Dawn
I am so sorry for how things are going for you lately! I do hope all will be okay with the bite from the stray cat! That is kind of spooky with not even knowing where it came from. Could it be someone dropped off some kittens and that one managed to make it to your house? I suspect people still do that sometimes but it is cruel in my opinion.

Glad the fire department didn't loose their station....my goodness.

But I totally understand your frustration. I am experiencing some of my own right now.
We first had a major clean out garage sale of our own weekend before last. The day after Christmas I had started cleaning out every cabinet, closet and drawer in my house and then went on to the attic, my craft cottage and outside buildings. The sale went great and we sold almost all of the stuff and there was TONS of it. So things are good on that count.

But by then I was ready to get back to the lake to be with some friends who have been there for weeks but this will be their last one there and we will not see them for a very long time.

However we started working at my mom's old house....we have to go through everything that is left there, tons of stuff...it is just full of stuff, and then we have to have an estate sale so we can get in there and remodel and paint and get it ready to sell. It is just awful doing this and sad too....really hard....sigh.

So that is what I have been doing for the last week...day after day spending all my time and energy there and truly getting nothing done at my place. I hope no one touches my furniture it is so dusty you can write on it but we have been so busy continuously for weeks now I am just pooped by the time I stop.
I finally checked my gardens on Sunday evening to find they were very dry and had to take time to give them a good watering.

I also am in need a vacation. But we have my sis and her husband coming most days to help us at mom's and I am afraid to take a day out. They might stop coming and we certainly need the help.

But I just may take the day off tomorrow anyway to go get my hair cut. This heat! I am not griping anymore about being too cold...hahaha. When it decided to become warm it just went from cool to HOT this year.

I picked my first squash yesterday but still have yet to get my own first ripe tomato. The tomatoes are growing and look great and do have lots of tomatoes on them.

BTW.....thank you so much for your suggestions of how to improve the soil in our raised beds...I can tell a huge difference and the plants are all so happy.

My poor hubby managed to get all of our yard done in the last two evenings but now mom's yard needs mowing.....hahaha. At least I don't have to do that.

I have two plants in pots which badly need to be repotted as they are rapidly out growing the pots but I go work at mom's pretty early and it is way too hot when I get home, by the time it is cool enough I am just too tired...haha.

Well who knows it could really cool off again with such crazy weather you just can't tell.

Take good care of that bite. And certainly don't go out to work in the heat.

No one ever said gardening was boring....hahaha.
G.M.

G.M.,

Thanks. I feel better now. Just writing about the frustration made a lot of it go away. I just need to keep working on that "To Do" list and not sweat the small stuff.

I just came in from working in the garden for a couple of hours. DS's fiancee' called to tell me that the school campus where she is working this summer caught fire at about 3:30 this morning, and the fire spread (carried by high wind) to her vehicle and several others and destroyed them. So, my piddly little "I can't get anything done" problems are minor compared to what she's experienced today. I am sure insurance will replace the vehicle, but it takes time, and can be so frustrating. I'm just glad the students were not injured.....the fire was directly across the street from the dorm where they were sleeping.
Now she is stranded 3 hours from home, so I hope they get her a rental vehicle or a replacement vehicle quickly. Otherwise, I imagine DS will go pick her up on Friday evening so she can come home for the weekend.

It sounds like you have been so busy. I bet the garage sale was fun, and at least everything is all nice, neat, organized and cleaned up. I know it must be very hard to go through your mom's house and get rid of the stuff as you prepare to sell it, but remember, it is all "just stuff". You'll always have the memories of all the time you and other family members spent there with your mom.

The wind is blowing like crazy this morning. Steve Lenore said it would, and he was right! This wind combined with our heat sure does dry out everything quickly.

When I talk about the need to plant certain things (like tomatoes) as early as possible in spring, I always say that the early planting is necessary because "it can go from cold to hot here overnight", and this year it certainly did!

I am glad you are getting squash and hope those tomatoes ripen quickly. I'm glad my tips for improving the soil helped. One thing I love about mulching is that, as the mulch breaks down, it continually enriches the soil so I don't have to add soil amendments as much. I think sometimes we forget that soil needs to be enriched constantly or it loses fertility.

My DH mowed and weedeated the yard for me this week, so that's three acres I don't have to worry about again until the weekend. It is TOO hot and doesn't look to improve much.

