Alecto's Ophelia

Really, I'm here

And the garden is amazing (go compost!) and life continues beautifully. I have been busy though. Single parenting and two full time jobs is a lot. I find the second job a whole lot more fulfilling but large gardens and chickens and dogs and who knows what else these days (I will explain Steve the Snake later) is rather time consuming. I like it. Helps me sleep peacefully at night.

The blog is about to have a face lift. The name is going to change but Alecto's Ophelia is still the site name.

I have four thousand garden photos to post including the finally blooming Wisteria. I won't post them all, I swear. And I'll remember to make them smaller too.

In any case, the girls and I are off to Vermont to camp at my dad's place this weekend and when I get back I'll be cleaning this place up and returning to my regularly scheduled events which include garden, chickens, girls and Bikram. Yeah, Bikram, three days a week.

Getting dirty, living clean

It's been too long since the last post. The garden grows fast, the weeds threaten to eat up all the space and the world moves at a pace it's hard to keep up with sometimes. Last weekend was prom 2009 and my big girl had a date with a very hot football player. Not her style but all she wanted was arm candy at that point. Her heart's still too tender over so many things. She wanted a princess moment and she got one. Don't we all sometimes?

Simon is growing at an alarming rate. He is not as big as we'd estimated but 154 pounds two weeks ago at 9 months is still a scary proposition. Getting him in and out of the car is not so easy but doable as we discovered. All it takes is some patience, two people and a fairly good quantity of chicken parm. The dog is a fool for anything covered in tomato sauce and cheese. He also likes his doggy pills (to clear up what looked like doggy leprosy that probably came from an infection from a bite from some unknown thingie in the swamp). He eats his doggy pills like candy and aside from having trouble with them getting stuck in his flews he usually has them consumed in under a minute.

Here are gratuitous doggy shots to go with the gratuitous princess shots:

He considers and weighs the risks against the benefits of eating bees. He hasn't done it yet but Homer does occasionally with the expected results. As soon as the swelling goes down on his face he finds and eats another. This guy might just be too lazy to work that hard. 

Here comes swamp dog toward the back of the garden. I should probably have posted the entire series because he's just cute as hell but that would have been too gratuitous even for me. 

 

I love this. My girl and her dog. OK, he's my dog but they do love each other. She didn't go to prom like that she just didn't get dressed at the house. I think she kept my denim jacket on for most of the night though. Reminds me a bit of Molly Ringwald in whatever movie she altered a wedding dress for. And it wasn't Sixteen Candles.

 

This is what my compost bin looks like so far this year. The path to the left is the doggy trail leading to the swamp and woods. I am hopeful that they will stop covering the lawn with landmines and just contain that stuff to the back of the property. It's not as if there isn't enough room back there. Everything a doggy, not to mention small children, could possibly ask for. Except a tree house. Haven't quite gotten around to that yet. Maybe this summer. I think I need to modify the bin a bit to make it easier to turn. I read something about building or containing a compost heap with bales of hay or straw and I'm thinking that might be more effective and certainly easier to maintain. I don't much care for the big plastic rotating things that put the creation of hummus on light speed. Makes me nervous happening that fast.

 

If this isn't enough to get you to stop and slow down, or better yet just sit in the dirt getting your hands, nails and feet encrusted I don't know what is.

 

The wild buttercrunch is getting ahead of itself. I'm thinking a graze through this patch would make a good start to breakfast. Although I think I'll pass on the bug protein and stick with eggs. My replacement chickens and little guinea babies are due in the next week or two. I still need to build an incubator but I should have everything I need. We went and bought a light and a heat rock for a rescued Ball Python. Somebody threw the guy in his aquarium stuffed into a plastic bag into a trash compactor and was rescued by the maintenance people in my building at work. I took him home and we called him Steve after the The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove  (Christopher Moore). We were just getting to the point of walking around the house with Steve when he made a break for it one night and is now living somewhere in the house. If the Rat Terrier doesn't get him he'll take care of any rodent issues we may have. We miss him though and would really like it if he'd come out now and then for a cuddle. In any case, the snake habitat can be converted to baby guinea home fairly easily and if Steve decides he want's to come back to his nice safe cage he's just going to have to wait until they've outgrown it.

