SUMMER MADNESS

Whew, it's been awhile since I've written anything here - blame it on summer madness, that quickening as summer picks up steam until it's rolling downhill, out of control, into the shorter and calmer and cooler days of autumn.

Drew, Casey, and Austin were here in August, and I've included a photo. Austin's nanny is teaching him to march; I'm assuming it's so that he will keep in step with her as she pushes her own baby in the stroller going to the park. And if he's not marching somewhere, he's RUNNING. He loved our cats and remembered the sign for "cat."

The garden went berserk with tomatoes and cucumbers, and I am still canning tomato sauce and sweet pickle relish and Hungarian peppers.

The bees are swarming all over my "live forever" (sedum) and rose of sharon bush. I've also seen them, for the first time, on the joe-pye weed near Vanland and in the garden. We will probably try the new extractor this weekend and harvest one honey super or box, our total honey outcome for our first year. Should yield around 40 pounds for us, and leaves plenty for the bees (two deep boxes) to eat throughout the winter until nectar flow in the spring.

Our Pyrennes, Daffy, has blown out her left back knee...but I don't think that anyone will hire her to do a panty hose commercial on TV as Joe Namath did after the same kind of injury. We have taken her to two vets, and both tell us that the surgery is expensive and may just cause the other back knee to blow out. We decided to wait until the spring and see if the knee will develop enough scar tissue to stabilize it. She'll walk differently, but it hasn't slowed her down a bit!

My own knee replacement surgery is scheduled for October 20th. A long-time friend is coming to help out the first week, and I anticipate I'll be cripping around for two months or so. But the rapidly approaching confinement adds to the urgency of getting ready for winter...it's supposed to be a wet, cold one in the Heartland; so we have checked firewood, food, and candle supplies, just in case.

Hope you are all enjoying the cooler weather.

Cedar City Revisited

Van and I have just returned from a road trip to Cedar City, Utah, to attend the Shakespeare Festival put on there every summer. We discovered the Festival in 1992 when Van was getting an LLM at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and we went throughout the 1990s. There have been a few changes in the past ten years.

Cedar City and the towns around it have exploded with new businesses and housing developments. We were happy to see a few of our favorites were still going -- even though the quilt shop had moved to a different location, and Pancho and Lefty's Restaurant is now just Lefty's!

The Festival seems as popular as ever, and college students from Southern Utah University still dress in period costumes and participate in a "Greenshow" of dancing and singing appropriate to Shakespeare's time (albeit somewhat tamer than what we remembered). Volunteers with accents and costumes wander through the crowds, selling tarts and programs; but I miss the older woman who kept us entertained in the 90s with bawdy jokes she would sell for a dollar.

The plays were better than ever. We saw, in order of our favorites, HENRY V, COMEDY OF ERRORS, and AS YOU LIKE IT. The first two were outstanding. We had seen HENRY V and AS YOU LIKE IT before, but the third was a new one and played to full slap-stick effect.

I bought fabric to create a wall-hanging for the dining room, and Van sampled craft beers in several brew pubs across Colorado and Kansas: Gella's in Hays, KS; Kanah Canyon in Grand Junction, CO; and Mo's in Beaver, KS.

Great trip!

Goodbye to Jake

We're all sad at TDTR this morning. My neighbor called at 6 AM to tell us that, Jake, our black-lab-mix male dog, had been hit and killed in the road.

Jake was a real sweetie, found at the pound and brought home as company for Daffy, our Pyrennes. He loved to play fetch, and he always ran to meet us with a "present" in his mouth -- usually a toy or stick, but sometimes just a rock or dried grass.

But he also jumped our six-foot fence, probably why he was in the pound as a "stray" in the first place. Everyone around us knew him because he visited all the neighbors, went hunting with some, kept other dogs company who couldn't jump THEIR fences. He was smart about almost everything, just not about the road.

We miss him already.

Recap of The News

It's been tooooooo long since I updated, so here goes the catch-up news:

~My sister, Debbie was here for as long as she could stand all the work! We painted and rearranged furniture and dug up plants and mowed until she had to go home to rest...but it was wonderful having her here for as long as we did, and we are already bugging her to come back. No work, this time -- promise!

~Trailing after Lewis and Clark with my brother, Brad, was an amazing trip, despite the fifth and final day when we drove from Bismark, ND, to Goddard, KS, in 15 hours. We stopped when something caught our eye, we took pics, we hiked at LoLo Pass after buying me a fleece jacket for the cold, and we ate at diners and weird places along the way. We were fortunate to see the trail at approximately the same time of year that L&C were there, and the camas field was gorgeous...even if we didn't dig the roots and try eating them.

~The Celebration for my father went well, and it was great to see all the cousins getting to know each other...the newest ones, Ava and Rylie, are only a few weeks apart in age and SUPER cute! My cousin's husband, Charlie, did a wonderful job at the gravesite, telling stories and encouraging us to share our times with Boompa. We had about 30 people for a barbecue, we provided the fireflies for the kids, and the weather provided the fireworks -- lightning and thunder and wind.

