We had a very warm and humid day yesterday with severe thunderstorm warnings. We did get a big old thunderstorm later in the day with sheets of rain blowing every which way. I took this shot after it was over.
You’ll note that the catalpa is finally leafing out. It’s always the last to display its magnificence – maybe it likes having the stage all to itself?
I worked on the puzzle yesterday and got a lot done. I had been reading Twitter and getting more and more angry at the events I referenced yesterday, so I finally pulled myself away and walked directly to the puzzle.
I calmed down immediately.
Know when to pull away. We have been held hostage by a madman for four years. It’s impossible not to let him get under your skin, impossible not to worry about COVID-19, but it is entirely possible to make a deliberate choice to read a book, to listen to music, to do a jigsaw puzzle, to garden, to take a walk, to sing a song, to watch old episodes of Cheers that make you laugh out loud, to cook, to create, to call a friend.
The view as I made our second cup of coffee this morning.
I just finished A Room of One’s Own and am now reading Maigret and the Old People, by Georges Simenon. Simenon’s Maigret mysteries are so well written. They’re also relatively short, about 150 pages or so. He wrote scads of them and Penguin has been reissuing them with new translations. They were originally written in French.
We’re going to mow the front yard today. You know I love to mow and I actually woke up and got excited knowing this is a mowing day. We’ll tag team. But even if I had to do it all by myself, and that has been the case many times, I’d still be excited.
It’s a gloriously beautiful day out there; blue skies and fluffy white clouds, birds singing, wind chimes moving slightly in the breeze. Good news by the way – my zinnias have sprouted and so have some of the morning glories and moonflowers.
I’m having an “I am blessed” day. Hope you are, too.
Stay safe.
Happy Saturday.
“Know when to pull away.” True words. I had to do that yesterday. I read your post three times…and, I tried to comment three times. I couldn’t. I couldn’t formulate my thoughts into coherent words. I was so angry. George Floyd was most in my thoughts. I had also heard the things said from a man pretending to be in charge of this country. Ugh! So I pulled away. I cleaned my house like I was possessed. I had calmed myself down.
I had seen episodes of Maigret on PBS, sometime last year. I guess I didn’t realize they were based on books…silly of me, of course they were. Now…I’ll have to read them. I really enjoyed the series…it was very well done.
The weather yesterday, today, and through Monday promises to be almost perfect. Cooler temps, sunshine and light winds. So a little yard work, mostly pulling weeds is top of the list tomorrow.
Have fun with your mowing. We are going to visit with friends today. I need to see these friends. We haven’t seen them in months…and I am so excited! Stay safe…we will too! ;)
I hope you had a good time with your friends, Donna!
We’re tired from all the work outside, so I don’t have the energy to think of that mad man. Stay safe!
Yes, yesterday after my comment back and my “rant” about all the things going on in our country, I pulled away and did things with our dogs and my family. You are so right about knowing when to leave things and take a breather! I am so glad you are getting to see friends today.
Stay safe, Jane! (I’m not seeing friends today, maybe you’re referring to Donnamae? She IS seeing friends today!)
glad you have things you love to do (including mowing the lawn) and are having an “i am blessed” day!
it can be a tough balance to find, i think … the need to be informed while taking a break from all the stressful things happening in our world (because both have to do … at least in part … with self-protection). i agree that we need to recognize within ourselves when we’ve had “enough” so it doesn’t get to be “too much” and that hobbies and necessary chores can help with that … as does, for me, putting my faith in God.
looking at images/videos of nature or (better yet) being outdoors is very helpful to me, too. thanks for always sharing here for us such pretty photos of the nature you so lovingly tend.
we are to have a cooler day here (60s), then see the temperature jump up to 90 for several days. my landlord has expressed worry for me not having the air conditioner to use, but hopefully that will happen next week … and i have a ceiling fan to help. i have a very kind landlord.
i am feeling noticeably better (still have a fever, some coughing and tooth pain, but nothing compared to the first week), but am very tired and shaky-feeling so am taking it easy today. and having an “i am blessed” day, too.
happy, easy, safe, blessed saturday to everyone!
kathy in iowa
It’s a very tough balance and often I fail. But I do my best! So glad you’re feeling better, but you have a fever, so take care! Stay safe, Kathy.
kathy, I’m glad to hear you are getting along okay but I feel worried for you; you’re not ‘there’ yet on your strength; try not to go back to work too early; thank you for including Claudia’s readers in your happy saturday; we’re all pulling for you!
