De rerum rubrarum (about red things)

OK, I know you guys don't care about the Latin, but I do. So indulge me. I once read that Queen Victoria gave herself a little Latin exercise every morning to stay in shape. A good model as far as I'm concerned.

The theme is red because I am very conscious of my tomatoes these days. I tell you, gardening in Oklahoma is a real challenge, and I am absolutely thrilled that I am promised a bumper crop of tomatoes this year! Last year, like any good Seattleite, I planted my tomatoes in full sun. Wrong, wrong wrong! They grew to about 7 feet tall, but nary a fruit. It didn't help that last summer was a blazer and our triple digit days started in May, but still...This year I planted them in partial shade, and that has proven a good choice. However, there are still hazards that I have no control over. The weather, for example. One plants tomatoes in May, smack dab in the prime storm season. How many aspiring plants have had their lives shredded by golf-ball size hail or by 70 mph winds? Not to mention the tornadoes. Tomatoes, tornadoes...should be a song. Anyway, I dodged those bullets this year (although some of colleagues had their car windows smashed by hail in OKC), so--so far, I am lucky. Read more about weather in the next paragraph. I am counting on Macella Hazan's fantastic recipe for Tomato Sauce I (page 93 of the Classic Italian Cookbook) that I have used for years to keep me in tomato sauce all through the winter. It freezes marvelously, and as long as I have that and homemade chicken stock in my freezer, I'm set. Have you ever been seduced by the heirloom tomato Mortgage Lifter? I am always, because I love the name so, and I always regret it, because the damn things grow so large that they have difficulty ripening evenly. But they are large! Like Atlas, they ought to be able to lift anything, and we all know how heavy mortgages are...below, two shots of the tomato plants. You can see that they are trying to marry with the wisteria vine. I'll keep you posted on that development.

Weather, a brief note between the red themes. Did I mention that hail is described--by the NOAA weather guys--by its size in gradations as follows: nickels, golfballs, softballs, and grapefruit. I kid you not. Someday I think I'll write novels based on weather mantras like this one, "Some storms may be severe..." My weather radio is prominently positioned in my dining room, and it has a blinking light that is either green or red. I probably listen to more weather than news. Jeez, that's scary!

So back to red. The next red issue is related to cardinals.

Cardinals are among my favorite birds here. This warm morning (it was shaping up to a 105 degree day) I was delighted to see a female in the bird bath. Just like a child, she was reluctant to get completely wet at first. She perched at the edge and sipped for a while, but I could tell that she was itching to let it all go. Next she hopped in and proceeded by delicate hops into deeper and deeper water. Scary! Finally all hell broke loose, and she started flapping and flinging water all over the place. By the time I got my camera she was gone, but she came back this evening, and I snapped her. That's her partner in the bird feeder, and in third photo you can see the great view I have from my dining room with the floor to ceiling windows. When I moved in there was a miserable little pond (lined with carpet) out there, and an odd assortment of ground covers, none of which were doing well. I took the pond out knowing it would be too much maintenance, and have been gradually dividing a very useful Oklahoma ground cover (Liriope muscari or Monkey grass) and moving it into this area. OK, what's that all about? Well, liriope was a "mythical nymph," and I don't know from what culture...I bet you can Wiki it and find out the answer. Confession: I'm using a 1948 edition of The Home Garden Self-Pronouncing Dictionary of Plant Names by Ralph Bailey published by the American Garden Guild in New York. And muscari? Egads, my little book doesn't have it! Yet, muscari is one of my favorite bulbs for the intense blue color of the flower, and the blooms of this monkey grass are very similar to the shape of that flower. Muscari literally carpeted my Seattle garden, as they ought to yours, Seattleites. But don't fall for the pitiful cry of the one named "neglectum." It's faint of heart. Darwin was right. The strong and plain are the survivors.

Next installment: The Regulating Line.

More honeysuckle than Latin these days

Well, I'm going to try this again. Wella, wella, well, ah...I can think of  at least three people who have warned me that the use of the word "well" is a waste of time, but I rank it among my favorite prevaricators.

The honeysuckle (Lonicera flava in this case, I think) does not prevaricate. It knows where it wants to go: everywhere. Now there's spirit for you! A name that combines both the temporal and the eternal: Lonicera for some German guy (although his name suggests some Italian root) and flava for the color yellow in Latin.