~While I was trailing along, Van made an executive decision and put a honey super box on each hive even though we weren't sure they could find enough nectar to make their own honey without our sugar water feedings. We checked them after I returned, and all is well...so far. Our weather this past ten days has been near-or-over-100-degree temperatures, not the best for the bees or the plants.

~On the plus side, the tomatoes are loving the sunshine and threatening to ripen in massive amounts!

~The Kansas Beer Guys are deep into The Pale Ale Pandomonium Tournament, and they are down to the Sweet Sixteen.

Van and I are off to Cedar City, Utah, to see the Shakespearean Festival. The troupe is doing our favorite play, HENRY V, along with AS YOU LIKE IT and COMEDY OF ERRORS. We will be stopping at a couple of brew pubs along the way: one in Hays, KS, and the other in Beaver, KS...the latter has a population of 60, so I can't wait to see what's there!

Mei-Mei

Debbie, my sister who lives near Guy, Arkansas (pop. 523 with the arrival of her great-grandchild Rylie), is staying a few weeks with us at the Dancing Toad Ranch; she is my younger sister, so her name in Chinese is "Mei Mei." If I remember rightly, my name in Chinese as the older sister is "Lei Lei." (I'd ask Casey, but she is in China until the 11th.) Mei Mei is constantly telling me that I am "big sistering" her or someone else -- it doesn't mean giving astute and wise advice because of my years of experience -- it means that she thinks I'm getting bossy! Imagine that...

Earlier in her visit, we had lunch with Allan Northcutt, someone who was at our grade school, intermediate school, and high school. At one point Deb and I were going back and forth about some embarrassing even in our younger days, and Allan said quietly that if we got any louder we were going to be kicked out of Red Lobster...and I don't think that's a common occurence in Allan's life. Imagine that...

Plans for my trip down the Lewis and Clark Trail with my brother and Dad's ashes are complete. I will fly to Seattle on the 18th, and I'm spending the 20th with a good friend Nancy Kress. Then we leave on the 21st. First stop is Fort Clatsop, Oregon, where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805-6. The fort burned several years ago, but Brad says it's been restored. I'm anxious to see it. To my relief, we are NOT:

camping
portaging
eating only what we can kill

Our goal is to be back at TDTR on Thursday, the 25th (what would have been Dad's 86th birthday) to start picking up relatives at the airport.

I had a lovely birthday on the 5th--thanks to all those (e)cards and e-mails!--Van and I drove to Lawrence to attend a day-long "Funday" put on by the North East Kansas Beekeepers Association. It was a blast, from holding bees to eating honey strawberry icecream to learning how to catch swarms.

The Birds And The Bees

Spring has finally arrived, with sunny days and lots of birds.

We have had a blue heron wading in our pond for several years, and we can watch him in the early morning and late evening when he flies out and back to his perch. But we never could find where he perched all night. We could HEAR his hoarse bark in the dark, but we couldn't tell where it was coming from. This year before the trees leafed out, I glanced to the woods early one morning -- and there it was! The heron had built a large platform of sticks in the crotch of a tree about ten feet off the ground. We can also see him wading in the wetlands in our West land during the day. I haven't gotten brave enough to climb the tree and check out the next tho...

There is also a blue bird at our niger seed feeder. When we first saw him, we decided he was a bluebird and eagerly put up several nesting boxes, only to have sparrows use them instead. This year I got a good look at the blue bird and checked out my BIRDS OF KANSAS, only to find that the blue bird isn't a bluebird at all, but an indigo bunting. No rust-colored breast; our blue bird is blue all over. *sigh* Maybe we'll just let the sparrows enjoy their houses?

The other visitors to the niger seed feeder are LOTS of gold finches.

At the regular feeder, we have a woodpecker who thinks the eaves on our house is a snack, and I throw things at him to disabuse him of the idea. There are also the usual suspects: cardinals, blue jays, orange winged black birds, and robins.

The cats sit on a table at the front room window and go nuts when the barn swallows (another blue bird who isn't a bluebird but has a rust-colored breast...confusing, isn't it?) loop and dive in from of them enroute to their nest in our guttering.

The path to the bees takes me past a killdeer's nest, which upsets the mother immensely. There were originally three eggs (off white with mud-colored mottling); but the last time I saw it, there were only two. Raccoons?

As for the bees, the second hive box is on each one; and the queens are busy laying eggs. The last four or five days have been sunny, and I've seen bees on the heather at the front door of the house and on the chives in the garden. We're hoping they are buzzing in and out and making honey like...well, like busy bees.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

A special greeting to all the women in my life. All are mothers and deserve to be celebrated today:

To the natural mothers who bore children that they would occasionally like to zap into an alternate universe upon hearing one more chorus of "Are we there yet?"

To the adopted mothers and the married-into mothers who chose to have children that they would occasionally like to zap...

To women who are like mothers to us, who comfort us when our own mothers aren't around and encourage us to be LaLas.

To those who care for our furry friends, who adopt them and get them nutured--thanks, Alice!

To those who mothered my father at the Garden Court Memory Care Center; you guys are the best.

To all women who fill the role of mother for others, whether in a classroom or as a next-door neighbor or for anyone who needs kindness and love and a little help.

Have a wonderful day!