It sounds like a perfect day. Yes, knowing when to pull away is critical to our mental health. Hostage to a mad man — that’s a spot on description. I sometimes wonder how we will go another six months and then panic that it might be more than that.
The puzzle is a wonderful Zen thing. So is Maigret — I love that series!
I love those books. And when you’re a little distracted and busy with other things, they’re the perfect length. Stay safe, Jeanie.
Your daily posts, are a true “blessing”! I sooo look forward to read about your Day, your Books & the Penguin Collection! My Father had a huge “Collection” of them, I read them all, 40/50 years ago! ;-) You sure help make me “feel” normal, in an “abnormal” World! :-) Thanks!
Thank you so much for your kind words, Cora! Stay safe!
Daughter is making sourdough crumpets and sourdough coffee cake with her sourdough started “discard”. The starter itself should be ready for bread baking soon. I’m doing jigsaw puzzles with my elderly Mom. It keeps her fingers nimble and her mind sharp (however, at 92, she’s still mentally together).
Claudia, Hope you feel at least part, if not all, of every your days is filled with “I am blessed” moments.
I do. Don and I are pretty good at appreciating the small things, the routine everyday blessings. And we say them out loud all the time. Stay safe, Wendy.
Hope your day has gone well and that you had a good time mowing. It is so often the easy and the mundane things where we can find some peace. And, boy, do we need it right now. His yelling maga today made me want to throw up. He still has babies and toddlers locked up and away from their parents for months and months and he is allowed to carry on like this. Where, oh where, is Karma?? The disparates abound. Where is the government that is supposed to govern? How many more lives have to be lost? I watch a bit of it and have to turn it off as it is all just too much. So I read…. and I walk thru the yard to look at my flowers. And you mow. And we all have to find our safe place because of this mad and dimented individual and the cult he has created.
Yes, we hardly ever hear about the detainees at the border. I was just thinking: would it be possible to list the most egregious things he’s done? Would it be pages and pages long? I feel like I have to think about doing something like that. We (I) need a record of every misdeed made by this sack of skin masquerading as a human.
Stay safe, Chris.
For some reason I never read blogs yesterday, so never read what you said. We were shocked when that gentleman was killed by the police. One of us said yesterday at the end of a conversation, that from our prospective in Oz, America appeared to be disintegrating with so much going on. We have had some unrest with people wanting to get back to old times, but nothing like we have seen overseas. Yesterday we only had one new case of Corona virus. One! I am so glad of our prime minister and government for the decisions they have made. That doesn’t mean that all is perfect as we have a few state premiers who are of the opposite political persuasion who are dragging the chain a bit. However, I feel for what is happening in America. That quote you gave was spot on. “A riot is the language of the unheard”. I am counting my blessings too.
Meant “perspective and not “prospective.
xo
Not to equate this with what a real prisoner of war would experience – it isn’t – but I do use that term for what we as a nation are going through. Everything we hold dear has been shredded by a man and an administration that care nothing for us. Not one bit. And they certainly don’t care for anyone who isn’t White. The difference being that at least I have my private life here at the cottage to sustain me. Many are not granted that luxury. We’re wounded as a nation.
Stay safe, Robyn.
Not so blessed here sometimes. Temporarily. Yet always. The inconveniences in between…
Decided to get away from news although I watched a lot of coverage late into the night, seeing places I know of in Los Angeles filled with protesters and police; so very disturbing and heartbreaking. Turned the channel to watch a few cooking shows while I ate a sort of brunch, called a friend. Otherwise ‘normal’ Saturday morning, unlike last week when I awakened to the crashing cymbals and amplified drum set next door.
We were deep into conversation on the phone when, first, my husband had a rather alarming spell of vertigo. Got thru that, called her back, when an electric saw started right at my window because my neighbor (of Saturday morning drum set fame), who is added to the list of one of the thorns in my side, decided to cut down, TO THE GROUND, this large tree he put in about ten years ago which is overpowering our block wall and growing into his roof.
