We had intense storms yesterday. Torrential rain. This is the result:
Yes, my beautiful hydrangeas were pummeled by the rain. I watched as it happened. My experience in the past tells me there’s no way to get them upright again. But I’m going to wait until later today when they’re not so rain-sodden and give it the old college try. Does anyone have any helpful tips?
The grasses in the big garden bed were also smashed down, but I’m pretty sure the sun and I can get them upright again. The hydrangeas? Doubtful.
Crap.
We watched Sense and Sensibility last night, a movie I love but one that Don always thought of as a girls movie. I ran down the list of actors in the cast and he began to rethink his initial assessment. Then, as we watched it, he kept saying, “This is a wonderful movie.”
I told you so.
But Amazon Prime? I have a bone to pick with you. Your thumbnail description says: “Emma Thompson stars in the captivating romance based on Jane Austen’s classic novel of two sisters’ search for love in strict Victorian society.”
Ummm…a big fat NO. It takes place at the end of the 18th Century.
I wonder who wrote that little blurb? I’ve given Feedback to Amazon. We’ll see if it changes.
A while back at the start of spring, I mentioned that a couple of plants hadn’t come back, including the balloon flower.
I was wrong. It did come back and, not only that, it had self-seeded. So now there are 3 or 4 plants. This is what the flower looks like before it opens:
A little balloon.
Then, when it opens:
Aren’t they lovely?
Today, I’ll weed a bit since the ground is so wet. Have to pick up a book at the library. And I’ll work on the hydrangeas. (Sob.) And I’ll read. Mowing tomorrow, I think, the grass is pretty wet right now.
Happy Sunday.
Your poor hydrangeas! Not sure what to suggest if it’s the harsh weather that’s caused them to droop other than hidden stakes and ties. Maybe Monty Don online can help! Mine have just opened this weekend, they’re pink.
You’re absolutely right about Sense and Sensibility, it’s set in Recency England when Prince George reigned in place of his father George the Third as he wasn’t deemed fit due to his mental incapacity in his later years.
Happy Sunday
Regency England…I swear this Kindle is going through the window, the next time it auto corrects!😬
xo
Thanks, Dee Dee! I can’t really get close to the bush, except from the porch. It’s surrounded by other bushes!
Hi Claudia,
Your hydrangeas will have a better chance if they are not down too long. I lift each stem and shake as much water from the blooms as possible starting with the middle stems and then when I get to the outer ones that are on the ground I prop them up with an apple crate and they hold up the inner ones and they all do much better.
I’ve done as much of that as I can, given that the bush is surrounded by other plants and I can’t get to all of the branches. But I did lift as many as I could about an hour ago and shook the water off them.
I’ll go back in a couple of hours and see if I can lift more of the branches. Thanks, Kelly!
Yes…balloon flowers are lovely. Sorry…no help here on hydrangeas. As much as I read about them, and their preferences, and, just when I think I have it all figured out…I realize I don’t! I would like to know the answer to your dilemma, though. Is it possible to stake them in bunches? I suppose you could cut some of the flowers that are smashed or broken, and take them inside to dry. That might take the weight off of the stems at least. And, at least you’d have a pretty bouquet, if you like that sort of thing.
I so enjoy watching Sense and Sensibility…I’ll watch it anytime I can find it. Hope your email to Amazon does some good. I don’t think people research, or proofread things like they used to. Do they even have proofreaders anymore?
Enjoy your day! ;)
I can’t stake them as they’re surrounded by other bushes and I can’t get to any of the inner branches!
No, I don’t think anyone cares enough to hire a proofreader except print newspapers and book editors.
Oh, the color of those balloon flowers! Just glorious. Sorry about the hydrangeas. My SIL has hydrangeas too & like you is a really knowledgeable amateur gardener. I’ll ask her if she has any trips for resurrecting flattened hydrangeas. You never know. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday! 🐝🌿📖
Thank you, Janet!
Claudia, sorry about your hydrangeas. I only have five blooms, finally, after transplanting my plant three years ago. I think you should cut the ones that are still droopy and enjoy them inside.
I love all things Austen! I love the Emma Thompson version of S&S bit I also love the Hattie Morahan version.
I absolutely have little patience with print errors…spelling, grammar, subject-verb agreement…! The newsfeed I receive is full of them! What kind of language skills are being taught these days????
No one tops Thompson in my book. The scene where she starts sobbing – out of nowhere – is stunning. And she wrote the screenplay and won the Oscar for it!
