Okay, so I've been tagged by my niece Kate. This is the first time I've been so honored, probably because only about 5 people know I have this site! Anyway, here are seven weird or random facts.

One: An octopus apparently has three hearts. I just learned that last night from a NYTimes Sunday Crossword clue, so it must be true. If you don't believe it, look it up yourself. (I have not at this point in time.)

Two: Only in the last maybe ten years am I no longer able to make my kneecaps, when my legs are straight out and relaxed, go around in circles. I thought everyone could do that until someone almost threw up when s/he saw me do that while I was relaxing somewhere. I can still do it somewhat, but my theory is that my joints were all pretty loose and age is tightening them up. Ergo, no more bobbly kneecaps. Amazingly enough, that "ability" never affected my walking or running, etc.

Three: My favorite gin of all is Bombay Sapphire. Not only do I like the pretty blue bottle but since every gin tastes quite different from every other one, I really do like Sapphire's flavor. And Beefeater, which might come in second for me, tastes better in a martini (real martinis are made from gin and NOT VODKA!!!) when a twist of orange or lemon or lime rind--rind only--is used instead of an olive. This is because Beefeater is strained through citrus fruit/rind and retains a distinctive citrus tang. I think you have to drink a lot of martinis to discover this. I have and I did.

Four: There was, probably still is, a pond on the island of North Caicos in the Caribbean, quite down near the Equator, that is the site of a past paint factory. The pond, in 1998, was orange in color. The water, that is. Everything around it was dead--no surprise--and I took some pictures of it. When I got the prints back from the photo shop (this was before affordable digital cameras), the technician had changed the color in the photos. I guess s/he thought that the color sensor on the camera or something on the film had gone kerflooey and so adjusted the photo to have water of a more appropriate "water" color.

Five: When you try to grow a garden of anything, perennials or vegetables, your soil is supposed to look like chocolate cake. You can achieve that by mixing bagged top soil, bagged cow manure, and bagged sphagnum moss. Then you remove all the dirt in your garden space that looks like the sandbox you had as a kid, and replace it with your chocolate cake dirt. And then you do that again and again and your garden is a live demonstration of the evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest.

Six: One of the more embarrassing afflictions I've had is tendonitis of the thumb. Thumbs, actually. I had to wear a brace on each hand. I wondered, speaking of evolution, if, since humans are a step "above" (relative term) many other beings because of our opposable thumbs and I (temporarily) had no opposable thumbs, I had taken a step back DOWN the evolutionary ladder. What do you think?

Seven: Running a high fever when you're four years old affects your permanent teeth. It interrupts the development of the enamel and you're more susceptible to cavities. Ask me, I know.

And now to complete my tagging assignment, I'm tagging my daughter, the Pi Lady. She's the only other person I know who has a blog. (If you're reading this and you have a blog, you could let me know.)

1. On your post, link back to the person who tagged you - that would be me, in this case.
2. Post your assignment on your blog - seven weird or random facts.
3. Post these rules on your blog.
4. Post links to the bloggers that you will be tagging.
5. Go to those blogs and give them a comment on their blog to let them know that you have tagged them.

I just HAVE to add this photo. These are my best jeans and I think they do all right by me!

S-s-spring is h-h-here

Brrrrrr! It's 45 outside and we have the furnace turned on again. I really thought we could make it with our last furnace run on May 15 or so, but no-o-o-o. (Think John Belushi, if you're old enough to remember him.) And that is probably the high for today. I tried to do my 5 mi. this a.m. but it was soooo cold that I only went "around the block" (2.5 mi.) once. Oh well. The wind was fierce and it was spitting rain on and off the whole time. Ugh. I'll do the whole thing tomorrow.

At least we didn't have it as bad as the "higher elevations." It snowed in Dannemora, about 15 minutes up from us. (Someday I'll take a photo up there of the whole Saranac valley. It's beautiful, if you can overlook the prison that'll be in the foreground!)

Noothing exciting on the calendar for now. Stan is going over to Vt. tomorrow to meet up with an old friend he only sees once a year. They meet at the Mount Mansfield Trout Club, a mountain club that counts many of Vermont's movers and shakers in its membership. But there's no heat in the building, so Stan will take his sleeping bag, as usual. Then he'll spend several days sitting with his friend in a boat, catching and releasing big trout. Not my kind of vacation. But he loves to do it.

I'm getting ready for a workshop I'll do in Saratoga Springs in 2 weeks. I won't get really nervous till next week.

My Favorite Summer Topic: My Garden

Okay, last year I made big deals about my garden. Well, get used to it. It's my true love in the summer. :-) This is the view from my den window as of May 16. The plant with white flowers just barely showing on the right is the aforementioned Bleeding Heart.

The saying is that a garden grows thusly: The first year it weeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps. My garden is now into its seventh year, might even be its eighth, and I'm still waiting for that leaping thing. I do have to give the garden its due, however. The "soil" I started with was basically a large sandbox with a smattering of dirt. Replacing that with my hand-mixed blend ("CarlaDirt"--equal parts topsoil and cow manure with some sphagnum moss) has provided some nourishment and the garden hangs on. I love reading gardening articles that say you need to divide your perennials every three years, usually, because they'll choke themselves otherwise. I've NEVER divided one of mine and actually have added plants to thicken their spread a bit. But like I said, that garden is one hard-working survivalist.

So this is what I look at every morning, first thing. This is the view from my bathroom window. (Both these photos were shot through screens, to explain the grid effect.) The scene changes slowly but enought to interest me every single day. I'll try to put a photo up each month so you can see the progress ... and the color.