(He says he’s cutting it down, finally, because he’s going to paint his house; but what I’m sure is going to happen is that without the tree, it now gives him the space to put up more hodgepodge fencing/’block’-stacked stuff as sight barrier [like these unsightly junk pieces of old doors] because he doesn’t want neighbors on either side looking over the only-four-feet high wall on either side of his property, as he’s a very secretive sort of person and it’s a long story about all his weirdness, but whatever; I feel sorry for the birdlife, but I’m not sorry for that tree to be gone as it costs my husband a lot of money two to three times a year to have to pay a professional trimmer to stand up on extremely-high ladders and trim this thing off OUR roof, and it completely overwhelms my patio. Not to mention the massive amount of bird poop to where we can’t leave lawn chairs out there.)
So, okay, I ‘get’ why all this is happening but after stopping the conversation on the phone already for my heavily-breathing/nearly-passed-out husband from the vertigo, calming down and enjoying my phone conversation even with the chainsaw going, I hear a WHOP, hang up the phone, and this bozo and his friend, NOT professional yard/tree guys, unloaded a large ‘log’ hard on top of our porch-room roof, putting a big jagged edge in the overhang, and there was the ‘log’ in the middle of our patio which had been the flying missile from this enormous tree. So, just another in a string of unnecessary things to happen with these people which then has to necessitate more conversation, them getting defensive and denying they did it, etc. My husband asking me to keep out of it (grrrr) but him being too much of the Mr. Nice Guy, and we’ll know more tomorrow when my husband floods the roof with the garden hose to see if the roof leaks into the room but, in the meantime, we have to live with this jagged ugliness of our roofline; and, well, it’s sure hard to get calm around here on any given day lately. Sigh. It’s now nearly 6:30pm and I’ve heard all this noise next door ALL DAY long and now they have a chipper going out back there which is shaking my whole house. I am not exaggerating.
But to your post, rain (to me) sounds wonderful since we get so little of it here where I am in SoCalif. The light filtering in to your house is really, really nice; your home must be situated in just the perfect spot on the property, as if maybe the original owner thought about it for awhile, as to the best place to lay the foundation. I always felt that the was case of my little cottage on the hill, from the 1920s. We’d had all new plans drawn up to change some things inside but after I’d spent a lot of time in the empty house in the five months between those plans, city permits and availability of the onsite contractor to start the work, I began to change my mind, realizing that the house was built the way it was built for a reason, with how the morning sun flooded the bedroom for natural awaking, the afternoon sun setting alight the kitchen, etc., right when I needed it for food prep or whatever I was doing getting ready for dinner in the evening. We ultimately changed the interior footprint very little, and I was so glad that went down the way it did. I had to give the house a chance to talk to me; then, I listened.
So sorry about your neighbors. They, of course, are clueless.
Our neighbors are building a deck, so we hear saws all day long, but it doesn’t bother me. In these days of lockdown, it’s nice to know something is being constructed. (They’ll have a perfect view of the river when it’s done.
Stay safe.
Thank you for putting up with my OTT-long comments, worse than usual.
We all will from time to time probably have a neighbor problem and I don’t have to keep going on & on about mine. Today I woke up to saws and drilling, only to have the tree neighbor erect an ugly fence which I knew he’d do as soon as the tree was down, but I decided he ‘can’t touch me’ because I’ll be putting my own up soon enough. Unfortunately we did have words although I kept my cool and didn’t shout or speak loudly or use bad language, but I don’t need to get into it here, as to what all transpired. I need to use your blog for the right purposes and not dump the way I’ve been doing. I apologize…again. We’re all having stressful times.