I haven't seen the wild cat this morning, and the finger doesn't look too bad. I had a friend who tried to break up a catfight once and was rewarded with an infection from a cat bite to her leg, and had to be hospitalized for several days. So I am watching the bite carefully because I know the consequences of ignoring it!

OK, I ate breakfast. Now, back out to the garden to try to work a couple more hours before I take a mid-day break of a few hours to stay out of the heat.

Talk to you later.

Dawn

Dawn,

Writing does help ease frustration. I feel better about my corn since I've vented and slept. I understand your frustrations and you're not whining - it's just always something sometimes. I hope your DS's fiancee' gets her car situation straightened out quickly. I always start feeling guilty about complaining when I realize my problems aren't "real problems" - most of mine are inconveniences. Some have consequences, but they are not life altering for the most part.

Jill

Dawn and GM, so sorry to hear about your trials and tribulations. As for me, I'm struggling trying to get my iris bed prepared and it is raining nearly every other day. The ground is saturated and smells spoiled. One of the pots containing my peppers and petunias got it's drainage hole plugged somehow and so I lost what was in that pot. Two of my Datura have died because of the water and DGS broke one. On the plus side, though, the remaining four are getting ready to bloom. They are not very tall and do not have many leaves so I hope the plants will be able to support these huge flowers. I have lost other plants as well, due to the standing water, among which were a couple of Cup and Saucer vines I had nursed along all spring and some english lavender I was really looking forward to.

DGS is on summer vacation now and all he wants to do is watch TV and play video games and talk on the phone. He'll be a senior in HS next fall. He's kinda getting on my last nerve. I'm trying to help him get a summer job and it's not easy because he has poor math skills. Last summer he worked at Sonic and it was a struggle because he was car-hopping and he had so much trouble making change, got accused of stealing $80 and then they found they'd made a mistake in their calculations and they had to apologize to him but it left a sour taste in all of our mouths because they treated him so bad when they thought he was a thief. Yesterday we had to go buy stuff for Church camp, had to get groceries and went to several places picking up applications and I helped him apply on-line at Wal-Mart and K-Mart. You end up taking a test and everything. So that ate up most of my day because I had to field phone calls while he was working on his applications since he thinks you can't just let the phone ring, ever, and his friends call over and over and over. We just got a call from Wal-mart and he has an apppointment to talk to someone at 9pm tomorrow so they're probably considering him for night stocking. I sure hope he gets hired.

On top of that, my computer is acting worse and worse all the time. It was fine till I had to install all that software when I got at&t high-speed internet. It has slowed my computer down big-time and sometimes I just have to reboot because it locks up so often. Last night I did a Norton scan, which didn't find anything, then I did an AVG scan which found 122 things to fix. Unfortunately, my computer is not working much better after all that, so I will probably do a defrag today and see what else I can do. This morning I worked outside in the mud trying to get a little further in the iris bed and now it's hot. I'm used to working in an air-conditioned office so I come inside when it gets hot, too.

I'm so sad to hear about the kitten. It sounds like its mother was probably dumped off sometime previously and has fended for herself after having learned not to trust people. She will teach that to her kits, if they survive in the wild. The kits can be tamed, but the mother is another story. And do watch that bite. I was bitten by a neighbor's Siamese. He liked to hang out on our front porch and I would always pet him. One day while I was petting him he just sunk one of his fangs into my hand, just below my middle and index fingers. Before I could get in to see the doctor, I had a lump on my hand the size of half a golf-ball and there was a red streak going up my arm. The neighbors denied he was their cat and later on said they "gave him to friends who lived in the country". You can bet your bottom dollar that's a nice way of saying they "carried him off". Jerks.

GM, I have plans to clean things out this winter and have a big sale next spring. The sale we had this spring was extra plants and things from the attic. It's really nice to have the attic cleaned out, but the rest of the house needs it badly.

Sometimes it's good to whine. Hugs to both of you.

Jill,

I put a lot of pressure on myself for everything in the veggie garden to look "just so" and I just get frustrated when it doesn't look the way I think it should. Of course, it looks marvelous to everyone else but me. LOL By the way, I am not nearly as picky about the rest of the yard OR the house, although they get their share of attention once the veggie garden is planted and firmly under control. Until then, they coast a little.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a lovely compliment on the veggie garden. A lady who is a professional photographer stopped by our house with a friend of ours. We weren't home at the time. They saw the veggie garden and stopped to admire it. She sent word through the mutual friend that the garden was lovely and she'd like to photograph it sometime. Then she went home and got busy, determined to clear out an old garden plot that's been unused the last few years. It actually meant more to me that it inspired here to garden again than that she wanted to shoot photos of it.

