From the back porch - August 21, 2017

Happy solar eclipse day!

I live and work in an area outside of the totality path, but our eclipse was about 90%, and it was still very cool to witness. 

I promised Nanny that I would pick the green beans this afternoon after work.  I came home, put on my lounge pants, and smoothe forgot about picking beans.  About an hour ago, it hit me.  I put on some capri jeans and some loafers and went to the garden with my picking sacks.

Nanny was already in the garden, cutting okra, and as I was walking toward the bean rows, I was praying that I'd gotten there in time, that she hadn't picked them already.  But as I neared the rows, I was relieved to see clumps of beans still hanging on the vines.  I said "hey" and got to picking. 

Thirty seconds later, I felt my feet stinging and looked down to find them covered with red ants.  I'd been standing right on the ant hill!  Thankfully, they had not yet made their way up my legs, for I would have embarrassed myself, right there in front of Nanny, if I'd had ants in my pants.

We ended up with about 4 gallons of green beans and a gallon of okra.  I brought it all home.  Tomorrow, I will be canning beans and looking for some folks who like okra.

Back porch genealogy - August 2, 2017

I don't really have anything much to report today - nothing informative and quite possibly even nothing entertaining - so you're free to just zoom right past this entry in search of something more worth your time.

Me, I'm off work for the afternoon.  I suppose there are loads of productive things I could be doing in the two hours between now and time to start supper, but I don't want to do any of them.  For example, I could be trying to figure out how to change Gloria's cranking thing - I've already bought the part - so that I could use her to till up the cucumber row (when it gets dry enough to work) so that I can plant another round of cucumbers before it's too late for them to make before frost.  But I don't want to.  Not today.

Or, I could be -

No, I'm not making that list, for fear I'll shame myself into wasting this lovely afternoon doing something useful.  I'd rather sit here and watch this hummingbird as he tries to get nectar from the still-closed four-o'-clocks beside the porch.  He's got another 13 minutes to wait, judging by the clock.  As he flies away, a big black, orange, blue, and white butterfly lands on the screen and slowly waves his wings.  I'd be missing all this, if I were doing something useful.

I thought about finishing the book I'm reading, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg.  This is the fourth book of his that I've read.  I've thoroughly enjoyed them all and hate to finish this one, hate for it to be over.  So I'll wait until bedtime, when I'll fall asleep after about 3 minutes of reading (no reflection on the reading material intended), thereby stretching it out, making it last another day or two.

I found out about Rick Bragg as a result of my genealogy research.  No, we're not kin (or, heck, maybe we are, five generations back).  My daddy's family is from Alabama, and as part of my  research, I've been reading Kindle books on Alabama history.  Rick Bragg's books probably came up on a "Folks who bought this book also bought" list.  I downloaded one of his books and got hooked. He speaks my language.  I don't know if it is the language of the South, or the language of Alabama, but I "get it."  I see my own family in his.

Rick's paternal grand-family worked in cotton mills and lived in cottages supplied by the mills.  My paternal grand-family lived in coal mining camps in Walker and St. Clair counties.  My grandfather finally got out of the mining business and took up share-cropping, some time after 1922, when my father was born in Walker Co.  The family spent a year or two share-cropping on an island in the Mississippi River, then later on various farms in the river bottom on the Tennessee side.  My grandfather ended up on the wrong side of the law and had to high-tail it back to Alabama in the early 1940s, but my daddy stayed, and met my mother, and married her when he was 22 and she was 14.  That's when his trouble started, I reckon.  ;)

Unlike Rick's father, my daddy did not drink much.  Not that he wouldn't have, if he could've gotten away with it, if it had been regularly worth the lip he would get from my mother if he were to come home with glazed eyes or even a hint of alcohol on his breath.  Only occasionally did he defy her, probably partly because he could rarely afford a pint.

Daddy was wicked smart, and although he was illiterate, he could figure out how to do most anything.  He could weld.  He could operate heavy equipment.  He could carpenter.  He could fix motors.  But he didn't want to do any of that; he'd rather go fishing.  Consequently, he'd quit a job when the fishing got right, and find him another one whenever the fish quit biting or times got too tight or he got sick of hearing it from my mother, whichever first occurred.  So it was that in his late 40s or early 50s, after a long stint of unemployment, he was able to get on with a millwright union, and finally began to make enough money to afford hamburger meat in his spaghetti and a pint of whiskey (which my mother would always pour onto the ground if she found it) under his truck seat.