xoxo
About the news and headlines, I do have my edict/directive that it’s preferred if I never mention orange-man or anything he says in our house. My husband reached a limit, his own personal limit, of how much stress he can take by That Man. So how I don’t then internalize my own stress about leadership (lack of) at the top is that I do have a friend and a cousin who feel similarly to me, so that’s my stress relief to go over things between us three that we’re horrified about or disgusted with (the White House admin, Covid, etc.) But, yeah, DT’s name or any references to him are verboten in the house I share with my beloved. So I have to respect it. But I fume plenty. How can you not, with that sorry excuse of a human; THAT MAN. I couldn’t even enjoy watching the liftoff of that rocket this morning without the news station having to flash the camera over to THAT MAN watching the launch. Anything to distract (or detach from the more-horrifying and serious events precisely now in our midst, like cities on fire, and why), when you know he doesn’t give a rat’s a** about the space program; it’s all the photo ops (free) for his re-election effort. You coined it so perfectly by saying we’ve been held hostage – and to just painfully reflect on the four years, dear Heaven, SO MUCH that’s gone so wrong and really so fast/too fast. It’s a lot for the next brave president (it can’t be DT again; just can’t) to have to correct/reverse and make right again. That’s why we need somebody in that job with experience and who will defer to the intelligence of the knowledgeable advisors he’ll surround himself with; best of the best, for the best, which is us; our country; which needs so much healing and so much help. The only reason America has to get ‘great again’ is because THAT MAN who somehow got elected sank the ship … or almost. It’s him who chipped at our greatness. But we’ll rise again; we WILL heal and the ship will be saved.
On a suitably lighter note: I had the Louise Penny #1-6 Armand Gamache novels sent to the friend I was on the phone with, and she’s totally hooked. She read Book 2 before 1 although I had tried to tell her the order; now she understands that characters in Book 2 would have been previously introduced, so she’s going back to Book 1 and then will jump to 3,4,5,6. If it wasn’t for you, I’d have never heard of Louise Penny, so now you’ve introduced two people (my friend and also me) to Three Pines. I just saw the reference that Ms. Penny has another book in the series coming out in September.
Okay so I’ll get the rest off my chest. You know how you recently said you saw someone without a mask at the store or garden center and you felt like you could slap ’em?
For the past two or three weekends, the neighbors on the one side of me have had people over. All of these people are in their 20s and 30s, to my guess. It started out slow, but today there are untold numbers of people in that backyard. I see all the cars out front, but I can also hear the loud music and what seems like many numbers of voices and talking and laughing and shouting, etc. It’s a big backyard BBQ event. I at one point, upon receiving a package, so my door was open, saw six people getting out of a car and going into these people’s house and NO ONE is wearing a mask.
On the other side of my house, the 35-yr-old neighbor with the chainsawed tree, had probably 9 or 10 adults back there working on this tree and yard clean-up, him and his friend-workers, his children but also his FATHER who is pushing age 70 and who has had a recent BOUT OF CANCER along with this father’s wife back at home who has been suffering from cancer that keeps coming back over the past six years. NO ONE, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE IN THAT BACKYARD TODAY WERE WEARING MASKS. Does no one think of the vulnerability of the father who is in his late 60s with likely a damaged immune system from the cancer? Does he-himself think of his own safety and that of his sick wife’s? And three of the children are under the age of 5, one being an infant. Children are not entirely immune from contracting Covid; it’s why they haven’t been in nursery school or pre-school or daycare.
Back to the house on the other side of me with all the maskless party guests, the wife of the house IS PREGNANT and about to deliver a baby in three weeks. She also has an 18-months-old toddler and a 10-year-old. Again, do you have no fear at all for your little ones? Do you have no fear at all that you could get Covid from any of these maskless guests and have to go into labor with a bad virus? (I would feel safe to say at this event going on tonight as I write this, that neither this pregnant woman, her husband or her two children are wearing masks. I have never seen them with masks since Covid erupted on the scene. How does she go to her doctor visits/pre-natal care without a mask? Maybe she saves it for when she walks into the doctor’s office. I’m sure the doctor must require a mask. She’s not some kind of dumb bunny, this pregnant gal; she used to work in a bank, up until that 18-month-old was born.)
Isn’t it CLUE enough, when the doctor tells you that you probably may not be able to be in the delivery room with your wife, that Covid is a serious threat; that it hasn’t ‘gone away’?? (That’s per the husband; he told me himself over the driveway fence, just a couple of weeks ago, that he was still awaiting word if the doctor/hospital was going to allow him into the delivery room. There’s a reason for this! Please tell me you’re not that stupid, that you can’t comprehend or are in some kind of denial! Southern California is a hotspot for Covid; we’ve got problems here; our specific town is a hotspot; we have more positive cases and hospitalizations than nearby cities, within our county, three to four times the size of our population.) I was and am happy for this young family; a new baby is a glorious thing. I simply can’t understand what I see as negligence when it comes to Covid.
