Janet – Page 6 – In the Woods

stickwork sculpture

Brushing my teeth with my left hand is getting very old. Although my right hand, which was injured so badly on October 1st, is making a lot of progress in its healing, I’m still waiting for new skin to completely cover the worst/last spot on the edge of my palm. And while I can use most of the fingers now, my pinkie still winces when I put any pressure on it. But I did manage to chop an onion on my own and drive the car a couple of days ago.

Been feeling very frustrated and lethargic this week, and spending way too much time watching TV. I think I’ve caught just about every news conference our governor has called to update Connecticut residents on the very slow progress the utility crews are making restoring power. As of this morning, 200,000+ customers are still without electricity, seven days after the storm. A couple of times Gov. Malloy has said that the last time we had a storm like this in October was never…

Janet and I spent an afternoon at the Florence Griswold Museum a couple of weeks ago – it seems so much longer ago – and I will resume posting pictures of the fairy tale birdhouses soon. But for now I’m sharing a few pictures of a stickwork sculpture that was also on the museum grounds. The artist is Patrick Dougherty at Stickwork. His website lists other places he has installations. We were enchanted! (I wonder if it survived the storm!)

along the river

It’s snowing like crazy outside, after four hours of rain. The changeover has occurred a lot sooner than predicted, so I’m happy we got up early and finished our errands before the October nor’easter made it here. I bought new slippers while we were out and my feet are delightfully warm and happy now. Time for a few more fairy tale birdhouses!

The Florence Griswold Museum sits on the banks of the Lieutenant River, pictured above. As you can see, the grass is still a summery green and the colors have not changed on all the trees yet. And it is now snowing – three seasons all in the same week. Janet has decided that the Lieutenant River will be a good place to have my first kayaking lesson in the spring.

#7. “The Sea King’s Palace” by Susan Zirlen & Mahady Makrianes (in honor of Pete, a prince among men), based on The Little Mermaid.

#9. “Neverland Adventures” by Kristen Thornton, based on Peter Pan.
London, where Peter, Wendy, Michael and John are searching for Peter’s shadow…

Captain Hook has captured Tinkerbell…

#10. “Up a Tree” by Sue Chism, based on Sinbad the Sailor.
Giant birds wrecked Sinbad’s ship…

and kidnapped him…

#12. “The Troll Bridge Saga” by Sheila Wertheimer & The Museum’s Garden Gang, based on Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Of course this is my favorite fairy tale because it’s Norwegian…

That was a freaky hungry troll “under” the bridge!

Tomorrow we’re having a Going Away/Halloween party for Nate & Shea and the gang. Cooking two vegetarian slow cooker dinners. Maybe there will be a goblin or two who aren’t camera-shy…

of feathers and fairy tales: enchanted birdhouses at the museum

Janet and I had a lovely time yesterday at the Florence Griswold Museum, The Home of American Impressionism, in Old Lyme, Connecticut. We were there to see a delightful temporary outdoor exhibit. Following Miss Griswold’s favorite cats, Padjkins and Toto, we were led on a meandering tour of 43 whimsical fairy-tale-birdhouse creations. A couple of hours later and tuckered out, we were wondering why on earth cats like to take the longest possible route from one place to another.

#1. “Thump!” by Julie Solz & Steve Hansen, based on The Wizard of Oz. Follow the yellow brick road…

#4. “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, Zzzzzzzz!” by Donna Carlson & Georgann Ritter, based on Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs. This scene seems to be part of a magnificent Cut Leaf European Beech tree…

#21. “Out on a Limb” by Brad Painter & Nora MacDonnell, based on The Swiss Family Robinson.

Although there are too many pictures (249!) to share here, I will try to add a few more of my favorites, in no predictable order, for a few more posts in the near future. Stay tuned!

into the forest

Sunday turned out to be the best day for Janet and me to begin exploring Pachaug State Forest, which is the largest one in Connecticut, with a total of 24,000 acres in parts of five towns, including Voluntown, where we began.

We had to adjust to not having signs to identify the trees and plants we were looking at. This place is pretty wild, not like the well-marked arboretum we’re used to!