I well remember Daddy's last "toot."

One Friday night, payday, he didn't come home at the usual hour.  By the time he was 30 minutes late, my mother was fuming; he was out loafing, was probably getting drunk, would lose his whole paycheck (which he would've cashed at the liquor store on the way home), would hit a tree, etc.  Sure enough, he didn't come home until almost daybreak, and he was drunk as Cooter Brown.  She went outside - I was right behind her - and found him in his puke-splattered work truck, half passed-out behind the wheel.

Man, oh, man, was she mad.

She yanked open the truck the truck door and, as soon as she found out he wasn't dead, tried to shove him over so she could snatch his wallet out of the back pocket of his overalls.  He resisted, as best he could, and told her to go to hell.  She rang his jaws for cussing her, and probably because she was so mad, and took the wallet, anyway.  Thank God, most of the money was still there.  Next, she snatched the keys out of the ignition and slammed the truck door so hard I thought all the windows would shatter.  She marched me back in the house, and woke up my sister, and said for us to get ready, we were going to town.  She drove straight to Stepherson's furniture store and bought a new living room suite AND a new maple kitchen table and six matching chairs, probably she first brand-new furniture she'd ever owned.

He was still sitting in the truck, his head tipped against the back glass, when we left for town in our ragged old car.

So, yeah, I get where Bragg is coming from.

I tried to e-mail him one time, through his publisher, to talk to him about a phrase I'd read in one of his books.  Regrettably, the email I received in return was from his publisher, telling me to mail him a letter c/o somewhere or another.  That was too much effort for such unimportant communication, and I let it slide.

In case he googles himself and runs across this, I'll quench his curiosity and tell him that the phrase was "if the creeks don't rise," used in the concept of a hindrance.  It is a wonderful phrase, I think, doused with history.  These days, rising waters don't routinely hinder us, but in olden days, they did.  The concept matches perfectly with the phrase, when used in that sense. 

But I learned something about the phrase when I was touring the Constitution Village in Huntsville, Alabama, a couple of years ago.  The bonnet-clad young lady who was leading the tour told us, as an aside, that the phrase "if the creeks don't rise" originally referred to the Creek Tribe, not bodies of water.  You could've knocked me over with a feather.  That put a whole new twist on the concept of hindrance!

From the back porch - 7/16/17

If someone had told me yesterday morning how tired I would be come nightfall, I might have just turned around and gone back to bed.

The first couple hours of the day proceeded as usual.  I got up, drank some coffee, cooked breakfast.  Around 10 a.m., The Grandson called, wanting to come over for the weekend.  No biggie; he's a good kid; we like him. 

Shortly after his dad brought him over, I started thinking about school starting soon, and how all of the grandchildren would be needing school supplies.  I got online, found all of the lists (high school, 7th grade, 5th grade, 2nd grade), and The Grandson and I headed to town to get the things on the lists.

Now, it's been a while since I've dealt with this sort of thing, and I was a bit shocked by the extent of these school supply lists.  When I was in school, if you had a three-ring notebook full of paper and a #2 pencil, you were good to go.  But these lists...!  Dry erase markers.  Spiral notebooks for every subject.  Composition notebooks.  Whole boxes of pencils.  Folders, with prongs and without.  Page protectors.  Glue sticks.  Highlighters.  School boxes.  Pencil pouches with metal rings and clear fronts.  Two of this, five of that.  Geez!  My shopping cart ranneth over, $200 worth of pencils, papers, and markers!

On the way home, The Grandson and I whipped through a hot-&-ready pizza joint.  When we got home, The Husband was on the back porch, sizing up the door frame for the new, snake-proof door we'd bought last weekend.  The first thing he said was, "I think it's the wrong size."  The opening is 36" wide.  We'd bought a 32" door, which came with a metal frame, part of which is welded onto the door, itself.  The hardware store man said it was perfect, if we'd also install something called a "brick ledge" that was supposed to create the right size frame on which to install the metal door.  It wasn't happening.  We tried adding lumber to the frame, but nothing we did made it okay.  And even if we had installed the door, there was a 1/2" crack between the welded-on door frame and the actual door.  Why, a big python could squeeze through that!  We decided to return the door to the store and get a regular 36" screen door.  Getting the metal door back into the packaging it came in was an ordeal by itself.  (Bear in mind that it was humid and about 167 degrees outside.)  We were both drenched with sweat by the time we loaded the metal door into the truck.

