Now Trending: Cry Babies

How can I express my discomfort...

...when I saw a photo of these Halloween masks on FB?

How about, "Ewww!"

These are truly horrible, right down to the veins on the head, rubbery tears, and insufficient openings for vision and breathing which harken back to the plastic Halloween masks some of us grew up with.

I shrugged it off as a fluke, until, on a trip to my local WalMart...

OMG!!!

Are cry babies the new zombies?

The realism of this cry baby mask is 100% more unsettling than the rubber cry baby mask and now the wearer has been reduced to nothing but 2 mesh inserts for vision.  And a quick study of those eye "holes" will reveal the scale of this crazy thing: it's HUGE!

And why "cry babies"?  Please, someone, guide me into this loop.

And one last time, this face:

I finally shelled out the $25 and brought her home.  

Love.

I've been asked why I like her so much.  I'm sure there's an eloquent French saying or long German compound word to express my feelings but all I can say is, "I knew it when I saw it."

Another face...

...with excellent zombie potential, if zombies weren't already so 20 minutes ago, is this Frida Kahlo on the door of a women's restroom.  Please note how a timid but thoughtful graffiti artist added the merest suggestion of lip hair. ¡Muy bien hecho!

The zombie garden cart lives!

(segue to my yard)

I took this photo right before my latest Frankenstein-ian repair job.  

This is getting ridiculous, but it still works!

We all need boundaries,

and chickens are no exception.

I shooed them back outside after this photo 

and then Schotzie took up a sentry position for her daily sunbath. 

No birds allowed.

Schotzie is getting old, she's 13, and there are many signs of her slowing down.

Until one of the boys drops a potato chip and we all witness her take a 12 foot leap from the couch and hit the floor running at the pace of a 10-flat 100 yard dash sprinter. 

She's got a little life left in her yet.

Life abounds.

Check out this momma gecko, chock full of the next gecko generation.

I tried to get a side shot which really showed the outline of all her eggs but she was having none of it.

She scuttled off and probably dropped this clutch within the hour.

I'm finally figuring out some of the settings

on my camera phone.

The instructions (Google) say to use the HDR setting when it's really bright outside.

I live in Florida so that happens quite often.

My gloriosa lillies are extremely happy right now, possible due to all the late summer rain, so I captured their glorious beauty with the HDR setting.  Looks good to me!

And the plumeria that won't die...

This plant looked so bad for so long that the only thing keeping me from digging it up was that I'd always get distracted by another project.  It's finally gotten it's act together and won a reprieve from the compost pile.

Baby knitting needles make me cry.

I felt a need to knit something other than the same shopping bag pattern I've been doing so I started this delicate lace scarf.  Ohhh, these needles are so small and I'm having trouble with my man-hands.  I've got about 2" of scarf completed so far.  We'll see if I can go the distance.

Summer summary

There's not much to eat in my yard right now.

Papayas and eggs do not a balanced diet make.

The summer veggies are long gone and even though I'm looking forward to a fabulous G&T season as my lemons are about to ripen, it's slim pickin's.

I picked a handful of habaneros at a friend's house and cobbled together a curry.  Hopefully, I'll have my own peppers next year.

And hopefully I'll have my own pigeon peas next year.

The great gandule experiment has had mixed results.  This plant is known for its ability to thrive in difficult environments and compared to India and Africa, how difficult can central Florida be? 

 I planted all my gandules at the same time and I now have 3 types of plants:

Dead

Stunted

Thriving

Our extremely wet summer caused an explosion of scale all over my yard and the gandules took it especially hard.  Still, that's a wide range of results.  I'll keep trying. 

A quick review of home-freezing my garden veggies.

Kale: hated it.

Papaya: s'okay.

Cherry tomatoes: Success!

These tiny heirloom cherry tomatoes have to be eaten immediately after picking as their thin skins don't hold up well, but that trait makes them fabulous to use right out of the freezer.  

The skin melts away and the flavor is rich.  They self-seed prolifically all over my yard and everyone nibbles on them from the humans, to the dachshunds, to the chickens.

Those goofy chickens.

One of my tweens, Pterry, wandered in to see how the other half lives.  Normally, the birds stop at the threshold, as if there were a chicken forcefield in place.  It was the clicking of her toenails, so different from the dachshunds, which alerted me to a new visitor.

And No, she didn't poop on the floor.

Gratuitous cute dog photo:

Gratuitous cute nephew photo:

Not so gratuitous but still cute knitting photo:

Baby mittens!  I think these were knitted on toothpicks!

This skilled knitter gifted me with a selection of fun yarns,

so Christmas presents will be fuzzy and bright this year.

I continue to build up my jewelry inventory

My Etsy store, SolOpsArt (https://www.etsy.com/shop/SolOpsArt) has gratified me with a steady trickle of sales and is a wonderful outlet for my creativity. 

I have started dropping in again at local thrift stores and was rewarded

 with this fantastic string of dyed bone beads for $2!

These will not be featured on a vegan necklace ALTHOUGH 

I do offer vegan alternatives in my jewelry.

I'm not sure what the decision is on fossils but I've decided to use the KISS method

 and do not include them in vegan designs.

