The mainstream media is finally comfortable using the word recession. I’ve been saying recession for a long time now and, in fact, I am comfortable using the word depression as well. Take an honest look around you. The jobless rate is frightening. Prices for food and other necessary items are going up instead of coming down. Housing prices might be more affordable for purchase now, but millions of people are losing money when they sell – or just plain losing their homes. Rental prices for homes and apartments are still sky-high and are not coming down to meet the demand for lower cost housing.

A depression could not be far off. Now, think about stories you have heard from people who were alive in the depression era. My grandparents are mostly dead, but I do have one grandmother who is still around to tell me stores of how she and her family survived. Also, my parents were both raised depression-era parents and were instilled with values of frugality and self sufficiency. Thank goodness they passed those values down to me.

Up north we always kept large gardens. My mother canned fruits and vegetables. I see now the value of growing as much of my own food as possible and “putting it away” for later use. I am ready to learn how to can. However, I live in Florida now and I have to re-learn how to grow a successful food crop. I know I am going to have to have good soil brought in. I will need to build a tarp to make sure my crops do not burn up in the sun. I will need to learn about planting season here and what foods do the best.

Fruit is an easy option to start. We have a large yard and although the grapefruit tree was cut down a few years back, the star fruit tree we trimmed to the ground this year will be back within two years. We have lemons and oranges in pots that are ready to go into the ground. We have apple trees of a variety that grow well in the Florida climate. I have looked online and found suppliers for Blueberry and Blackberry plants that should do well here. All of these things can be canned and will also provide a good deal of fruit to be eaten fresh.

I am one of those people who is not afraid of spiders. In fact, I like them a lot. Therefore, I feel like I need to be educated about the ones that would pose a danger to me if I were to pick them up and be bitten. I was looking at an article by G. B. Edwards of the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services and he says that only two main types of venomous spiders are in the state: widow spiders and recluse spiders.

Widows can be native to Florida. Of the four species of this type of spider, three are native. The fourth species has been introduced. It turns out that widow spiders are not native to Florida at all, but there are three species that are occasionally found here.

Since both of these kinds of spiders generally stay where they are no easily seen, the article recommends that you wear gloves when doing things like lifting firewood or reaching into a storage box or your BBQ grill.

A widow’s bite releases venom that acts systemically and moves through your lymphatic system. You might notice “intense pain, rigid abdominal muscles, muscle cramping, malaise, local sweating, nausea, vomiting, and hypertension.” The symptoms can last three to five days if not treated, but treatment is easier than you might think. Not only will an anti-venom work, but so will calcium gluconate – with can be obtained at the drug store inexpensively.

Recluse spiders are hunters and more aggressive than widows, but still only usually bite humans when trapped against the skin, like when you roll over onto one in bed or put on clothing where one is hiding. Their bites cause symptoms within two to four hours, generally making a swollen, painful blister at the bite site that is reddish in color and surrounded by blue. This is called a ‘bull’s-eye’ pattern. If it turns purple, the skin around the bite is becoming necrotic, which means it will eventually turn black and the cells will die, leaving a pitted, scarred area.

When I lived in Gainesville, we had a lot of brown recluse spiders in our wooded yard. We often found them on our screened porch. Alachua County is one of the places the brown recluse is often found. We resorted to putting out a trap, because my daughter was a toddler at the time and liked to run about touching things and exploring the environment. Of course, I still felt safer being right with her so I could monitor her actions.

I kept my daughter’s crib bedding. After she was born, I went out and bought bedding with lots of Battenberg lace and embroidered rosebuds. I did the whole room is mostly white, with rosey accents. I guess I hope one day she might be able to use the bedding for one of her own children.

Now, before she was born I bought a set of crib bedding that did end up being used. I have been a huge Babar fan all of my life and I went to al lot of trouble to locate a set of Babar crib bedding. I figured that the liberal use of red and Kelly green would work for either a boy or a girl and we had chose not to find out the gender of the baby before she was born. When Gigi was born, I suppose the red and Kelly green just did not feel right anymore and I boxed up the Babar set.

About a year ago I gave away the crib, bassinette, changing table, swings, and other baby items on Freecycle, along with a lot of Gigi’s clothes and toys that she had outgrown. I offered up the Babar bedding, asking that someone only take it is Babar meant something to them, since I the crib bedding had been to hard to obtain – not to mention expensive. I got a lot of replies, but every single one said they ere just looking for whatever they could find for their babies. So, I chose to hang onto the bedding. I did not want to give it to someone who could very well just toss it out.