Since early spring, my to-do list has included washing off the back porch and water-sealing the wood.  We bought the water seal last summer but never applied it (the instructions said to wait a while to seal treated lumber).  In my mind, this is the year to do it, especially since the recent snake slaughter had left bad voodoo snake blood stains on the floor.  So while The Husband went to return the door, I started moving the furniture off the back porch so that I could clean the floor and the rails.  This porch is 16' x 20', and FULL of furniture and loads of crap that shouldn't even be out here.  Unloading it took a while.  The high-powered nozzle that fits on the end of the water hose did a great job of taking out the dust, pollen, and spider webs, but there were dark, moldy spots that would only come off with a scrub brush.  Once the wood was clean, I turned to the furniture, itself, to remove the spider webs and dust bunnies from under the tables and chairs.  Then it all had to be moved back to the porch.

I'd just about finished the porch when The Husband came back with the new door.  Soon after that, The 3 Granddaughters arrived, tired and hungry and wet from an afternoon of swimming.  (Their parents had come over to help install the new door.)  Since they were here, it seemed practical to sort out the mountain of school supplies in my living room and send them home with the children.  We all sat down amongst the pile and called off the items on everyone's list.  To my disappointment, I'd bought the wrong kind of notebooks and not enough crayons and markers.  *sigh* 

8 p.m. - The girls have gone home.  The Husband and I are exhausted and hungry, and we stink, and there's nothing in the house to eat that doesn't require serious cooking.  When I floated the idea of fast-food burgers, The Husband and The Grandson seconded and thirded the motion.  The Grandson and I went to town and got them at the drive-thru window (I was still way too stinky to go inside).  We gobbled them down the minute we got home.

9:30 p.m. - I'm finally clean.  But I am done - D-O-N-E done, I tell you - for the day.  It took me about an hour to rest up enough to go to bed.

I think today will be a lazy day.  There's still some work to be done on the back porch - tools need to be put away, and a little more straightening-up is in order.  But it's still hot and humid, and there's a movie that The Grandson wants to see.  An afternoon in a cool movie theatre sounds just right.

Snake 3 and Pest Removal

Okay, clearly, the wildlife in our yard is plotting to kill us.

Monday evening, The Husband was sitting in the living room, watching tv, when he saw something move outside the window.  Upon closer inspection, he found this:

The very idea, peering in our windows like that.  (Actually, it was probably aiming for the bird nest in the box on the window.)

The Husband went all samurai warrior on it.

The next day, I went to the garden center and bought TWO giant bottles of Snake Stopper. 

* * * * * * * *

I have been on a mission to make enough compost to make a difference in the garden.  Earlier in the week, I was dumping table scraps into the compost barrel and got stung by a wasp (or something).  Whatever it was, it was badass.  My hand swelled up until it looked pretty much like a blown-up latex glove.  And ITCH....  Mercy.

I went out to the barrel yesterday afternoon armed with a can of wasp spray - the kind that jets about 20 feet.  A sassafras sapling has come up through the frame, impairing access to that side of the frame, but I could get to the other side, so I filled it up with wasp foam, then ran my butt back into the house before a wasp could get me.  The Husband worked on it again tonight and thinks he found where they were hiding, and he thinks he got them.  I'm going to go out there tomorrow and dose it again for good measure.

* * * * *

Yesterday I went to the garden to pick squash and noticed that the tomato plants are firing up with blight.  I know that the best remedy for blight is to prevent it by spraying a fungicide before the blight takes hold.  But, dang it, it has rained and rained and rained here, and anything I sprayed would have washed right off.  And now it's about 100 degrees, and as humid as a swamp.  Heat + moisture = blight. 

To frost the cake, I found aphids on some of the tomatoes AND on the purple hull peas. 

I went to the garden shed for the chemicals.  I don't like chemicals, and so I try to use as them as little as possible.  But at this point it's either use them or lose the plants. 

Don't think I wasn't tempted by the latter option. 

Nevertheless, I got out the sprayer, mixed up the foul stuff, and started to spray.  I got a few seconds of good, fine mist, then the nozzle started to sputter and dribble.  I tried to work on it, wound up getting a fungicide/pesticide bath, but not a better spray.  Nanny went to the shop and got out a brand new sprayer - brand new in the sense that it had never been used, but it had been sitting in a box in the hot shop for about 5 years - but it wouldn't hold air around the pumper, wouldn't not build up pressure, and would not spray.  I tried swapping nozzles and hoses.  Nothing worked.  I put it all back in the shed, went BACK to the garden center today, and bought another sprayer.  It worked for about 2 minutes before it started spewing 3 streams instead of a spray.