 

Silly pre-prom girls. They'd make fabulous garden accessories. Sort of like a useful version of my pot smoking Garden Gnome that has yet to be located and installed this year.

Back to the Garden

I am late this year. Except for the potatoes and onion starts but even those were late although they aren't suffering in the least. My reasons for being late just made everything worse because I wasn't doing what I needed to do which was to go back to the Garden. I'd like to say I feel better but I don't. I felt better when I was out there today. A lot to catch up on. I spent a good part of the afternoon sitting on my ass in the dirt pulling up weeds in a hazy relaxed zen state. I was wearing my old paddock boots my mother bought me a long time ago and Simon recently ate the zipper off one and the back off the other. They still work. I rolled up the cotton yoga pants I was wearing and put a knot in the t-shirt from yesterdays 5k and forgot everything but the forest to cut back enough to add food.

My mistake was shooting myself in the head again when I'd showered and settled down. Not really relevant except as a reminder to go to what's real. Or suffer the consequences of painful illusion. I'll take the garden any day. It always makes sense as long as you're paying attention.

 

I didn't have to do anything. The lettuce is back from last year except it looks like butter crunch, not romaine which means it's moved back inside the fence and over three beds. Wild food. Or I don't know what little romaine looks like. Either way it's food and all I had to do was notice it.

 

If I had the motivation I'd link back to these alpine babies and show you last year when they went in. You'll have to take my word for it; they've more than doubled in size and should have been split this year. Next spring for sure. They'd make a nice border and produce until the first hard frost. 

 

If I pay attention this year the potato bugs won't have a chance. They are planted on top of last years corn which is one of the few things that didn't volunteer this year making me think about Michael Pollan's thing on the way corn evolved requiring human intervention and do we control it or does it control us?  

 

Tomato forests were everywhere. The only explanations I can come up with is either the squirrels were playing tomato cricket last fall or the rototiller picked up and spread the seeds to nearly all of the beds early this spring. I left this forest on top of one of the potato hills. I don't know what will happen or how soon because I'm going to have to hill those potatoes eventually. Maybe I will leave this like an island in the garden and see what it does. I left a couple of islands here and there including a couple of pumpkin plants which may or may not be Audrey's children. Given the location they could be Audrey or children of the great jack-o-lantern failure. I Know I said no more pumpkins in the garden but well I only left a few.

 

Tomato forest a few feet back.

 

This shot takes my breath away. Can you see the unspent wish in the middle of the garlic patch? I left it for the forest fairies. I discovered I don't care for orderly gardens. I like the weeds. Can't have them taking over but the ground doesn't need to be sterile. Last summer sitting in the dirt I decided that if I was going to be something in this garden it would be those flowering chives. More so this year.

 

I know that I am supposed to keep my beds separate and pull up the volunteers and kill all the weeds and I want you to know that I did very well. I only left about 1%. What I thought about doing was leaving the entire potato bed from last year alone this year packed with tomatoes, pumpkins, wandering dill and potatoes and who knows what else I missed. I compromised and tore out almost everything except some guys like this potato and some pumpkins and a few tomato forests and then I put in the yellow squash seedlings that I had to buy this year because I was too absorbed with illusion that I never started the seeds I ordered.

The beds all have quite a bit of room this year. One of the things I learned last year was that over planting, as much as difficult soil killed a lot of my food. I wonder what I'll learn this year. I like weeds. I have already learned that it is not too late. Might even be perfect.

 

The dill is everywhere. I pulled up none of it and protected even the little guys.

 

Crazy oregano, the biggest patch of dill (which did not start there last year) a scattering of habeneros and basil. I put the basil in little patches all over. This is feeling more like the start of a perennial bed.

 

I pulled up all the weeds to put the celery back where it was last year against the fence and its in neat rows because it asked to be. What's up with the OCD celery? I left some dandelions for wishes. Maybe the celery won't notice.

 

I stopped waiting for Nomans to put the catnip in for Beloved Cat (most amazing catnip slut ever) and she got a few more things as well. There is terraced basil to the left and something that makes a white flower.

  

See? That is wild butter crunch from seed two years ago and it's come inside the fence. Doesn't it look like the wild lettuce from the first shot?  I think so. I put in strawberry beds next to the garlic and the onions. It looks pretty and maybe the strawberries won't be laced with garlic.

 

Dill forest up close.

