facebook Time.
Lots of sunshine. The garden is progressing. Still aiming for the “Magical-Enchanted-Butterfly magnet” type garden.
Quaker (tm) cheddar rice cakes are The Bomb!
5 weeks of school left.
I got my 15-year service award at work last Friday. Whooo!
a well-vacuumed house
lavendar

Medium:

I fcking freeze my ass off at work. The temps are set on arctic blast. Ugh! I hate the AC. I worked my 1st 20 yrs with no AC, (except for in the principal’s office). I have never acclimated to heavy doses of cold blowers and AC systems set low.
My daughter, Mermaid Fan, is running a full marathon on Sunday in our local Flying Pig. I’m a worried mom, but she believes she can complete it no issues. She has never run the big one before.
Still having the occasional “Sad Day” re missing my mom. I relive either her funeral day or the day “it” happened. PTSD perhaps?

Bad:

War(s), conspiracy theorists who actually buy into this shit beyond entertainment, liars, gaslighters, abusers of power, people, animals, the elderly and children

halfshellvenus

I saw a turtle at the edge of the bike path on my ride today. I'm not sure what it was doing there, though turtles have been spotted in that area before. But it's a crawl of maybe half a block to the river, where the water supply is. This was a decent-sized specimen, about 7" in diameter, though they can get bigger.

I dodged a fair number of fuzzy black caterpillars out there, but it was nothing like 20-30 years ago, when they were everywhere! We also don't get clouds of orange ladybugs anymore. I spotted one in flight last week, and I've picked up hitchhikers before, but there are so few of them now. The enormous increase in turkeys, egrets, and Canadian geese in the intervening years seems a likely cause.

I occasionally get actual red ladybugs at the house, probably because we have so many roses (50-60 plants). People buy them for aphid control and release them in their yards, and they migrate to our house. ;) The ones that occur naturally in our yard are more of a yellow-brown color, and sometimes they pinch. Rude. :D

Speaking of plants, I got ZERO daffodils this year. The shoots came up, the same as always, but no flowers. I have a clump near the front door (where we can see them from inside), and another across the walkway. That second group has never flowered. I planted them maybe 8-10 years ago, and I even dug them up once and replanted them at a more shallow depth, but Nada. I'd like more daffodils, not less. Maybe it's too shady where I have them? Or maybe it was that endless fog earlier this winter?

I hope to get out this coming weekend and do something about the weeds and all the roses that need dead-heading. I would have liked to do that last weekend, but it rained again. I didn't get much of anything done, TBH. A lot of my TODOs involve dealing with the extra framed family pictures that we don't have places for now. It's as much an emotional task as a physical one, which is why I can't seem to do it. Give me strength!

halfshellvenus

another staged assassination attempt. :( What's really at issue? Distracting peole from the war in Iran and the Epstein files. Not to mention grift and treason, but who's counting?

In lighter news, Sacramento is still in the off-again/on-again rain cycle. A few days of biking outdoors, a few days in the garage. This is keeping the summer heat at bay, though, so I'll take it. May is coming, and that can be the start of hell. Or not. We got married on May 20, some almost 37 years ago. It was a beautiful day, about 80F. On our first anniversary, it poured all weekend. Other years? 90-100F. There's no way of knowing until you're in it.

We watched Beckett last night with The Boy, which was entertaining but another reminder that Denzel Washington's son will probably never have a huge career because he looks like his mother rather than his father. Pleasant, but not distinctive. Then HalfshellHusband and I watched Happiness For Beginners, which I always thought was a Simon Pegg movie. It was not— different flavor altogether— but we enjoyed it. Gorgeous scenery.

( Books )

Speaking of which, there are ads now for eyedrops you can use to temporarily remove the need for reading glasses. Ullhhhh... That seems kind of risky to me. I used to have daily contact lenses that would sharpen my right-eye vision and make my left eye work for short distances. But I always wound up taking the left lens out when I biked, because otherwise I couldn't see the traffic behind me clearly enough to know if it was safe to merge left. And most of my reading now is either computer screen or Kindle, and the Kindle lets me adjust the font size up and down!

The medical miracles I want have to do with weight control (currently ineligible) and shedding less hair. I've seen a little improvement on that last issue. My sister bought and then didn't use about 6 months' worth of Nutrafol, which she passed along to me. AFAIK, it isn't helping the corners of my lower eyelashes grow back, but it HAS reduced the amount of hair that comes off in the shower. Possibly due to the extra iodine— added to my multivitamin, I'm at 250% RDA. \o? My doctor won't raise my thyroid levels (which I think would help BOTH issues), so maybe this is a small workaround? It may also be helping my energy levels and mental clarity a little, both of which can suffer with low thyroid.

What's everyone been doing this weekend?

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Jackhammer Nation

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Wildlife

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January 2021

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