These Are The Nights…

Or mornings that try women’s souls.  The nights that drag by, the nights that it seems I hear every clock tick in this marvelous world of battery operated clocks that in truth, don’t…  This is one of those nights that thoughts bounce around in my head like ping pong balls, one of those nights where my mind can’t really settle on one thing to lull myself to sleep with, instead I’m jerked like a fish on a hook from one thought  to the next.

How much iodine did we mix with baby oil back in the day when it was far from any doctor’s mind that tanning might not be really very good for your skin, much less the possibility of being lethal…?

Have I ever written about learning to ride a bike on my big sister’s bike?  The one that the seat was too high for me to sit on but I wanted to learn so badly to ride that I would stand on the pedals, my hands having to reach up above my shoulders to hold onto the handlebars…

Or about the times that we, my brother and the neighbor kids and I, would have ‘hoe-downs’ in the front yard that were nothing more than our mother’s prayers being answered that we were running off the excess energy before bedtime, wrestling or chasing fireflies to catch and put in a jar with holes carefully punched in the lid so we wouldn’t suffocate them, no matter that occasionally we would pinch their glowing butts off to make rings for our fingers or a pin on our t-shirts…

Maybe it was an evening for playing ‘statue’ when the bigger kids would whirl us around and then let our hands go and how we stopped we had to hold that position… until we were itchy from falling in the grass on sweaty summer evenings until we were called in for our baths before bedtime and how sweet and fresh the sheets smelled from being hung out on the clothesline to dry in the sunshine and summer breeze back in the day before clothes ‘dryers’ came to live in our basement.

Did I ever tell you that I could dribble a basketball one hundred  times without missing a beat before I was four or that my mom had her first heart attack the summer I was twelve and I thought for years it was my fault because I had been out playing all day and she didn’t know where I was?  Of course it was no different than any other summer day when my baby brother and me and the next door neighbor had been out riding our bikes, playing in our hideouts or walking to the neighborhood store three blocks away back when kids could walk to neighborhood stores but still I knew it had to be my fault…

Or about the crush I had on the cutest boy in the sixth grade class, a little blond/tow headed kid that right now I can’t remember his last name but I can remember riding bikes with around the school yard singing every song I could think of from the musical “Oklahoma” thinkin’ I could get him to fall in love with me even though I didn’t have a clue, though I thought I did, about what love really was… probably the very first crush I ever had on anyone that I can recall right now?

Or about the crush I had on my p.e. teacher the very next year that drove that little blond/tow-headed boy that had gone on to another school right out of my memory?  And did each and every one of us have a crush on our p.e. teacher or band teacher or English teacher no matter what sex they were?

Thinking about how Hallie loves weiners and how I love schnauzers and how wonderful it is to have all these differences that make us each so unique and to really enjoy the facets that make us all bright and shining stars in a universe, a galaxy, a milky way of personalities and how we find each other by such random ways in our different worlds…  A coincidence? The birds of a feather axiom?

All these thoughts and more… and it is now six in the morning, I’ve been to bed four times only to toss and turn, finally giving in and getting up to go read stuff on FaceBook or to play Farmville or Cafe World trying to lull myself into mind numbing stupidity to slow my brain down enough to finally fall asleep and, obviously since I’m typing this missile, it hasn’t worked and since I’m going to get my hair cut at nine I will just give up, plan on staying up and hopefully watching the sun that we haven’t seen in a day or three rise in the east only to be fighting sleep in the chair while getting my hair cut or, better yet, laying getting my hair washed and my scalp massaged and feeling totally pampered…

Or is all of this brought on by withdrawal from watching more butts that you could bounce a silver dollar off of during the past two weeks, glutes and pecs and traps that were hewn and cut by hours, weeks and years of a single pursuit, a focus and a direction that I never in my a.d.h.d. life ever knew for more than, oh, perhaps twelve minutes whether in pursuit of my next meal or Olympic Gold?

Or is this no more than the sleepless ravings of a feverish mind?

Who knows…?

The Shadow knows…

Who cares?

Hallie, when did you corner the market on Ambien and why won’t you share?

Everywhere…

You’ve seen a lot of here through my posts of the past and I’ve shown you quite a bit of there through the last few posts. I’m having trouble finding the rest of the photos I wanted to wind up there with so now we are going to everywhere so you can see the blank slate that I am starting with… This is a rental home so I won’t be able to be as comfortable in doing any radical creativity but I can certainly make the place feel more like a home.

Here we go…

The house is on a corner and has this fourteen foot wall in the front yard. I’m already planning on what I’m going to do out here.

There are a few neglected and older shrubs along the about 3 foot wide bed that goes along the walk heading up to the front door.

then the walk is right along the house to the nook where you find the front door. This is looking north to the stockade fence. The shrub on the right is a rose of sharon that was there when we rented. Our rose of sharon that I’ll be bringing is younger and shorter and I will plant it closer to the brick pillar.

This is a crepe myrtle and there is one planted on either side of the drive way and you know that something else is going to be planted in there so it doesn’t look so plain.

