Oct. Week 2: Have you had about enough of this wind?
OklaMoni
2 years ago
last modified: 2 years ago
Featured Answer
Sort by:Oldest
Comments (61)
OklaMoni
2 years ago
hazelinok
2 years agoRelated Discussions
1)What have you planted so far, 2) what will you plant this week?
Comments (46)I'd really been wondering when the redbuds would show that first blush of color and finally .... just in the last day or two, they are showing up along the roadsides. A deer visited a few days ago and snacked on some of my tulips :( but the ones that are left are beginning to bloom and they are beautiful! Phlox is now blooming and the hostas are growing fast. I'm now pretty sure that the tree that I thought might be a crabapple is just that, and it looks like another small tree is a redbud (yay). It's fun discovering what's growing here, now that the weather has finally decided to warm up. A neighbor said 12 wild turkeys were in our yard the other day, but we were at work so we missed seeing them. The street we live on is called Turkey Run Drive, so now we now how it got its name :). Oh, and one bit of good news .... they started the dirt work where the building will go, and when they stripped off the bermuda grass the land is mostly nice dirt, with only one little strip of red clay running through it. This may have once been farmland, or a pasture. So that's good news for the vegetable garden. Suzie...See MoreOkay, fed up, worn out and have had enough!!
Comments (35)Obviously, you're looking at your shortterm problems. As you should. However, for the long term? if your husband is a school teacher, there's absolutely NO reason why you couldn't get a parttime job in the evening. Work a couple of nights a week at a store, or in a restaurant, WHILE your husband is a father to his children. Being a teacher, he has regular hours. You wouldn't be the first couple to work opposite shifts so that the family can be taken care of. My sister worked days, my brother worked the overnight shift for YEARS when my niece was little so that they DIDN'T have to use daycare. There's a huge added benefit, too--your children should have the enormous opportunity to spend time alone with their dad. It's a good thing for you to be out of the house several hours a week, so they can have that. Actually, whether or not you have a job, you SHOULD be making sure there are several opportunities a week for them to spend time alone with their dad--it's vital to them both. And what about working from home? I know many, many women who have found ways to make money from home, so they can raise their children AND help with the family finances. I used to smock children's dresses that sold in upscale boutiques, some women I know make between $50,000-100,000 a year recipe contesting. Another woman was doing work at home on her computer for a local mortgage company. Others have done done things like: call the subs for the local school district or hospital; made crafts throughout the year and had a home sale before the holidays, in home childcare, yes--can collecting or picking up stuff from the trash on trash night to resell at flea markets or on E-bay. Assess your skills, and then put your thinking cap on and figure out a way to make them pay. You have to be a little creative to make it work, but it's definitely possible, and if being home with the kids is important, you have a lot of incentive to make something like that work. Also, have you spoken to someone who can help you with your budgeting? I don't know what kind of expenses you have, but it does seem a little unreasonable that a teacher's family is in this desparate a financial situation. Teachers generally start at $50,000/year (around here, it's more like $60,000) and their salaries just go up and up---especially if they take on extras like clubs, independent studies, coaching and other activities. But in any case, teachers make good money--and many have other good paying jobs in summer. So it may be that having someone who can help you organize what you've got coming in would be a very important step for you to take at this point, so that you can get back on track. Look, I totoally 'get' that you want to be there to raise your children yourself--that's admirable, and I think--very important. IF (and only if) it is doable. From what you're describing, right now, it's not for your family. You DO need more money coming in. You do need to sit down with your husband and brainstorm what solutions you can come up with that will let you make a little extra money, that will have minimal impact on the kids. They are out there. And once you get through the next 2 weeks, it is time to really figure out what you're going to do to prevent being in this same situation over and over and over. Good luck to you...See MoreJanuary 2018, Week 4, The January Thaw, Warmth, Wind, Fire, Seeds...