Perhaps I've decided to try writing this blog again because I am missing my Latin, because I'm missing my friends, and I'm missing writing nonsense. I am writing, and enjoying it, but gads it's difficult at times! I am feeling particularly inept today, hence this missive. Lots of "missing" going on there. Now what's the etymology of that word? Looks like it's Middle English, like this: "I am a-missen my luv..."

Now I know that you probably don't want to follow me into interminable rambling, so I promise to devote this blog to Nature. Nature, that is, in the form of plants and weather. I have been thinking about this for awhile, as I have been turning my yard into a garden, something I would not have thought possible one year ago. It is Oklahoma, after all. But we have been blessed with a benign and relatively cool spring, and I often find myself thinking that I live in paradise for the moment. Here is another image that makes me think so:

This is my pergola where I've been reading and writing in the morning. I can do this as long as I cover myself with mosquito repellent, and after some initial resistance to the idea, I capitulated since I rarely am having white-glove lunches these days anyway. The cover up is well worth it, because my avian orchestra is remarkably diverse and especially active in the morning. There are lots of new birds right now (new cardinals every day, just like the Borgias!), and it's very amusing to watch them learn the tricks of bird life and to hear them trying to sound like adults. Funny how that doesn't happen in the human world. No student I know wants to sound like me...hmmm. 

I think that's it for today. I bet the trick to keeping this up is to keep it short. So I'll exit with a photo of my languorous Zoom. A bientôt, mes amis!
Dr. Kitty

First trip to the Wichita Mountains

Click on the image to see the my album from this day trip to the beautiful Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma.

Order outside the court

Had a few adjustments made to the front of the house...

Below is how it looked before:

You can vote!

How the new electrical revealed a termit party

We opened up the wall where the electrical panel was located,

To find studs and plates that looked like this.

Luckily, the party took place years ago, and the house was recently treated , but still, a classic nightmare!

The challenge to the electrician: which wire goes where? So far there is only one mystery circuit...

Zoom

Looked especially fashionable on a bed of packing paper...

And can always accurately pinpoint the center of any space.

The Moving Crew

Shot by Ann before the guys could get away!

Skyspace at night

Here's the view of the full moon from the courtyard "Skyspace." There was some remarkable planet hanging out to the right, but I neglected to check StarDate to see what it was...

This is a view looking into the front entry hall from the courtyard.

And the moon, the scene-stealer.

Oklahoma!

Our transit across the flatlands was punctuated by two things that stand out in my mind: fins for wind machines and a truck stop west of Amarillo, Texas where we found the perfect post card (soon to be scanned a published). Actually we had seen the wind machine fins all along our route, but they were especially dramatic in the open plains. A sign of the times; wind farms, and a beautiful one, indeed. It's one thing to see the farms with their windmills, standing like colonies of insects from outer space, performing silent and graceful ballets
in the landscape, and quite another to see the fins themselves being transported. They are huge! Often mounted as a pair on either side of a giant I beam, they are easily the most beautiful cargo on the highway.

We entered Oklahoma at sunset. The sun was at our back, an orange globe that moved slowly towards the netherworld, and the evening was ahead of us, in shades of warm blue and purple. As we drove along with that huge expanse of Oklahoma sky above us, it felt as though we were traveling in the chariot with the universal and ancient gods who bring night to the land every day of our lives.

It was like this until we hit the suburbs west of Oklahoma City, and then on the drive down to Norman, this is what we saw: the gods of commerce in control! Washingtonians would cringe at the unbridled enthusiasm for advertising here. In some ways it reminds me of my early days in LA. I especially like how the big lights of the car lots and other commercial centers came out in these photos taken while we were moving along the highway.

Well, that's it for now! I'll be back soon with more about what's happened after Ann and I arrived in Norman, and other events after that. I've been feeling like every day has been a little battle to keep ahead of the game, but now that I finally have a refrigerator, everything seems OK and I can relax. I will explain. In the meantime, I want to thank everyone for all their help during my move, and also tell you how much I miss you all!