Art and inspiration surround me

and I'll take it where I find it

or buy it:

A mere $25 and this lady will be mine.

I feel like I can wake up on those mornings when I was too tired to mess with the makeup remover the night before, and she will understand.

As Precarious As I Wanna Be

I don't just sit around in my house all day, every day

washing dachshunds

and photographing chickens...

It's a lot more than that.

I have a daredevil moment every time I want to pick a papaya, especially during a thunderstorm.

Sometimes I have to beat my way through fragrant trumpet flowers just to get off my deck.

I unload tons of rocks in flip flops.

Ok, it's pretty boring.

This morning I sat perfectly still and got to see a tiny bird carefully sort through tufts of fur I had just trimmed off Lilly, choosing the perfect pieces for nest construction.  I also observed a little lizard stalk a fly all the way across the deck.  I hate to crap on anyone's aspirations but I knew that wasn't gonna go down.  The fly waited until the lizard was 6" away, winked a thousands eyes, and took off. 

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the lizard, 

it too was being stalked...

The babies are officially tweens and have begun venturing into the yard to forage.

They will eat anything.

Gratuitous cute frog picture.

Awww, hang in there buddy!  Friday's coming!

The old Ranger is gone, and in its place is a sweet new ride, which needed a sweet new system that would enable me to haul junk all over central Florida.  I had been seeing the streamlined TracRacs on trucks and decided that's what I wanted.  I scoured Craigslist for a few weeks but have come to the conclusion that there are now professional Craigslist scourers and the deals are a lot harder to come by.  I called around for pricing and ended up purchasing my TracRac from eBay for a small savings and decided to install it myself, saving another $80.

Armed with a cup of coffee and my beautiful Bosch driver, the initial construction only took about 30 minutes.  Attaching the sucker to the truck took a little longer.

When I was finished, I stood back and thought, 

"That looks like an easy way for someone to steal a few hundred dollars from me."

Bring in the big guns!

I had Mike drill through each foot of the rack and install bolts with locking nuts.

I had Mike do it because I couldn't bear the thought of drilling through my new truck, myself.

The bolts might not be foolproof but they will definitely make it a pain in the butt to get the rack off.

I'm still obsessively checking the tightness of all the bolts.  A little precariousness spices things up but I don't want to see my kayak receding in my rear view mirror as I'm cruising down I-4.

Prepare For Landing

I would prefer to always be on vacation.

But that's not gonna happen so I'm back home from West Virginia and looking with freshly weary eyes at all the things that need to be done on my croft.

Take the above photo.  

I finally got the ladder out of the shed and trimmed back the big cactus that was threatening to shred the shade cloth for the orchids.  Too bad I put the ladder away before dealing with...

The monster papaya tree!

Word to the wise: don't let your papaya tree grow so tall that you can't access the fruit 

until it falls to the ground in a funky mush.  

Last year I allowed two side shoots to start maturing and now it's time to saw the top off of this thing before it get into the power lines.  

I've tried and tried and tried to grow another one from seed and always failed so I was extremely grateful when a friend gave me a healthy young tree.

The day after she gave it to me, I spotted this little guy growing next to the compost bin...

So I will soon have stacks of papayas to consume.  

Two words: SMOOTH! EE!

Speaking of the compost pile,

what on earth is this ethereal creature?!

It's a native Florida lily. Don't know how it got there but it can stay.

  Back to the papaya situation.

The only thing standing between me and a beautiful papaya tree in my front yard was this tenacious shrub:

Once upon a time it was a sweet almond bush and the flying insects loved it but before too long, it became an over-achieving, weedy bastard that had to be cut to the ground TWICE a year merely to keep it in bounds.  Time to die!   It took a couple of visits with different tools to finally extricate it.  

Gone!  Papaya in place!

And if Thomas Jefferson can have figs, why can't I?

Different climate and soil?  Pshaw!

I have one fig tree that was growing in a pot and now it is, hopefully, growing in the ground.

I won't stock up on brie just yet, but I have my fingers crossed.

While working in the front yard

I noticed this possibly concerning development with one of my painful plants:

The "cowboy cactus" that I bought for $5 at the flea market in the spring is happy...

Maybe TOO happy.

I just noticed 3 pups growing around the base.

I'm gonna keep my eye on you!

I thinned some bromeliads, 

only scratching the crap out of my arms from my elbows to my shoulders because now,

I wear welding gloves.

The most gratifying part of the process was that the people who wanted the starts were there to get them within a couple of hours and had them all planted before nightfall.  

OCD's after my own heart.

In some cases, I have to choose my battles.

Take these persimmons, for instance.

A friend brought them to me and I was very excited.  

I like persimmons!  Right?  Don't I?

To be honest, I don't really understand persimmons.  They seemed to go from rock hard with an alum aftertaste to complete goo, overnight.  I was not put off because that's what NurtiBullets are for: turning unwieldy produce into nutritious sustenance that doesn't require teeth.

Still, I had that moment of thinking I needed a dwarf persimmon tree...until I studied how these things are connected to said tree.  Look at the stems. Geez!  They're not coming off without pruning shears!

Pass!