Planting Seeds

It has been raining all week. Every once in a while the sun comes out for a few hours and we get puffy clouds and great color, which cheers me up until it starts raining again. Last Sunday it started out cloudy and warm, then we had howling wind for a few hours, then sunny and no wind, then hail. That's Idaho. Having lived in two of the windiest places in the US, I know Boise is not a windy place, but it has been windier this year.

Cruiser comes in from the yard with muddy feet from digging and as I wipe off his muddy paws, I think for spring he has reverted to being a dog.

First I get crocus, then the forsythia,



Forsythia is meant to grow wild looking, do not trim your forsythia into pod shapes, it will not get many flowers. Kurt has a few that he trimmed into pod shapes last fall and they have half as many flowers and are not good for much other than the birds love sitting on them.

With all of the rain, I have not been able to finish setting up my vegetable garden, but it is sunny this morning and I hope to get it done today. I did start seeds indoors. I am now educating myself on vegetable gardening and am amazed at what I do not know. My friends all know these things and I am reminded I am still a city girl. Do you know about companion planting? Hardening seedlings? Wide row planting?

I started seeds indoors. I started herbs and sweet peas. Those herb seeds are tough, you can hardly see them they are so tiny. Did that seed go in the dirt? Or is it still stuck on my finger? Is what is under my fingernail dirt? Or is that the seed, too? I bought some trays and some soil especially for starting seedlings. I can plant seedlings after danger of frost, here the average last day of frost is May 5, but I have to harden them first. That means introducing them to being outside, but bringing them in at night, so they get used to being outside gradually.

Some plants do not like each other and some grow better together. Plant chives with your roses and the chives will keep the aphids away. (Chives keep aphids away, oh, that is why Sarah has so many chives all over the yard, I thought Sarah really liked chives.) Cucumbers like corn, peas, radishes, beans and sunflowers. Cucumbers dislike aromatic herbs and potatoes. Lettuce grows especially well with onions and strawberries, carrots, radishes and cucumbers also are friends. Onions seem to be the biggest offender and I am not planting onions this year. I finally printed out the companion planting list and I can now see why you need to really plan your vegetable garden.

Wide-row gardening means grouping several rows together, rather than planting in single rows. This reduces the amount of walking room between rows, and saves space, saves time, increases yield and makes harvesting easier. It looks more like a random mix rather than the tidy rows I imagine vegetable gardens should be, but seems like a good idea for a garden that is only 4' by 4'. I like messy gardens over formal ones anyway.

All of the vegetable garden information I found on Ed Hume seeds,
http://www.humeseeds.com/ehndx.htm

For my birthday I received a letter from the IRS. Seems like I should have saved opening it until after my birthday, but it appears I have now paid off my taxes for 2008 and am now working on 2009. Almost three years of payments and applying two refunds and I am on to paying for 2009. Feels like slow progress, like trudging.

My birthday dinner was really fun. My friends are really funny and it seemed like an eclectic group, especially for Idaho. I was talking about women artists coming into their own after 40/50 and it turns out my friend lived in New Mexico and knew Georgia O'Keefe's houseboy. That's the guy 50 years younger that she married just before she died, so he inherited everything she had. This is the same friend that gave me flowers and then her fortune said that a friend would enjoy flowers tomorrow. I need those flowers back, I need to give them to someone else tomorrow. I told her I would be sure to enjoy them tomorrow, I'm not giving them back. Margo brought appetizers, penguins made with olives with carrot slice feet and chicks made with hard boiled eggs. She had trouble with the eggs, they were like deviled eggs made with 3/4 of the egg white as the body and the other 1/4 as a hat. The shell kept sticking to the white and she had to eat the egg and start over. (Did you know old eggs peel better?) She arrived at dinner full of hard boiled egg.

The friend that gave me the flowers told a story about St. Michael creating Idaho. God is creating the world and he creates everything in balance, good and bad. St. Michael (now, really, is their a St. Michael yet?) wants to try and he creates Idaho. St. Michael says, God, look what I created, beautiful mountains and streams and fertile land, and God says great, but where is the balance? St. Michael says, here, I also created the Idaho legislature! They really are a bunch of dopes, fortunately the legislative session is short.

