I took my camera for a walk around our yard after the rain the other day.

Here is what I found of interest.

 Rain Drops

Violets

When I mowed the yard unfortunately I had to mow some violets. I have never seen so many violets in our yard!

Dwarf Iris

A Busy BumbleBee

Blooming "Orange Goo" Fungus

Remember last year? This time I caught it as it was drying up, but still creepy.

MORELS !

Rick found these mushroom gems growing in their same old spot.

Now that I've said yes to a trip to Cartagena, Colombia I need to brush up on the little I know language-wise in Spanish. I can speak enough German and French to get me into trouble, and a smidge of Dutch, but Spanish? Nope.

When we took our trip to San Miguel des Allendes, Mexico a few years back I spent some time before we went with the Rosetta Stone software for learning Spanish and did pretty well. But of course, now that I haven't spoken any Spanish in a few years I've pretty much lost all that I knew, which wasn't that much to start with. I can speak in pleasantries with como está, buenos dias/noches and the usual please, thank you, etc.  And, the important one: asking for a glass of vino tinto. 

Our roof is original to the house which was built in 1998, (oops, I meant around 1988: see Rick's comment below) so it had pretty much come to the end of its life span. Superstorm Sandy helped us out by ripping chunks of shingles off on the back side of the house. When the insurance adjuster came he said our roof was in such bad shape that more damage would be done by patching it than by replacing it. So, Sandy paid for the back side of our house which helped out a lot. Roofs are expensive! Plus, ours is a hip roof and labor costs more than a more normal roof with less pitch.

~ Where is she going with this?? ~

The crew working on our roof are all from Ecuador. They are a happy bunch and hard workers. They dangle from the peak of the roof on their ropes like monkeys on a vine. And by that I certainly don't mean any disrespect nationality-speaking, only that they look about as at home on their ropes as monkeys do on their vines. They speak a little English, but not much. They sing while they work. 

When one of them showed up at the front door, I said ¡Hola! in a perky tone of voice and was quickly rewarded for my efforts by a rapid dump of Spanish. I'm sure he could tell by the blank look on my face that ¡Hola! was the extent of my extremely limited Spanish, and that he had lost me with hello. He switched to broken English and asked if they could they please have some water. 

The whole process of taking the shingles off was pretty interesting. They tented the house with large pieces of fabric screening and slid the shingles down to the ground as if on a big slide. The noise they made as they slid sounded like the sky was falling and the dogs didn't like it one bit. I ended up putting them down in the basement where they were happy to stay. All day long I couldn't hear myself think and it was hard to concentrate on much of anything. First from the sliding shingles, then from huge booms that shook the house as the packs of shingles were dropped on the roof. After that came the pneumatic nail guns. 

They worked from 8:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Like I said in my previous post, they cleaned up pretty well by running a magnet over the grass and driveway to pick up the nails and blew pieces of shingle and other debris off the decks. 

Here you can see the new shingles against the old ones on the sun room and the garage. We think the darker color looks really nice, and we hadn't realized how much red was present in the old shingles. The new ones are high-definiton too, so they give a 3-D effect.

I will be glad when it's all over and done with! To be continued … hopefully today!!

 Blog + Rut = Blut

I know I haven't written much lately. Every time you visit you just get more photography. When I look back each day in the On This Day category in the sidebar I am reminded of some of the witty things I used to have to say. It also reminds me that I had more people following me and commenting. I'm not really sure why I don't write much anymore. Maybe because I really don't have much to say. The days go by in a blur of daily chores (grocery, walking the dogs, etc.) and I figure no one wants to read about that, plus how much can you really say about any of those subjects?

I think I've lost my voice. Every time I sit down to blog no words come into my head. My fingers sit listlessly on the keyboard until I hit the "close" tab on my blogging program without writing a word. Am I depressed? No, I don't think so, but maybe. I have no reason to be.

I pick up my knitting and make mistakes, resulting in tinking backwards to undo what I just did that I didn't want to do. Today finds me contemplating ripping the whole project as it exists to this point, (about 1/4 of the way finished)  completely back to nothing and start over again. (sorry, sis!) If I weren't such a perfectionist and instead of trying to fix my little gaffe had kept on going, chances are no one would notice. Except for me that is, and therein lies my problem. I'm going to try again to save it when I'm done here but I don't hold out much hope. Damn.

Same thing happens lately when I start a book. I can't tell you how many books I've checked out of the library in the past few weeks only to take them back with only the first few pages read. None of them grabbed my interest. I pick them up, I put them down. Unread.

We are experiencing re-roofing interruptus at the moment. The roofers came on Tuesday and got the main roof of the house ripped off and back on again. The garage roof and sun room roof have yet to be done. Yesterday they didn't come because we had heavy rain (which we sorely needed). Today it's raining again, so no roofers. Not sure about tomorrow either weather-wise since they need one whole good day without rain to finish. In the meantime they've left all their ladders and assorted paraphernalia  around. They cleaned up as best they could but we still have bits of shingle everywhere. Kind of a mess.

We managed to get our new cabana up this weekend by the pool. Photos coming as soon as the rain and the Blut is over.

Thanks for listening.

Photo: Grape hyacinths and buttercups w/azalea at Skylands (where else??)

This weekend when we went to the grocery store the VFW was selling poppies outside the exit. I have a soft spot in my heart for veterans selling poppies. I can't pass them up. As I slipped my money in the canister and reached out to receive my poppy I saw myself sitting outside the Grand Union supermarket in Hyde Park, New York when I was a child, helping my grandfather (who we called Poppy) sell poppies. 

Poppy fought in World War II and loved every minute of it. He was very involved with his VFW and also marched in the local Veteran's Day parades. In fact, I think we watched the parade from that very same supermarket's parking lot. 

A few years ago on Veteran's Day I did a salute to my grandfather on the blog. I won't repost it here in its entirety, but follow this link to read it. If you missed it the first time I posted it back in 2009 I think you'll find it's worth reading. I have all his medals (including his Purple Heart) and a photo album with old war pics that my grandmother saved and I shared bits and pieces of that album in the post. There are even a couple of photos that put my grandfather somewhere in a crowd of soldiers with arrows written on the photo pointing to General Patton. And, actual postage stamps with Hitler's image on them. I hope you'll take the time to read it. Comments have been disabled on entries that old due to spammers, but you can always leave one under this entry if you so choose to do so.

I'm being followed by a tree's shadow,

tree's shadow, tree's shadow.*

*sing to Cat Steven's "Moonshadow"

I couldn't help but notice the wonderful shadows being cast by different trees.

In a few short weeks their shadows will be completely different, full of leaves and obscuring their graceful limbs and branches.