There were a lot of unusual mushrooms, like the red one with white dots (above) and the huge rust colored ones sticking out of a stump (below)…

Next trip Janet is going to introduce me to me kayaking! Wonder if I’ll have to leave my camera on the shore…

at the herb farm

Last weekend we took a ride out to The Salem Herbfarm. It was a hot and humid day so we didn’t last too long. Took a few pictures and bought a moonflower and a bamboo pole for it to climb on. Fortunately the weather has cooled off for now, after a wild evening of violent thunderstorms, which produced devastating tornadoes in Springfield and Monson, Massachusetts…

This weekend Tim has been working from home and a kind of lethargy has set in, in spite of the delightful weather. This past week I got a lot of work done on my garden and the living room. Janet and I are making plans…

No more house centipede sightings and yesterday I finally got up the nerve to sit on the couch again…

Reading a fascinating book: A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgård. It’s an unusual piece of historical fiction, based loosely on the lives of characters from the Bible. But it gets into their heads and reinterprets the ways Cain or Noah, for example, might have experienced Biblical events. The author’s descriptions of the natural world of pre-flood times are detailed and vivid. The book is supposed to examine the nature of angels, too, but I’m only a little less than half way through.

light in the spring

Maggie ~ 4.15.11 ~ Colchester, Connecticut

It has turned into a three-day weekend for me! Friday Janet and I got together to create pysanky – Ukrainian Easter eggs. While visiting her I was introduced to Maggie, a very sweet twelve-year-old shelter dog with arthritis who is a pit bull or mostly pit bull. She barked for a while after I arrived – Janet explained she had anxiety issues. So Maggie and I had something in common and soon relaxed around each other. Maggie kept Janet and me company as we worked on our eggs, and then the three of us took a nice long walk along the rural roads surrounding Janet’s home. It was a bright, warm-in-the-sunshine, cool-in-the-shade, day. On my way out Janet gave me some venison and a recipe for it to try out on Tim. Thanks to the GPS, I successfully navigated my way home!

Tim was working off and on this weekend, but we did get out a little on Saturday, stopping by the grocery store to get some more ingredients for the venison stew. It was very windy and we were amazed to see the flag over the grocery store flying straight out. Storm clouds were gathering, but I managed to get a picture of the chionodoxa popping up through the periwinkle and dead leaves in my garden. Tim returned to working, from home, and I watched a couple of other versions of Jane Eyre from Netflix. The rain came down hard overnight, but this day dawned bright and sunny again, a bit warmer than it was Friday.

Is it so small a thing
To have enjoyed the sun,
To have lived light in the spring,
To have loved, to have thought, to have done?
~ Matthew Arnold
(Seasons)

Today was a slow cooker day. The recipe Janet gave me for the venison stew was given to her by Erik, Janet and Tim’s stepdad, who died in 2008. He was a fantastic cook! When I first read through the recipe, I noted with a smile that it was from an out-of-print cookbook Erik had, called Glorious Stew by Dorothy Ivens. This brought back a pleasant memory. Many years ago Tim had enjoyed a stew Erik had prepared so much that he wanted the recipe. When Erik showed him the cookbook Tim decided he had to have one, too, but it was already out of print. So Tim asked the Book Barn to set aside a used copy for him, if one ever came into the store. A used copy did show up after what seemed like a very long time, so Tim was thrilled to finally have his own copy! 🙂

So… I modified the recipe a bit for the slow cooker and it smelled so good cooking away all day. Being a morning person, I love slow cookers because I can prepare something yummy early in the morning when I’m fresh and alert and then have something wonderful to eat in the evening, when I’m too tired, cranky and overwhelmed to cook. When Tim got a break this afternoon, we went out for a walk around Olde Mistick Village and when we arrived back home the stew smelled tangy and very tempting. It was delicious!

I took some pictures of the ducks and shops on our walk. Yes, today we have enjoyed the sun…

book of events

“The Artist’s Mother in the Little Room” by Hans Thoma — “The Artist’s Mother in the Little Room”
by Hans Thoma

One year ago today I started writing this blog. Changes…

…I use those little dots a lot…

I think it’s because, as the amazing Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska observes:

Every beginning is always a sequel, after all,
and the book of events is always open halfway through.

Changes keep coming along, welcome or unwelcome, keeping us on our toes, and the Japanese scholar Kakuzō Okakura reminds his readers:

The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.

I feel like I’ve fumbled around this past year, but have finally accepted that this blog has been and is going to be a hodgepodge of anything and everything I think about, dream about, or experience, although the line between “reality” and dreams in my consciousness is often pretty fuzzy. For this blog, over the year I have tried out five WordPress themes, Coraline, Structure, Tarski, Treba, and this one, Elegant Grunge, as far as I can remember. It’s fun playing with the widgets! My favorite posts are the ones with pictures taken on my nature walks with Bernie, Beverly, Janet and Tim. Making friends with my readers, reading their comments here and reading and commenting on their blogs is the best part of being in the blogosphere!