Today is my daughter's 24th birthday. Happy birthday to you. In honor of her birthday, I will leave off with the lyrics of a song that always makes me think of her and cry,

10000 Maniacs - How You've Grown

"My, how you've grown."
I remember that phrase from my childhood days too.
"Just wait and see."
I remember those words and how they chided me,
when patient was the hardest thing to be.
Because we can't make up for the time that we've lost,
I must let these memories provide.
No little girl can stop her world to wait for me.
I should have known.
At your age, in a string of days
the year is gone.
But in that space of time,
it takes so long.
Because we can't make up for the time
that we've lost,
I must let those memories provide.
No little girl can stop her world to wait for me.
Every time we say goodbye
you're frozen in my mind
as the child that you never will be,
you never will be again.
I'll never be more to you
than a stranger could be.
Every time we say goodbye
you're frozen in my mind as a child that
you never will be, will be again.

Turning 50

It was winter again for a few days and spring again on Thursday. Last Sunday it was drizzling rain, so I decided to get to CostCo early before the crowd, and came out into a blizzard. Pouring down snow and windy, but none of it staying on the ground. On the first day of spring it snowed again, almost all day. Fortunately this time it waited to start until I got to work. It decided to be spring the next day, and this weekend it will be in the 70s. Last weekend's snow delayed my spring cleaning, but I am very excited to be able to open my windows and air out the house this weekend.






My boss and my coworkers decorated my office for my birthday Thursday night. Alyssa convinced my boss that I would not be happy with being greeted by noisemakers when I came to work on Friday morning. Bless her heart. After working next to me for six months, she knows I can barely say hello at 8 am and need to ease in to the workday. They left the noisemakers on my desk.

I have to confess that I had some trouble connecting the new TV and I felt like senility was on it's way. I watched an entire movie in the wrong aspect ratio, why is everyone so short and fat? The connection diagram for the TV is the worst I've ever seen. What is the difference between a component and a composite connection? When did we start having connections with five wires? I only had three. Not only did I watch an entire movie in the wrong aspect ratio, I watched it in black and white. Hey, it was an arty movie, could be black and white anyway. I put in a movie I knew was in color, nope, no color. In small print: Note! If connections are done incorrectly, it could result in a black and white picture. Then I realize there are more connections on the side of the TV, in addition to the back. Oh, that's why there are both horizontal and vertical diagrams. Good grief. It is all connected now, everyone taller and thinner and in color.

The only mark on my great month is that the buyer of the house next door started remodeling. After the first Sunday of jackhammering, I went over and asked him when he was going to quit, since it was Sunday. He was very apologetic and said they are just doing some minor work on the kitchen and the basement. The following Sunday, and it is snowing mind you, after a few hours of more jackhammerng and sawing, I called the Boise police desk.

The policeman called me back and was really nice. Nope, no construction hours in Boise. The policeman moved here from Oregon into a new house in Meridian. Said he would never buy a new house again, after listening to nine months of construction at all hours. His only suggestion was to call my landlord and ask for a rent discount. Turns out good renters are really hard to find and landlords are having trouble renting out here. I have not called the landlord yet, but that is good information to know.

This week I watched the construction workers next door haul out wheelbarrows full of dirt and a giant piece of concrete, that is still laying in the front yard. Yea, minor construction, the guy appears to be expanding the basement. Wonder if he has a city permit for that? For now, I just tell myself to feel sorry for the guy, anyone stupid enough to buy a house and try to flip it right now is an idiot.

At least this weekend I can get out of the house in the nice weather.

Setting up the TV and more and more of that walking into a room and wondering why I am there is making me feel 50, but I don't think I look it. Just to make me feel young again, I got a pimple for my birthday. Pimples at 50?! That part of youth I did not need to relive. I will post a turning 50 photo when it goes away.

In a month I will probably start a class with that promotion and I am a bit concerned about learning something completely new at 50 while my memory deteriorates. Mom reassures me that more life experience helps make up for memory problems as I relate new things to experience. I hope she is right. At least I will be in class with a guy who is older than me.

