Creating

We continued to work in the yard as weather permitted this week. By Friday afternoon, after a morning spent with our regular breakfast group, a stop at a local nursery to get some ideas for some replacement shrubs for the yard, then to the grocery store for Thanksgiving dinner shopping, and finally an exercise walk, and after a late lunch, I was ready to stay indoors and do a little creating.

First up was a new bouquet for the family room, made with a bunch of grocery store mums added to hydrangeas and snippings from the yard. 

 I used one of my old McCoy vases from the  1940's, like me, now an antique. 

 Beauty Berry Bush (Callicarpa) is so much fun to add to bouquets. 

 Would you believe that when these hydrangeas first bloom, they are white? 

 Then I decided that since I would not be spending Thanksgiving with any of my siblings this year, I would make cards to send to them.  I used photos from my files. These were taken in our yard in 2011, when we had an early frost. 

 I used a favorite hymn of the season for the verse.

 I keep a template in my desktop files to format the greeting and the signature on the back. 

I added a handwritten message and got them into the mail at the post office before going to a drama production at Irene's school. 

Missoula Children's Theater teams travel all over the country putting on week long after school workshops in theater arts. From first meeting with the kids who wish to participate on Monday, they hold practices each evening, and the culmination is a production with two performances on Friday. 

Irene was a Houyhnhnm Horse. Don't ask. I didn't get it either. It was some kind of Gulliver's Travels in Space. She is the one in blue below.

 (Terrible cell phone photos from deep in the auditorium)

But the point is that the kids had a great time and participated in a wonderful experience. 

Creativity is a good thing. 

"Baby, the rain must fall" and other stuff

"I'm doing my best to find opportunities to laugh, especially at myself. 

This afternoon we went for our usual walk. It had rained an inch over night, but while we were out taking care of other business this morning, the sky cleared to blue for a while. Back home, after lunch, we set out, me without any rain gear, because, well, the rain was done. Right?

Wrong.

We got caught in a fast moving squall and here I am, one big drip. 

I  told Tom to get the camera, because I was over due for a blog post, and I might as well laugh and go with this. 

Then, since I was already wet, I put on a dry yard jacket and went out into the garden to pick some material for a new kitchen table bouquet. 

Making arrangements out of material from our yard is something I love to do. It consumes all of my attention for a while and takes my mind off of other things. That's good right now. 

This morning I got some grocery shopping done, and then we set off to the light rail station for a trip to Capitol Hill to the Group Health Medical Center. It has been six months since I got my hearing aids and it was time for a check up to see that everything was still working well.

Since we live near the two Link light rail stations, we really like using that form of public transportation to go into the city. The freeways are always slow and the timing unpredictable. Of course the rail is not all that fast. We found parking on the top floor of the parking garage at the new Angle Lake station, waited for the next train, rode about 45 minutes into and through the city, then had a six block walk uphill to the medical center. But it was easy, cheap with our senior discount, and stress free, except for the political articles we were reading on our phones on the way. It took about three hours for a 15 minute appointment, but we were OK with that. 

Six months into having enhanced hearing with my hearing aids, I am used to them and they do help at certain times of my day. If I am out walking and then working in the yard, I don't put them in until late afternoon, but I wear them in the evenings for listening to the news and watching TV. I wear them whenever I go any where. I usually forget I am wearing them.   They do still have a sort of metallic, rattly sound to then in certain environments, and even though they are tied to my iPhone, the sound quality for listening to iTunes is bad. I use my iPod instead for music. If someone asks me if I like them, I say I don't really LIKE them, but I use them. Tom says they make a big difference. 

Now it is 5:15, and as I turn my head to look out the upstairs window, all I see is blackness. It's time to go downstairs, close the blinds, make some dinner and settle in. The dark season is upon us. 

I'll keep looking for reasons to laugh. I'll need to, because the rain must fall. 

Aftermath

It has been a difficult and exhausting week. My emotions have been all over the place. 

