Summer’s Tail – Kicking and Screaming

16 Aug 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Games, Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, Vacation, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s still hot like summer, but in many places kids have already gone back to school. Some as early as August 1. Summer is over for them. It’s the tail end for us, and I want to grab on to these last few weeks kicking and screaming as I lick the last bit of salt off my fingers before summer goes away again. My daughter can’t wait for school to start back up. She’s excited to experience her new classes and see more of her friends. I still have unfinished plans and goals and more tomatoes to grow!

We did some fun things this summer. We took a trip to Pittsburgh where I participated in Pinburgh, a pinball tournament. Pinburgh has been around a few years, but this year it was held at a huge new classic video game festival called Replay FX. I brought my daughter because, hello, video games and pinball! And they had other kids’ activities like a velcro wall, giant inflatable obstacle course, and slides. For a video game festival my daughter actually got a lot of exercise!

While Pittsburgh may not bring to mind the typical image of summer vacation paradise, there was much fun and our hotel room had extra niceties that kept us saying, “wow, cool!” This made for a fairly complete vacationy experience.

Our room had a motion sensor foot light (like a night light at the floor that turned on when we stepped out of bed), pull-down individual book lights on each headboard, and in the evening, when we returned exhausted from a full day of game play and activities, the hotel supplied milk and cookies (free of charge for kids 12 and under). It was great!

We had another very mini vacation this past Friday night when we slept over at the National Museum of American History as a Smithsonian Sleepover. Last summer we did this at the Natural History Museum and loved it. There are scads of activities and crafts centered around various exhibitions in the museum. Then folks get to roll out their sleeping bags and camp out under a whale or antique machinery as museum lights are dimmed. Continental breakfast is served in the morning. And it is all so way cool!

Next year my daughter will be too old to do either of these sleepovers (there’s an age limit), and we’re super glad to have done them. I’ve always loved the Natural History Museum with animals and minerals, but I forgot how much fun the American History Museum can be. I feel like we made the kind of memories that can last a lifetime, and I think (I hope) my daughter feels that way too.

Earlier this summer my daughter had camp, so most weeks I had to drop her off in the morning and then run out on my lunch hour to pick her up and drop her off either at home or somewhere else like another camp (from which I’d have to pick her up again later). Most of the camps have been wonderful! She’s learned more music and dance and even cooking.

For me, one or two days of driving at lunchtime isn’t a problem, but week after week gets tiring. Exhausting even. I need some down time, or I start to shut down. On top of it, I fell and injured my knee last March (for crying out loud) and it has been slowly healing. At the beginning of summer it was much better but still painful on a regular basis. Pain is exhausting. (I have much more empathy for folks who live with chronic pain.) I’ve been trying to fit physical therapy exercises into my daily schedule to help my knee heal. Here at the end of summer I finally feel like I can squat to take care of our balcony plants without groaning in pain at the same time.  Long and short of it, instead of writing and blogging more this summer I remained rather unproductive.

These last few morsels of summer I have no plans of driving anywhere at lunchtime — at least nothing major. I may still run occasional shopping errands or drop my daughter off at a friends house and such. But mainly I plan to eat lunch.  I plan to write.

I’ve set goals for myself.  I want more summer fun. Maybe a quick trip to the beach! Maybe tubing. Definitely more swimming. I want more tomatoes to grow! More peppers! I want to write regularly and am setting daily and weekly goals. Really, I want more summer!

I swore I wouldn’t: A Balcony Garden Journey Part 2

15 Aug 2015 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening Tags: ,

I absolutely did not go to Home Depot with the idea of purchasing plants or seeds and most definitely not tomato plants.

I went there to have a key made and to purchase a spray bottle so I could mix up some homemade cleaning spray. My old bottle stopped spraying.

The smell of the store was distinctly Home Depot — earth, chemicals, metal, and concrete. People milled in and out of the garden area, and, as it was almost spring, I could see greenery with each flash of the sliding door.

I had to go take a peek. It was the promise of sunshine and green life pushing through dark soil.

I resisted the urge to purchase plants right there and then. I wanted to think about what we might grow and use and liked the idea of sharing the experience with my daughter. She’s much older now than the last time I grew plants on our balcony.