The Journey Part III: New Mexico

These were the views coming down out of the high desert of Colorado into New Mexico. The photos don't do justice to the brilliance of the yellow aspens that lit the landscape like molten gold. Ann and I stopped at Taos for our final night on the road so that we could visit our friend Linda, and we stayed at a wonderful place called the Sagebrush Inn (http://sagebrushinn.com/sagebrushinn/index.html. ). The next morning we headed out for the final push across Texas and into Oklahoma...

Morning inside the mesa

In the morning Ann and I hightailed it back to the cliff dwellings where we toured "Spruce House," one of the largest complexes in Mesa Verde. It was built between 1211 and 1278, so it's contemporaneous with my beloved town of Cordes in France! It has 130 rooms and 8 kivas, and is thought to have housed 60-80 people. What a place to live! One has shelter, but there are also distant views down the canyon out into the surrounding desert. The canyon contains a great variety of trees and shrubs, a remarkable contrast to the stark nature of the rock dwellings.

The Journey Part II: The Far View Inn on the Mesa

After our visit to Arches, we headed down the highway to Mesa Verde, where we were able to reserve a room at the Far View Inn, 12 miles into the park. The road wound steadily upwards from the entry to the top of the mesa, and man oh man, what views! It seemed that we could see for hundreds of miles in every direction, and we were blessed with benign weather so it was comfortable to get out and walk around. We were astounded to see that the Far View Inn sat at the highest point on the mesa, so that all motel rooms had sweeping views of the surrounding desert. Below is a view of the motel units, which were built mid-century and merge with the mesa-top form pretty well, in my opinion.

We arrived just in time to visit the museum and get a look at the cliff dwellings that we would visit the next day. That evening we attended a lecture on the history of the dwellings and the Indian cultures of the area, and afterwards we had a most delicious dinner in the Inn restaurant. Our dinner included local specialties such as mole sauce, corn pudding, and prickley pear relish. Get thee to the Far View Inn! http://http://www.visitmesaverde.com/accommodations/far-view-lodge.aspx

My cat Zoom was anxious to see the views too. In the middle of the night I got up to get something out of the car and he escaped, running away from me as fast as his legs could take him, with his tail up and his loose belly fur swinging merrily side to side. I despaired of chasing him, and sat down on the stoop in front of our room. It was a beautiful night with a million stars gleaming. I would have been completely at peace except that I could also hear rustlings that suggested horned owls on the prowl. Occasionally I called "Zoom, Zoom!" and finally he did appear and I buried my nose in his fur with relief.

Cliff dwellings seen in the evening, and below, Ann offering you a bite of trout.

The Journey Part I

Ann Hirschi and I left Seattle Thursday morning, September 30 to head for Oklahoma via the Southwest. The Subaru was stuffed with all sorts of things that I thought would be necessary for our trip and for our survival in Oklahoma until the time the movers arrived. Turned out that the only thing that really came in handy was the electric hot water kettle. The back of the car was devoted to cats and plants. Zoom and Beryl rode out the trip in their cat carriers like veterans of travel, although this was the first time they had been on a journey longer than the 5-minute trip to their vet. The first day we pressed through to Ontario, Oregon, where we stayed in a nondescript motel and enjoyed a Mexican dinner with some very good margheritas.

The next day we drove down through Idaho and into Utah. It was a second day of steady driving, as we planned to dally later in lower Utah. The most remarkable thing that happened this day was that we experienced the worst traffic jam either of us could remember as we crawled from Ogden to Provo. It was three hours of stop and go, and there was no exit. Highway 15 is the only was to move between the mountains and the Salton Sea, and we strongly recommend that you avoid it at all costs. However, once we escaped this torture, the landscape we were driving through at sunset (along Highway 6) was gorgeous. By nightfall we had arrived at Price, proud home of more than 57 varieties of immigrants (no kidding; one of the sights promoted in local literature is the cemetery where the smorgasbord of names can be seen on the gravestones!), and we found a local brew pub for our dinner. Our motel hosts were Polish, and had Polish dresses on display in their lobby. Breakfast was very good!

The third day we finally enjoyed some spectacular scenery. Our first stop was at Arches National Park where these pictures were taken. We were there around noon, so the light was high, but still the landscape was magnificent. Ann spent more time in the museum that I did, as I was occupied with my feline charges, and she may have some information to add to this post, but we both agreed that this was a place to return to!