Dutchman's Breeches (Skylands)

This morning I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the glorious song of the wood thrush! In my last post I remarked about how it wouldn't be long now that the trees were fully leafed out, and as it turns out I was correct. There is nothing prettier than the song of a wood thrush. Clear, distinct, and melodious. I drifted back off to sleep listening to it.

Yesterday the tile in the laundry room got grouted and the utility/slop sink was set. It looks so much better than the old one which really had seen better days, say 1988! We've been trying to bring our house up-to-date a little at a time. We still have the carpeting to replace later this year, but that is not going to be fun at all. We have a lot of furniture that needs to be moved completely out in order for that to happen.

I haven't gotten to the wisteria yet. Maybe later today I'll walk down and see if I can get some shots. I did want to note that my lilac bush did bloom this year.

This bush is special because it started out in life as a tiny shoot off my mom's lilac bush in her yard in the Adirondacks. We brought it back and planted it together the first year we lived here. I lost my mom in 2007 and she didn't get to see the little sprig flourish and bloom. It first bloomed in 2011 but we were on vacation in France and by the time we got back it was done, so I really didn't get to see it actually blooming. Last year it didn't bloom at all. So I was very excited to see a few flowers on it this year. It's not full of blooms, but at least it's something!

We had quite a few lilac bushes that towered over my head when I was a child in Hyde Park, and the scent always takes me back there, just like this particular bush reminds me of my mom. I miss her so much.

Today I have to do some thinking and planning for our weekend trip to the shore since we leave tomorrow. Since the dogs are going with us (please let them be good!) I have to think of everything I need to take for them as well. It's a bit like parents loading up young children but instead of diapers I pack poop scoop bags. Instead of formula I pack dog kibble, canned food, biscuits, water and food bowls. Alex will take "Pink Bunny" as it's his favorite toy to carry around. Also a few chew bones should be added into the mix. 

We are cooking Saturday night dinner so we also have to prepare our mise-en-place and pack it to go, and I need to bake the Chocolate Raspberry Brownie Torte for dessert.

I might blog from the shore via my iPad, but I don't really know if I will or not. I'm just going to go with the flow of things.

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 wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black"

That song by the Rolling Stones kept going through my mind yesterday and I wielded my spray paint can over and over our steel outdoor furniture. Rick and I worked together to get the job done. It's a necessary one that needs to be done every other year or so. Our furniture sits outside in the elements all year long and as time goes by, it starts to rust. Spraying it with good old  Rustoleum™  paint keeps it going. We've had the same two sets of tables and chairs since we moved in to our house in Fort Collins back in 1995. They still look great.

The weekend weather was pretty much perfection. Warm with plenty of sun. We got lots of outside chores done (or maybe I should say Rick got plenty of outside chores done) such as the first mowing of the yard and removing some stray tree limbs. I cleaned out the herb planter on the deck since we didn't want the oregano anymore because it takes over, and the thyme was not coming back as well as it should. Now we have a freshly planted sage plant and two thyme plants. Rosemary will stay in her separate pot for the summer as she needs to be brought inside for the winter. As soon as I can I am going to put tomatoes in pots.

We rolled figgy out in the driveway to soak up some sun. It has the beginning of beautiful big leaves already, and one fig! At least it looks like a fig, but it might me a very large leaf bud. We would have left her outside but our roof is being replaced tomorrow (partly thanks to Super Storm Sandy) and we were afraid that something might get dropped on her delicate branches. We thought it best to leave her inside for a few more days.

Lunch yesterday found us at the Warwick Valley Winery for a pizza. As we were sitting outside enjoying the sunshine, our pizza and a bottle of wine, the people at the table next to us pulled out a cell phone and proceeded to have a conversation with a friend on speaker phone. How annoying is that? I couldn't even hear my own thoughts so we got up and found another table in a different area. Enjoy the moment folks; call later!

We are so looking forward to Rick's mom's visit in late May. We're so glad she's coming! We already have tickets to this food tour in New York City. They are always so much fun and so informative. She has also requested a visit to the Freedom Tower which I have not been to yet.

Our trip to the cabin this year will be in September but I might have the chance to accompany Rick on a business trip in June to Cartagena, Colombia. What do you think, should I go?

P.S. Sorry for all the randomness of this post!