I knew I would have to be very strict about how much we tried to grow. Several years ago I grew too much which made for a lot of work. There were some plants I hardly even used. Pineapple sage, for example, was beautiful and smelled great fresh. But it didn’t dry well or hold it’s flavor in cooking.  It really became more of a decorative plant. I don’t mind some strictly decorative plants, but I really like plants that look nice and offer something we can eat. It makes for space well-used.

A couple of hot peppers and strawberry plants in hanging baskets seemed to be about right in my mind. Maybe a couple of herbs too.

Years ago the squirrels didn’t seem to be able to raid the strawberry plants when I had them in hanging baskets. The hot pepper plants they left alone after the first few bites. This seemed manageable. Fun. Pretty. Hopefully giving us a few things to eat for the trouble.

When I brought my daughter near the gardening section, it was the seeds that caught her eye. Well, dang, I hadn’t planned on trying to grow anything from seed. In fact, I already had a few packets of 5-or-more-year-old seeds collecting dust in a cabinet somewhere. I let her pick out two of something new.

She settled on cucumbers and a variety of marigold called Cottage Red.

I guided her to a variety of cucumber called Picklebush since they seemed like they would stay pretty small and produce cucumbers that look like deli pickles. Cottage Red marigold were not edible flowers like some (Lemon and Tangerine Marigold are edible), but they looked pretty on the packet and marigolds are usually good at keeping away garden pests. So there’s a usefulness there.

As far as plants, I quickly picked up a Tabasco Pepper plant and some jalapeño peppers (one mild variety and one standard). My daughter doesn’t like anything too spicy. I looked for a parsley plant but found none at the time, so I grabbed a packet of flat-leaf parsley seeds and a packet of Siam Queen Basil seeds. Plus we selected two strawberry plants — the only everbearing ones that looked good at the time — Ozark Beauty.

My daughter pleaded with me to get tomato plants, but after my somewhat bitter memories of squirrels that consumed every single tomato my plant grew the last time I tried. I told her, “no.” I said it several times. And we left with no tomatoes.

I didn’t know I would be back to Home Depot so soon. There were not only more strawberries in our future, but possibly tomatoes too.

(Part 2 of a series. Visit again later for more.)

I Swore I Wouldn’t: A Balcony Garden Journey

20 Jul 2015 5 Comments

by alightningbug in Construction and Repairs, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening Tags: , , ,

I swore I wouldn’t try to grow tomato plants on our balcony again. That was about seven years ago. And I hadn’t grown ’em since. So imagine my surprise this year when all that changed.

When I started growing tomatoes the first summer we lived here I thought that no pesky insects could find their way to our plants way up here on the third floor. But find us they did. How’d those aphids get here? Are those other things mites?

Not only did insects find us but it wasn’t long before the squirrels did too. The outer shell of our building was coated in artificial stucco. The squirrels could grab the bumpy texture with their claws and scale up the side of the building like Spidermen in furry gray suits. Not only did the squirrels find us, I’m pretty sure they put posters up around the neighborhood advertising the free food to all their friends. Drove the cats bananas as the squirrels taunted them then escaped up a stuccoed pillar.

I tried sprays for the insects and mesh along with hot pepper sprinkles to discourage the squirrels. But they’d still find my tomatoes. 

There are challenges to growing tomato plants in containers and especially so when you have only a balcony and jugs to carry water instead of a backyard with a hose.  

The plants grew nicely. Tomatoes too. More than once I’d patiently wait one more day for a tomato to turn red only go out the next and find bites already taken out of it. How rude of them to take a few bites and leave the rest behind! Do they know how hard I worked to make those things grow? 

The last straw was the day I saw a squirrel perched on the bricks around the edge of our balcony. His fluffy tail twitched in excitement. I went out to shoo him away only to find a partially chewed green tomato sitting there. Cute but infuriating, those furry thieves weren’t even waiting for the tomatoes to ripen.  No tomato was safe. It was the last tomato. I was done. 

I moved on to growing only herbs, a few flowers (some of which the squirrels ate too) and hot peppers.  The squirrels bit a few hot peppers but soon left them alone. 