Comments (101)Jennifer, The first time I saw a BP truck at our Wal-mart, which was just last week, it was only delivering wooden shipping crates of BP onions, but then it was back this week delivering a few cool-season herbs and veggies. I'm thinking of those poor little plants right now because our OK Mesonet station is showing a current temperature of 20 degrees and that's pretty much borderline too cold for some of the plants I saw yesterday, especially given how small they are and the fact they are in small containers and not in the ground where soil temperatures could help insulate them from some of the effects of the cold. I hope the garden center employees covered up those plants last night or moved them indoors. While the very early transplant arrivals often do not freeze or have damage at 20 degrees, sometimes they do....and sometimes the damage is invisible and can result in later problems like early bolting or buttonheading of brassicas....and no one links that bolting or buttonheading in March or April to the fact that the plants were exposed to excessively cold temperatures while on the garden center shelves in late January or early February. I'm sorry your mom has the flu and wish her a speedy recovery. I hope whatever you're fighting is not the flu and that you can successfully repel those germs. I carry hand sanitizer in my purse, not that I am obsessive about it, but I hate touching anything in a grocery store at this time of the year for fear that flu and cold germs are lingering everywhere. I wash my hands constantly, and I do not understand how/why people would use a public restroom facility and not wash their hands. I just don't get it. Rebecca, Well, spinach is really cold hardy. Perhaps dew and/or frost have left enough moisture behind to induce germination. We're in severe drought, are awfully dry and have tons of tiny little green things sprouting everywhere now. In fact, the OK Mesonet's Relative Greenness for our county went from 11% last week to 21% this week, which surprised me, but then when I looked at the ground closely, I could see all the tiny green sprouts popping up in fields, and clearly the program (satellite? radar?) that calculates Relative Greenness for each county is 'seeing' that greenup as well. Are any of y'all allergic to cedar (which actually is juniper, but I cannot win that battle on getting people to correctly label it)? Because it is pollinating down here already and everyone who is allergic to it is having allergy symptoms already, including Tim and I. Just yesterday I was looking at cedars in our neighborhood and commenting to Tim how heavily they're covered in pollen, and Fran and I noticed the same thing while out at wildfires in northern Love County a few days ago. A lot of folks who recovered from the flu now thing they are having a relapse or have caught a cold or whatever, and I just wonder if what's actually happening is they are allergic to the cedar pollen. Nancy, We all are so proud of Amber. She's just an awesome person and her students are so lucky to have a teacher who loves them and works so hard to teach them. Everything she does is always for them and about them, so when she was named Teacher of the Year, she was totally surprised because she doesn't think about stuff like that---her focus is completely on her kids. The riding mower is dead.....or dying. It is around 16 or 17 years old and gets used a lot since we mow about 2 acres regularly. I think it really needed to be retired 3-5 years ago, but Tim is a cheapskate who doesn't want to spend the money to buy another one, so he keeps fixing it and keeps it limping along and just barely working. I just kinda wish he'd go ahead and buy a new one and have something reliable. Weekends are too short as it is and he doesn't get much mowing done if half the weekend is spent chasing down parts and fixing the mower. Jen, I bet it was a nice day to go to the dog park. Our dogs spent a lot more time outdoors today in their dog yard than they usually do in the winter, and they were so thrilled that it was mild, sunny and warm. They were exhausted by the end of the day which I always think is a good thing as it does cut down on how energetic they are in the evening. I think Tigger is the perfect name for a dog! I assume the planters you're planting are your winter sowing? Have fun finishing it up. Nancy, That bermuda grass is such a nuisance, and it creeps into the east end of my garden every year in late summer once it is too snaky for me to hand-weed it out. Johnson grass does the same, and it essentially is bermuda grass on steriods. Since I don't use chemical herbicides and since the presence of the rattlesnakes and copperheads makes weeding too risky after a certain point, that sort of invasion just cannot be avoided. It drives me mad. Even if I could hand-remove it, I'm willing to bet that at some point the summer weather would get too hot and I'd decide I wasn't going to spend all that time out in the heat removing it. I'll be removing all of it this week (I hope) that I can as long as the wind stays down and I am able to spend more time at home in the garden instead of being away at fires. I think on Mon and Tues, the wind will be low enough that I'll be home in the garden. I'm not so sure about Wed and Thurs because the stronger winds are expected to return then. I have been watching for snakes this week on the warmer days because last January they came out here in southern OK on the warm winter days. A little girl in the Austin, TX area was bitten by a rattlesnake at Longhorn Caverns State Park a few days ago on a warm, sunny day when the family was excited to get outdoors and have fun after being cooped up by cold weather, and that certainly caught my attention. Undoubtedly it generally is warmer in Austin than it is up here at this time of the year, but not necessarily that much warmer, so I took her mom's warning about snakes being out to be a serious one. I think your soil will be fine whether the stuff is broken down enough or not. We have gazillions of things that sprout and grow just fine in some pretty awful dense, red clay.....although I'd never expect my precious garden plants to survive and perform well in that stuff. It is merely that as the soil gets better via amending, the plant performance improves year after year. I've always been in it for the long haul---not expecting to totally turn around the soil in 3, 5 or even 10 years, but just dedicated to continually improving it slowly over time. There's places in my garden that probably never get as much compost as I'd like, but the plants grow well there anyway. I do look at the improved soil now and have trouble remembering how truly awful it was in the beginning---but all I have to do is dig down maybe a foot to get beneath the area of improved soil and there's my reminder of the awful red clay we started out with. We only eat out about once a week, something made easier by the fact that it is pretty much too long of a drive to go anywhere that we'd really like to eat, and eating out usually is restricted to the weekend anyway since Tim's long commute makes his day incredibly long as it is. By the time he walks in the door at night, he's been gone 13 or 14 hours and going out to eat is not on his list of things he wants to do....and I don't blame him. I am hoping for a better week this week than last week when we had fires virtually every day. Having said that, we're off to a bad start, with the fire pagers going off for a vehicle in the roadway on fire about a mile from our house around 4 a.m. this morning. I am sure there's tons and tons I do not understand about motor vehicles, but I just do not understand how you're driving up the road at 4 a.m. and all of a sudden your car or truck bursts into flames. That must be a terrifying moment when you realize you're in a vehicle that is on fire. So, now that I am up and wide awake, there's no way I can fall back asleep. Tim, by contrast, can crawl back into bed after something like that and be asleep and snoring in 5 minutes. I wish I could fall back asleep like that, but it just doesn't happen---once I'm awake, I'm awake to stay. This is useful in summer because I just go outdoors at the break of day to get into the garden early and beat the heat, but not so useful in winter when it is cold outdoors. Dawn...See MoreNovember 2018, Week 4 "Oklahoma! Where The Wind Comes Sweeping....."