I am stymied. It’s as if ‘reopening’ falsely signaled the end of Covid. (???) It’s still out there among us! Neither of my neighbors ever really were very safe about it; the husband with the pregnant wife went back to ridesharing to his job very quickly; I think he only drove separately maybe three weeks, and then he was right back to being a passenger in a car with three other guys again. I know this because I’ve sometimes heard them at 5am out on the street with the slamming of car doors and talking and car music, and the other passengers leave their cars here all day, as they all get in the one car. I’ve seen the one car that is sometimes the designated car. There’s no way they can physically distance in that small vehicle.
Do they really think the threat is gone? What is the mentality? Have people just given up and are saying, “Okay, Covid; come at me; get it over with; I’ll be part of herd immunity. I’m young; I’ll probably either not get bad symptoms or they’ll be light; I’ll survive.”
If I felt ‘paranoid’/personally-vulnerable before, like this past Feb-May, I feel more so than ever in these coming summer months of June-July-Aug when somehow I’d felt that maybe the virus would possibly tamp down again in warmer weather before a ‘Fall’ wave. The expectation is that people will be smart about it and still do the mitigation of mask, distancing, etc. But some/too many are not. And there’s no good to come of it. And there goes my hopeful expectations.
These other people are screwing it up for the rest of us. Or so I fear. Maybe my fears will be unfounded. But I don’t think so.
I just feel like there’s a whole heckuva lot of people out there who don’t care if I live or die.
I don’t like what it says; that people can be this selfish, yet I know there are others out there who do nothing BUT be selfless and caring for others. It’s a divide, for sure.
I feel so sad about this development. It’s disappointing. I always expect people will be better. I want to think that other people are kind. But my friend went to the grocery store yesterday, heretofore really never having had many problems with being out & about, even a couple of months ago, and a woman filed behind her at the register, ignoring the distancing instructions on the floor as well as the store employee guiding her into the waiting line/queue. She didn’t wait for my friend’s load of grocery items to clear the ‘conveyor belt’ and started loading her stuff right behind my friend’s. My friend said quietly to the clerk at the register, “Is she supposed to be doing that?” The clerk said, “No.” (My husband said that was the fault of the store, for not enforcing with this bold woman to stand back and follow instrux and wait her turn. It really does put the store employee into a potentially confrontational position with a store customer, and when did a store employee have to become a police person? There’ve been articles written about this lately.)
But this annoying woman/shopper spoke up and directly confronted my friend by saying rather aggressively/combatively, “Are you complaining to the cashier that you don’t like it that I’m in the store and not wearing a mask?” (Defensive and defiant; I’m sure others in the store had already said, “Hey, you’re not wearing a mask; you can’t be in here with the rest of us without a mask!”) My friend said, “No, I’m simply asking if you should have waited your turn. Your groceries are now commingled with mine.” (I guess those little divider bars have been taken out now as just one more thing to have to sanitize, where in ‘the old days’ before Covid you could use them as a separator between your items and the person behind or in front of you.)
Of course my friend DID want to say something about the mask, but this other woman was ready to fight. You don’t always know who you’re dealing with in this kind of situation; it’s not worth it to escalate a further problem.
But WHAT IS UP WITH THESE PEOPLE AND THEIR REFUSAL TO WEAR A MASK? Again, do they not care about their own health or the health of those they love (and certainly their fellow ‘man’)?
I feel like I have to hit my head against the wall in frustration. Like, why-why-why. Why balk and go against expert advice on Covid … to wear a mask? It doesn’t make sense, except to consider it may indeed be a political statement.
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m hearing about (and witnessing) in my very-small corner of the world.
What do you think, Claudia?
I think it’s a combination of willful ignorance and self-entitlement. We are suffering from fools who are basically self-absorbed and clueless. Anyone with a lick of sense and a sense of the larger picture knows better. If not wearing a mask is a political statement, they are even bigger fools.
Yes, foolish. I watched the truck come this morning, picking up all the catered chairs and tables that my other neighbors had apparently rented for that big party yesterday, where anyone I saw, if they happened to be in my view as I came and went, was maskless. To even know how many people they had over there, I can’t even begin to probably count them. I hope they didn’t infect one another with the virus. But I stayed clear. I feed the cats against a fence that’s technically only a foot from where they’d be sitting on their patio, so the poor cats didn’t get fed til midnight after what seemed to be the last person/guest to leave over there; I didn’t want to risk breathing any of those people’s ‘air’/droplets in what had become a still evening after the breeze died down.