Ilene,

I vented my frustrations and got over it and feel so much better now. Isn't that crazy?

You have it so much worse than us with the never-ending rain. At least, if we need "more" water, we can turn on the hose (and brace ourselves for a larger water bill). Sadly, you cannot vacuum up the excess water out of your soil. Uh-oh, if your soil is getting that sour smell, you've got trouble. (sigh) Last year, I didn't start losing plants until the soil started smelling sour, and then it took it several weeks to dry out enough that the smell went away. By the time the sour smell was gone, so were a lot of plants.

I'm sorry you're losing plants and hope everything gets better soon.

I hope DGS gets the job at Wal-Mart. Our son worked at Wal-Mart one summer and came to hate the place, but it kept him employed and out of trouble. LOL

We had a kitten mysteriously appear in our pasture out of nowhere last year and we kept him. He was so little and starved in the beginning that he would have fit into a coffee cup. We took him to the vet, got him some medicine for a mouth infection, fed him, lavished attention on him and gave him lots of love. He is now a beautiful one year old black-and-white coon cat who is going to be absolutely gorgeous when he reaches full maturity. (We didn't know he was a Maine coon cat until we watched him grow and realized he was 75% hair and 25% cat. Then I found a picture of a 1-yr.-old coon cat in a book and it was identical to him. It takes coon cats up to three years to get their full big fluffy coats. He already has the big ruff around his neck and the "britches" (thicker fur) on his hips/legs. Strangely, when he meows he sounds IDENTICAL to our mature male coon cat, Fluffy. Maybe all coon cats sound the same? Not only do they meow the same, they talk to us in the same little tone of voice....make a little mumbling sound. So, Gizmo worked out OK and maybe the little stray will too if we can catch it and tame it. It ate the food I put out for it last night, and it isn't hiding in the car engine today, so I don't know where it is.

Your arm reacted just like my friend's leg. It happened to her as she was leaving the house to come to work, and before the workday had ended, she had pain, fever, swelling and red streaks up her leg. One of our co-workers took her directly from work to the hospital. She went through quite an ordeal. My finger has a tiny bit of swelling and was a little red near the puncture site this morning, but actually looks better this afternoon, so I think it is going to be OK.

Thanks for tolerating the whining and understanding that sometimes it is good to whine a little. I'm sending a hug back to you, and would send you some of our sunshine and dry weather if I could.

Dawn

Ilene - Sorry about your plants, and it sounds like you are getting more rain tonight. I hope your plants survive the winds since the weather report looked like it was headed straight for you. It went north of us this time.

Oh, my gosh! I didn't know what a Maine Coon Cat was and so I googled for a picture. The picture below is my cat, Pearl. Her name is actually "Poor Pitiful Pearl" because she was scrawney when we took her in. The white markings on her face make her look like she is sad. Her mother was a black cat so she's not "pure bred". But gosh, look at the similarities! She has huge snow-shoe feet and a big ruff around her neck that gets in her way when she grooms herself. And yes, she's mostly fur and has the sharpest little claws. When she walks across you with those big feet of hers you feel like you're going to have a bruise everywhere she has stepped. For a couple of years she didn't meow at all. Now she does quite a bit, when she wants to be fed or to go out. But it's not your normal meow. It sounds more like "MRA" and is kind of low and scratchy. She's not bigger than your average cat, though.

We didn't get the rain we were expecting last night, but lots of wind and our electricity went off for awhile. I hurried out early this morning and finished digging the iris bed. We are not expecting rain again until tomorrow night so I'm hoping DH can get out there and till the amendments in. If he can get that done, I can do the rest in the mud and hope things will dry out. I have gone all around and scattered granulated lime, hoping to sweeten things up a bit, I don't know if it'll help or not. Even though I have lost a lot of things, I still have some things to enjoy. The moonflowers are now in bloom. Gosh the flowers are almost bigger than the plant! Having raised beds has saved my tomato crop. DH works out with a man who lives in Caney, KS -- just across the line from us. He says his garden is so wet he can't even get in it.