My friend sent me seeds for my birthday, so I went and bought a cedar planter frame for myself. My ammo box planters were looking pretty small for much of a vegetable garden. The frame is 4' by 4' and my plan for the weekend is to set it in the backyard. Then I need to ask Sarah how she keeps the animals out, since I could easily have four cats using that super new cat box and digging up my seedlings. My seeds are from mypatriotsupply.com. I told Alyssa about them and seem to have converted her over to preparedness. One of the cans I got is the salsa garden, which made me think I will need to learn how to make tortilla chips, salsa is no good without chips. Then I need to grow corn and learn how to dry it and grind it. (Even at 50, I know how to make life more complicated.) This seems like a lot of work, but then Alyssa reminded me that when my life changes to just being about survival, I will have nothing else to do anyway.

Tonight I am going out to dinner with my friends. It is really nice to be able to afford it for a change.

Luck

It's funny how you hear about something and then it starts coming up everywhere. My friend told me about the benefits of raw apple cider vinegar and then I see it as a facial toner and a treatment for diabetes.

In my first issue of Mary Jane's Farm there is a recipe for Queen of Hungary water using herbs and raw apple cider vinegar. The Queen of Hungary supposedly used it as a facial toner and that is why she always looked young and beautiful. Turns out the recipe more likely originated as alcohol (wine) and rosemary in the 13th century, was the first version of perfume, and cannot be attributed to any Queen of Hungary. Oh well. I tried using the vinegar by itself with warm water as a facial and after doing this twice, it removed what I thought was an age bump on my face. Turns out you can use vinegar to treat warts. Was that a wart?! Oh dear, it is gone now.

Since I was feeling a bit jittery when I haven't eaten, I researched hypoglycemia online and found raw apple cider vinegar as a treatment for diabetes. Turns out it can help regulate your blood sugar levels. Tuns out it can also help lower your blood pressure. Unfortunately, I have a healthy low blood pressure and raw apple cider vinegar can make my blood pressure too low. I wondered if it had anything to do with my jitters that went along with some mild dizziness and decided to lay off the vinegar for a while. Oh well.

On March 4th I started as a regular employee with the State of Idaho, just in time to be eligible for a two percent pay increase that they announced this week, and for the first time in more than ten years, I'm feeling lucky. It has been almost a month of one good thing after another. Two percent of not very much is not very much, but it is something and I would not have been eligible as a temp. I do not think of myself as a lucky person. The last time I felt luck was in 1994, when I moved to Vegas and got a great job right away. For years it seems like I was the person who could not catch a break and the only breaks I got were in letting go of material things, like my house. I was lucky to sell it when I did, but I didn't want to let it go in the first place.

One problem with winter here is that by March I am sick, sick, sick of my winter clothes. Winter seems to last from time change to time change. I proclaimed spring started March 9th and I was right. We had a few days of nicer weather and I got in two good walks before it started to rain, which it has done since Tuesday. Someone at work tried to give me a hard time about the rain and my proclamation, and I reminded her that is what it is supposed to do in spring, rain.

My crocuses are blooming, Sarah's tulips are coming up, and all the trees are budding. Both of my blueberries are bursting with large buds and Sarah's raspberry that I let grow on my side of the fence last fall is about to be full of leaves. I am really happy with the blueberries, they looked good with burgundy color last fall through December and there they are getting ready to be full of blueberries already in March. Sarah cuts her raspberry down to short sticks in the fall, so that is what I did with what was coming up in my yard. I have two good thick sticks and I am hoping that means my own raspberry crop this summer.

It is time to plant vegetable seeds, but already started seedlings have to wait until after danger of frost, here that means the first week of May. I think I will plant the same things as last year, although I might try lettuce. Lettuce seems like a good thing to grow from seed, since I do not want to plant a bunch of seedlings at the same time and end up eating lettuce all day for a week, but I think I will wait to plant seedlings for everything else.

Since it is raining anyway, this weekend is a good one for spring cleaning.

I hope that the last few really great weeks are an indicator that my 50's will be much better than my 40's. Most of my 40's sucked and I am really looking forward to 50 (next week) like some kind of great turning point.

The Dragon Year

Mom sent a TV for my birthday and it came early. It came at the beginning of two weeks of me feeling like my ducks just will not get in a row and my boss reminded me it is a Dragon year. Even the Farmer's Almanac describes the weather prediction for February, March, and April in the Northwest as unsettled.