And then it was such an awful night anyway. I finally turned off the local news channels at 1am this morning. I couldn’t watch another minute of ‘my’ city burning. I still have extended family in the City of Angels where my ancestors first came in 1903; I was born there, my mom was born there; in cemeteries across Los Angeles are buried my great-great grandparents, my great-grandparents, three grandparents, many uncles/aunts and other dear people we’ve lost over the years. I love Los Angeles so much. It will always somehow be ‘home’ even though I’ve been away more years than not. I’m a suburbanite now and for most of those years, but I still love the big, spread-out city of L.A. and am quite familiar with a lot of it. So, to see all those National Guard troops brought in; the curfew. The looting; the fires. Such descent/so ‘off-topic’ after a point, not honoring Mr. Floyd and furthering the pleas for justice and equality; but instead hoodlum behavior I’m sure he wouldn’t be condoning.
Heartsick; heartbreaking. Hurts. Too much hurt, on all sides; we are a wounded country. I felt gutted, just like those hollowed-out buildings; one popular restaurant, closed for weeks due to Covid but feeding unemployed L.A. restaurant workers, only to reopen this weekend with dine-in, now a neighborhood establishment gone for good, just a shell, with the owner unsure about rebuilding and making yet another start; one story of so many who were innocent bystanders. Pick a city, pick a street; Mom & Pop stores who probably can’t recover now. Covid and (worthy) protests-that-went-wrong, just too much for the store owners; their livelihood gone.
You are wise to take a day away from it, Claudia; I’m glad you chose well for your Sunday. Me? I feel wiped out. Between my neighbors, Covid and the horrible headlines, I really feel a need to retreat into my shell for awhile. Ranting about all my issues and problems and opinions on your blog is not showing good discipline or etiquette on my part as you so graciously host this wonderful site every single day. I need to step away and center myself again, then try to come back to MHC and not drain anybody else when we’re all feeling the life get sucked out of us during too much crisis. You’re so generous and supportive with the space to ‘talk’ and console each other, it’s such a lovely group of readers you have, and I don’t want to continually be one who is polarizing when I’m so wordy and going on & on about myself; there’s another audience for that, and not here. I want to keep your blog in my life and heart for other reasons and be a good contributor, not a bad one. I want to learn to edit myself better. I keep reverting and would rather improve.
So, yes, to your good words Sunday on how to be and feel blessed, I’m going to try to pull things around and get myself together, put on blinders when it comes to my neighbors (don’t look right, don’t look left; pretend they’re not there!), get some comfort from our growing veggie garden; dig thru some old packed boxes and keep trying to get organized in my small house (joy of discovery in what I’ll find in those boxes!); look forward to my new frig coming; be grateful I have the shelter of a home, and one with air conditioning in summer. A bid to quiet myself instead of having all the churning inside. Thank you too for always ending your responses or posts by reminding us and hoping for us to be safe; stay safe. It’s very important. For all those not keeping safe for themselves or others, the rest of us have to take up the slack, but we can do that, because we’re the smarter and kinder ones!
I hope your first week in June is just fine-so-fine, with great weather and lots of nourishing work in the yard. It’s always such a treat to have photos of your pretty surroundings, both inside the house and outside. You give me ideas and inspiration for my own ‘nook’. So, summer improvements … for my house, yard but also mind & body. It’s a goal!
Much love, Vicki.
We will rise again, indeed. I hope that man rots in prison for the rest of his sorry life. He has done nothing worthwhile his entire life. And the amount of illegal things he has done is mind-boggling.
Glad your friend is enjoying Louise Penny!
Your words of wisdom for me yesterday were greatly appreciated. I love how you are excited to mow the lawn! We had a small lawn at our tract home and it had a side slope to it, but I used to love getting out the old push mower and go up and down in lines, even when the mower was tilted slightly making it a bit of a challenge to stay even. I’d wash off my green-stained feet with the hose. The smell of fresh mown grass still brings pleasure. Stay safe!
It’s a true pleasure for me! Stay safe, Nora.
Dear Claudia,
all so true, there is nothing more to add!
Stay save and carry on!
You, too, Helga! Love what you’re doing with your dollhouse! Stay safe.