Thanks Wendy!
Poor pretty flowers!
An aside: Claudia, has anyone ever told you that you look like the actress Patricia Clarkson? Saw her again on one of those PBS Actors On Actors shows. Yet I don’t recall seeing her in much TV or film although I know she has an impressive resume. I think she’s about age 60; I’d read something recently, then saw her on that show and said, yep, there’s Claudia!
No. That’s the first time anyone has ever said that!
Well, take it as a compliment; she’s intelligent, educated AND pretty!
A new development here on the home front; oh man, what a mess.
We knew we needed to check on our offsite storage facility after these earthquakes on Thurs & Fri. Today was the first chance. (I have no problem with the facility itself. It’s a large, professional, gated one, with an expansive office and impressive security; the managers for the facility live on the premises in a 2-story apartment. It’s a very well-run enterprise there overall. Costs me $200 a month I can’t afford, but it’s the only place right now for my vintage car, which turned age 45 of my ownership this weekend, and we have it surrounded by stacks of yet-more storage boxes which I stare at but never can make myself cull [I’m overwhelmed with too much stuff, of my own and about 7 other relatives who thought they were kind by bequeathing me everything they owned; it’s a big job to go through it, and I fight a lot of health issues on a daily basis, so it’s hard to have the energy for these kinds of big projects]).
Anyway, 80 boxes, shoulda been 16 stacks of five but my husband had piled them higher, which I always worried over. This is nobody’s fault but ours and Mother Nature – – but the boxes did fall in the earthquakes as I feared.
We were not prepared for it. Not to this degree.
My husband looked around dazedly and said, “Where do I start?” Several boxes broke thru their strong packaging tape, toppled onto the hood of the car. I’m glad they didn’t break the windshield. We’d been more concerned with potential rainwater damage/leakage from heavy rainfall this year so had everything tarped with some iron plant stands anchoring the tarp so of course those iron stands are what hit my car; again, call us THE most stupid of stupid.
Contents of boxes all over the place. Stuff ALL OVER THE concrete floor of the unit AND my car. Little treasures; broken treasures now. Books; lots of books. Boxes that contained small but special collections. Stuff littering my car as I said, nicking the paint BADLY, glaringly. I am SO upset.
We are clueless, dumb-sh**#!s to not have strapped in those boxes; we were in some kind of la-la land, ‘earthquake’ never entering our mind, and you can’t be in Calif and NOT have earthquake on the mind. In the past 20 years, we got too blase about earthquake. I’m sure if we’d have lived thru the Northridge quake in 1994, we would have not been so indifferent and unorganized. But that was a brief time when we lived out of state.
Frankly, my husband is more sick of boxes than I am and he mostly has just always wanted outta there; I mean, we get the car in and out to drive it but he has had no interest in the boxes although it’s his stuff, too. Another case of, we get what we get. You reap what you sow. It’s too much clutter. Not just burying us, but now my car!
We’ve been there at the unit (in the warm humidity, exacerbating my asthma again) the last four hours trying to clean up/mop up and of course what is particularly upsetting is that I had more breakage than I can bear to think of, heartbroken as my husband shook the boxes of china, etc. that I couldn’t even open, not today, it’s too raw; I know what I’m going to find; I have ears; I heard the ‘breakage’. The if-onlys; if I’d only been able to get to this earlier; they’d have been more safe either with someone else or in my home where they should be instead of a box.
I wish now that I’d take someone’s advice years ago to just call in a dealer/auctioneer and have them section out what they think they can sell; I just always think I’m gonna do it myself; I’m the one with the remembrances of the things and the people who owned them. I have a cousin who’s offered to help; I think I’m gonna take her up on the offer.
(We HAD made big pushes in the past and gotten rid of quite a lot of stuff but we’re far from done yet. I’ve slowed myself down by trying too hard to find the right places for things, like the best place to donate. the best-suited antique store or secondhand store, a museum where it would make the most sense; I’ve currently been looking for the right repository for a key collection of World War II military memorabilia from an uncle; where I could also throw in my dad’s Army uniform from WWII, etc., but that takes time and, now, time is of the essence.)
This is when ‘things’ can rule your life. Days turn into months turn into years; I’ve been living with a bulk of this for 15 years (and between three houses, two under constant/chronic, ‘remodeling’/home improvement; ironically when a house is no longer a home but a warehouse/work-in-process/progress). And stuff in storage too long can be sensitive to temperature extremes, fabrics can fade and deteriorate, books warp and tan (and what’s the point, ’cause if it’s in a box, nobody’s enjoying it).
