Street trees 07-17-21

Placentia plants crepe myrtle trees in the sidewalk strips - not really a good choice.  They aare beautiful when they bloom, but they require more attention that the city is willing to give.  I think there are fewer than 50% remaining in our 65 house tract.  Most of the trees have rose, mauve, lavender, blooms, but there are a few white ones which seem to bloom later than the others. 

The trees tend to send out suckers from the base which turn into bushes unless someone trims them.  This white blossoming tree grows on the next street and has so much growth from the base that pedestrians have to walk out in the street to get by.  I plan to take my clippers with me tomorrow morning and give it a trim.  

Usually the blooms are so high up that I cannot take a closeup, but these are so low I have to stoop over to get close. 

I love those long hairs sticking out of the orange centers.  So elegant. 

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Miscellaneous photos 07-16-21

Here are some photo "notations".  They have nothing to do with each other and aren't part of a story.  Just random things I come across. 

While KoKo was having his appointment with Peter, the groomer, I went to Supercuts and had my hair cut.  I was so surprised to look down at my lap and see this white "puff" - a hunk of hair.  But it is WHITE!  I have had some white hair mixed in for a few years, but didn't realize there would be patches of pure white like this.  I have my mother's genes and she had very little grey/white when she died at 65.  My paternal genes are from early white haired people, I never knew my father's mother as anything but white haired.  Her sister, my great aunt Effie, wore her hair hennaed from my earliest memory, so she was also white haired.  One thing I wonder about in my non-connected family is how these genes have been passed on.  Wonder if my sister, who is much like our father's family, has white hair at 85.

 

I went to the nicest local flower shop to chose flowers for the birthday of my friend Liz.  I looked at the flowers in the cold case and could see behind the counter.  Someone had been stripping rose thorns/leaves/outer petals and made this colorful carpet.  I as a little surprised at how the prices have risen, but they were delivered on time and were greatly admired. 

Quite a few of my neighbors have planted milkweed to attract Monarch butterflies and there have been a lot this year.  I have no luck photographing them with their wings wide open, but this is a nice image.  I put a Monarch in a quilt recently, I'll look up a photo and post it one of these days.  

I am trying to finish a small quilt for the Surfside Quilters Guild Challenge with a deadline of Monday!!  Hope to finish the quilting tomorrow.  It would be wise to then start the challenge for Canyon Quilters which is due in October.  I do tend to leave things for the last minute!  

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It is a KoKo night 07-15-21

 Such a good dog!  

He looks so sweet and innocent curled up in his fuzzy bed with Froggy. 

But he bugs me when I am sewing until I put him up on the table and then he creeps closer and closer to where my hands are.  He just wants me to pay attention to him, not to my project.   He doesn't make any attempt to get closer than this, but I am always prepared to get my foot of the pedal FAST.  After a while he seems to realize he isn't going to get any petting and he wants to get down.  

I am so fortunate to have had his company during the Covid isolation.  Now that I am going out more and it is too hot to leave him in the car for even a few minutes, he must stay home alone and is not happy about that at all.  I don't wonder why dogs who are home alone all day while their people work create big messes.  

Back to PTherapy this morning after a week's hiatus and I am a bit sore tonight.  Gotta keep moving - walking twice a day with KoKo, doing the exercises the therapist recommends, not sit too long at the machine or just reading.  That old saying "Use it or lose it." keeps me moving, just not very fast! 

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Still sorting, but also sewing 07-14-21

First I want to answer questions from Gayle M-P about e-waste.  The collection last weekend was to benefit the local school district.  The way I understand it is that private companies conduct these collections and remove the precious metals and anything else that is reusable.  They sell these to companies that can reuse the materials.  The school district, or whomever set up the collection, gets a cut of the money.  I have not researched how this all works, just taken a friend's explanation.  I had collected all those broken laptops over the past 30 years because they contained a lot of private information.  When I mentioned it to friend Dick he offered to remove the hard drives.  I asked what he did with them and he said he just put them in the trash.  Once the hard drive is taken out it has no use.  He did say he has a little box full of tiny screws now!  The paper is a different matter.  Only I can go through and shred or take to a shredder, but three days have gone by and I have yet to touch any of it.  Tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow!! I am a champion procrastinator.   Thanks for you comment, hope you continue to find my blog of interest.  

Way back in March 2020 I started a quilt project of little houses which was posted by Diane Perin Hock who lives in NCalifornia.  It is a simple pattern and her idea was we would work on these blocks while Covid kept us in isolation.   Of course she didn't know that the isolation would go on for over a year!  Some quilters got right to it and finished their little house quilts and posted the images.  I fiddled around and finally finished the blocks sometime in the summer. Then last fall I sewed the blocks together.  Finally this spring I decided to finish the quilt.  I quickly discovered that I would need to piece the back, for which I had already purchased fabric.  Today, at last, I have pieced eight more little houses to use as a strip on the back and tomorrow I plan to baste everything together and start quilting.  It will just be straight vertical lines - what we called channel quilting in the 60s and 70s, but is now known by several names, mostly matchstick, I think.  

Four of the eight houses in the back strip.   I am enchanted by the "Celebrating Women" fabric by Maria Carluccio for Windham Fabrics.   Wish I had purchased a couple more yards!  

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Flowers and Cleaning Out 07-11-21

This morning the water slide was collapsed and ready to be hauled off, but the truck didn't come until afternoon.  Guess it wasn't scheduled for another party today.  It is kind of sad seeing it all wrinkled up, like a dead dragon. 

The plumeria are blooming and lending their sweet fragrance to the air.  There are a number of different colors and some say that the darker the flower the stronger the fragrance.  I'm going to start sniffing around to see if that holds true.  The most common color around here is white, but there are shades up to about a lilac color. 

Darker pink. 

And a paler pink.  The flowers are 2" to 3" and the larger leaves are about 9" long.  Not a gorgeous plant, but the flowers make up for any deficiencies. 

Aren't the petals interesting?  They grow in a sort of spiral and have just the tiniest turned up edge. 

And cleaning out!  The impetus for me was the local school district holding a two day e-waste collection.  And I had a LOT of electronic waste.  But I had to clear off around many of the items and get them in the back of the car.  Yesterday I took five laptops (from which friend Dick had removed the hard drives), five plug in phones, an answering machine, a printer, a small TV, along with two boxes of clickers, wires, dodads, and whatnots.  The laptops were accumulated over about 35 years and the phones... well, forever!   Now I only have a cell phone. Today my neighbor in the cul de sac came to carry the huge old fashioned TV out to the car.  Bless good neighbors.  I also had two printers and, of course, more wires.  AND I have about ten boxes of papers, pamphlets, and other junk to go through, shred, and put in the recycle bin.  I feel very virtuous, but every room needs sorting and de-accessing more stuff.  I suppose the realization of my mortality as 83 approaches is a large part of my motivation.  I'm on a new antidepressant and have started PTherapy again, so that might be helping also.  If I could re-build some strength I could accomplish more.  A two hour completely-zonked-out nap was required this afternoon and I still have achy muscles.  As the saying goes, "Getting old ain't for sissies."

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