This year we're going to add a Burning Bush to the front yard and it will be just visible in this view. It'll be against the property-line chain-link fence that you can't see clearly here but the bush will be in that green space that's visible in the center far-left of this photo. Stay tuned.

And HAPPY SPRING ... at last!

I don't get the formatting

I've been working on that big post below for hours, waiting while the video tried and tried and tried to get itself uploaded. Now that it's finally included there, the spacing of my text changes mid-post. I've looked at the "Edit HTML" option to try to correct it but nooooo. So you're stuck reading squished-together lines.

My apologies.

"Later next week" ... Yeah. Right.

Well, this is far beyond "later in the week" as I said in my last post. It's not even later in the month. It's halfway through a whole new month! The meeting of the Every-So-Often-Procrastination Society can now come to order.

And it's not that I've been overwhelmingly busy, either. I just really haven't felt like writing here. But I'm trying to push myself a bit. I've discovered that when I have too much time on my hands, it stays right there, on my hands. I don't do anything with it at all. Like many other mentally organized people--those of us with a non-institutionalizable level of OCD (like that non-word there?)--I'm much more productive when I have too little time. So my current assignment for myself is to get the things done that I said I would.

This raises a pretty interesting question for myself: Should I have retired so early? My answer is still a ringing YES, but not because I have so many things I want to do; it's because I was so very ready to stop doing what I had been doing. Now, like many other Boomers, I'm trying to "find myself"--my new self, that is. I'm on the hunt. If and when I find myself, we'll introduce ourselves to you

For now I'll move on to the trivia of my life that I'm sure you all find absolutely fascinating. I actually took this little video and planned to post it under the title, "Why I'll Probably Never Move Away from Here."

It's the sound that gets me--we can hear it from our back porch even though the dam is about 1/2 mile away. And if we get our screens on somewhat early we can hear it when we go to sleep at night--sometimes with the windows closed!--and first thing in the morning too. I love it.

My other favorite spring sound was affected by the oddness of this spring: the peepers. These little froggies start singing early early in spring and then their sound disappears as we get into summer. Well, this year they apparently got fooled by a week of warm days and then got clobbered by plummeting temperatures. I hope it didn't wipe them out completely. This is one of the sounds I used to have to go to our camp for (here in NY a cabin/cottage in the Adirondacks is known as a camp). Now I can hear peepers in the comfort of my VERY comfortable Serta Memory Foam bed. (Just had to put that here.) Anyway, I miss the peepers this yearMy garden is coming right along this year, though. The wicked winter of 2007-08 almost did in a few residents but they're coming back--smaller but tougher, I guess. I did have one "resurrection" that really surprised me. Last year my friend Lynn had me pick out a couple of plants as a gift to me in memory of my mom. Of course, one of them had to be a dahlia--maybe more about dahlias some other time--and then I saw a white Bleeding Heart. I didn't know they came in white. So I dutifully dug the hole and put some good soil in, and planted it. It looked very nice and healthy, and then it disappeared. I don't mean it shriveled up, or got some disease or anything like that. It was just there one week and not there the next. I dug up the soil a little and everything, looking for it because I could NOT figure out what had happened to it. If something had eaten it--like that pesky rabbit, another thing for maybe more later, even if it had eaten ALL of it, there should have been some stem left at ground level or evidence of digging to eat the whole thing. Nada. Nothing. No sign of it at all. So I just wrote it off as some freaky fluke. Well, the freakiness continues. This year it was the first plant to show growth, as in about an inch a day when the snow melted. Now it's out there in full flower (early for us!). All I can do is shake my head and say, "W H A T ?" But it's lovely. This is a not-very-good picture of "Resurrection--the Plant" so you all (that's implying more than one reader, y'know) can see it ... before it disappears again this year. (I don't know that it will but I'm prepared!) And one more plant of note.

My friend Rachelle also gave me a plant in memory of mom so this is my magnolia, "Marie." I rarely name things but both this and Resurrection just needed them! Isn't this a lovely shrub? The leaves will appear after the blossoms all fall off and form a skirt around the bush on the ground. Since this was such a tough winter I have hopes of Marie continuing on. (Just like another Marie I loved.)

Ah, there is one more thing I named. I'd like you to meet my new toy, "Raleigh Rose." I think that sounds like a name for a thoroughbred. (BTW, I told Stan's daughter Lana to bet on Eight Belles and if she had put her $50 on the filly to win, place or show, she would've made $500. But she only bet her to win. Which I think Eight Belles did in her own heart anyway.) Anyway, I did a 5 mile ride this morning, up some VERY tough hills and found out just how not in shape I am currently. My whole windpipe is still very sensitive from all the hard panting I did. No joke. So here's my trusty steed. She was an impulse buy and she replaces my trusty O-L-D Gitane, the men's skinny-wheel racing bike I bought in 1972. And was still riding, although I figured that I didn't ride it last year even one time because I just didn't want to hassle with the glitchy dérailleur anymore, carrying a paper towel tucked in my waistband to wipe the grease off my fingers after I put the chain back on after the dérailleur made it overshoot the sprocket. AaAAARRRrgGGHHH. Much more fun this year!

The best thing Raleigh Rose does is keep me away from the blackflies. You wouldn't believe how gigantic they are this year. They're like the ones I first encountered: in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota on Memorial Day weekend in 1975, I think it was. I remember telling people in Iowa that there were these horrific bugs that "looked just like black regular flies only littler." Well, that's what the Nort' Country has this year, eh? All my gardening has been done with a headnet on, and just to let you know HOW bad the blackflies are, even Stan is working outside wearing a headnet most of the time!

So until next time I get the inspiration--or have a video or photo I want you to see--Happy Spring!