I hope your little kit will tame up. Food usually does it. I usually sit out there with the food when they come to eat, inching a little closer each time. Once they're close enough that I can touch them lightly (and carefully) while they're eating, they see I'm not out to hurt them and then they'll gradually let me pet them. A good ear-scratch and they're hooked on humans! LOL

I think that Pearl is gorgeous and it does appear she has some Maine Coon Cat in her. Fluffy looks like the traditional coon cat with the same colors in his coat as a raccoon. In the winter, if he is off in the pasture or you just catch a glimpse of him from a distance, there is something about him that has a "wild" look. Once, I saw him a long ways off and said to DH "Look at that wild beast out in the pasture!" And, in reply, he said "That's not a wild beast, that's Fluffy". Ooops. Gizmo is black and white but almost just as fluffy.

That distinctive meow is so fascinating, don't you think? I've only heard it from Maine Coon Cats. And, now that you have the image of Maine Coon Cats in your mind, watch the TV and print cat food commercials. You'll be surprised how many of them feature Maine Coon Cats (and in the full range of coon cat colors too.)

We saw the wild kitten last night. She is living in a huge tangle of wild blackberries under a willow on the banks of our largest pond. I put food out for her and she ate it, but we can't get close enough to her to catch her. Hopefully, if we continue to feed her, she'll eventually let us touch her. And all the swelling, soreness and redness is gone from the finger, although the puncture wound remains, so I am apparently going to survive the bite of the wild kitty.

I'm glad you caught a break and didn't get more rain yet. Maybe, just maybe, you'll get the iris bed done. I LOVE raised beds. About 75% of my veggie garden is raised, and I usually use the unraised parts for sweet corn or for really late crops like okra, black-eyed peas or winter squash since our excess moisture tends to come earlier rather than later.

In 2004 and then again last year, the only folks I know of who had ripe tomatoes here were those of us who have raised beds. In both of those years, standard flat rows drowned. (In June 2004 and July 2004 we had about 10 to 12" of rain in June alone, and July was almost as bad....and you remember last year!)

I have fed the deer and bunnies for so long that they are used to me and tend not to run off when I appear. Last night, though, a young buck appeared at the eastern edge of the garden (I was still IN it) around sunset, and he wouldn't leave. (And I didn't want him jumping in there with me!) I finally yelled and waved my arms and moved towards him in a noisy and erratic manner, and he retreated to the edge of the woods. Once there, he pawed and snorted and carried on. Finally, I had to turn lose the two young terriers (the older is about 3 years old, the younger is 1) and they chased him for a few acres. Usually we only have does and their young fawns, and I haven't seen this buck before. I don't mind if the deer eat a little of the hen scratch I put out for the bunnies, or the sunflower seed I put out for the cardinals and doves, but I am not going to let them chase me out of my garden!

We had a huge snake in the flower bed on the south side of the house yesterday, and even though it was a non-poisonous one, I am never really happy to see them. The heat seems to be sending all kinds of wildlife our way.....everyone's just trying to eat and drink and survive the heat. Even the turtles are coming to the yard to eat hen scratch. Sometimes, in the mornings, they are in the chicken pen!

Dawn

Well, that was not really a good picture of Pearl as I was in a hurry to get the post sent. She actually is quite a pretty girl. As she is about ten years old as near as I can figure, she lolls around most of the time, although once in awhile she gets in a mood to bat something around with those big paws of hers. Her tail is constantly brushing something off the big coffee table in the living room, or whatever we might put on one of the ottomans. She is not a lap-sitter, and I always thought that was because of how she was treated as a kitten, but apparently it is typical of a coon cat. We had renters next door who brought her, her brother (who was a white cat with a gray saddle and a big spot of gray on each side) and their black mother, who was pregnant with with a new litter when they moved in. It was not uncommon to look out the window and see these people's children running down the street with Pearl or Spot in a clutch under their front legs, with the hind legs and half their body dangling as the kids ran. It hurt my heart to look at it. It wasn't long before they started hiding under my front porch, and I started feeding them. The mother cat had her kittens under the porch and then wouldn't let Pearl and Spot hide there, so they took to sleeping on the porch behind the Adirondack chairs. It wasn't long before the renters left in the middle of the night, obviously owing rent, and since they couldn't find the cats they left them behind. Something, sadly, got under the porch and killed the kittens. The black cat was adopted up the street, and I kept Pearl and Spot. Pearl took really good care of her brother. She hunted when she was young, but she never ate what she caught. She'd bring it into the yard and wait for Spot to notice she had something, then he'd kill and eat it while she stood there. She would groom him, too. Spot hated children and when we adopted the grandsons he wouldn't come in any longer. I tried to feed him outside but the other neighborhood cats got most of it and eventually he wouldn't show himself when I called. I don't know what happened to him, I hope he got adopted by someone who didn't have kids. Pearl now shares the household with our dog, Sonny, who knows that Pearl is the boss. She bullies him sometimes and I swat her for it. Then she's mad at me for awhile. The website that I first looked at when I was Googling to see what a coon cat is, was wikipedia. And the picture they have looks exactly like Pearl. As I looked at some of the other sites, I saw that they come in many different colorations. Isn't that interesting? Once again, you have taught me something new. Keep me sharp and using my brain, Dawn, they say that's how you fend off Alzheimer's. Although I've been a little worried this week. I've been trying to match a lid with a plastic jug all week. I found the jug, couldn't find the lid. Put the jug up. Then I found the lid, couldn't find the jug. So put the lid somewhere. Then found the jug, forgot where I put the lid!!!!!! This has gone on all week and it's about to drive me nuts!

