As the World Keeps Turning ...

                                     Please, Sir ,

                         

May I have some more?

    
                                                                            

As the World Keeps Turning

The cat is perching.

Her  tail spins.

White-winged doves, beware!

                                                                                

As the World Keeps Turning ...

 January 1, 2023

Walking in the  park

on a quiet foggy morn

Happy New Year's day!

Wait Until I Tell You About My Day - It Was a Hoot

Yesterday the baby wrens in the nest in our night-blooming cereus fledged. There may be another baby still nearby because one of the adults was standing guard in the front yard, chirping encouragement. The feather coloring on the fledglings was so vibrant. We had two families of birds in the front yard this summer; the other nest was built and tended by blue jays. While those babies were fledging, the adults pecked Jim on the head whenever he came out or in by way of the front door. And I think there was a screech owl in the backyard before daybreak yesterday.  I find that unsettling.

Truly, I am not a superstitious person, but we have screech owl history at this house; in the southern US, there is a superstition that the call of a screech owl foretells a coming death. Late in the summer of 2003, we began hearing the call of an eastern screech owl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4C4U70Ajc) in the pre-dawn hours. I was up and about early Saturday morning of that Labor Day weekend when one of my son’s cats, Marley, began yowling loudly and fell over. I awakened my husband and we rushed him to the emergency veterinary hospital where we were advised that he had had a heart attack and had no chance of recovery. We had adopted him, as a kitten, from the Houston SPCA exactly three years before, so he was still a young cat; but, apparently, it is a common occurrence for American short hair male cats to have heart attacks around three years of age. We had him euthanized and went home to grieve.

 The next morning, I again was awake in the predawn hours when I heard a loud screeching begin at the far end of our street, traveling down the length of the street, and stopping in my front yard.  That evening as dusk fell, my husband went out into the front yard. He heard a quiet hooting trill; looking up into the large ash tree to the right of our front door, he saw a small screech owl which bobbed its head at him, swooped over to the tree on the other side of the walkway and then flew away. 

We didn’t hear or see a screech owl again until November 20^th, Thanksgiving Day. A group of family and friends were sitting on the patio drinking beer and wine, thankful for time spent with each other, when someone happened to notice a small screech owl sitting in hole in the siding of my garage. My son, who had been away at college in Ohio when Marley died and his father had had his moment with the owl, bobbed his head at that owl who bobbed his head back and gently hooted then flew away. My son came home the following spring, spent the summer digitizing well logs for  his dad, and on the day he left to return to Wittenberg for his senior year of college, four screech owls were gathered in the trees outside our front door. 

I am thinking that a screech owl just might be my patronus.

Introducing a New Blogger

Today I helped my 25-year-old granddaughter who has autism set up a blog about her experiences in the kitchen,  a Mouse in the Kitchen. She plans to share her experiences cooking foods from her favorite cookbook, The Ultimate Harry Potter Cookbook, and write reviews about local restaurants we visit.

We hope you will visit her blog site  and leave encouraging comments.
marijkeinthekitchen.blogspot.com

The Waterbed

So, while exploring further in the "warehouse" that is our newly acquired property, we discovered a waterbed in one of the upstairs bedrooms. There has already been a ceiling collapse from a bathroom leak and we certainly didn't want another, so we decided to drain the mattress. Establishing a siphon turned out to be a bit harder than we expected because there was no running water in the house. Finally we ran a garden  hose from a faucet on the side of our house, over the fence and through the upstairs window and backfilled the mattress then disconnected the hose from the faucet. While the mattress drained we sorted through the pile of clothes on the bedroom floor, throwing away socks, underwear and butt-torn jeans; there were 4 pairs of like-new khaki Dockers in my husband's size. Alas they are pleated and cuffed; don't even ask.

A neighbor who has done restoration work came by to see if we might like some help. After a thorough walk-through, he confirmed our thoughts that our BIGGEST job will be cleaning the house; structurally it is pretty sound. No problem -- after all, there are cartons of cleaning supplies scattered throughout the house.

Risky Business

Earlier this week, while talking with friends, someone mentioned a piece of advice they had heard about living life mindfully – do something that frightens you every day, not frightening like spooky frightening or getting mugged frightening but instead something that requires you to make a scary leap of faith or a commitment to a project, or a change in your investments direction. A better way to say it might be make yourself open to taking a risk.

The absentee owner of the house next door decided it was time to divest himself of the property that he has been using as a storage facility for the last 5+ years. Utility services, sans water, have been maintained as has the minimal landscaping, but the inside of the house has not been cleaned in YEARS. The garage is full of tools and boxes, possibly raccoons, and fleas; while scouting through the piles of boxes and power tools, we discovered the mummified body of a yellow-striped cat. The ceiling in the dining room is water-stained and has a massive hole as a result of a leak in an upstairs bathroom hidden  in which is a Rice Krispies box filled with  Penthouse magazines. Bureau drawers in bedrooms are stuffed with white tube socks and underwear. Suits, sports coats, and dress shirts hang in closets. Eyeglasses are scattered all around. Cabinets in the laundry room, kitchen and bathrooms are filled with cleaning supplies which is quite ironic given the degree of dirtiness in this house. Considering this state of disarray, a portion of which the owner intended to allay by hiring a company to come in and dispose of furnishings and junk, our neighbor decided he would sell the house for a price less than half of its current taxable value and perhaps a third of the value of my house, right next door.

Yesterday that house, and all its contents,  became ours.  My stomach is still in knots.