The UPS man delivered the TV like he was Santa, "your TV is here!". I knew it was coming, but I still had that giant TV in the living room and I can't set up the new TV until I get rid of the old one. I tried Craig's List, starting with trying to sell it and then trying to give it away. I tried getting the motor-cycle riding Karaoke singing used electronics store owner to take it. I called the city trash collector. No one will take it. The hazardous waste pick up guy that the city gave me, that I have to pay to pick it up, is on vacation for a week. After a week of trying I could not stand it and I bought a furniture dolly and had my neighbor help me move it into the garage. Out of sight, out of mind.

A few days before the TV arrived, the State called me for an interview with the Tax Commission for the same job I had, but permanent. I scheduled the interview and a few days later my current job offered me a permanent position. They were unsure starting when, and they are also hiring three adjudicators, probably starting at the end of April. The adjudicator position is the one I applied for in December 2010, got a perfect score, and then they cancelled the list. After two meetings about me changing from temporary to permanent, the Administrator is talking to me like I am already and adjudicator. So, I cancelled the interview and since then someone else with the State also called me for an interview, that I got to turn down.

Last Monday I started as a permanent State employee, which is a huge relief. Nothing in life is really permanent or secure, but I feel more valued and less tenuous. The application for adjudicator should come out at the beginning of April, then the interview, then the training starts April 30, so I have more than a month of sitting in a job I probably will not be doing for more than a few weeks and trying to care with one foot out the door.

Last weekend I went out and bought a stand for the new TV from a restyled furniture store. It took two trips to that store and lots of comparison shopping before I could convince myself that it was alright for me to buy myself something I do not really need and then I came home and watched my neighbor move out as I was setting up the new TV. My neighbor Kurt in the tiny house is a really difficult person to talk to, but turns out his house was foreclosed and sold in a short sale for $62K. It is hard to believe that my house sold in the same circumstances four years ago and no matter what anyone tries to say, the economy is not better. I will not miss Kurt, except he was really quiet, but I will miss his dog.


With my neighbor moving out, the new TV and stand felt frivolous, but my living room is now twice as big and HD is pretty nice,


Funny that my picture includes some getting out of debt show.

So, my ducks do not exactly feel like they are in a row, but at least one is shoved in the garage.

The Idaho Watercolor Society Capitol Building show was in February and ended last weekend. I had to host for two hours, which turned out to be on the day Occupy Boise new rules went into effect and protesters are no longer allowed to spend the night at their camp at the old Ada County Courthouse. A short angry old man came up and asked me while I was working my two hours of hosting the show where the "Occupy Boise" meeting was. I had no idea, which I told him twice, and he shoved past me making me get out of the way in an uncrowded room. If Communists believe in "to each according to his need", they should try handing out some manners.

This is in great contrast to the banking lobbyist who bought my painting that was in the show. I entered "Eagle Horses", which the show coordinator told me sold on Tuesday night and I delivered on Wednesday. The banker has horses and said the painting made her happy.

I walked around my house Tuesday night feeling really happy and saying, this is so cool! Except for my commission work, I've never sold a painting. This is the very first time someone saw my work in a show or gallery and bought it. Selling something because it made someone happy makes the feeling even better.


Last Sunday it was sunny and warm and the park was so crowded I thought there was an event. Monday night it snowed. Yesterday it warmed up again and I think spring started for good. The trees have started to bud and the tulips are coming up. The ground is unfrozen enough for Cruiser to resume his digging. It has been an unsettled, but really good few weeks.

The Lakeshore Kids

Like some kind of new rule, for the second time this week, and the third time this winter, it started to snow right before I left for work yesterday. For two weeks in February it felt like spring and I noticed the crocus just starting to come up, and then it was cold winter again. Everyone at work is edgy and cranky, except when it is snowing. This weekend it is supposed to get up to 65 degrees.

There was still not much daylight when I got home from work when I started the commission, so I waited until the weekend to do the study. I can finish up a painting in artificial light, but I don't like to start it that way. I started with the study,


Watercolor studies should stay pretty lose and should be mostly about planning where to leave the white of the paper. This one was also about shades of blue. Since there is so much blue, what is the shade difference between the blue water and the two blue shirts? The only thing really separating them is the different shade of blue, so it should be right. On this study I also tried an experiment using salt on the wet paint of the water and the tie-die shirt, since I thought it might help achieve the soft light in the reference.

