Patience, grasshopper

I have been practicing being patient for 50 years now.

I have seen some improvement.

One of my friends has the most amazing pineapple "plantation" in her front yard, harvesting 12-15 fruits every season, and I've been emulating her...for years!

Glory!!!

Baby pineapples galore!  FOUR, to be exact!

Only 4 more months before they ripen...

Patience, grasshopper.

I bought a new toy that also requires patience...

on many levels.

This ominous looking machine is a lapidary slab saw with a big diamond-edged blade inside.

I bought it, used, from the owners of Hogg Mine and while I was initially intimidated, it's actually relatively quiet and non-threatening.  They told me that the diamond blade won't cut your skin but will go right through your fingernail.  

No intention to test that theory.

Here's what I can do with this saw:

This is a very thin slice of a chunk of fossilized coral that I found in a local river.

Amazing, I know.

I am determined to earn back the cost of the saw through selling coral in some way, shape, or form.

I was a vendor at a tiny fossil show last weekend (shared a table so my cost was $0) and I'm proud to say I sold $11 worth of coral slices.

Hello, big money!!!

...patience, grasshopper...

I had the usual SolOpsArt fare for sale...

...and was happy to bag up a few of those, too.

My pineapple guru is also a master at reducing her impact on the planet

and she gave me a set of these cotton produce bags. They are light enough that they won't affect the weight of your goods and they are reusable, of course.

I felt like the coolest shopper in the store that day.

But I can't totally give up on plastic grocery bags.

I line my small trash cans with them and they have many creative applications when I'm in a pinch.

Witness impromptu scupper plugs for my kayak.

Those are my paddling gloves, tightly folded, and water-proofed with plastic shopping bags.

I loaded my yak waaaaay too heavy so it was either jettison cargo or get creative.

Ka-ching!

I know you're wondering...

...and yes, the pigeon peas are doing great!

Here's hoping for 4 more years of culinary bliss with this one shrub.

I've been patiently ignoring

 the crazed bougainvillea in my yard

but it was finally time to tame it or lose an eye trying to get around it.

They are beautiful, but why so mean?

The branches remind me of the sleeves of a calypso costume.

No?  Well, I guess you had to be there.

No flower will be forgotten!

I did it!  I finally devised a little arrangement out of cactus flowers. 

Bright as a calypso shirt!

And for a split second, I thought this looked fun:

and then the doubts crept in.

The more I studied it, the more it looked like a minor form of well-heeled torture.

FIVE people?! Such a small space for so many useless flower arrangements.  Much more practical to use that space for wine but...what about bathroom breaks?  I guess they're supposed to punt to the bank with that stick of bamboo.

I'll be meditating on this mess for days.

Have a great week!

The Sexy Side of Chilling Out

Random, I know,

but as I often listen to Pandora's "Chill Out" station while I work,

I couldn't help but notice a sexy feel to many of the CD covers.

This surprises me for a couple of reasons.

Relaxation music is often seen as something women like and I've even had male haircut clients make cracks about the music by referencing mani's and pedi's and facials, but these CD covers would suggest marketing to a male audience.

"A Seductive Double CD of Sublime Rhythms"?

I'm old school so I'm trying to adjust my mind to the fact that the beautiful women must be the seducers and they are using this relaxing, seductive music to get the Euro dudes to fall into their beds. 

Right?

I guess I equate relaxation as coming after the sexy time and to me, this is music to nap to.

Oh, yeah, baby...Hedkandi.

I'm going to sleep now...

Safe and Sound

I threw a 50th birthday party for myself

which was odd because I'm only 45.

Psyche!

It was my 50th birthday (witness the beautiful cymbidium orchid gift above) and prepping for the party was a bit foreign to me.  I can throw together some fruit and cheese for a few friends but full scale party supplies?  

Lost!

This is what my cart looked like

 and when I walked away from it for a moment in the store, I had trouble finding it again because I've never before had a cart that looked like that!

So the craziness is over, cake has been eaten, 

guests have gone home,

and I can go back to wandering aimlessly around my yard, enjoying the pretty flowers.

These were on clearance for 47¢ because they weren't blooming.

Look at 'em now!

I finally moved my Buddha Belly to a shadier location and it's coming back to life.

Bromeliad perfection!

One word:  orchids.

And the best surprise of all?