Eventually the outside of our building became less and less appealing as the improperly installed artificial stucco became discolored and cracked in places. Above the utility closet off our balcony there was a large gap left by our builder where several generations of pigeons made a charming home for themselves. But for us, the pigeons made a horrible mess. We tried mesh to keep them out, but they found another way in. Eventually we stopped trying to grow anything we might want to eat. Soon, we hardly went out there at all. Shame too, nice view.

Last summer, with building repairs in full swing (partially due to that artificial stucco), we couldn’t go out on our balcony at all. The winter before, the repair workers had wired our balcony door shut from the outside. We scrambled to save a few nice flower pots when they first did it. We had put our fresh cut Christmas tree on the balcony in a bucket of water, so we had to make special arrangements to retrieve that too. We didn’t even have windows for a while.

So early this Spring a visit to Home Depot resulted in the purchase of a few small plants. This started a slippery slope of greenery and a whole new battle. (Part 1 of a series.)



Now That I Started

14 Jul 2015 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Getting Organized, Laundry, Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, WordPress Tags: , ,

I’ve started half a dozen blog posts since the end of the school year — even more of you count the ones I started in my head. There’s a lot going on — gay marriage is legal, the flag has come down, photos of former planet, former non-planet, now dwarf planet Pluto are streaming in — and I’ve managed to publish exactly zero of the blog posts I started. I can make a lot of excuses as to why. Many of them are legitimate excuses… But I still think I should have been able to manage to publish some with just a wee bit better time management or focus or something. 

It’s not for lack if topics!  Along with all that stuff in the news, we have a small balcony garden again. Yay! And my daughter has been having fun in Strings camp (kind of like band camp only it’s a day camp for orchestra). Zomagad, I even found Zote laundry soap in flake form instead of bars. 

That whole 10-minutes-of-writing-per-day thing worked well for a while. But I seem to have misplaced my 10 minutes (maybe under a tomato plant).

The one blog entry that I might actually manage to publish is about how I’m not blogging. This one. Which makes exactly zeros cents. I seem to best be able to blog about how I’m not blogging. I need to work on my priorities!

For the Record: A Snail’s Pace

05 Nov 2014 2 Comments

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, NaBloPoMo, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening Tags: , , , ,

For the record, in honor of NaBloPoMo, I’m trying to post a blog entry for every day in November. I’ve been struggling to keep up regular posts again, so I aim to fix that.

Some of these may be extremely short posts. And many of them will likely be written on my phone. Today’s will be a good example although it’s longer than I though it would be.

In other news, a couple of weeks ago we got several nerite snails for our two fish tanks. We were having some algae overgrowth, and instead of scrubbing the tanks we decided to try a few algae-eating snails. This is by far one of our better fish tank purchases.

Those snails have been busy! In our ten-gallon tank they have scrubbed the decorative bridge clean. After months of sporting greens, browns, and grays, that bridge is practically day-glo it looks so clean. I think the snails even ate some of the paint off. I hope it doesn’t make them sick. They don’t appear to have slowed down any. So far, so good. One has even moved on to the side of the tank, and there’s now a large clean section.

In our smaller kitchen tank there’s hardly any algae left at all. The striped snail scrubbed the rocks, the back of the tank, the sides … It has now moved on to eating and cleaning algae off the leaves of an artificial plant. It’s amazing!

I would really like a larger, omnivorous, air-breathing snail that I could set free in our living room.

Honeysuckle

25 May 2011 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Mom Stuff, Plant Life and Balcony Gardening, Uncategorized

Last Thursday my daughter missed the buss which takes her from school to the after-school program and I had to leave work and pick her up. But the cool thing was that as I picked her up from school, she noticed there was a mass of honeysuckle blossoms near my parked car. So she said, “wait, can we pick some honeysuckle?” I agreed and she proceeded to share with me the way she and her friends had been tasting the honeysuckle nectar on the playground. So I shared with her the way I used to sip the honeysuckle nectar and together we stood there tasting a handful of honeysuckle blossoms. It was deliciously sweet and I don’t just mean the nectar. Funny how something which at first seemed less than convenient, turned into such a delightful moment. Last night as I was driving back from seeing a friend in Old Town, I could swear I smelled honeysuckle along the drive home.

