Football Season Begins! Again!

The NFL season begins as usual at the O.K. Chorale. We get together on Thursday nights to do our picks for the week. The menu for Eating the Opponent comes up for discussion, and we’re set for the weekend. Mostly.

With the routines in place, we gathered the ingredients to Eat Chicago with a home made deep dish pizza. Thick crust from my breadmaker, Italian sausage, peppers, onions, olives, pepperoni, home grown oregano, fresh tomato sauce from garden tomatoes – are you hungry yet? It was delicious and filling. We’ll have leftovers for lunch for a few days, too.

I’m drafting this post midday Sunday (That’s 3:35 in the NFL world), and Amigo is in the lead so far with picks. He has 7, I have 4, and Chuck and the visiting bunny are tied with 3 each. I keep repeating my script “it’s a good thing I don’t do this for money!”

Meanwhile, our Milwaukee Brewers are in the 11th inning of a cliffhanger with a score on 1-0 over the New York Yankees. Any minute now we’ll hear an update on whether they held the Bronx Bombers to a shutout and swept the series  – or not.

Now it’s time to put the computer down and enjoy the Packers competing with their arch-nemesis, Da Bears. Go! Pack! Go!

 

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Writer’s Block?

Amigo keeps asking me if I’ve blogged recently. It’s not that there’s nothing going on; it’s more like there’s too much going on. Focusing in on one topic seems overwhelming.

George Floyd. The protests he inspired; the riots and vandals that tagged along.

Buttercup. Our sweet bunny, about 14 years old (ancient!), passed on last week. I still expect her to meet me at the bottom of the stairs every morning when I get up.

Covid19. Again. Still. Pandemic hasn’t let up, despite its being relegated to smaller status in the evening news stories.

School. Work from home. How it’s different, both better and not so good.

The ever present garden! Some of the peas haven’t come up; there are blank spots in the lettuce patch. I blame the chipmunk who has taken up residence under one of the boards in the raised bed. Dang pest.

Sports. Amigo and I really, really miss sports. Baseball now, football in the fall – we’re left at loose ends.

Local protests vs. nearby cities vs. larger cities – compare, contrast, consider.

Barbershop chorus! They keep rehearsing in Zoom, but their two biggest fundraisers for the year have been cancelled. What does the future hold?

Meanwhile, I’m watching the world spinning around me and wondering when it will slow down and maybe even stop.

Where to go next? Too many directions, too many important topics in our lives, here at the O.K. Chorale.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Oh, deer.

It hasn’t been the best garden season. Some of the pallet plants died from neglect, pure and simple – not enough watering on my part. Hanging flowers suffered the same fate. Herbs are okay. When I’ve watered, they’re on the top of my list.

Approximately one third of the raised bed actually grew. The rest is weeds, pure and simple. I’ve done a little weeding of the actual vegetable successes,

And then the beans – the replacement beans! – were attacked. This was obviously a critter much taller than a rabbit. It looks like it climbed or jumped over the chicken wire fencing and was not deterred by the layer of green onions around the edges. In fact, it may have knocked over a few monster onions (if the hail and hard rain last week didn’t).

Readers, I don’t know why the pictures rotated left on me. WordPress isn’t playing nice with me here. Anyway, you can see where something nibbled about five feet off the ground and then left its mark on what little lawn we have left. Grrr.

I’m pretty sure I know what kind of critter visited, but I welcome your input. Anyone? Smaller than a moose, bigger than a rabbit, not a dog or cat. What do you think?

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

Bye Bye, Sadie.

There she is, “masquerading” as a slipper. Or maybe she thought the slippers were imitating her.

Sadie, La Petite’s bunny, “hiding”

But try to get her to do something cute? Pretend to be an Easter bunny, perhaps?