I thought the painting would be easy. The kids are from the back, no faces, I know how to paint water and sand, the colors are already great, and the red hat is obviously the subject. I was wrong, this painting was hard.

Saturday morning I finished the study, transferred the drawing for the painting and started the painting Sunday morning. I was trying for a soft wet on wet effect for the water and I worked on trying to achieve that until mid-afternoon Sunday, when I had to give up. There are moments in painting when it is time to keep pushing through to something great and there are moments when you went to far and the painting cannot be saved. It takes practice to learn the difference. I tried pushing through for an hour, but had to admit it could not be saved.

I felt like I wasted an entire weekend and now I was not going to have natural light for another week and it was really hard to go to work on Monday. Then I realized that a big part of my problem was pressuring myself to get most of the painting done in a weekend. It also seemed like I developed more contrast in my landscapes and had not painted children in a while, which need less contrast. I leave skin tones very light in my watercolors, the lights are lighter so the darks can stay lighter. Dark skin tones in watercolor quickly look muddy and grey. Lighter skin tones means everything in the painting has to be lighter, so everything looks like it belongs in the same painting.

So, the next weekend I had the new drawing ready and I started over, starting with the water in light subtle layers. The water took a long time to get the look of the reflected soft clouds, but it led the way to a much better painting,


Since I had to start over and was pressured by time and only a few weeks before my framer closed for good, I took the reference to the framer before I even started the second painting and picked a mat and frame. This is very risky and in the end the framer changed the inner mat because it was the wrong red, but it took the pressure off. I picked up the framed painting before last weekend, admired it all weekend, and then took it to the shipper last Monday.

Not only did I find a good shipper, but they patiently tolerate me as I am unable to leave my painting and get chatty. Leaving my painting with the shipper is like sending my child off to college, off to have their own new life without needing me anymore.

For a month it felt like I was working two jobs and I am glad for a rest.

Next week: A new TV and a permanent job.

Commission and Taking a Break Until March 3

This is my neighbor's site,

http://dappered.com/

Sarah's job ended before Christmas, so now she works with Joe, and his site makes enough money for them both to support themselves. Go figure. Kind of reminds me of Maxim magazine.

Yesterday I finished a larger version of the baby geese study,


It is still only 7.5 inches by 10.5 inches. I thought the water came out a bit groovier than I intended, but I was going for more graphic and then didn't really like it. I liked it better once the grass was in, but mostly I just wanted to get the fuzziness and light of the goslings, which I did.

Two days of rain washed away the snow by last weekend. It has been raining off and on since then, which is making it feel like Spring. In a week, the snow on the mountains caught up to normal. The weatherman here will say, today the sun might come out, or it might be cloudy, or it might rain or snow, and some days he will be completely right. That is Idaho. If the sun is out, there is almost enough daylight after work to walk, it just has to be in the upper 40's, the lower 40's are too cold. I went for a walk this afternoon, with my gloves and earmuffs, but my face still feels warm.

Last week, at 4 am Saturday morning, and again at 6 am Sunday morning, the fire alarms in my house went off. Nothing like waking up to a fire alarm at 4 am to ruin your day, and two days in a row will ruin your weekend. They went off long enough to wake me up, and then went off. Did you know you are supposed to test your fire alarm every week? Who does that? After half a day of reading manuals on line, I cleaned the outside of the alarms and replaced all the batteries. It should not have been the batteries, the alarms were not chirping, but I did it anyway. I think it was the cleaning that stopped them from going off, since no more alarms this week. The downstairs alarm was pretty dirty, with I don't know what, bug juice?

It is really dusty in my house, as long as I was cleaning alarms, I cleaned the furnace intake vent, since most surfaces are covered with dust after a day and the filter is fine. The vent was really dirty. Considering it is hardly windy and I have very little dirt around me, it sure is dusty in Idaho. I also noticed dryer sheets glued to the inside vent of the dryer. My friend told me not to use dryer sheets, because they can start a fire, but I thought she was being silly. Today I looked and there were two of them glued to the vent stopping any air from getting out. Guess that is something I now have to check until I finish using up the dryer sheets.