FREE Plants! (No, not really)

04 Aug 2010 Leave a comment

by alightningbug in Plant Life and Balcony Gardening Tags: , ,

Beautiful bursts of color had been laid out on the front strip of lawn at the high school across the street from my office. For weeks I’d been thinking I should pop over there and pick up a hanging basket of flowers to add a little beauty to our deck.

As I was driving home on this day, I saw that the whole stretch of lawn was positively crawling with people holding plants. You’d think they were giving them away for free there were so many people carrying plants. Then I saw the sign, “FREE PLANTS.” But as most things in life are not free, the plants were no exception in more ways than one.

Upon inquiry, the kind folks working the plant stand said they were asking for a donation and that then you could have “free” plants. (I must have missed the fine print.) To be fair, the plant sale started as a fundraiser for the high school, the “free plants” offer was just their way of clearing out the plants which had not yet sold when it was time to close the plant stand. So I handed over my donation and selected a few plants as I overheard at least one or two other “customers” say, “so, the plants aren’t free then?”

It was only after I’d loaded up my car that I realized the plants would cost more than my donation. For starters, these plants had been at the stand for a while, so they would need some pruning, pinching back and general cleanup. What I didn’t realize is just what the plants would do to my car. When I removed a few hanging baskets, herbs and strawberry plants from my car, it looked like a greenhouse had exploded inside it. There were bits of plant matter everywhere! My trunk was littered with brown leaves, broken green leaves, stems and flower petals–the passenger side was no different. This is going to need a vacuum.

I set the plants on the floor of the garage before bringing them upstairs. I knew they would need some serious maintenance before dragging them through the living room or my home would end up looking like the inside of my car. The family needed dinner before I could get to this and I dreaded the work ahead.

It was a sultry evening, and as I trimmed plants I broke into a serious sweat before long.

I swear those plants sprouted new brown leaves after I removed the old brown leaves and I’m amazed there was actually any green plant left after all that was trimmed. But several of the plants looked really nice and I was pretty sure a little water would perk up the rest. The plants were basically healthy and I was pleased to note there were no aphids or whiteflies. I brought the plants upstairs and wouldn’t you know, the plants managed to shed even more bits along the way, so yep time to vacuum the living room now too.

It was when I gathered the last couple of plants to bring them upstairs that I noticed something other than plant parts had managed to escape into my car. The rear window revealed a giant moth furiously beating its wings trying to fly through the glass. It was actually quite pretty–yellow wings emblazoned with eye-like gray spots.

So I had to rescue the moth. It was not easy. Every time I thought I had it, the pesky thing dodged my hands just in time to leave a powdery mess behind in my car and on my hands–it was like mothy pixie dust. But I finally closed in and gently captured the moth and its big fuzzy body and let it outside of the car. I then escorted a spider and another crawly insect out of the car. Not sure if every critter had been relocated, at that point I was too tired to care. Ah sleep.

The plants looked lovely on our deck and I started to think that the plant struggle wasn’t all that bad. Even if the donation had been an outright plant purchase, the price was good and if the plants came home when they were in better shape, I’d still have had to give them some care eventually.

It was on my way in to work that I discovered I hadn’t relocated all of the “free” insects that came with the “free” plants. A giant green one dropped down from my visor. It waited until I was at a stoplight to fling its green body at my head. So at least it was a considerate thing. No harm was done as it was quickly shooed out the window and I think that was the last of them.

The next morning, I was eating yogurt when I saw large shadowy shapes pass back and forth behind the balcony blinds. I heard shuffling too. This was definitely too big for insects. Another type of critter had discovered the new plants. SQUIRRELS! Evil Cute little squirrels had decided that the strawberry plants were a feast which I’d put out just for them. The squirrels were devouring the plants–not the berries mind you. There weren’t any berries. The squirrels were eating the woody part of the plants as if it were a nut. ACK!

I searched the mess, there wasn’t anything left to try to put back into the soil. Bits of leaf, stem, soil, plant roots and torn open plastic pot remains covered the balcony. Another greenhouse slaughter. Sigh. I finally discovered one last strawberry plant the furry invaders had missed and relocated it to the living room before the little raiders could return to the scene of the crime to finish the job. I guess I shouldn’t be too upset. The flowers in the hanging pots were untouched and still lovely. And the strawberry plants were free, right?

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