Canada

Here's a post I wrote on the way home from Canada but never published:

We had beautiful weather in Canada. It was a little warm but not awful. I spent a lot of time wading in the lake to cool off. I took lots of video and I'm working on editing it into a production for people to see. I still need to add pictures and maybe try to put some text into it if I can. We caught fish for dinner two days. It is difficult to find fish this time of year. Walleye is so yummy!

I packed enough entertainment for a week of rain but we had a week of sunshine. Consequently I didn't work on my afghan at all. But I did make a catnip stuffed mouse and a stuffed dog bone, I made a sweater for Cyrus the yorkie, I identified lots of the trees around camp, and I hiked around a lot. It was a good week.

FIL taught me about camp maintenance and boat motors and I took video. I'm pretty confident we can do the whole trip on our own next year, provided we have enough money. There are lots of ways to save, but gas is still a killer. It is 2500 miles round trip, not including gas for the boats and generator. It looks like we'll end up taking our car which gets 25mpg but that's still a pretty penny. We can take the train to camp instead of the float plane and that'll be $200 instead of $1200. We can camp or stay with friends on the way up and back instead of hotels. Hotels won't take Tuvok anyway. 80lb limit on pets. So yeah, we're excited about next year.

We're on the way home today. I'm making Tuvok a wool jacket for winter. He barely has any fur underneath and he gets cold if he has to stay outside for very long (and he's not playing). I found fisherman's wool from lion brand yarn on clearance for half price and I found a pattern on ravelry.com for larger dogs. I'm modifying it a little but I think it'll work nicely. I hope he isn't afraid of it. He's such a weenie.

I miss my dog...

Also, Caribou Coffee is a wonderful place. They should replace all the Starbuckses.

I attached a picture of where our camp is. We drive to Sioux Lookout in the bottom left and fly about 20 minutes to the purple dot. Middle of nowhere Canada is the best place in the world!

On the road

I just learned that you need to save the blog draft in Blogger+ before doing anything else. I'm spoiled with the new-fangled computers autosaveing.

Anyway. We're on our way to Canada with the in-laws. We just passed Des Moines. There's water falling out of the sky. I seem to have some vague, distant memory of that happening in Oklahoma. Maybe someday it'll happen there again.

So far I've made Cyrus the yorkie a sweater. He was acting cold last night so this morning I made one from some of the random yarn I brought along. It looks pretty good. I went to ravelry.com and got a bunch of patterns to play with. They're saved on the iPad. This iPad thing is pretty cool.

I have a video app so I can record how to do stuff in Canada like fix boat motors and hook up the propane fridge. I hope that next year we can go on our own. Also, it'll be nice to show people what it's like in camp. When we go by ourselves we can take Tuvok with us. They think he's too big. Oh well. He's having fun with his friend Jersey this week.

The fall flowers are blooming in Iowa. There are lots of coreopsis and rudbeckia still from the summer but the sunflowers and goldenrods are making quite a show on the side of the highway. The cattails are fluffy too. Every so often there's a stand of tall purple asters. Makes me want to stop and pick a bouquet. Back home the only fall flowers are snow-on-the-mountain. It's too dry for the others this year so far. Maybe if it rains they'll show up.

I've always wondered why the dominant flower color changes as the seasons progress. In the spring there are pinks and blues and purples and they give way to more yellows and oranges in the summer and fall. Do the pollinators change? Obviously you can find just about every color in every season, but the yellow is so dominant in fall and practically nonexistent in spring. Hmm.

We'll be in Cloquet, Minnesota by the time I get to post this so I'll just add to it if I feel like talking during the day.

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Ok, we're in Cloquet. They have wild yellow snapdragons here. The goldenrods and asters are really gorgeous. I wonder if those things will be growing at camp too.

It's only 6:20. We could make it several hundred miles further but oh well. That's one of the reasons we want to go on our own next time. We can drive the 26 hours the way we want instead of in such short spurts. At least the hotel has wi-fi.

It is cool here. I was helping FIL re-ice the coolers and I almost needed a long sleeved shirt. Even with my new thyroid pills making me hot and being in desperate need of a shower which, oddly, makes me hot too. The hotel has a shower (yay).

DH is listening to the first OSU game against Louisiana. We're winning by a lot, which is expected. Tomorrow we hit the road at 6:30 and should make it to Sioux Lookout a little after lunch. Then its a 15 minute float plane ride to the camp.

Happy smiley faces will ensue.

Here's a picture of the rain in Iowa.

What we leave behind

One of the Hoya dudes brought up an interesting point. In the event of our death, our plant collections need to go to good homes. And then I realized that our wills or black books or whatever need to contain the login and password information to our online communities so our cyber-friends can be notified. I haven't really thought of that since I got Lilly. She goes to Dave and Froggi. But Bones and Tuvok and Garak? Of course DH can take care of the animals on his own but I know he can't keep up with the plants. And if we both go together... It is a subject that requires more pondering.

Pictures

Ok, I'm trying to catch up on pictures.  This is random stuff.  The next time I catch up I'll do one from the trip to Grand Lake.  There are lots of those pictures.

All my houseplants enjoying the rain

The Datura in mid-summer

Yes, Bones is still cute

Totally rockin' cookie cake...dude

Foam Board Light Box (beta test 2)

Lilly posing in the light box 

I have not fallen off the face of the planet.  Though some days I wish I could.

It has been hot.  Over 100 degrees almost every day.  The heat makes my shingles hurt.  Also, I'm tired.  The new thyroid pills make me hot too but they are at too low a dose to make me not tired.  So mostly I'm hot, tired, and uncomfortable.  Work continues to be difficult.  I am preparing to apply elsewhere but if work finds out they'll fire me before I am ready to leave.