PRODUCE!

Those are baby green beans!

After I thinned some crowded seedlings, 

I had enough veg for a morning frittata.

Great success!

Lilly has discovered the perfect way

 to follow me around the garden.

I was afraid she wouldn't be able to turn around but she contorts that skinny body to great effect.

This method keeps her feet out of the garden soil but her fuzzy hide

 still drags in plenty of mulch and leaves so....

Time for a furcut.

Needless to say, she hates it, but she's a good sport

 and now all the birds will have soft nests this spring.

Driving around with the dogs,

I had to get a photo of how Schotzie likes to ride.

It's not about seeing out the window for her;

she wants to smell the whole wide world.

Let's close with some funny looking chicken feet.

Who knows why this leghorn adopted this posture to sip water dripping from the hose?

I just know, those chicken toes are hilarious!

Foolhardy determination

It's springtime,

which, in Florida, means it's 85° by 9 AM.

I have a gaggle (and I use that term incorrectly) of Carolina wrens trying to nest in my yard,

or more specifically, in my shed.

Since I got my new/used toy, a lapidary slab saw, I am about to embark on a lot of "shed time" and I don't want to scare the wrens to the point of abandoning babies.

Wrens gotta go!

It took me awhile to find where they were building their first nest: 

in the bag on the front of my bicycle.

Don't they know 

I'm going to ride that thing at least once in 2015?!

I dismantled the nest before they could start laying eggs and zipped the pouch shut but they still kept coming into my shed with leaves and twigs and dachshund fur.

I definitely use my kayak anchor more than my bicycle so a second nest had to be dismantled.

They got the hint.

Other news in the world of foolhardy determination:

Coconuts

A friend gave me some coconuts and while I know there is good stuff inside, I have not a clue how to get to it.  Do not sign me up for an episode of Naked and Afraid (for a variety of reasons)!

I hammered at one of them for 15 minutes with a 2lb sledge and didn't even mar the outer surface.

I called in my neighbors from Trinidad and they knew exactly what to do: 

they took the coconuts away from me.

The trade-off is that this weekend, they will deliver 

enough amazing curry to feed me through the weekend.

The Trinidad neighbors also told me

that I could easily preserve all my Meyer lemons by washing them and popping them into the freezer. When I need lemon juice, I take one out and either microwave it or let it set in the 

springtime sun for 5 minutes.

True to form, 

I've just been slicing them, as is, and using them in lieu of ice cubes in my G&T.

And the determination to grow vegetables...

The small, sickly plant in front is the "goal" vegetable, a pepper plant.

Towering to the left is a mushroom and behind the pepper is a weed that is sure to outpace my pepper plant, if the pepper plant survives.  At least the chickens haven't found a way in yet, but I did have to chase a flock of ibis out.  I think the ibis are only looking for bugs but they would have no compunction about trampling my seedlings.

And now for a review:

This is a shandy made with grapefruit soda

and it's pretty darn tasty.

Have a great week!

Rainy day ruminations

It's still raining

and has been for most of the winter.

I'm told this is a good thing but I count on the dry season to accomplish certain tasks like repairing the leaking vent on my roof.  

The constant rain has made a smooth transition for planting my vegetable seedlings so I have high, probably unrealistic, hopes for bushels of veggies this summer.  The true test is adding hot temps to the constant rain: recipe for pest success.

Dendrobium Sao Paulo in the house!

We only had one week of freezing temps this winter and I usually let most of the plants fend for themselves but this year, the freeze was late to I pulled Sao Paulo inside to protect those magnificent buds. I also covered up my young papaya trees and the Meyer lemon that was flowering.  

Lots of bromeliad action

and this one is currently the biggest and the best.

In Florida, bromeliads cannot be beat for ease.

I wonder if this advertising campaign

has caused an uptick in the sales of rubber gloves?

I have to imagine that the sales figures for rubber gloves remain extremely stable.

No matter what.

My chicken hand puppet.

I'm prepping to apply to groups of preppers.

Someone's gotta take me!

I worry that I'm older and my only real skill is cutting hair 

(not very important during the breakdown of society)

 but surely chicken husbandry counts for something.

Let me in!  I come bearing hens!

Ho hum...I could always clean more rocks.

Amazing how dirty they get.