“Oh, fine. I’ll get in the basket. But I won’t pose!”
Sadie was at least 13 years old. In rabbit years, I’m pretty sure she was Betty White. We joked about her “immortality” because she seemed to recover from every illness, despite her age and physical weakness.
She came to us as a Pet Saver animal on the noon newscast. Chuck saw her and said, “Let me see this bunny.” The little bunny won him over right away. When he brought her home and took her out of the carrier, she grunted like a little piglet. At that, we were pretty darn sure she was ours. Peanut, our other little bunny, was a champion grunter. Indeed, they became fast friends almost immediately.
But even our feisty grunting bunny could only last so long. She took a fall, a bad one, and could no longer get up. La Petite realized it was time, time to let Sadie go without suffering.
We’ll miss our little sweetie. She enriched our lives for a long, long time. She’ll stay in our hearts forever.
Sadie and Peanut, together

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




I’m Back Online!

Did you miss me? No, don’t answer that. I was offline for a (much too long) time while my laptop was repaired. When I got the laptop back, I couldn’t log into my dashboard or cPanel or AMP. After trying numerous combinations of usernames and passwords, even though I was darn sure I knew what it “should” be, I gave in and sought help from the hosting provider. The Helpdesk type person was very patient and, well, helpful. He went through a number of possibilities, verified my identify multiple times (for which I’m grateful), and within 20 minutes had me back on my dashboard.

Then the screen dimmed as if operating on battery, and I realized the rabbit had nibbled through the laptop cord while I was focused on troubleshooting the blogs. At this point, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I laughed. There may have been tears, but hey, I laughed. 

First world problems, indeed. When I went to the computer store to buy a new cord, I had a chance to tell the folks there about the problems I’d had. Bookmarks were fine, usernames and passwords not so much. Clerk/techie nodded thoughtfully.

Meanwhile, I did get into the dashboard for A Mother’s Garden of Verses early this morning. I posted an encore, one that unfortunately is very relevant today.

Read and enjoy. It’s good to be back online.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




Shoes and Rabbits – Some things never change

Here’s an old post from one of many college dorm moves. We were grateful to own a reasonably big minivan for these occasions.

The pile begins.

The pile grows…

…and grows.

Can I bring my rabbit?

Sorry, no more room. It’s either the rabbit or your shoes.

(Just kidding! The rabbit stayed home.)

Now, back to the present day. La Petite lives in an apartment with rabbits AND shoes.

Shoes! Slippers! Boots!

She still manages to keep them in a relatively small space. There’s still room for the rabbits.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




Why Doesn’t my Garden Grow?

Three major section of my raised beds are growing nothing but weeds. I have a few theories, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m hoping to narrow down the possibilities so I can figure out what to do about the problem.

Suspect number one: poor seeds

  • The basket of seeds got soaked when I left it out overnight. I successfully dried the packages, but did I manage to destroy their viability?
  • I like to stock up during late season clearance sales. The seeds I used could have been old.

Suspect number two: feathered and furry creatures

  • Birds! I suspect cardinals in the demise of my butterfly garden seed mat.
  • Chipmunks! Or chipmunk! Darn thing slips through the tiniest gaps in the fencing, and I find holes all over.
  • Rabbits? Not likely this time. The wire fencing is pretty good.

Suspect number three: random environmental influences

  • Seeds planted too late
  • Weather – too hot
  • Weather – too cold
  • Weather – too wet
  • Poor soil – doubtful. Treating my soil with compost, etc., would take a number of posts. The green “walking” onions around the edges are growing beautifully, too.

Incidentally, the pallet garden and the various containers are doing very well. Herbs, mainly, along with a few leafy edibles and flowers, all thriving. The rest? I’ll keep trying to make it work. Promote growth. Plant something that comes up, already.

Readers, suggestions? I have a gauge for testing soil pH. I might try that. What else do you recommend?

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




Last Week of School – encore

Years ago, when I was still teaching in a traditional classroom, the chalkboard provided all kinds of opportunities. My fourth graders loved to create their own drawings with this simple medium of chalk on chalkboard. This one went up on a muggy, drizzly day. The blurry writing in the middle states, “Rain, rain, go away!” Earlier in the day it said, “Rian, rian, go away!” until someone more astute took eraser in hand and played editor.