Comments (37)Aaaackk! I'm so far behind I don't know how I can catch up, but I'll try. And, technically, this is a new month and a new week but I want to finish this thread before I start the new one. Bruce, It definitely is encroachment of a major type. Frisco and all the surrounding areas have grown, and continue to grow, exponentially. We drive down some of the roads mentioned in the coyote area occasionally, and they were country roads not too long ago and are city roads now. The development is occurring at such a breakneck pace that one of the things I tend to say to Tim every time we drive through there is ""where's all the wildlife being pushed away into?....what's left for them now?" Amy, It is alright. You've been through a lot recently and I am sure you have a lot on your mind. Now that you've found this thread, I'll go start the new one for this week in a few minutes. Regarding the chickens? We've had ferrets, weasels and ringtailed cats all get into coops we thought were secure, so maybe you have one or more of those sneaky beasties around? The first two, in particular, can squeeze through fences and through tiny openings. Congrats on the contract on your dad's condo. That happened fairly quickly all things considered. I know you'll be glad when you can cross the condo off your list of things you have to worry about. Nancy, The beautiful weather sounds nice. All too soon it will be icky again, either cold or snowy or windy or icy or some combination thereof. Today was only 56 degrees so warm but neither too hot or cold. All the wind the last two or three days brought down most of the leaves left on the trees, so we look really wintery now and even the last remaining red oaks in the neighborhood have lost their red and gone brown or naked now. It definitely looks wintery and I sure miss the green foliage. Fruitcake is an acquired taste. My dad made it as did several of my uncles, but I never acquired a taste for it. Early in our marriage I made one. I have no idea why. I wonder what I was thinking? Maybe I thought that making a Christmas fruitcake was a southern/family tradition I should carry on into my adult life? Nope, nope, nope. It wasn't worth the bother, we didn't even eat it, and I never made one again. If I wanted a fruit cake (and I don't) I'd order this one from Corsicana's Collin Streat bakery that ships tons of them annually: Deluxe Fruitcake A lot of people in Texas, in particular, consider this the ideal fruitcake, perhaps because a lot of it is not fruit---it is pecans. They sell about 3 million pounds of fruitcakes per year (mostly at this time of the year) and ship to at least 195 countries, in addition to the USA. In this particular case, even though I love to bake, I feel like they make a much better fruitcake than I ever could or would or have. Rebecca, I am not even sure my dad and his family members really liked fruitcake, but I guess it was a tradition from their relatively poor youth so they kept making it and eating it....despite not really liking it. I think maybe it is because their parents loved it and they lost their parents really young, so perhaps they clung to the fruitcake tradition as a way of hanging on to their memories of their parents. Larry, It is really kind of you to provide some entertainment for the cows. I know there must be some really good fruitcakes, but most of the ones I've eaten would not have been labeled as good in any shape, form or fashion, which is a shame considering how much work goes into making one. It also is tiring to try to chase down all the ingredients. I've noticed the last two or three years that a lot of the candied fruit type stuff that goes into them isn't even sold in local stores any more. Kim, I bought the Whole Seed Catalog at Sam's Club the first couple of years but it wasn't that special, other than just for reading it to pass the time, and I stopped spending money on it. Jen, I don't know of any way to tell the good seeds from the bad ones when they all look the same at the time you harvest and dry them. About the only thing you could do would be to run a germination test by sowing 10 or 20 of them on a wet paper towel or coffee filter and putting it in a ziplock bag. Check daily to see how many germinate. That at least would give you an idea of what percentage of the seeds you've saved will be viable. Keep in mind if the original plants were hybrids, their offpsring likely will not come true from saved seed. Jennifer, I hope your long day on Saturday went well and that you've spent today resting and recovering. Amy, I was watching the weather when the tornadoes spun up and was horrified when they started issuing Tornado Warnings for a "Particularly Dangerous