Why do these things never work right? 

Would the world beat a path to my door if I built a better sprayer nozzle?

* * * * * * *

While I was in the garden tonight, The Husband sprinkled the snake repellent all around the house and along the edge of the woods.  He said he left an "exit hole" where he didn't sprinkle it, so that any snake that might be in the yard can GET THE HELL OUT.  Tomorrow, we'll close the gap.  I think it's supposed to rain again this weekend, so we'll probably have to do it again when the rain goes away.  It makes our yard smell like a giant Red Hot candy.  Kind of pleasant, actually!

From the back porch - July 10, 2017.

Three days since the last snake incident, and I am almost comfortable sitting on the piazza without a pistol in my lap.  We figure that Mr. Snake must have come through the hole in the screen door.  It's a big hole - actually just a place where the screen has come loose from the frame.  We've repaired it several times, already, but it keeps coming loose.  Probably that snake actually LIVED behind that cabinet and kept battering holes in the screen door with his head so he could get in and out when he needed to.

Okay, maybe not.

Anyway....

We loaded up and went to the hardware store, and bought ourselves a new screen door.  It is the Fort Knox of screen doors.  The frame is metal - no more warping, hopefully - and so is the screen.  It has a hydraulic thing that will make it whoooooosh closed instead of SLAMming closed, which will make The Husband happy.

I might kind of miss the slam.

But I won't miss the snakes.

The last time I checked the garden (Friday afternoon, prior to the snake-fest), it was drowning.  The tomatoes and peppers are just limp.  Green beans growing, but not blooming.  Purple hull peas beginning to bloom.  I picked a sack full of crookneck squash and three big zucchini (dang, those things grew in three days!) and a good many cucumbers.  Nanny took some of the squash, and I headed up the driveway with three grocery bags full of vegetables, wondering what I was going to do with it all.  I gave the squash and cucumbers to a neighbor who happened to be out in the yard.  I brought the zucchini home and eventually made bread with it.

I should've kept the cucumbers.  We need pickles.

I bet I know where I can get more.  ;)

ANOTHER SNAKE!

Tonight, just as I was about to get ready for bed, I went out on the back porch to get something from the table where I've been working all day.  It was dark, but there was a flashlight on the counter outside the door.  I grabbed the flashlight, switched it on, and aimed it at the counter just in time to see a SNAKE slither over a basket full of craft supplies, heading toward the crack between the back  of the cabinet and the wall.

I leapt to the other side of the porch and started screaming for The Husband.  "COME HERE!  AND BRING A GUN!"

He came running out the back door.  "What?  What is it?"

 "SNAKE!  BIG snake!"

 "WHERE?"

 "On the - on the THING."

 "WHAT THING?" 

 I could not think of the word "cabinet."   I aimed the flashlight at it the counter near him.  "ON
THAT!"

He jumped back in the house.  "WHERE?"

"I DON'T KNOW!" 

 Mayham ensued.

"Turn on the ceiling fan light," The Husband said.  When I did, he grabbed the broom and started shoving stuff around on the countertop.  The snake was gone. 

A gone snake is about worse than a present snake, when you don't know where it went. 

I came in the house and put on my gardening boots.

We moved everything off the cabinet, shined the flashlight beam down the crack.  Didn't see the snake.  We opened the cabinet doors, didn't see the snake.  I started moving porch furniture so that we could pull all of the furniture away from the wall. 

Then, The Husband, who was still shining the light behind the cabinet, said, "I see his head."

A wave of relief washed over me at knowing where he was.  But then I asked, "NOW what?" 

There were three BB guns and a bottle of BBs on top of another cabinet farther down the wall.  The Husband started shaking BB guns to see if one was loaded.  When one rattled, he brought it around to the end of the cabinet.  "Hold the flashlight!" he said.  He cocked the BB gun, and went to shooting down the crack.  BBs were ricocheting all over the place. 

 "YOU CAN'T KILL A SNAKE WITH A BB GUN!" I yelled, holding the light, dodging bullets.

 "YES, YOU CAN!" he said, and kept on shooting.

He made the snake mad enough that it eventually came out to escape the onslaught.  He kept shooting.  He emptied all the BB guns, reloaded, kept shooting.  He must have put 50 BBs in that snake's head, and 150 more in its body. 

Finally, we deemed it no longer fit for combat. 

