Blather

Here's the baby walnut tree that the squirrels left me. There are three more in the front yard, but I haven't yet tried to move them. One is small, like this one, the other two are about knee-high and will require some (as the Wicked Witch of the East said) "deh-lee-cate" transplanting.











This morning there was an email from the Dallas HR guy. I fly to Atlanta via Salt Lake City on Friday, then on to Iraq after some time at Fort Benning. I have been trying to get as much done as I can before I leave. I spent the day in the backyard, moving garden tools into their new garden-shed home, trimming and raking and I even fixed the plum tree which had dropped a branch from too many plums. I put lots of trashy wood from the shed (the bad floor and roof) into a trash can; my big son knows it's there and will get it into the garbage cycle. Before the lawn got mowed, I found a gift from the squirrels- a six-inch walnut tree.



This is where the plum tree broke a branch off. The black stuff is tree repair. I'm hoping the plum tree will survive this semi-major disaster.















I cleared the grass away and used a small shovel to transfer the baby tree to a one-gallon pot. The soil came away in a nice chunk, so I think the tree wasn't too disturbed.



Here's the east side of the yard. The lawn looks better mowed. It'll look better still when the rains come in the fall. Not sure what those flowers are growing there, but I'm glad they chose my yard to go wild in- they hide my compost pile. Note the smoker up against the house. It sleeps there because it rolls so easily out on the cement patio when my big son fires it up.





I turned the sprinklers on. The lawn has been looking a bit brown in places because I have had the timer shut off while I worked on the shed and it wasn't until today that the lawn was cleared enough to run the sprinklers.

Tonight I'll pack and get myself ready, as if I were leaving tomorrow.

Tomorrow I might do a few small chores- clean my room, organize my shoes, stuff like that. But my daughter and big son are supposed to be here in the afternoon. I want to say good-bye to them, and to see if we can commit to some sort of communication schedule. There's a lot going on there. My ex is involved in everything with my son. She keeps a white-knuckle grip on him. Ditto my daughter, though she might volunteer to be controlled a bit. It's hard for me to say if they just don't pay much attention to me because I'm boring, old, and out of touch with their younger lives or if they won't spend much time with me because my ex would interpret that as disloyalty to her. It's complicated and involves her control over my children.

I could write more about her influence, but most of what I have to say is speculation. Oh, sure, I speculate gladly and with sufficient bitterness toward my ex. But I don't feel like speculating right now.

My ambitious big son bought a ten-pack of four-foot florescent fixtures yesterday. Today he decided to change out the two two-foot fixtures above the kitchen sink for one four-foot. He asked me use my Japanese saw to remove the piece from the middle of the frame. Then he preferred that I do the free-hand routing to get the trim pieces to match the frame. He seems to think that I'm better at this eye-hand motor control business.

More next time.


Here's No-Foot aka Frigga. This one I've nicknamed "Schlanke" because she seems to have so little excess avoirdupois. She is quieter, more reserved. She's near the tangerine tree, surveying "her" yard.













Here's Fulla aka Four-Foot. I've nicknamed this one "Saftig" because she's smaller and pudgier than her sister. Here, she's balanced on the edge of a 2 x 4 fence holding the flowers behind the compost pile.