 Over the weekend, La Petite came with me while I cleaned up my classroom. This was the work of La Petite, age 21, art minor, in colored chalk. 

In truth, the wild bunnies eat my vegetables more than they do the flowers – with the exception of the coneflowers last year. The flowers in this picture lasted longer than the coneflowers did.

Note: the plethora of encores may be due to the fact that it’s the last week of school and any creativity of my own is getting poured into progress report comments. 

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




Just another plastic bag of produce.

Sometimes I have to help the grocery store cashiers when I’m buying bunny food. Red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, or Romaine. Curly parsley or cilantro or maybe even flat leaf (a.k.a. Italian) parsley. On my way home yesterday, the cashier and the staffer bagging my purchase needed more help than usual.

I almost, not quite, but almost felt sorry for the cashier. She seemed new at the job. I suspect she has a hearing loss, too. Trust me; I recognize my own hearing-impaired behaviors when I see them in someone else. But where were we? Oh, I was checking out at the small grocery store on my way home from school.

The woman ahead of me in line was buying a six pack of bottled water. The bottled water ended up in a plastic bag. Huh? Put a sticker on it, people. I mean, really.

So I came in prepared; I handed over two cloth bags I always carry in my purse for times like this. Between the bunny food and hamburger buns, two bags should have been sufficient. But then, nothing seemed to go the way of “should” on this trip. First of all, my cloth bags didn’t make it to the end of the checkout right away; they got tangled in with the plastic produce bags. The first bags of lettuce ended up in a store plastic bag anyway.

While that was happening, I was distracted by a clueless clerk. “Is this kale?” “No, it’s parsley. Curly parsley.” She rang up kale. “Excuse me, that was parsley. Curly parsley, not kale.” Oops! She fixed it. And then – “Red leaf lettuce?” “No, it’s Romaine. That’s red leaf, coming up next.” She rang up red leaf. “Excuse me, that was Romaine. The red leaf lettuce is there.” I pointed. Ugh. She was lucky Chuck wasn’t in the checkout with me. He would have identified everything else on the conveyor for her. “And those are carrots” is his favorite line when faced with produce identification problems.

Finally, when I could look down toward the bags, I realized she’d packed my two bags with a few items, a store plastic bag full, and was reaching for another store plastic bag for two small packages of cookies. It was right after school, people. Don’t judge me. Sometimes a teacher just needs cookies. This was really ridiculous, though. I ended up bringing home way more single-use plastic than necessary.

Next time I’m stopping at the nearby grocery on my way home, I’ll avoid this particular pair of employees. If I have to deal with them again, I might react badly. And by badly, I mean I might loudly announce, “That’s curly parsley. That’s red leaf lettuce. That’s Romaine. And that’s celery, by the way.” Or I might glower at the  person bagging my groceries in twice as much plastic as needed. Growl.

If the produce is problematic, maybe the solution is to just buy cookies. Cookies might check out smoothly. Well, they “should”. However, we all know that “should” carries no guarantees.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares




I Have My Voice Back!

It’s been a long, long week or two – so long that I’m not sure how many days I’ve been waiting. First, my laptop went into the shop to have malware removed. In the process of the malware-ectomy, Chrome was also removed, including all of my bookmarks. Most of my bookmarks are fairly easy to recover. One, however, wasn’t.

The dashboard to Compost Happens eluded me. I looked and I searched, and I searched and I looked. It wasn’t on the laptop; it wasn’t in a book. With apologies to Dr. Seuss, of course, for the loose rhyming pattern. 

I found my way into our hosting provider’s web site, then into our AMP (Account Management Panel), and from there into the cPanel.for our account. None of the links were direct, but I had enough at my fingertips to know I could get here from there. A short chat with someone in IT, and I had it.

CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES, COME ON!!!

What should I post first? A rabbit, of course.

A Rabbit in a Sweater

A Rabbit in a Sweater

La Petite’s bunny, Sadie, wearing the latest in rabbit fashion – a sweater made from a Muk-Luks leg warmer. Perfect.

Ah, readers, it’s good to be online again.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares