What Was In Bloom On Valentine's Day Around The Manor



Love
"For Always"

MeMa's Valentine's Day Favorite
Red Tulips





This Hot House Azalea was a centerpiece at MeMa's mother's memorial
It's nice that it bloom's on Valentine's Day





MeMa's Orchid she bought while we were on Maui
"Dendrobium spectibile"



Redwood gets a trimming

Some of you may remember the post I did on History of our Redwood. I take a lot of pride in this tree and made a promise that we commit ourselves to keeping it healthy even if we had to call in the professional arborist or two, this time it took two. In the past I would carefully cut off lower branches as they matured because they become so heavy that they would touch the ground. Those were the easy ones to cut and they would supply a small amount of fire wood in return. As the years went by the branches would still start to bend toward the ground but the point were they attached to the tree was further off the ground so I would eventually have need for a ladder to do this job every six to seven years. Our mammoth friend is now 29 years old and I can no longer reach the branches from the ground or a ladder so I called a company called Arbor-Pro who sent two of their young tree experts out to remove the offending limbs.

This photo was shot about four years ago when we had about six feet of clearance under the branches. This last year I had to stoop over to walk under them.



Because of the dense growth of our tree we had a lot of dead stuff on the inside so the fellows removed a little more than I had anticipated, but our garden giant looks so much better. We are going to have twice the amount of sun light which will benefit the rest of the garden.



I had the fellows leave all the limbs for me and I have started cutting the large portions into fireplace logs and then stacking the debris into separate piles to be hauled to our recycling center. I have an eight foot trailer which has one load ready to go and three more waiting in the garden. Nice fire wood but so much clean-up.

This all took place on Friday and although I worked a bit on the clean-up Saturday the rest of the weekend was spent relaxing with MeMa after her visit to the hospital. She is doing well considering what she went through.

A Rough Day

   After waiting for the defroster to clear a good layer of ice from the windshield before leaving the hospital emergency parking, I drove home that crisp morning at 04:30 through frozen quiet streets and I began to weep.  They were just tears in the corner of my eyes at first but then soon became uncontrolled run down your cheeks and splatter in your lap tears.  I had just spent the last seven hours by MeMa's bed side while Dr and nurses fussed around her hooking her up to monitors asking questions and coming up with no answers.  She had come home from working a full day at the school and was complaining of nausea, light chest pain and upper back pain.  I took her blood pressure and it was off the chart high.  We then called the advice nurse who quickly passed us to a Doctor, who then told us to get right over to Emergency.
  After getting admitted and hooked up to the monitors they gave her morphine for the pain and nitroglycerin.  They tried three rounds of meds for the nausea and said that as soon as it settled then they would take her up for a stress test.  It was decided then that I should go home and see to the dogs and get a little sleep before returning at 10:00 a.m. for her stress test.
  I took the back roads home instead of the freeway because teary vision for a fellow with only one good eye is not a smart way to travel.  It was that long damn hallway leaving the treatment rooms, knowing MeMa lay in that bed still not having any answers that got me thinking of the "what if".  I am normally a very positive person but with being tired and still not having any answers got me thinking those horrible thoughts.  We spend all our younger years working hard to achieve our goals and to create the beauty and comfort we live in.  "We" is all it has ever been about and I cringed at the thought of going home, opening the door and stepping into an empty house.  I don't ever want to say "this is mine" I only want it to be "ours".  I'm guilty of just assuming that this is the way it always be.  So this little awakening kind of hit me in the face hard.  Don't take things for granted because when you do is when things could change.  Miss Betty and little Sophie looked at me confused as to why their beloved MeMa was not with me and went back to the door and fussed, sniffing at the closed door.  I crawled into bed rolling over and looking at her pillow and pushed those ugly thoughts out of my head and thought about all the good things that happened in our life and will happen in our future.  I eventually fell asleep, waking at ten till ten I leaped out of bed a drove straight back to the hospital cursing at myself for missing the stress test.  When I dashed into her room she was sitting up and I just made it in time to put a basin under her as she got sick. She said they took her for the stress test but she was so sick that they postponed it.  The nurse came in and gave her an injection of another drug to settle the nausea, five minutes later she was sleeping soundly, so sound that when the Dr. came in it didn't wake her.  I put my finger to my lips and he whispered that when she woke they would do the stress test.
  At around five in the evening the discharge nurse could not talk fast enough as we prepared to leave the hospital.  The result of the whole event?   Was (besides the inconclusive tests)  two very tired people drove home in their car, stepped into their house and were greeted very enthusiastically by their dogs, just the way it was always meant to be and the way it always should be.  MeMa is doing well, she passed the stress test and the Dr. said she has a good strong heart and so it is still a mystery why her blood pressure was so high.  I'm thinking it is not too late for me to get out there and shop for Valentine's Day.