I just collected these chunks of rose quartz from the Hogg Mine in Georgia but next time, I'll let the mine owners pick my rocks for me because the ones they loaded for my friend were waaaaay better.

Working on my jewelry.

I've finally used this beautiful piece of fossilized mammoth enamel and I like the result.

People want knits!

I've had some requests and I have the yarn to meet those requests.

Hey, is knitting a survival skill?  

Yes, although more valuable in the northern climes.

Gratuitous cute dog photo.

Lilly woke up from her nap and had super cute bedhead. 

Here's another cutie waiting in a bike basket.

This was one cool cat of a dog.

Down Ol' Mexico Way

I recently traveled to Arizona,

ready to warm my bones in the American Southwest.

Cold, rainy, and...

snowy?!

I wasn't about to change out of my flip flops so I headed back to Florida and went on a mini-vacation down ol' Mexico way, or, to be more specific, highway 17 along the Peace River.

I met up with a couple of friends who were traveling in a

Burro

Their burro is a cool little 70's era travel trailer and their visit to Highland Hammocks State Park serendipitously coincided with a fiberglass travel trailer meetup event.

I'm not making this up.

Our original goal was to hunt for fossils in the Peace River

but rainy conditions meant the water was too high to engage in that pastime.

What to do...what to do...?

I decided to take the ladies to my favorite little Latin American store:

The Fiesta Market

in Bowling Green, Florida.

This store is better than a Bravo for making you feel like you're on vacation down south.  The ceiling is lined with piñatas and the shelves are stocked with all kinds of goods from Mexico and Central America including leather work boots from Guatemala and a selection of Mexican molcajetes.

The molcajete: an obsession from afar.

I have been gazing longingly at molcajetes for decades, never feeling confident enough to purchase this raw-boned, serious-as-a-heart-attack, Mexican mortar and pestle. Hell, after all these years, I still have trouble remembering the name for the pestle: tejolote.

(tejolote, tejolote!)

I've dicked around with old timey looking marble mortar and pestles and even bought a large clay Thai version but I'm convinced that you need to grow up in a country where these are kitchen staples to truly intuit the technique.

Then I asked the price (in Spanish, of course)...

$9.99? 

 ¡I'm going native!

Traditional molcajetes are carved from a single block of volcanic rock but for $9.99 you get a molcajete formed from volcanic scrap and cement.  Although this is an accepted substitute, my 60lb molcajete smells like a bag of wet Sakrete.  

I'm going to season it for awhile before I start eating what I grind.

Meanwhile, Anne is mesmerized by the tortilla machine...

or the tortilla technician. (smile)

I believe he said the machine cost $30,000 and that's a lot of 99¢ packages of tortillas but really, there's nothing like fresh, warm, soft corn tortillas, right off the incredibly expensive tortilla machine.

The day we visited, the deli counter featured fresh tilapia.

Now I've heard people trash talking' tilapia but I've had fresh-caught tilapia and it's very good.

I just prefer to remove the face before I cook it.

If you get down ol' Bowling Green way, check it out.

Back home, the yard transformation continues,

and let me tell you, there's nothing like moving twenty 60lb bags of Sakrete to make 40lb bags of manure feel like child's play.

The manure bags smelled so bad, the young man at WalMart almost refused to load them into my truck.  The Sarkrete bags smell like, well, a molcajete.

Coolest, easiest job yet?

The giant bag of gravel from Lowes:

cheap and satisfying; now the spaces between my stepping stones

 look as good as my stepping stones.

I thought I'd get to keep the bag for use on heavy laundry days but I wanted that $15 deposit back.

I found these "ladybug" seeds on a vine near the Peace River.

I thoroughly researched these on the internet for 5 minutes and have no idea what they are besides extremely toxic. 

No plans to eat them or plant them (they SCREAM "invasive") but they sure look purty in a jar.

I also found this sweet little deer mandible.

Love.  Don't know why Mike wants me to get it off his kitchen window sill.

Sakrete is hell on the skin

and it's taken constant applications of coconut oil to keep my hands from feeling like sandpaper.

I suppose it adds a little "texture" to the yarn when I'm knitting.

I've decided to knit snuggly socks for Christmas presents (with knitting, I have to plan waaaay ahead) and here's my first try:

I stopped halfway through (obviously) because I had to adjust the pattern, but now I'm thinking...

Is there a market for slingback socks?