Oh, there’s more. The guy in the garage unit next to us I find out ALSO has an old car in HIS unit which apparently leaked, unless it was a bottle of something (maybe transmission fluid or coolant but who knows what; probably got knocked off a shelf in the quake), which then somehow penetrated underneath our common wall such that it was on half of OUR floor except that by some miracle it was the ONE place where I did NOT have a towering stack of boxes. The fluid instead soaked into large pieces of cardboard we had on the floor to catch any drips from my own old car. (So, thank goodness for that ‘sponge’ effect.)
Another fortunate thing is that the manager of the facility was THERE today when normally Sunday is an alternate employee, so she got right on it, called the owner of the contents of that other unit that this was an URGENT matter he needed to attend to, they poured absorbent clean cat litter over our garage floor and made the determination (hope they’re right) that it’s not a toxic or flammable substance (do they know for sure?), we won’t be responsible for stained concrete, they even offered us another unit but no way was my husband going to move boxes from unit to unit this afternoon.
I really could just cry. This has been four days I want to forget. A calmer holiday weekend has been really disrupted.
I feel I can’t complain because ’tis I who chooses to life in SoCalif, and people in our east desert are suffering more than I from these earthquake clusters; still, I’m distressed. My husband looked at me and said, “Well, we know our priorities once and for all. This can’t continue. We’ve gotta make it a priority – – a JOB – – to go thru and be rid of all these boxes asap, in the house and offsite of the house.” We’ll be putting heads together, I’m tell’in ya; it’s really not a job for somebody else; it has to be us that tackles it. On the cheerier side, I’ll find the Roseville! I’m 95% sure it’s already in the house…it better be…
Like our governor was quoted as saying and it’s on a lot of people’s lips, ‘Californians, this is your wake-up call.’ Maybe in the last few years we had wildfire sublimate our attention from earthquake; we do have our share of natural disasters here.
Right now, though? I feel like the guy who said, “I just want to move!”
to vicki …
so sorry you have damage in the storage unit and more stress to deal with. i i know you said the sorting is a job for you and your husband, but wish i could help you with all that work. instead, i’ll cheer you on from iowa and keep praying for you.
kathy in iowa
…you are a dear as always, kathy; I’ve gotten a little too carried away again with my long comments on Claudia’s blog; sigh…
Oh, you poor thing! Too, too much to deal with. Sending you love and support, Vicki!
Thank you. And then, when we came home utterly drained – – mostly I’m just so mad at ourselves, because this was a mess and damage we could have prevented – – I was laying down for 20 minutes, getting drowsy, and here came another tremor around 5:30pm which shook me atop the bed (that one wasn’t a roller, it was a shaker) and one of the risers under the bed was lifted momentarily off its base, then went ‘crack’ and settled back into place. Eerie. (Because the old, arthritic dog can no longer jump on the higher bed, we had to ditch the frame and rise the mattress barely off the floor with those risers and it’s stable enough but nothing like a conventional box springs & mattress in a frame.) Enough!
Oh no! Enough already! Everyone needs a break from all of the tremors and aftershocks!
I have tried for years to get my husband to watch the Emma Thompson version of Sense and Sensibility, but he swears that he has already seen it. He is just confused because of the many times I watched it and he walked through the room. I did get him to watch a version of Emma a couple of weeks ago and he did like it. It took 20 years for me to get him to go to a Chinese restaurant and now he is willing to go from time to time, so I guess I will have to be patient about Sense and Sensibility. I am sorry for all the rain you are having and the consequences. We have not had enough, but when we do, I know that some of my plants will be flattened as well, but never the hydrangeas so far, luckily. I feel for you. Hopefully they will straighten back up. Your flowers are always such a pleasure to see in pictures.
Don thought the same thing. It’s because he’s seen parts of it while I was watching it. Keep at it, Beverly! Maybe he’ll finally go for it!
Poor hydrangeas. We don’t have any, sadly, so I can’t advise. I have to tell you how jealous I am that Don will sit and watch stuff like S&S with you. I have the DVD and watch it, along with the P&P series (not so much the film) regularly. When I suggest anything comparable, Dean usually says, “you can watch that when I’m traveling.” Have you seen “Becoming Jane?” I love that one too and Anne Hathaway even does a passable English accent. Well, passable enough that I buy her as Jane Austin. I always sniffle at the end of it just as I never fail to sob along with Eleanor at the end of S&S.