Initial shock led to grief right after the election. Then anger set in. I have read many articles and comments and participated in online discussions and arguments. I have found much support for my emotional roller coaster and my point of view. I was also exposed to the harshness of those who supported Trump and wanted us whiners to just get over it. Many were insulted that we blamed them for supporting racism, misogyny, bigotry, hatred, lies. After all, many were "just voting for their party". I still believe a vote for Trump was a vote for ignorance and hate. 

By Wednesday I had reached the stage where I  was just curious about what would happen in a Trump presidency. Then I read more articles about what the Trump presidency might be like that scared the hell out of me and disturbed me deeply. By this morning, Friday, I was ready to fight!

Now, as news begins to leak out from the transition, I realize that we have no idea what Trump will be like as a president. We only know what he was like as a candidate, where anything was allowed as long as it helped him win. The ugliness of that campaign was compounded by the dishonesty and slander of his opponents. Rage was released, bullying was condoned, and it all had the taint of evil. 

Trump conned his supporters and his political party. No one knows what he really believed, and I don't think he did either. He just made it up as he went along, based on the boisterous reactions he got from his crowds. 

Then reality set in. He won. Oh My God, he was going to be the President of the United States. Even Trump had to be taken back by that realization. He actually had to find a way to be presidential. He met with that good, kind and respectful man, President Obama, and he seems to have come away a bit more of a grown up. I am hearing now that he no longer plans to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but instead to revise it. And it does need some fixing. 

The Congressional Republicans, who are in charge of both houses, are in for a bumpy ride. We all are. We really have no idea where any of this is going.

I can only have a glimmer of hope now that President Trump will not resemble Candidate Trump. We have him as our president for four years at least. We need to have some good come out of it. Please. 

And still, at the end of this week, I remain deeply sad that I did not have the opportunity to celebrate the election of the first woman to be President of the United States. I have been a supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton for twenty-five years. I really wanted to be able to call her Madame President. 

Tears

It's raining this morning. Kinda' feels like tears.

More tears.  Tears of grief. 

Tears for our personal loss, and tears for our nation's loss.

I just watched Hillary Clinton give her concession speech. What a strong, beautiful, caring woman. I grieve for the lost opportunity to have this good woman as our president. 

Because it is raining, we will be indoors. After watching the aftermath of yesterday's election, we will launch into house cleaning. As we go along, dusting and vacuuming and sorting and organizing, we will begin to deal with cat toys and perches and the residue of cat hair, and I will shed  more tears. 

We will still be watching, for the cat that is gone, and the woman who should have been our leader.

And we will continue to be aware and involved. As Hillary said, 
"Fighting for what is right is worth it". 

Where is Josy?

We'll be asking ourselves that for a while yet.

Where is Josy? Is she on the couch...

in the bedroom?

 in the family room?

 in the living room?

In her box?

Or her "bowl"?

 Or playing at the catnip infused base?

 Getting a drink out of the shower?

 Or sprawled on the bedroom carpet waiting for a rubdown?

 At the patio door thinking about going outside?

Or actually hanging out outside?

Or, most likely, in her nest in the office/sewing room closet?

No, today she is in none of those places.

Sadly, Josy is gone. She is no more. Over the weekend she suddenly began to fail. She seemed fine on Friday. I had noticed that she was drinking a lot of water lately, but I didn't ask Dr. Google until she took a sudden turn for the worse. By Monday morning when we took her to the vet, she was, as the Doctor said, "a very sick kitty". We left her at the clinic for tests, and got the call back an hour or so later. Josy had feline diabetes, was seriously dehydrated, had a kidney infection and her test numbers were very bad. 

Treatment would have required a long hospitalization, intravenous fluids, antibiotics and insulin, and then if that brought her back she would have to have two shots a day for the rest of her life. Not only would Josy have to endure that, so would we, and the price tag would run $4000 to $6000. 

