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One Week, Four Seasons

25 Mar

The tulips and daffodils are poking their little green heads above the ground. Saturday is was warm enough that I was able to go to my meeting with just a light shawl over my shoulders. It cooled off a bit Sunday and yesterday, but it is snowing at the moment. Old Man Winter is back for one last fling, but like most old men, this “fling” shouldn’t amount to much, as it is supposed to be near 50 tomorrow, and in the 60s by Sunday. We also have a number of trees here that don’t drop their leaves until the old ones are pushed off the stem by new, green growth, so I suppose you could say we are even having Fall.

March seems to have come in like a lion, and is going out the same way.

Oh! It is snowing, and we have ants – again.

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Putting My Foot in it

21 Mar

About a week ago I went to my podiatrist because I thought I had a corn on the inner edge of one of my toes on my right foot. It turned out I had bone spurs on both my little toe and the one next to it, and they were “kissing”.

This morning, the doctor numbed both toes and went in, between the skin and the bone, to grind off the spurs. Not at all painful, but I am all bandaged up, and wearing one of those fancy shoes. I’m going to a meeting tomorrow, so The Squire went over to church and borrowed the wheelchair, so I won’t be tempted to try to stand around talking.  Even with the fancy shoe, walking still moves my toes a little bit, and The Squire worries about me.

The only problem I am having so far it that when I sleep I normally tuck one foot or the other under the opposite knee, and I will have to be careful not to tuck the right foot under, as it would not do to mash those toes. A friend of mine had this same procedure done, and the bone snapped because she wasn’t careful.

As long as I can keep my foot out of my mouth I should be fine.

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Here We Go Again

17 Mar

We woke up this morning to six inches of heavy, wet,  snow and about six million grackles and starlings, all shouting at once. Honestly, we had three days of fairly warm weather, and now this! I pulled on my boots and went out to fill the birdfeeders and put out peanuts for the squirrels.

We really need to get some new feeders. The two small ones have been dropped, tossed, and rolled across the yard more times than I count, thanks to the busy fingers of our local raccoons. What was once a lovely copper colored globe with a clear plastic tube is now a badly misshapen ghost of its former self.  The squirrels managed to reach through the wires and ate the two bottom feeding perches, so The Squire had to use hot glue to insert some sort of plastic plumbing doohickey to keep the seed from running out. As it is, the whole business is so crooked, the seed runs out anyway.

This is the better-looking of the two feeders. The grill is supposed to sit inside the bottom plate, and the tube should be perfectly vertical. The wires obviously are not supposed to be broken in several places.  All in all, I’d say we about ready for couple of new ones. These have served Trojan duty and are ready for a proper burial.

feeder2

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Telephone Troubles

15 Mar

The Verizon service at church went out last Wednesday, and when we called the company they told us that they are no longer servicing the copper phone lines. We will have to take FIOS, whether we want it or not, and they couldn’t possibly get to us until Monday. We arranged to have the church’s phone calls forwarded to Fr. Matthew’s cell phone, which worked out well because he was on Spring break (He is a full-time teacher.). The Squire went over to church this morning to meet with the installer, to make sure everything was ready to go.

Well.

First of all, because the church has always had a P.O. Box, we were never issued an actual house number. We are simply at the corner of Bridge and Anchor Drives, both of which are dead end streets. With the advent of GPS, we had to have a “real” number, so the Post Office gave us 700 Anchor Drive – which never comes up on GPS, anyway. The phone company informed us that since we didn’t show on the GPS, they couldn’t/wouldn’t be able to come out. OK. Fine.  The Squire gave them the address for the house diagonally across the street from the church, 1 Bridge Drive, and made it very clear – he thought – that they were to look over their shoulder and go to the church, not the house.

As I said, this morning, the installer and The Squire met at the church. First of all, somehow or other Miss Utility has not been out (this is the phone company’s bailiwick, not ours), and will not be able to come out until Tuesday, at the earliest, so we probably won’t have phone service all week.  Second, the installer discovered that somebody had been out – and had installed FIOS to the house across the street! GLDU!

How can you have a work order in your hand that says “Church of the Resurrection” and think a ranch house is the place you want? Especially since you have to face the church (it’s on a dead-end street, remember?) which has a sign on either side of the parking lot…oh, never mind! The Squire swears he is dealing with former government employees, refugees from Cake Wrecks (http://cakewrecks.squarespace.com/), total idiots – or a lethal combination of all three.

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High Church

12 Mar

Last night, we attended an Even Song service at a friend’s  parish, and it was wonderful! I don’t know if they do this all the time, or if they just “pulled out all the stops” because they had a visiting choir (more on that in a minute) but judging from the ease with which the congregation sang the responses to this service, I think this is Standard Operating Procedure.

First off, their cantor had a truly lovely voice. I’ve heard folks chant who really should be taken aside, and told – gently, gently – that they really shouldn’t do that. She chanted the Opening Sentences and the Great Litany, and then we settled back to listen to the Cymrag Cor Rehoboth – the Rehoboth Welsh Choir – sing, at the appropriate places, two canticles, the Lord’s Prayer, and at the very end of the service, the Welsh National anthem.  All of the hymns were Welsh tunes – Watchman Tell Us of the Night (also the tune to Jesus, Lover of My Soul), Singing Songs of Expectation (I wonder why they removed Once to Every Man and Nation from the current hymnal) and Lord Whose Love Through Humble Service – which seems to stand alone.

It truly did my Anglican soul good. All that was missing was the incense!

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Funny!

