Weather change coming!

Hello, everyone.

Today the weather is very warm--the prefrontal heating as I call it. Tomorrow it will be colder than today, by about 35 degrees F. And Monday we will probably not get out of the 40's (F) at all.

It reminds me of winters some years back, when I'd dig out all the incandescent light strings in the house, and all the worn-out bedsheets, and do things like this:

Tomatoes wrapped against the cold in February 2011. Right hand plant needed two sheets.

At night, we plugged in the extension cords.

We're not supposed to get that low this time, only in the tip-top of the 30's, so I probably won't wrap tomatoes. We did haul the potted frangipane up onto the porch, out of the wind, and draped it with incandescent C7 bulbs. And the orchids are coming inside for most of the week.

User tip, in case you are looking at sudden near-freezing weather and want to cover up a tender garden plant: bring your fabric all the way to the ground and weight it down with rocks. No openings at the top, especially not the kind of openings where if the plant had eyes it could see the stars. (Much of the freeze is by radiation of the existing warmth out to space. Overhangs or old sheets block the radiation.) Bonus points if you tie or safety-pin the fabric so it won't inflate in the rush of cold wind when the front arrives and blow over. (Or completely away!)

Down here, where it almost never freezes, we have our water service going through the air on the way into the house. These pipes need to be wrapped in fabric.

I remember in the 1983 killing freeze, we didn't know that. Our water pipe froze. I got to take a table lamp outside, and a cardboard box, and get the lamp inside the box. The wind was blowing a lot, and I had to drag a bag of BBQ charcoal out to the hose bib to hold the box against the wall so the pipe would thaw out. (Ah, memories.)

In the 1989 killing freeze, the water line was wrapped, but the air got so cold that the faucet froze that part of the line inside the wall. At least that time the wind wasn't blowing away my impromptu warming setup apart!

This n that

Hello, everyone.

I really wanted to post a picture of something I saw this morning, but the traffic was busy and there was nowhere to pull aside and often when you pull over to look at birds they flee. There is a good-sized pond (AKA "water hazard") at the city golf course that we pass going home from church. Today I observed 12 white pelicans, 1 white crane, at least 1 dark-gray anhinga (native cormorant species) and a large flock of whistling tree ducks. It is doubtful that all would have fit into the water at once. As was, the tree ducks were hanging out on the grass alongside.

Just for pretty, from the other day when it was misty and foggy in the morning:

The young red oak is coloring this year. And this spider web is highlighted so beautifully by the dew that it had to be photographed.

Banana wine

Hello, everyone.

A few months back, the neighbor's banana plants fruited. Giant stalks of yellow bananas drooped down. DH watched them ripen and droop and asked the neighbor what he was planning to do with them. The neighbor said that DH could have them all!

Banana wine

The wine is now ready for drinking and it has proved to be a dry white. We mostly just sip it chilled.

And this recipe didn't even use up all of the bananas from the plants!

During the holiday rush, daily life and maintenance incidents continue

Hello, everyone.

It's been an incredibly busy week at ye Olde Homestead. There were family duties to attend, there was a Christmas party for (dozens of) school children to work at, and in the midst of it all, the modem died.

It was a couple of days before I could find time to figure out why the internet wasn't working.

I had two very productive phone conversations with ATT tech support (my ISP) and at the end of it, and a quick run over to Best Buy, we have a new modem in place and working.

There was a cabinet in the way of the phone plug/line filter combination. It's a tall cabinet and it was stuffed with fabric. After moving it, I concluded that this whole incident was a message from above: organize the sewing/craft room first, before other desired projects.

Where the big fabric cabinet was. 

Maybe there is a better way to organize all the stuff. Sewing up some more quilts would help, of course! And using up beads.

But definitely, the new arrangement will not have a large, laminated particle-board cabinet blocking the computer bits!

The Candles Row (Christmas decorating again)

Hello, everyone.

The baby quilt is moving right along. For the fun of it, here is a picture showing what the many battery candles did last year, when there was a bit more space to put things on.

Dollar store battery candles, with a glass angel that was a gift some years ago, and almost invisible in the foreground a glass Nativity scene.

More Christmas decorating

Hello, everyone.

As I'm still hip-deep in finishing the baby quilt--the time approaches!--a little more on the theme of Christmas decorations.

A couple of years back, I was making table centerpieces for a party. They involved battery candles, glass balls, and artificial floral picks. Seasonal floral picks, of course.

Fast forward to this year, the battery candles are sitting in the storage box and the silver trays--who knows where they are now? (Some of the glass balls are in the post a few days back showing the golden balls hanging from the other chandelier.) But! The floral picks have come into their own.

They tuck nicely into the breakfast area chandelier.

Go for a walk. Look around! You never know what you'll find

Hello, everyone.

Today we strolled down our own street, past the tall, untended hedge of oleanders, toward something we were curious about up the road.
As we walked, we looked around--and saw a completely unknown (to us) plant in the said oleander bushes.  It was a lush green (so green that I am surprised the cutter ants haven't taken it all!) leaf, with the veins all running from the base at the stem to the outside. And there were brown papery-skinned blobs on it, and fallen on the ground around it. It had already climbed most of the way to the top of the oldeander, too, and if you know oleander that isn't a mere 3 foot bush (1 meter for my metric zone readers) but more like a 12 to 20 foot one. (erm, 3 1/2 m to 6 m approximately)

Here are some photos of it (I love the camera in my new-ish Samsung Galaxy 5!)

DH held up the stem for it's glamour shot--see the baby bulbils on the stem

One that fell on the ground

We carried one home. It's on a 4 inch tile.

And I cut it open, too.

The first web search didn't help. That might be because the brown things weren't fruit. Who knew? But then I tried the old reliable Valley plants list. That turned up a possibility: Dioscorea_bulbifera.
When I searched again with this name, the pictures matched. It turns out this plant is one of the Evil Invasive Species of Florida! It can grow to 60 feet tall and overtake tall trees, killing them with the shade of its leaves, and reproduces wildly with the aid of its aerial bulbils.

It's also one of the yam family, and its tubers contain components that can be used in the manufacture of birth control pills. (Not that this has any bearing on anything, it's just interesting trivia.) Apparently it's cultivated in Panama, at least some varieties which are allegedly edible.

Encouraged by this info, I cut it in half and discovered that it does look like a potato inside. Hence its common name of Air Potato. And when I licked it, it did have a sort of bitter, pharmaceutical afternote. I don't think I'd like to eat it. Perhaps it would improve if  it were grated and flushed with plenty of water and then boiled. But we're not so desperate that we need to try such tricks. (And if we were, I'd try it with the acorns of our Chinkapin Oak instead. Flushing out the acorn tannins is actually something the North American Indians did to make oak acorns edible.)

So the thing I took away from this was, you never, never know what you will see on a walk. Even on on a paved, in-town road in your own neighborhood!