Return to US

We made it!! Holy cow it was an amazing trip and lived up to the last 10 yrs of my wishing and saving for it. Our activities ran from communing w/penguins/seals, & whales, to drinking russian vodka @ Ukrainian polar station, to a Polar Plunge! to snowshoeing & hiking on ice shelves & mountains, to zodiac rides around glaciers, to a ride on the "train at the end of the world", and more to follow!

SO close!

I am so close to a dream of mine, I can taste it!!

Pam and I are flying to Ushuaia, Argentina, via  LA and Buenos Aires. We will switch not only planes but airports also. We have 8 hrs to do so but we've been warned that it's not as easy as it sounds. From there we fly to the end of the world: Ushuaia, aka Tierra del Fuego, "land of fire". We will spend 3 nights in Ushuaia and do the tourist thing, including the "train at the end of the world" (dunh dunh duhhh)!

On Thanksgiving we board our ship w/115 other crazy people for 9 days & 2 ports on the continent of Antarctica.

We will kayak, hike, camp out, and maybe even take the "polar plunge"! I've just wanted to pet a penguin for as long as I can remember - cant tell you why.

Anyway, now that I've got this (adding photos to) blog thing on pam's tablet, I promise to share the trip w/you, as real time as I can get. I hope you enjoy it too!

Needed to test if I could move photos from my schnazzy camera to Pam's tablet, to take to Antrctica/Argentina: if you can see the photo below of the view from Pam's back door, then it worked - YaY! Now that I got that done, more will follow soon!

Heading out again soon - Oct/Nov/Dec 2014

Hello all and welcome back! I'm embarking on another ROAD TRIP and you are invited to share the way. I'm leaving in a couple days for a visit w/Elsie the loan resident of Monowi, NE., a west coast tour, a week at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in UT, Vegas, Big Bear, San Diego, Oregon, Idaho, and then on to ANTARCTICA/Argentina. The So Pole thing has been a dream of mine for YEARS! Strap yourselves in...

Garden Gone Wild

I've been meaning to get back to you with the garden because it's been going crazy! I was hoping for nice, but that's an understatement. I've already made a stirfry and a couple of salads with our goodies.

I haven't thinned out anything (which I'm supposed to) but I got greedy. The radishes are like a small forest in a rectangular pot. In fact, the first radish I reaped was basically because it was pushed out of the dirt by the others. I'm not really a radish person, so mom & hunter sliced it and ate it.

The okra is taking its time but that's okay. I've got a buttload of the little guys at their pointy ends growing and showing.

The corn is the craziest of all. Some of the stalks are now as tall as I am (not that that's hard to do, but...) in this short amount of time. They have multiple fuzzy ends which will become the cobs soon. You can see the cob shape developing under cover of greenery.

The cucumbers have been the most abundant and the fastest. We've already had several of the guys to eat already. In fact, the plant itself looks like it may be dying out. Pam, one of my garden mentors, says it would not be too late to start another batch in the same pot.

The crookneck squash has been a close second as far as giving us goodies. I'm going to try to freeze/save some of those unless I find people who really want our leftovers. Julie, my other garden mentor, says I can slice and freeze them with no problems.

I started a couple of shallow pots of mixed spring greens and 2 rectangular pots of spinach. The results are varied.

The squash patch started sprouting pretty quickly, and now has a ton of flowers which will become goodies. The only thing in the squash patch that has produced so far is zucchini, but those cheated - that was the only thing in that patch that went in as a plant; everything else started as seeds. The zucchinis are in the front; then there are straightneck, spaghetti & summer squash, then canteloupe, then pumpkins at the far end.

Last week, we had a stir fry for dinner. It contained, directly from the garden, crookneck squash, cucumbers, basil from my basil plant, tomatoes from mother's already-established plants, & one tiny green bell pepper.

This last weekend, we had a salad and were able to add some of the goodies to it too. And, I made homemade Mac & Cheese with my own chives decorating the top! (Don't have a photo, sorry)

I will get back to you very soon with some newer photos, especially of the corn!!!