Tomorrow is the start of demolition of our kitchen, at long last. We have had a behemoth dumpster and port-a-potty delivered to our driveway in the last couple days. And today is the final packing away of, or transferring up to our temporary kitchen in the guest room, whatever is still in the cabinets/pantry. Lord, I hope I survive this!
But it took me years, Kay. Years! I didn’t think he’d agree last night. So you never know!
Good luck with the renovation!
if i admit that i’ve never seen “sense and sensibility” (any version), can i still come back here?!? :)
i’ve heard great things about movies like “sense and sensibility”, “pride and prejudice” and “becoming jane”, but i don’t have cable tv, hbo, hulu, etc. and am out of the swing of watching movies … to the point i’ll probably need to get out the instruction manual for my dvd player if i can even find a place to rent “s+s”.
maybe i should start with the books (strike 2?!?) …? i much prefer reading a book before seeing any movie made from it.
sorry about your pretty hydrangeas getting pummeled by the rain. would one of those grabber sticks (often sold at pharmacies) help you reach/shake the plants in the middle?
hipe you’re in the middle of a lovely dry day!
kathy in iowa
uh … i mean “hope”!
…kathy, I’m having a really irritating problem with auto-correct on my computer and we’ve been trying to get rid of it AND auto-save to no avail; I am so tired of this ridiculous word substitution (the computer doesn’t always know best!!!!) and then often I don’t proofread or my bleary eyes don’t catch it before I hit ‘send’!
Pride and Prejudice has had several adaptations, one of which – starring Colin Firth – was on PBS. I think there has been another version of Sense and Sensibility on PBS, as well. So you see, you don’t need cable tv to watch them. The books should be required reading for everyone. They’re brilliant And the adaptations, especially the ones I have mentioned are beautiful examples of acting at its best. Don just got done going on and on about the amazing portrayals in last night’s movie. He couldn’t say enough about them.
Grabber stick wouldn’t work – it would break the stems.
thanks, claudia. i will have to check pbs schedules more often! and will go for the books (none of which were required reading when i was in junior high or high school).
happy sunday.
Same to you, Kathy! xo
Sense and Sensibility With Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet has always been one of my favorites! I am just catching up on your blog as I’ve been in a remote cabin in Maine for the best two weeks and the internet there is not great. We had the same big thunder storm come across the lake yesterday – it was quite the show to see the build up of clouds and hear the thunder rolling and then finally see the rain coming across the water. But I really wanted to comment on your post of 10 days ago about the wonderful book The Salt Path. I bought the book for my husband for Father’s Day because we have walked two parts of the path – only covering small parts in the two days that we were able to hike. We both just read the bike while we were in Maine – about the same time that you were reading! The scenery on the path is beautiful but some of the uphill and down make the walk quite grueling and the idea that the author and her husband hiked over 600 miles of the path is astounding to me. As you summarized so well, there were hardships and challenges but the story ended with a note of hope . The book has earned the author, Raynor Winn, much critical acclaim and has, hopefully, helped her and her husband in their struggles. I’d encourage anyone to read it . It is a book that demonstrates the power of love in a relationship – a theme that we all need in the world we live in today!
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on The Salt Path, Carol. I completely agree with you. I also envy you having hiked some of that path. The book must have resonated even more powerfully with you because of that.
My aunt gifted us with balloon flowers years ago, for the kids lol, and I think I may actually be the one who gets the most never-ending pleasure each summer out of watching those puffy things, full of life, blow up and become big beautiful stars :)
Our lovely neighbor told me that she has been watching them with fascination every year (while she washes dishes!) so of course it was my pleasure to be able to present her with a 90th birthday present we knew she’d love. Now we get to look at hers as well!
That’s a lovely story! Sharing plants and flowers is such a wonderful thing to do! Thanks!
My hydrangeas were smashed by a rain storm last month. They seem to have come back on their own, although if you can place a stake or hook behind them and tie them up with a bit of twine it might help. Good luck. They are gorgeous blooms.
Love Sense and Sensibility. But it’s Emma, Hugh, Alan, Kate — what’s not to love?
They’ve recovered a bit and look perfectly fine from the street. So, I’m happy. Thanks, Jeanie.