Mr. Lector, back in the institution, has now gotten a phone and called the news station. He assures everyone he meant no harm, he is no longer schizophrenic, and the sickle he was carrying was to protect him from mountain lions.
A kid at school had a cough. Fears of swine flu led the school to dismiss him home. He got on his bicycle, and headed home. He was struck by a car rounding a corner and sent by ambulance to a local hospital. The hospital called his parents, who got in their car and rushed for the hospital. They were hit by a drunk driver and taken by ambulance to the same hospital. Fortunately nobody is too seriously injured, beyond road rash, whiplash, and bruises. They have a group photo all showing their id bracelets.
We are still finding things out of whack in the back yard, like aquatic grass blown flat, out of its rocks, and are increasingly sure it was a downburst from a collapsing storm. What blew our back gate in and dragged a foot-long drop-pin in the wrong direction before ripping the whole pin assembly off the boards…was no small wind.
And otherwise we are going through the flurry of preparation for winter…sealing the mural on the garage is the day’s chore, and that’s going to be a doozie. We have to work with a paintbrush, because a roller would leave bubbles, and we’re afraid to put this stuff into the sprayer. So this is going to be work.
Jane’s sore after wielding our new pruning-hook and taking a dead limb off the hawthorne.
And we are not going to get much office work done today. But we will protect the mural from winter.
I saw Jane’s post about the hook pruner, and the need thereafter for Advil and Satohap plasters. My favorite Implement of Destruction is an anvil pruner/lopper I got from our local Ace Hardware. It was beefier than anything I could find at Home Despot or Lowe’s, being able to handle 1 3/4″ branches, and is the only thing I have found able to chop the seedlings from the neighbor’s monkeypod tree. They make a fine supplemental hedge, but must be trimmed back every 3-4 months before they get tall and whippy.
if the grass is lying in one direction, it’s most likely from a downdraft, or what gets called “straight line winds”. It’s amazing in summer to stand outside, watch a thunderstorm approach, and feel the cold air as the downdraft hits.
I hope the drunk driver was carted off to jail, or if he/she’s in the hospital, too, they’re handcuffed to the bed. Oh well, if there were a fire, they might not be able to get to that particular bed, so I guess it’s not a good thing. The boy is NOT in a good place if he has a sniffle and they think it’s H1N1, suppose he doesn’t have it, but catches it there? They have sick people in hospitals! OSG told us so.
“Yes, Mr. Lector, that’s very comforting to know.”
Sickle. Mountain Lions. ?_? Rrriiiiight. I’d rather just be REALLY noisy as I wander about the forest than consider taking one on!
As for the ambulance-upon-ambulance escalation… wow. Is that situational irony or what? Thank heavens everyone is mostly ok!
Re flattened plants: I was caring for a neighbor’s garden recently, and came over after a heavy downpour to find some superbly flattened flora! Some recovered; others… *drumroll* …did not.
*ominous music* Bum-bum-buuuuuuuuuum!
Brush-painting the whole of the garage, eeurgh! Is there no exterior aerosol sealer you could have obtained? 🙁 Yet, better safe than erased by wind and weather, that’s for sure!
Actually brush painting is about the safest way to apply paint sealer,etc…any spray puts particles into the air and should not be used without the properly rated mask……not sure about paint but I know that submicroscopic clay particles can stay suspended in air for up to 72 hrs………are we going to have more pictures? Puleeeeeze?
Oh a SICKEL! Definitely my weapon of choice as protection against predators! And I thought RI was strange….but we tend toward arcane politics here…one of the benefits of living in a state where everyone seems to be somebody’s cousin or in-law.
The ambulance scene: literary deja vu via Slaughterhouse Five.
Windy, rainy, feels almost like hurricane weather…no digging the fish pond today.
The sickle is particularly ominous if you know that a) he was not in the woods. He was hitching on I-90; b) he decapitated a neighbor c) he now states he is cured of schizophrenia and doesn’t need his meds.
The sealant (Benjamin Moore outdoor-rated Stays Clear) is great: no smell, water-based so if you want to touch up, you can paint over it later. And we were lamenting that the greens and blues had faded over the summer. We put this on, and immediately they were back. Since we painted the mural with interior house paint (those nice little sample jars you can buy at Ace Hardware) we were very concerned about durability. And now it’s well-sealed and bright.
I think I missed something. You have a mural on your garage? Is there a picture posted somewhere?
Yes: go to Jane’s blog: she’s the keeper of the picture gallery. There’s the mural, the pond, the whole shebang.
http://www.janefancher.com/TheCaptainAndLime/
It’s no good for a long reach, but Home Depot sells a LOVELY lopper for general work or for carrying around in your hip pocket (seriously!) as you patrol the property looking for pruning that needs doing. It’s by Fiskars, it’s very short-handled (hence the pocketability), it makes up for the short handles with a gear assembly that gives it the cutting capacity of 24″ handles instead of 14″. And it’s all plastic, very durable plastic, except the blade, so that it weighs very little. Regular loppers very quickly make my upper arms and shoulders sore just holding up the heavy head out at two feet of length. I can use this one for hours. Even my 5-year-old nephew could use it! And it only costs twenty bucks…well, actually it has gone up to 23. Lowe’s doesn’t have it; I have only found it at HD. http://www.ordertree.com/cms/fiskars-15-inch-power-gear-anvil-lopper/9996.html
I expect no one will ever read that previous comment. I have NO IDEA how my bookmark of this site took me to a year-old post!
Ah! But you reckon without our handy-dandy post tracker on the left sidebar!