Garden Journal

Returned from Africa (to the US) at the end of April, spent a couple of days with the kids in GA and on to SD to stay with mom and Hunter. Hunter has Alzheimer’s and has his good days, but overall, he is not doing well. Sometimes, the lapses are noticeable daily, which is very sad to watch. This is a sweet, kind, lovable man who would not hurt a fly, and who has worked hard all his life, raised a family and brought joy to whomever he has met. I met him 7 years ago, and I don’t have one negative thing to say about him, even before he became ill. 

The house is in a deep canyon that used to be a riverbed.  There wasn’t much room behind the pool but we made space by using cement (pony) walls that had been built to keep rains from flooding the back patio, where there used to be a building. It was a guest/game/office/party room until the psycho-lady next door called the authorities who told mother that the building had to be moved 3 yards to the west, (which was impossible to do) so the entire building had to be destroyed. ANYWAY, in SD’s version of winter the rains would come down the canyon and flood the building. Hence, the pony walls were created. They worked too, but now there is not building to protect.  I used the V-shaped areas resulting from the walls meeting the canyon, plus the only flat area of the (back) back yard to make a veggie garden of sorts. Ever since I discovered gardening, when I lived in RV, planting and growing things have been very important to me, part of my spirituality, actually. It was impossible to do in Miami and very difficult in GA, but I actually had a loft-porch, vertical garden in B’ham that turned out pretty cool.

Already being summer when I started, I wasn’t really expecting too much – didn’t want to get my hopes up – but SD is so cool (for summer) the road to veggie-ville has been pretty fruitful (haha) and amazing.  I started on June 12 with the following: corn,

3 kinds of squash, cantaloupe, and pumpkins in the ground, from scratch;

okra, radishes, scallions and chives, in containers, from scratch;

3 different types of bell peppers and 2 eggplants, from plants, in the ground;

plus zucchini, from small plants, in the ground;

and crookneck squash and cucumbers, from plants, in containers.

I bought 2 avocado trees for mother, because she had always wanted to try growing them. We had a professional come and remove an ugly tree that blocked the sun from some of the garden and had served no other purpose. He planted the avocado trees while he was at it.

 I also bought a couple of pretty flowers while I was at it.

The next week, I realized that I had forgotten to plant some fresh spinach which I like with my salads, so I bought some of that and some assorted greens too. I put them in 2 pots each. (started on June 26)

They went crazy! But, since I don’t want to give it all away in one entry, you’ll have to check back in a day or two to see. Hint: the corn is already whispering to me like in the movie, but since (as most of you know) I’m half deaf, I haven’t yet deciphered the message…

PS: you can see that the corn took off immediately in the last photo. Even Chipper, Hunter's son who is a landscaper, was impressed!

San Francisco Weekend

Very quickly after arriving in SD I accompanied my Goddaughters (and my BF, Christina, their mother) to San Francisco for a Girl Scouts of America graduation, called a Bridging Over ceremony. When my boys graduated from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, their Bridging Over ceremony was at the church and the boys walked over a small, man-made, wooden bridge about 5 feet across. The girls walked across the entire Golden Gate Bridge! Since I wasn't an official part of their GS Pack I didn't actually get to walk across the bridge with them. But we did see the sights and have some fun.

Lombard Street is always a must, of course, as is Alcatraz.

The weather was a bit overcast (shocker, right?) but the bridge itself is always the best.



We arrived Friday afternoon and road the cable cars - the girls loved it - and stopped by the top of Lombard St. We had dinner at Boudin's, the original bread maker, and stopped by Ghirradelli's (sp?) for a cone. The girls did their thing on Saturday and we wandered around again Saturday evening, leaving first thing Sunday morning.

While riding the boat back from Alcatraz, the wind was so strong I couldn't stand still enough to take decent photos - the camera was moving so much!

San Francisco is one of my favorite, all-time places! Being here with the girls was a good part of the visit...

I have to come back here again soon, with more time to relax!