Since I get a refund, I did my taxes. I got Turbo Tax, just Federal, how hard can Idaho State income taxes be? Wish I got Turbo Tax with State, Idaho income taxes are a confusing mess. I am poor enough to get an Idaho food credit of $60, the maximum, woopie! It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to complete my return in order to get it.

The Chinese New Year of the Dragon begins February 4. This is a Male (Yang) Water (Black) Dragon year. To know how this year will be for you, you need to know your animal sign and your lucky element. I am a Black Tiger and my lucky element is Earth (making total sense that Idaho would be good for me.) The Dragon is solitary, lucky, and dramatic, so the Dragon predicts a dramatic year, good or bad. My horoscope this week also predicts dramatic change, like I have not had plenty already, but I would not mind dramatically good.

I have a commission and I'm losing my framer. The commission is from one of my regular (if you can call it that) clients. They are also a dream client that always supplies reference that will make a super painting. Yesterday I went to Target and noticed the framer I use is closing, going out of business. Turns out they are retiring and really happy, but will only be open for another short month. That means I need to finish my commission within the next week or two to be able to have them frame it.

I am also starting some inner work and wondering what to do with this blog. I seemed to have achieved much of what I was after, but the inner work is because I feel a bit "stuck."

So, because of the commission and the inner work, I decided to take a bit of a vacation from blogging until March 3rd. Maybe by then I will have more of an idea of what to do next. I will be almost 50 and it will be almost Spring.

Snow Report

When I got up this morning at 6:30 am, there was no snow on the ground and it was not snowing. By the time I left for work (5 minutes early) at 7:40, it was snowing and there was close to an inch on the ground. I picked a different route to work, that included only right turns and a cut through a long parking lot instead of that risky left turn from the median. I arrived safely at work and on time, unlike most of the rest of the office. It was a scarey drive even at a very slow pace and I kept having to remind myself to breathe. By 10 am I would say there was 4 inches of snow on the ground.

Tonight I was supposed to get my haircut, but I called my hairdresser in the morning to tell her I might not make it. She was at home because most of her appointments already cancelled. I thought I might be being a wimpy girl from So Cal, unwilling to brave the snow to keep an appointment, but was relieved that plenty of hardened Idahoans didn't want to either.

From KTVB.com,

"Ada County dispatchers reported 106 crashes between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. Wednesday. Five of those crashes left people injured. There were also 75 slide-offs and 45 stalled vehicles.

Meanwhile, over in Canyon County, there were 33 accidents Wednesday.

"It was just an inch of snow, some ice, you couldn't brake hardly at all," said Steven Johnson who slid off I-84 in Caldwell.

Johnson hit his brakes to try to avoid an accident, lost control, slid off the highway, down the embankment, through a fence, and into a field.

He talked about his thoughts as it happened, "I hope I don't flip. I hope I stay upright. I hope that fence doesn't hit me too hard."

Johnson didn't flip and says he's thankful, as this accident could've been much worse on what was a day of accidents."

At lunch I went for a walk over to Starbucks in the snow. This was fun, even though on the way home the snow was getting wet and blowing right in my face. Back at work I felt damp and rumpled with melting make-up and stringy hair for the rest of the day and I am not sure I will try that again.

By afternoon it started raining and my drive home was in heavy slush. Tonight we might have freezing rain and my commute tomorrow may be even worse than today's. We are supposed to warm up for the rest of the week and have more rain and I am afraid most of the snow will wash away before I get a picture in the sunlight.

When I got home I decided not to try to plow through the fresh snow down the alley to get to my garage. That car that likes to park parallel to their garage door was there, which I found irritating, since for sure I was not going to risk sliding into it, so I parked in front. I hope my car is not covered with ice and snow in the morning. I figure 6 inches of snow fell in my backyard, although it is hard to tell since it rained on the snow that fell. My neighbor did shovel my walkway for me, that was nice.



The cats have been still going out for their roll around on the patio, although they are brief, since it is cold, but this morning they took one look at all that white stuff and said no way. They are both, I mean both, now sitting on the computer table watching me type.

Last Monday I took an alternative late Christmas card picture, since I may not get one in any snow. My brother Dave gave me the ridiculous hat for Christmas and I told him I would take a picture of myself in it anyway,