We have a choice with our pets. Kitties don't have to live that way. We chose to let her go, as the doctor suggested we might. 

We called our son Jake,  who first adopted Josy from a shelter as an adult cat and had her for about three years, until he had to change living arrangements and couldn't keep her. We welcomed Josy into our home, and came to love her deeply.

Jake was in agreement with our choice.  And so on Monday afternoon, as I held her in my arms, she slipped peacefully away.

This morning, for the first time in five years, I did not get up, put on my fleecy, cat hair infused robe, go downstairs, pick up my kitty, give her a hug, and then fill her food and water dish. 

I din't quite know how to start my day.

We will be looking for her for a while yet, but she is gone. We are missing her. We are sad. 

Rain

This morning we stood in the rain on the sidelines of a West Seattle soccer field, watching Isaac's team, the Rockets, play to a victory. This team has struggled, having been formed from the remnants of other disbanded teams, but are showing a lot of improvement. It was good entertainment, and worth venturing out on a rainy Saturday morning. 

We have had a lot of rain lately, in fact we just endured the wettest October in recorded history. But we did have two days of sunshine this week, and that allowed us to get some work done outside after returning home from Whidbey Island. 

We got the lawn raked and mowed. Of course now, this afternoon, the leaves are continuing to fall. There will be several more rakings. 

 I have been working on cleaning out this bed, clipping and weeding and removing unwanted plants. Then I mulch with the raked up leaves. 

 The path to the Secret Garden has a red carpet. 

 You can see the raindrops in the camera lens. We were supposed to meet up with my sister and brother-in-law to go to an antique show this afternoon, but Laurie is sick so that outing was cancelled. That gave me time to fill, so I ventured outside in the rain to take a few photos for a blog post. Pac 12 college football in on TV in the background. 

 We picked up the wire yesterday to mow the lawn and then put it back down, but I see the raccoons found new territory to rip up. 

The show is over in the front yard. The leaves are now mulching the shrub bed. 

There is a color show in the dining room, besides outside the window. The Christmas cacti, which are in fact the Halloween and Thanksgiving cacti, are blooming in profusion - orange red of course. 

Now, what else can I find to do on this rainy afternoon? I'll check my blog list and see what you all are up to.

Another working trip to Whidbey Island

The weather didn't look too promising when we made our way north out of Seattle Monday morning. It was a bumpy ride on the ferry to Whidbey Island. But when we arrived the rain had let up and the weather had calmed down. 

We had lunch and then got started on the gardening project. We cleaned out the beds, raked and weeded, and got ready to plant tulip bulbs the next day. By Tuesday noon we had the bulbs planted and ten bags of compost spread. 

It got very windy Monday afternoon, and the surf was up over on the bay. 

The gull gallery next door kept track of our comings and goings. 

 We had time for a walk on the dike along the lagoon. 

By Tuesday afternoon we were ready for our next project. Tad, our IT Guy and friend to Jake and us, had donated a big TV and two weeks ago he and Jake and Jake's cousin Andy got the cable hook up installed, but didn't have a stand. Our job was to figure out a stand for the TV. We decided to re-purpose a shelf we already had at the cabin, but then we had to make the whole thing secure. 

 Fastening the shelf to the wall was easy to figure out, but securing the TV was more tricky. We worked with Pip at Ace Hardware in Freeland, but couldn't come up with a means of attaching anything to the TV. After lots of designing and engineering that didn't work, I decided we should go with heavy duty Velcro. 

 The sticky Velcro was attached to the wall and secured with screws to the studs. 

 Then the Velcro was stuck to the back of the TV, a foot long piece, with a T strip across the top of the strap for extra reinforcement. 

 We don't think that shelf or TV are going anywhere unless the tsunami hits. 

That was a time consuming project that left us with just a little time Wednesday afternoon. Tom took a nap and I went for a short walk. 

And now we are back home in Seattle. The Cubs have just won an epic World Series. 

All is good, unless, of course you are a Cleveland fan.