On March 14, 2010 I started another blog, called “…select and collect all the words…,” which was at first to house my collection of quotes. Then I discovered all the art available in the public domain at Wikimedia Commons! So I spent hours pairing quotes with paintings, and wound up neglecting this blog. Finally on January 6, 2011, I posted my last quote there, and made the decision to merge the contents of that blog into this blog. It will take some time, but for now I think I’ll post quotes and paintings on the weekends. Of course, that may change, too.

On March 23, 2010 I started a family history blog for our relatives, close family and distant cousins, Rodgers Family History. (Actually we had a family history website since 2004. I created it on our own domain using Front Page 2000. But using WordPress has been a nice change, making presentation and navigation so much easier.) That “blog” has been neglected, too, but new cousins have found what is already up there and generously added to my database. Connecting with them has been so satisfying. I hope to get more of my data up there in the near future.

“Sailboats in Le Petit-Gennevilliers” by Claude Monet

A slower and incomplete change has been The Change, a hormonal storm through which I am still trying to navigate. The seas around my little boat are pretty choppy, and I’m never sure if I’m making the waves or being tossed around by what others are leaving in their wakes as they sail, drift, or jet-ski through their own lives. And then there is an energy from the tides that doesn’t originate with people, but pulls from the universe through the moon. Steady and yar…

A year ago I was asking Stevie Nick’s questions:

Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

I am still asking. And sometimes answering affirmatively. Some day I hope Carole King’s lyrics will be my most frequent answer…

My life has been a tapestry
Of rich and royal hue;
An everlasting vision
Of the ever-changing view;
A wondrous woven magic
In bits of blue and gold;
A tapestry to feel and see;
Impossible to hold.

Well, it just occurred to me that perhaps this blog isn’t a hodgepodge, but a tapestry! And with that thought, I’m off to embrace another year of writing about the “ever-changing view.”

winter wren

I’ve been meaning to post this video since November 12, when I found it on Val’s blog. All the excitement of Thanksgiving made me forget about it! Watch what the wren does with the little caterpillar! It’s from a website called The Music of Nature. If Janet, Nancy or Ellie is reading this, you can go to the website and the featured video is of the Eastern Towhee, which one of you identified for me as the bird with the “drink your tea” song. Now I can picture it better!

Scrambling around here – Auntie is getting a hospital bed delivered tomorrow and is very impatient to get her old bed and some other furniture out of her cottage. She had a freak out while we were in Virginia and spent a few days with Beverly & John and Dad. She’s back home now and soon will be set up with a professional companion-homemaker for regular help. In case she needs to be with people again, they’re setting up a room for her at Dad’s, and furniture is once again on the move between households. Hope the dust settles by Saturday because the kids are coming over to decorate a tree and we better have one by then!

This is my first holiday season at WordPress and I love the little falling snowflakes feature! I love snow, but today we’re having a big wind and rain storm. Temperatures will be dropping sharply tomorrow… Nice to be cozy and tucked inside…

insects and trees

Look who reappeared! On Monday Tim spotted our darling little cannibal taking an afternoon sun bath on the west wall under the kitchen window! Since I never finished weeding the garden I think she decided to stick around after all! I think we’ll call her Iris, as she was sitting on an iris leaf when first I found her. (See Mantidae Stagomantis if you missed her story.) I wonder what the neighbors will think if I just let my garden go wild so praying mantises will feel at home here?

In recent years we’ve had a cricket population explosion at the end of summer, many of them finding their way into the basement laundry room where they would sing and scuttle around. We’ve tried to find a humane and non-toxic way to discourage them from coming inside, and it would seem that Mother Nature decided to help us out by sending Iris the cricket carnivore. We’ve only heard a couple of crickets this year! We hope she decides to deposit her eggs in the garden and helps to restore some natural balance in the neighborhood.

Friday afternoon we got flu shots, which was my first time getting one. And promptly, on the ride home, we both came down with colds. So it was a crummy cranky weekend, and mainly why I haven’t been online (except to play Scrabble) and have missed reading and commenting everyone else’s blogs. Hope to catch up today and tomorrow.

The tree pictures from Avery Point are for Janet, because I didn’t manage to squeeze them into my last post. 🙂

Last night we did see the full moon and Jupiter briefly through the clouds, but Jupiter didn’t show up in the photographs we tried to get. And we had a thunderstorm soon after we saw them, a regular, nice, thunderstorm.

I’m so happy Autumn is here! (Even if it is supposed to be hot and humid again tomorrow.) I would have loved to go apple picking yesterday or today to celebrate, but I think we’ll have to do that this weekend, when we’re feeling a little better. The weather on Sunday is supposed to be more autumn-like, so maybe I’ll bake a wheat-free apple crisp!