This is looking up the side yard from another gate in the stockade fencing. I love the fence, SueSue doesn’t. She can’t see what’s going on in her world except for the occasional squirrel that drops into the yard, the she is on a mission to get that critter. Being the ornery and lazy woman that I am, I’m going to start feeding the birds AND the squirrels. After I need some entertainment to lighten my day occasionally, too. And if she catches one and kills it, I know how to skin them and fry them. I’m not too worried about that happening, because while Suess is fast she is not quite bright. She runs straight at them and you know squirrels can twist and turn on a dime…

This is the back yard. It is pretty large which the girls love, except with the stockade fence they can’t keep track of what all might be going on in their corner of the world.

This is the side of the house that the front is on, just the other side of the fence.

As I do my planting thing, I will take pictures along but I must tell you that Carol’s sister has her ideas about how we should plant the place. She, besides being rapid cycling bi-polar, has got to be ocd as much as she likes and needs order in her life.

She likes things in a row, I like things the flow. When I got to the house I took my babies out and looked around. When I saw a number of plants all along the back fence all in a row and almost exact distance apart. I just got my shovel out of the truck and started working on them… even as boring as she like it. Carol and I have lived together for so long that she know that there is method to my madness and whatever I do usually comes out somewhat unusual. And usually she loves what I do even if I do things somewhat with odd combinations that I enjoy trying odd colors and/or textures. So I know that while I will keep as many plants alive as I can, this will be essentially a plain, basic garden because the riots of color and shapes of a garden that Carol and I both enjoy is like raucous noise to her sister.

So as I get things planted and growing I’ll keep you posted but for right now, besides my life being bland, I’m so exhausted from the moving that I probably won’t be a very interesting blogger. And if I don’t live through this move I just want to say thanks to all of you who have become my friends through this wonderful blogging medium.

Oklahoma Burning...

I had intended to write a new post yesterday, but I made the mistake of turning on the TV to check out the weather as I was planning on driving to Ft. Worth today to spend Easter with my brother and s.i.l. and any other sibs that I might run into while I'm here.

The first thing I saw was a home burning. It was so wind driven that it looked like someone was burning it with a flame-thrower. Then the camera operator in the chopper pulled back from the tight shot and there was fire EVERYWHERE. I was, needless to say, glued to the TV for the rest of the evening.

The first reports started coming in around 1:30 or 2 p.m. All three Okla. City TV stations were broadcasting about the fires continually from about 2:30 in the afternoon. Oklahoma was burning from south to north, from Texas to Kansas, being pushed by southern winds that were blowing from 40-60 m.p.h. The ember fireballs were blowing up to 1/4 of a mile over the firefighters and starting more fires.

The firefighters were trying to get ahead of the fires but the wind was being ferociously aggressive. I wasn't worried at this point about where I live because the closest fires were about ten miles north of where we lived. When I started getting worried about where we lived is when the winds started turning from south to north with the cool front that was coming in from the west and north and the winds were expected to increase and drive the fire back the way it came. That problem with that was the fire had been driven by the wind so fast that while a lot had been burned, there was a lot that hadn't been burned.

Whole small towns were evacuated. In Midwest City and Choctaw, both of which are east of OKC, but still bedroom communities,and Wellston which is north of Choctaw, over 100 homes were destroyed. One home would catch fire and the firefighters would be fighting it and the house next door would catch on fire or maybe the embers would blow over the house next door to the second house down the street. And all of this was happening in front of the viewers eyes.

Got to stop for now, but I will be back later and wrap up this story. I can only deal with getting my brain wrapped around so much and then I have to rest and think a bit. I just wanted to get this started and let you all know that we were okay. I'll get back to you later this evening.

Please bear with me...

Part 2---


I'm back. When disasters happen, and this is a disaster, I have to think things through and try to get my brain wrapped around it. I want to try to tell you as honestly as I can how I see things through my eyes. All of the stuff that I write about is as I see it. And as I watched these fires bursting out all over I was both horrified and fascinated. Horrified at the destruction, all the people who lost their homes, and the firemen who were injured fighting the fires.

Fascinated by the incredible power of mother nature, God or however you want to chalk it up. When I saw those videos being sent into the various stations from their choppers with the fires destroying places I knew, areas I was familiar with, streets I have driven on a good portion of my life, each one that flared up was like a burn on my own skin. I can understand now the effects the California fires had on the people that had to be evacuated, that had everything destroyed that they had worked for all their lives.

I would watch the California wildfires, the Arizona wildfires and the Florida wildfires and it never really touched me because I didn't know these places. These places were not ingrained in the fabric of all my life's experiences, these were not the places that I had grown up around. These were not the street's I had ridden around with my mom and my dad when I was little... going out to what was the country then to my aunt and uncle's home... the streets that I rode with my mom and dad going just out for a Sunday drive.

I watched on until after 11 p.m. when things were brought under control enough that people were no longer being evacuated and the TV stations were no longer streaming video and warnings to folks to stay away so that the firemen could fight the innumerable fires. I will never again see a fire, whether it is a grass fire, forest fire or a house fire that I will not be touched by now. And I now can, truly, understand why people rebuild in the same area or on the same grounds that the homes they lost were on.

Because it is just that... home.