Situation" type tornado emergency. It looks like it was horrible in the areas hit, but also seems like injuries were minimal and no one died. Why can't we have normal weather here? Tornadoes at the end of November are not unheard of but also not terribly common. We had some very strong wind gusts (likely in the 50s) as our severe tstorms roared through, but no real damage here. Some people in our county had portable structures, like sheds and carports, flipped or destroyed and trees damaged and power lines down and such, but I think it all was straight line wind damage and no twisties here. We got less that 0.20" of rain out of it, but I'm so relieved to not have mud any more that I'm not complaining. Rebecca, I hope y'all found a Christmas tree that was up to your standards. We bought a terrific and beautiful pre-lit one several years ago and I love it. I believe we got it at Lowe's. When I looked at the trees they have this year, none of them were anywhere close to it in quality though. It seems like everything we buy anymore just keeps being made more and more cheaply, although prices continue to go up. We had the girls this weekend and had lots of holiday fun, but I am exhausted and ready for the new week so I can catch up on my rest a little bit, Good-bye November! Dawn...See MoreOklaMoni
2 years ago
slowpoke_gardener
2 years agodbarron
2 years ago
Kim Reiss
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoOklaMoni
2 years ago
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoOklaMoni
2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agohazelinok
2 years ago
Nancy Waggoner
2 years agodbarron
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoLarry'
Oklahoma Red sweet potatoes , the best two , about 8-10 inches long. The rest were smaller on down. Dug three 5-gallon buckets of them. Looked like a lot of them didn't fill out very well , a lot of skinney tubers. The ground was packed pretty hard around them. It was a job digging them with a fork.Rick
slowpoke_gardener
2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
2 years agojlhart76
2 years agodbarron
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agojlhart76
2 years agohazelinok
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agoOklaMoni
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoHU-422368488
2 years agoNancy Waggoner
2 years agodbarron
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoKim Reiss
2 years agoOklaMoni
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agodbarron
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agohazelinok
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agodbarron
2 years agoOklaMoni
2 years agohazelinok
2 years agolast modified: 2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years agodbarron
2 years agoNancy Waggoner
2 years agoslowpoke_gardener
2 years ago
Related Stories
STORAGE2 Weeks + $2,000 = 1 Savvy Storage Shed
This homeowner took backyard storage and modern style into his own hands, building a shed with reclaimed redwood and ingenuity
Full Story
KITCHEN DESIGNKitchen of the Week: Making Over a Rental for About $1,500
Fresh paint, new hardware, added storage, rugs and unexpected touches breathe new life into a Los Angeles apartment’s kitchen
Full Story
FARMHOUSESNew This Week: 2 Charming Farmhouse Kitchens With Modern Convenience
These spaces have all of today’s function with yesteryear’s simplicity and character
Full Story
KITCHEN DESIGNNew This Week: 2 Ways to Rethink Kitchen Seating
Tables on wheels and compact built-ins could be just the solutions for you
Full Story
KITCHEN DESIGNNew This Week: 2 Kitchens That Show How to Mix Materials
See how these kitchens combine textures, colors and materials into a harmonious whole
Full Story
KITCHEN OF THE WEEKKitchen of the Week: 112 Square Feet Laid Out for 2 Cooks
A thoughtful new design lets this couple cook comfortably in tandem and includes room for a much-needed pantry
Full Story
KITCHEN DESIGNNew This Week: 2 Kitchens That Nail Modern Farmhouse Style
Natural materials and a fresh country feel create welcoming kitchen designs that connect the old with the new
Full Story
INDUSTRIAL STYLENew This Week: 2 Industrial Kitchens to Inspire Your Next Remodel
Bored with white kitchens? Introduce concrete and steel elements for modern industrial style that doesn’t disappoint
Full Story
DECORATING GUIDESHouzz Tour: 2 Weeks to an Apartment Transformation
Speedy didn't mean skimpy for this couple's Santa Monica rental, thanks to a designer who thrives on tight deadlines
Full Story
EVENTS5 Big Trends From This Week’s High Point Market
Learn the colors, textures and shapes that are creating a buzz in interior design at the market right now
Full Story
HU-422368488