 

Peppers and zucchini and cucumbers in the back. Lots of space this year.

 

Eccinacia, hundreds of cosmos, morning glories and nasturtium. Simon runs through here all the time and it's still thriving. I yell at him anyway just on general principle.

 

Baby nettle?

 

Last year most of this patch had some serious trouble. This year not so much. It comes up without interference and thrives. Sometimes it's better to let things be. I ran outside in the rain to take these photographs during a wave of agony I've mostly got at bay these days. This one snuck up and twisted my guts until I nearly vomited on my feet. I managed to not throw my cell phone and grabbed the camera instead and ran back to the garden.

I came upon a child of god
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
Im going on down to yasgurs farm
Im going to join in a rock n roll band
Im going to camp out on the land
Im going to try an get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devils bargain
And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Beloved Cat

 

I found her on February 7 under Cletus's bed and I'm guessing she'd been there about 2 weeks but Cletus was so sick at the time we were distracted and unsure when we'd last seen her. Given how sick she'd been we knew it wouldn't be long. We just didn't want to take the last cat to the vet the way we did the two before. She was taking comfort. So were we. Nomans was gone and we had his cat. His dead brother's cat. The last cat. I guess when you run away you run from everything.

We put her in one of the freezers in the garage that held mostly local beef at that point. She was wrapped in a pillow case and then double bagged before going in a box sealed with duct tape. We're big on duct tape around here. We were waiting for something because we could have lit a fire and thawed the ground enough to bury her in February. We could have put her in during one of the thaws. We could have put her in six weeks ago. I guess we were waiting for him to come home. He didn't.

The girls and I went to Bikram this morning (Cletus and one of my surrogate kids - there are at least two these days) and then came back to shower and sweat ourselves up again cleaning the house. We stopped at Walmart on the way back. To really understand this you have to know that Bikram is ninety minutes of essentially Hatha yoga at 105 - 120 degrees and 40 to 60% humidity. You go in there early to acclimate and center yourself and you stay late to let everything go. So we were saturated. Seriously saturated as in soaking through the dry clothes we put on before we left. Anyway, we bought a home waxing kit because the girls wanted to play. So I cleaned and they waxed themselves. I don't mean legs because they'd both shaved recently. I mean tummies, necks, backs, you name it. Not that anything needed to be waxed. Just slightly bizarre adolescent girls playing on a Sunday afternoon.

During a rest period I noticed that the sun was finally out and the temps in the 50s which is a good time to dig. We decided it was time to bury Wicious and so I sent a text to Nomans asking him if he wanted to come or wanted us to wait. He didn't. So we did. Dug a big hole up against the garden fence where I'm unlikely to dig deep any time soon and dug a hole in the soil down to the clay and then some, about three feet. Then we took the cat out of the box, out of the bags, even out of the pillow case. Skin so sleek and beautiful as if she'd just curled up and gone to sleep.

We covered her up, packed down the soil and found a big rock and a caterpillar. The fuzzy kind that curls up in a ball to protect themselves. I haven't seen one in years around here. Found this little guy under the rock I pulled up to mark the grave.

Life and death waits for no one and the world moves on.

32 Minutes

32 Minutes

I think I'm being obtuse. The link is to a video I made in the last 48 hours and posted to youtube so that I could actually post it here (Blogger lets me embed it, what's up with Typepad?).

Anyway, the last time I did this I did manage to embed it but apparently I can't make it work this time. On the other hand having a link to youtube makes it easier for anyone with a slow connection to view it. It is not 32 minutes long; 32 minutes was the amount of time it took me to shoot the pics from the fire (and, no, that is not my wedding dress) start to finish which stunned me. It felt like hours.

Life is like that. It loops around itself and seems infinite and then you blink and everything has changed.

What's gone is gone. What's here is forever. (not me and don't know who to attribute it to other than John Hanley Jr. who posted it on his facebook site).

Go view the video and leave me a comment. I find it absolutely beautiful.

Time loops. Try not to blink too often.

Virtual World Goes Boom!

Really, this deserves an actual post but I'm tired so I'll come back and add more later. Stuff about meeting blog buddies in the real world which kind of takes the ethereal and safe and solidifies it into actual human beings. Anyway, it was really cool, we had a great night and this really ought to happen more often. No matter how far or how close or how easy or how hard.