11 Mar

I was trained from childhood to sleep flat on my back. I fold my hands just under my rib cage, and have one leg or the other pulled up like a stork.  And other than switching legs, I seldom move. We have always joked that when I die, all they’ll need to do is straighten out my leg and drop me into my coffin.

This morning, The Squire woke up, smoothed out the covers on his side of the bed, replaced the two decorative pillows, and came over to my side to do the same.  As he leaned forward to put the pillows on my side, he put his hand down to steady himself, smack-dab on my right shoulder! He didn’t even know I was there.

I hate to think what my reaction would have been if that pillow had landed on my face!

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Me and Tippi Hedren

7 Mar

Every morning, I go out and fill our three bird feeders – a large hopper-type by the stream, a ball shaped feeder by the den window, theoretically designed to let small birds feed while keeping out the large ones, and a second ball feeder outside the kitchen window. We also put peanuts in a length of PVC pipe for the squirrels.

When I go out, the only birds near the feeders are the little guys, sparrows, titmice, nuthatches, and the like, but if I look around, every tree has a contingent of grackles and starlings, waiting, waiting, waiting…As soon as the feeders are filled, they swoop down, flapping their wings at the other birds and clinging to the sides of the ball feeders, making them sway and spilling seeds all over the ground, where they push and shove each other, as greedy and pushy as a bunch of politicians, and just about as useful.

Someone once told me they had gotten a kitty litter bucket full of sour mash (I felt it wisest not to ask where) and spread it all over the ground. The big bullies loved the stuff, gobbling it down and getting drunker by the minute. When they were all well and truly sloshed, he gathered up a black trash bag of the feathered ba – birds – and took them to the State Park about fifteen miles north of here and just dumped them out onto the ground, figuring they’d be too disoriented to find their way back home.

In the meantime, I feel a real sympathy with Tippi Hedren.

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You Can’t Be Good At Everything

6 Mar

I went to the dermatologist this morning to have them take another look at the cancer on my right cheek. I was wearing a sweatshirt given to me by a friend who knows me very well, which reads “I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you”.

The PA first had trouble pronouncing “grammarian” and then asked me what it meant. I told her it was some one who wanted you to speak English correctly.

“Ooh. Something like a librarian?”

Close enough. Close enough.

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I’m From the Government…

28 Feb

Last year, our rector was at the local MARC station at the unholy hour of 4:45 on Ash Wednesday to provide “Ashes to Go” to those who desired them.

I don’t know if he had or needed a permit, but this year he does. We got a call today from someone in the Harford County Government who said the permit could not be issued because we “were not in good standing, as we had not paid personal property taxes for the last three years”.

First of all, the State of Maryland does not have a personal property tax, and second, as a church we would be exempt even if there was one. Who are they going to bill? God? When the call came in, our Senior Warden happened to be there, as well as The Squire, who was working on plats to take to the County Seat to get this shed business untangled. The SW put the call on speaker-phone, and it was obvious from the answers the man on the other end gave us that he had NO clue what he was talking about. We’d ask a question and he’d circle around and come back at it from another direction. He finally gave us a URL to file the paperwork on-line, but the options as to “what sort of business are you running?” did not include a section for churches.

At the moment, The Squire is off to the County Seat and the SW was going home to call the 800 number and see what the devil is going on.

If this keeps up, I’m going to become a Libertarian.

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Back to Bed

27 Feb

For the last seven years The Squire and I have been reading David Weber’s “Safehold” series. This saga in long and involved, and swings from oared galleys to spaceships, and back, with a World War, a robot, and two romances thrown in. The books are big (600 pages each), and complex. I had to make a list of who was on which side of the war, as I forget who is who. It is essentially a retelling of the Reformation, told from an obviously Protestant point of view. They are published at a rate of one a year, and when the library gets the newest one, there’s a waiting list, so you can’t renew it.  (The first one was Off Armageddon Reef, if you want to track it down. You do need to start at the beginning.)

The odd thing is, I dislike both science fiction (totally implausible!) and historic fiction (you have it all wrong!) but these books are “can’t put it down” stuff. The real thing.

Yesterday, The Squire had the latest book, Like a Mighty Army,  while I was off doing other things, and then when he went up to watch TV, I grabbed it.

And stayed up until 3:00 this morning to finish it!

Woke up at 8:00, said hello to The Squire and back to bed until noon.

For as long as I knew her, my mother’s attitude was “once you are up, you are up for the day”. Even when she was living alone after my dad died, no matter what time she woke up – 4 AM, whatever – she stayed up. This wasn’t too bad for my sister and me during the week, but on weekends, we all wanted to sleep in, and she was really mentally unable to allow us to do so.

Our house was built in 1952, and had only one bathroom, which was right beside my parents’ bedroom, and they slept with the door open. If my sister or I had to get up in the middle of the night, we would carefully close the bathroom door, and stuff a towel against the bottom, so she wouldn’t hear us. If we happened to wake up with a full bladder at 6 AM on a Saturday, she would wake up, and drag herself out of bed, and insist “As long as you’re up, you might as well get your sister.”  Lynn and I could hardly tolerate each other as it was, and this didn’t help matters one bit. And naps were not allowed.

So my poor father couldn’t sleep in, either, and had to deal with three grumpy, sleep-deprived women, to boot.  The man really was a saint.

Not too long before I left home, Lynn and I got an alarm clock, which we would set for 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, tip-toe downstairs, and then go back to sleep on an empty bladder, staying in bed until around 9:00.

So this morning I was able to go back to bed with a clear conscience and a deep sense of how lucky I am.

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