Here is a link that might be useful: Wikipedia

Our Fluffy looks like the picture on Wikipedia that said something like Typical male tabby coon. He also has the furriest ears and feet I've ever seen. And he loves water, which I don't understand. He will sit in the rain, walk through puddles, etc. Gizmo was a starved, scruffy, mess when we found him. Kristine washed him and cleaned him up and he seemed to enjoy the sink baths (!) so she bathed him weekly. That lasted about six months until Gizmo rebelled and decided he wasn't going to have baths in the sink anymore.

Wonder where the lid is? That's not Alzheimer's though. That's just normal forgetfulness. LOL If you had Alzheimer's, the odds are you probably wouldn't know that a jug has a lid or that a lid goes with a jug. LOL (My dad had Alzheimer's.)

Remember that I said fires come in threes? First, the Marietta fire engine and then Kristine's truck? The third one was last night....a large tanker carrying liquid propane flipped end over end on I-35 but didn't explode. So, technically, it wasn't a fire.....but it did keep our firefighters tied up from about 10:30 last night until around noon today. It took a CRANE to lift the tanker upright so the fuel could be offloaded to another tanker, and they had to do it in this monstrous wind. They wouldn't even try to do it until after the sun had come up. So, I-35 and Hwy. 77 were a mess in the Thackerville area this morning and last night. Considering he was in a rollover/flipover involving a large liquid propane tanker truck, the driver walked away relatively unscathed, with just a few broken ribs. So, we've had three fire incidents in close succession, and I hope it is quiet the rest of the week.

I need to get back out to the garden and finish my weeding and mulching....a never-ending job.

Dawn

Oh, wow, how scarey that must've been for the trucker. God must not be finished with him yet, that's all I can say.

We are getting lots of wind, beating my pepper plants to death again. No point in watering, they already have plenty. I guess being at work all day I never noticed how much wind we get here. Makes me wonder why they don't open up one of those windmill farms right here and we could generate enough electricity to take the total burden off the oil and gas industry. We see the "parts" being trucked along HWY 75 through to someplace in KS all the time, and DH said he heard they were starting one in Catoosa now too. I think that's got to be the way to go. Now if we could just strap a little windmill on our cars.... we might not get where we wanted to go but we'd end up somewhere away from home, that's for sure! LOL

Gizmo and Fluffy sound so cute. It's amazing how much the little critters enrich our lives.

I found the lid and FINALLY remembered where the jug was!

DGS had his interview last night and they told him to come back tonight to get paperwork for his drug test. Things are looking up! He'll be working from 10pm to 7am so that will be a new experience for him.

Well, I am not sure that we've had this kind of June wind in many years. Trees and limbs are just crashing down in our woods every now and then. Eventually we'll have a real mess to clean up, but the woods are really overgrown and we've been thinning them and cleaning them up ever since we moved here.

My pepper plants (like everything else) are taking a beating from the wind, but they took a worse beating last night from Mr. Deer who must have returned after I chased him off at 5 or 6 p.m. This morning, half a row of hot peppers are 1/3 the size they were yesterday morning. Some of the peppers only have a central stalk and some jalapeno peppers left on the plant. I don't know if those will bounce back since there's no leaves to conduct photosynthesis. (sigh)

This morning, DH said we should get put a sail on the car and let the wind take us where we want to go. Since it is blowing relentlessly out of the south, though, we could only sail to the north.

I'm glad the lid and jug finally ended up together.

Hope DGS likes working all night. I don't think I could do that....I'm not much of a night owl.

I'm watching the weather and it looks a lot worse (and potentially dangerous) up there than down here, so be careful!!!!

Dawn