 

Spartacus and Alecto

 

And Skippy and Florkow.

Maybe that's enough. Life is short. Live like you know it.

Simon - 8 months, 1 week

Estimated at 185 pounds.

 

Yes, he really is that laid back. Right up until he's not. Hasn't eaten anyone yet. Don't expect he will either. He had his first bath as a big boy yesterday on the back deck. He was not pleased in the least but we managed to get him to hold still long enough to hose him down, scrub the hell out of him, rinse and mostly dry him with giant beach towels (he likes that part).

Next time he gets cross tied like a horse.

Cletus wants a new kitty now that we've been kittyless for a couple of months. I told her we have to wait until he's old enough to understand that kittehs are not squeaky toys. We'll go to the local shelter and pick out the feistiest kitteh available and maybe she'll kick his St. Bernard ass into submission (at least hers anyway).  The only trick will be walking out of there with JUST ONE. This is going to have to be a one kitteh household for awhile. I have too many chickens on order to add more than one more house beast.

Who am I kidding? Lets just hope it's only one for each set of arms. Remind me not to bring Cletus's friends.

Speaking of which, there were three girls in the house last night and two of them (one being Cletus) came to baby bikram with Little Girl and I this morning. It is stunning how flexible eight year olds are and even more stunning how flexible my seventeen year old who stopped dancing four years ago still is (dangling something or other).

I did a double today if you count the baby bikram. The heat was dropped to 102 for the kids and I was cold and stopped sweating within 20 minutes. My hair was nearly dry (and encrusted with salt and whatever toxins I'm leaching this week) by Namaste. Three hours today. Five miles yesterday. I am almost ready for the corporate 5k on the 21st. This from a girl who nearly destroyed her knees last year. Bikram and daily elliptical. Highly recommend it.

Now I have to go finish brushing that dog. The bath finally brought on the blowing of the winter coat which was delayed due to ground in swamp dog grunge.

Change

 

Yes I did.

 

Hers will wash out. Eventually. The posing though, I wonder about that.

Secret weddings and other things

Retold with permission.

In January 1985 I got married in Greenwich CT exactly three months before my 21st birthday. This was at the end of the three year drinking age increase that had me legal for 2 months and then legal for 6 months and then maybe I was grandfathered the third time when it went to 21. In any event, I was young enough not to be entirely sure I was legal at my own wedding.

My mother had a very hot date. He was a jump pilot she'd reconnected with and I'm not sure if they were living together at the time or not. He was, at that point, a pilot for People's Air (I think that's close if not quite right) that later became Continental. In any event, they were together and had been for some time. I'm just not entirely sure of the circumstances and she wasn't talking.

A few years passed and I started a cleaning service in Fairfield County that turned out to be a gold mine. Clean a house, collect $50, go to class, clean a house, collect $50, go to class, clean a house, collect $50, collect baby from daycare, go home, do homework, play with baby and go to bed. It wasn't a bad deal all around.

At some point I got the idea to expand the business and hire a crew, which went badly, by the way and didn't last long before I went solo again. While I was in the process of starting this business I was working out of an empty bedroom in my mother's house because she lived in Fairfield County and I did not. The room was upstairs and empty except for a phone and a couple of boxes. It worked for me. New business cards printed up, new ads in the local papers and Sunshine Express was ready to go. I was in the house a lot.

We owned a piece of property together, she, me, my husband and his parents because there was no way we were getting a mortgage for a six acre farm with barn and outbuildings on our own. We did manage to pay the mortgage but my mother contributed in the form of barn rent or something like that and had a percentage split on the mortgage tax deduction.

When it was close to April and we all needed to do taxes we couldn't remember the exact split ratio from the year before so she sent me back upstairs to the other spare room to pull last years return out of a filing cabinet. On the front page there they were, married, filing jointly.

Uh, Mom? You said you were never getting married again, when did this happen? About two years ago apparently. And then I waited for the story. I'm not sure I questioned that she hadn't told us I just wanted the details.

The details involved drunken debauchery in New Orleans that ended up on a dock with a defrocked priest and two prostitutes as witnesses and a marriage certificate. They had been married for two years when I found the tax return.

The story grew and got better as the years progressed but I never questioned the validity of the actual event, circumstances or location. This is my mother, she tells a story so well she believes it herself. That's the best way, I think, to be a story teller.