One man’s junk is another's treasure

Family members of our dear neighbor Margarette Mackenzie, tossed this lovely vase into the trash while they were emptying out her house in order to put it on the market. MeMa rescued it and I cut a few sprays Cymbidium orchids from my greenhouse and beauty has been restored. I have no idea the history of this piece but it looks great on the mantle.

“Mom, can I order a monkey?"

I can remember asking my poor mother on several occasions if I could do just that.  I would usually pick my moment carefully and would experiment with different clever approaches.  When she was peeling vegetables in the kitchen, that ended with her not missing a slice and shaking her head no, giving a snort of disbelief I left to plan a better moment.  The next month when Boys Life Magazine would arrive I had a new plan of attack in mind.  My mother was helping my twin brother with homework and things were getting a little heated at the dinning room table, confusion was my moment for sure success.  Mother was just about to unload a volley of insults about the lack of interest my brother held in his academics when I blurted out, “Mom can I order a squirrel monkey, they make great pets and they are only fifty dollars?" Remember the look that the evil witch gave the magic looking glass when it was discovered that Snow White was not killed by the Woodsmen, but was flourishing in a happy new life with the Seven Dwarfs? Well the look on my dear Mothers face had it all over the evil witch.  I retreated to my room to lick my wounds and that is when I discovered the add for “Four Pygmy Seahorses, Watch the Miracle of Birth When Your Pregnant Male Gives Birth to Twenty Live Babies."  What?  I read it again and that is what it said, the male carries the eggs in a pouch and the babies are born live tumbling out of the pouch to come swim around with the three females and the obviously odd male.  All this and it was mine for just five dollars.  I ran down the stairs to find my mother alone in the kitchen, a changed person by this time, she had finished my brothers homework…..err, I said that wrong…..maybe not.  Anyway….I plopped the magazine down in front of her and before she could get the words “NO MONKEY” out I said “Did you know that the male seahorse gives birth?"  Which caught her completely off guard.  So without missing a beat I asked if it was OK if I ordered some as they were only five dollars.  I think she was so happy that this order did not involve little furry mammals or stocking the pantry with large shipments of bananas that she nodded her head yes and something like “sure you can” in a foreign language came out of her mouth, but it was good enough for me.

It was a typical late winter day when my three siblings and myself came stumbling into the house from our day of school, cold and rainy!  My Mother stood in the doorway and said that I received a package in the mail today.  She looked worried and said that she had been doing the laundry and did not hear the delivery which was left inside the outside screen door in the cold.  The package was about four inches square, surely this was not the whole shipment.  I carefully opened the little box which then held a small plastic bag of……water???  Oh….. and there floating in the smallest little bundle were four flesh colored seahorses, tails interlocked and looking for all appearances …….dead!  I gave the bag a very slight shake and they immediately came to life.  In the bottom of the box was a small set of instructions and a very small amount of dehydrated sea salt.  I quickly set about getting their aquarium set up and after the prescribed floating time I set them free to explore their new home.  ,In two weeks time, just as the add said, a small opening appeared in the diminutive males pouch and out came a small army of twenty baby seahorses.  They were so small it was difficult to count them.  I don’t know if one can still order these fascinating little creatures by mail anymore and I don’t think that if I knew then what I know now that I would order them again because they lived a fairly short life even with my best efforts to give them all they needed.  I preserved the original adults by drying them in the sun and then coating them in my Mothers nail polish…..oh yeah Mom I forgot to tell you that part.  I wonder if they still sell squirrel monkeys?

Male on upper right