I went to the shed for a hoe and a rake, and we dragged the thing out and put it in a sack and flung it down the hill.  Washed the blood off the porch.  Moved the furniture back into place. 

As we came inside, I said to The Husband, "THAT's a way to wind down a peaceful evening, huh?"

He said, "For real.  I need another shower.  My *ss feels kinda swampy now."

While I piddled around in the kitchen, he looked up snakes on the internet.  He thinks it was a rat snake.  I was sure it was a copperhead, or maybe a python.  ;)  Sucker was at least 3 feet long.

It'll take me 2 hours to calm down enough to sleep.

And far longer than that to sit comfortably on the back porch with my feet under the table.

UPDATE:  The snake must have landed belly-up, for it began to rain about 30 minutes after The Husband pitched it over the hill.  He may have to go find it, for we've had enough rain for a while. 

SNAKE!

This weekend was . . . eventful . . . in a not-so-great sort of way.

It started out with a backed-up sink. 

Our kitchen sink has been draining slowly for the past week, and finally stopped draining altogether Thursday night.  We plunged and plunged and poured hot water.  Nothing.  Friday I came home from the hardware store armed with a new plunger and a bottle of some sure 'nough drain cleaner, "Guaranteed to Work."  We let it soak all night Friday night, but there was still water in the sink come Saturday morning.  I went back to the hardware store, bought ANOTHER new plunger, one that pumps like a bicycle tire pump, a drain snake, and another bottle of drain cleaner (should've taken the old bottle back, instead).  I will spare you the details of why there was water running from UNDER the sink an hour after we put the new equipment to work, but it had to do with both the plunger and the snake, which became irretrievably hung deep within the drain pipes.  I made a third trip to the hardware store for replacement pipes.  We ended up calling a plumber, anyway.  Miraculously, we found one who would come on a Saturday afternoon. 

While we were waiting on the plumber, I took the "compost tea" to the garden.  I'd made 5 gallons of "tea" in a 2-gallon bucket (one uses what is at hand), figuring I could just dilute it before applying it, which I did.  I gave all of the tomatoes a good dose and spread the left-over silt around the puniest plants.  The squash needed picking, so I did that, and also grabbed a few cucumbers to soak with onions in vinegar, a summer favorite in this house.  When the plumber finally finished re-assembling the entire plumbing system under the sink (I kid you not), I cleaned up the kitchen, put the sopping towels in the washer, and spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on some computer work.

Yesterday was quiet.  After breakfast, I took my laptop out to the piazza and spent most of the day digitizing and test-sewing and uploading new embroidery designs.  (Shameless plug: https://www.etsy.com/shop/sfancy?ref=shop_sugg ) Around lunch time, when my tummy got to rumbling, I recognized a hankerin' for meat loaf and decided to make one for supper.  I stirred it up and put it in the refrigerator, thinking I'd put it in the oven around 5.

I like creamed potatoes with meat loaf, but my potatoes were getting puckered and sprout-y, so I had to come up with some side dish alternatives.  There was a bag of dried Ford Hook butterbeans in the pantry.  I'd given Cousin Roger the squash I'd picked the day before, but I'd left some growing, and if Nanny hadn't already picked them, there should be enough for our supper.  Butterbeans and sautéed squash and meatloaf and cucumbers with onions soaked in vinegar.  Sounded good to me!  I put the beans on to soak and asked The Husband if he would go to the garden and get us some squash around 5.  He said he would.  I went back to my digitizing.

By five o'clock, I'd decided that I'd go get the squash, myself.  My neck was stiff, and I needed to move after sitting most of the day.  So, picking sack in hand, to the garden I went.  Nanny saw me go past the window and came out to the porch to say hello.  She said she'd take a few squash, if we had enough to go around.  I said I'd bring her some.  She went back in the house.  I headed for the zucchini.

When I bent over to raise the first zucchini leaf, a black, 3-foot-long, hoe-handle-thick snake shot out from under it.  I hollered, "OH!" and jumped back.  It's amazing how quickly stiff joints can un-stiffen in certain situations.  Mercifully, the snake had headed AWAY from me instead of TOWARD me, but it still took a few minutes before my heart resumed its normal beat. 

Between the zucchini and the yellow crooknecks, there was enough little squash for our dinner and Nanny's.  I brought ours home and sautéed it with onions in olive oil until it was caramelized and sweet.  Man, it was good. 

But, next time, I'm sending The Husband to get the squash.  ;)