On March 17 this year I received an unexpected (really, it was unexpected by me, apparently not others) and relatively cruel email from my husband telling me he wasn't coming home. Actually, the email wasn't that precise. He suggested we meet at a local bar where we'd been dating (last date about four days prior) because he had something to tell me and a plan. You know I picked up the phone and called him. I don't just sit there and swallow that stuff without clarity.

At the end of the 20 minute conversation when I'd managed to finally get some air back into my lungs, I sent out a number of emails, one of which was to my mother asking her to come. Now. Come now. I've never done that, not ever and she came. She arrived the following evening at LaGuardia and somehow I managed to drive the 55 miles from Weston to pick her up with Cletus in tow. That was the only day I didn't go to work.

Mom stayed for 12 days, dragged me back to my attorney and kept me distracted and occupied while I wrapped my mind around the idea and then reality of consuming oxygen on a regular basis and keeping my feet on the ground.  We haven't spent more than two days together since I left home at 18 if you don't count the fact that we shared horse space for a couple of years. This was living together in the same space and learning to be together again. That part was pretty wonderful, the finding each other again. I like my mother very much.

So the conversation about her New Orleans wedding came up in the context of many things and I believe it got a bit more embellished until she looked at me and asked if I wanted to hear the truth. Well, only if it's as entertaining as the story you've been telling me for the last twenty years.

Mom worked for an insurance company and her husband was seen with her at public functions and so was introduced as her husband because nothing else would have been even remotely acceptable. At some point HR told her she needed to put her husband on her insurance policy since they were married and so she did. At that point they both got nervous about the deception and after a bit of conversation (I have no idea how long this went on) they went to Fairfield town hall and got married. Telling no one.

There was a night in New Orleans and it probably did include a defrocked priest and a couple of prostitutes and that's when they came to the marriage decision; which was difficult for many reasons for both of them.

I don't know which story is better but somehow I've overlapped the two and it works for me.

I tell my own stories until I find one that works for me and keep moving forward. And by the way, I still don't know what not coming home really means. I don't know if he does either. I'm OK with that too.

Pulling at ground rush

My first jump was two days after my sixteenth birthday and shortly after my father retrieved me from Philadelphia on my way to Hatteras with my best friend Deeb. So that would have been April 14, 1980. I'm guessing I had at least 30 jumps and was well off instruction when I had the malfunction.

The malfunction was the result of packing too fast. Instead of taking the time too properly stow the lines in back and forth neatly rubber banded rows I kind of shoveled them in and closed in an attempt to fill a vacated seat on a plane that was about to take off. In retrospect, they would have waited.

When I pulled what I got was a tangled up ball of spaghetti leaving partially inflated bubbles but nothing that could have been straightened out in the air falling at roughly 170 miles per hour. It's called a Mae West, I don't know why, I'll have to look it up. Regardless of what I was looking at and obviousness to my fully deployed jump mates above me and then pretty quickly everyone on the ground, I continued to pull at the lines in disbelief, doing everything I could to straighten that canopy out.

Ground rush occurs at 700 feet which is about 4 seconds before impact. I looked down, saw the ground rushing up at me and cut away. The Steven's cut away system for student rigs is a one step process that disengages the main and then deploys the reserve. What I knew from training was that it took twelve pounds of force to release the tacking that held the reserve lines in place. Turns out it takes one hell of a lot more than that to pull out the daisy chain that holds them neatly in place. I pulled and pulled not understanding why I had a partially inflated canopy and then finally got enough line for deployment but not enough to steer. So there I was with an oscillating canopy threatening to collapse and I'm pulling hard on the right and then the left lines to get it to stop.

I landed hard and I lived. Some kid from one of the developments retrieved and stole the cut away main. Little bastard. By the time they found it, knocking door to door, the kid had already cut it up into a million pieces. Dumb ass, it makes a much better toy whole. Must have skipped that particular parachute gym day.

There has been a great deal of debate on the minimum age for skydiving. It used to be 16 and now it is 18. I don't know how much difference those two years make but if a person is going to ignore the signs and keep tugging those lines then that's what they're going to do no matter how much living they've done. Commitment to a collapsed main will kill you if you don't cut away at or before ground rush.

PULL!!!!

And deploy.