A couple of weeks ago DH had a conference in Tulsa at the Hard Rock Hotel.  His boss kept suggesting that I needed to come for the banquet on Thursday night.  So I did.  Turns out, the Association of Oklahoma Narcotics Enforcers named him Prosecutor of the Year!  That was cool.

What wasn't cool was that the car started acting up during the trip.  Auto Zone ran the code and said it was an electrical problem in the transmission.  We took it to the shop on Tuesday and they serviced the transmission and put a conditioner in it to give us some more time, but said we'd need a new transmission at some point in the near future.  Tuesday night we went to Fowler Honda and bought a 2009 CR-V.  Reliable transportation is extremely important to me.  So anyway, they needed to keep it one more day to do the certification so we went back to get it on Wednesday night. 

Since we bought the 2001 CR-V in 2004, I've had 3 things I wanted in our new car: good cupholders, passenger side armrest, and lots of windshield wiper speeds.  This car has all three of those so I'm happy with it.  It has lots more too, like a sunroof, but that stuff isn't as important.  But the more I drive the car the more I like it.  Today we bought a bunch of stuff for it like a steering wheel cover and a 12v vacuum cleaner and ArmorAll wipes.  We already need to use the vacuum because we got 5 bags of mulch.  :-)

I decided that I could mulch the part of the backyard that was muddy with some old mulch we had on the side of the house.  That worked pretty well even though I spread a really thin layer.  But then it rained and half the mulch is gone.  I guess it got buried or something.  So I got more.  Hopefully it will stand up to the rain better this time.

I've been doing lots of Hoya things.  The cuttings from Iris Marie in Australia rooted so I potted them up.  And then Joni at SRQ was having a sale so I got 6 plants from her.  Then I made a light box to take pictures of them.  Turns out the cats like the light box too.  I'll upload pictures soon I hope.  But for now, know I'm still alive. :-)

Rrrrrgh...

I wrote this on Monday or Tuesday and was planning to add to it but that didn't happen. So here ya go.

So last weekend we went to Grand Lake to visit Froggi's parents. We had a lot of fun and I brought back lots of cuttings and seedlings. Also I noticed a rash on my ribcage when I got back home. I thought maybe I got into something so I didn't really worry about it. After a few days it started to itch a little but when I would touch it, I'd get significant pain that lasted several seconds longer than it should've. I popped one of the blisters and it looked like a spine or prickle was inside it. So then my theory was I got into a cactus or one of those stupid pigweeds in the backyard. Well a couple days after that, this morning, my rib started to hurt to the left of the rash. That sealed it. So I went to the doctor and I have shingles.

Can't ever be easy

First thing this morning we... went back to bed. I decided it wasn't nice to wake up all the neighbors at 6 in the morning. So at 7:30 we got out the tiller, and broke the pull cord. I spent waaaay too long trying to fix it. One of the bolts was blocked by a bar but I finally was able to loosen the bar's bolt enough to get the ratchet in there. Then I couldn't get the screw loose on the winder. That took forever too and then I realized I didn't need to take off the screw in the first place. So I made a new knot and reattached the starter. It didn't wind. I messed with it for a while and then came inside. After some google searching I discovered a fundamental truth about pull starters: wind the starter, then insert and knot the cord. Not the other way around. So I got it all put back together and we started tilling at about 10:00. By 11:30 we were both totally worn out. I put the sprinkler on the area, which I should have done last night. But the rental guy said not to. Maybe not under normal circumstances but we have no soil moisture and clumps of clay. We need water in the soil to make it friable. So this evening I'm going to go back out and see how much progress we made and if I need to till more or if I can just rake everything into submission. We did get quite a bit of the hills smoothed out so hopefully if there is more to be done, it won't be much.

Yes, I know I shouldn't have tried to service a piece of rental equipment. But I fixed it, so there! :-)

So in other news, I'm doing pretty well at work. It is getting easier to maintain my belief in my own abilities despite Richard's shenannegins. I get to deflate him pretty regularly. Not by really doing anything except not reacting and also being right. He is continuing to piss off just about everyone there and I kind of feel like I'm watching a spectator sport, just waiting for him to get himself fired or demoted or at least a stern talking to.

Right now we're babysitting Dave and Froggi's animals while they help a friend move stuff across the country. We now have 5 cats, 2 dogs, a snake, and a chinchilla. Dinnertime is quite the adventure. Everyone wants to eat each other's food so everyone has to be separated. Since two days isn't long enough to establish a routine in the minds of kitties, I literally get to herd cats twice a day. Lol!

Other than the yard, my goal tonight is to work on my houseplants. Some need to be repotted. I dug up my dwarf burning bush and brought it inside to see if I can save it. There aren't any leaves left on it but several of the twigs are still green.

Oh, yesterday morning I got up early and mowed the front and the back, and weeded bed 3, the long bed beside the driveway. I think there's less than half of the plant material left in the garden! But all the native morning glories are out of there and most of the crabgrass. It looks good.

If we go back into a la Nina next year, I think I'll cover bed 3 with cosmos. It is doing great in the heat and drought. And if I let one or two of those morning glories grow from the beginning of spring, they'll flower all summer too while they crawl through the cosmos. Orange and blue look good together. If we have a more normal pattern, I may try to put some veggies in instead. I think either way, I will move the Datura over there from bed 1. It is way too big for the space. I think it will do nicely between the mint and the forsythia up near the house. Last year, the first year I had it, it grew about 4 feet wide and tall. I thought it was an annual. Nope! By June this year, it had grown past the 4 foot mark. It's now about 5.5-6 feet tall and wider than that. Bed 1 is only 2.5 feet front to back and it is in front of the front porch, you know, where the porch chairs are. It makes the front porch almost unusable! It's a keeper for sure, but not where it is now.

Ok, time for dinner for the animals. Cat herding, commence!