And so, I have both sets saved. Maybe I’ll even use them again myself one day.

I wish I could go into greater detail about a neighbor of one of my best friends, but out of common decency I can’t say enough to identify him. My rant here is about the fact that all it takes is one bad neighbor to spoil an entire neighborhood.

My friend lives two houses down from her neighborhood’s resident bully. He has cameras trained on his next-door neighbor’s pool and the park across the street. He has gone door-to-door during HOA elections each time to try and smear everyone running for an office. He has made physical threats to several of his neighbors and regularly attempts to engage people in shouting-matches and the like.

Lately, though, he has escalated. He’s been spraying Roundup on his neighbor’s yards so the grass dies and he is has been seen messing around with newly planted trees in other people’s yards – and they die within days of whatever it is he is doing. Now, it looks like he has poisoned at least two dogs in the cul-de-sac.

There is a lot of proof, just not really the kind the police will take into consideration. He was told by a sheriff, though, that the next time something destructive happened in the area they are going to open up an investigation about him. My friend gets the blood work back on her dog in the morning and if it is positive for poisoning, I image that will b the straw that broke the camel’s back. Let’s hope.

I’ve never had a neighbor THAT bad. I did live next-door to a couple in my last neighborhood who had loud outdoor parties during football games and who also dumped their car ashtrays on neighbor’s sidewalks. They were the type to mow their lawn and skip the mere 6-inch swatch of grass between their property line and my driveway. You know – the kind of people who would rather suffer physical pain than do even the slightest kindness for a neighbor. They were super loud, unbelievably so, but I do not think they every knowingly damaged my property.

What a treat!

This week we found heirloom tomatoes at Publix. They were a hefty $5 a pound, but we picked one each of the available varieties and will save the seeds. It will be fun to try to grow them.

After all the flavorless hybrids I’ve eaten from the local stores, the heirlooms were such a treat. I cannot tell you how much I miss the tomatoes in my grandmother’s garden up in West Virginia. When I went up a year ago for my other grandmother’s funeral. I ate garden corn, tomatoes, and green beans every day for at least two meals each day. I couldn’t get enough.

I’ve been trying some tomatoes on the back patio and they grow and ripen well, but the birds and squirrels keep beating me to the punch so I have not got any actual mature tomatoes yet this summer. I am going to start moving the plants onto the screened porch to see if that works.

Anyway, here is a snap of the tomatoes. Aren’t they pretty? The varieties are Red Brandywine, Gold Medal and Cherokee Purple. According to the stickers, they were all Florida greenhouse grown.

If you were to ask me what my favorite bodily sense is, I would say scent. I love the way the world smells, most of the time. Better yet, I love filling my own world with delightful smells. I love the smell of rain (it is pouring rain outside my window right now and I just opened it a crack so that the smell of the wet earth would waft inside), ripe blackberries, my daughter’s clean hair, orange blossoms, and so many other smells. Scent is the one thing that can launch me into vivid memories.

When I cook a meal, I pay careful attention the aromatic elements. I choose my lotions and shampoos and soaps carefully, for both quality and scent. I am choosy about my perfumes, preferring Champagne by Yves Saint Laurent. I even make sure my laundry smells a particular way – roses and violets. A house that smells pleasant is a sign of how much you care about your environment.

I recently tried the Renuzit TriScents scented oil air freshener. Between you and me, this is ideal for me. I am actually that person who changes the oil cartridges in my other air freshener systems back and forth, before they actually run out. I like variety and I get in the mood for one type of scent or another and I take charge and just switch it out.

This particular TriScents rotates through some of my favorite Renuzit fragrances: Waterfall Mist, After the Rain (my absolute favorite), and Pure Breeze. They call it the Morning Meadow Collection. I love these scents, because they’re crisp, clean and natural smelling. What happens in the unit, when plugged into an electric outlet, cycles through the fragrances in 45 minute intervals. It’s divine, honestly!

(I even kept the little blue, green and yellow lids that came on the oil containers just so I can have them here at my desk to add a little yumminess to my office!)

I really should be outside getting my yard work done before it gets too hot. May in Florida is when summer starts setting in and although the humidity is generally still not in the picture, we hit 90 degrees pretty early in the day.

I have some tomatoes I still have not potted. I’m not doing them any favors by leaving them in the containers they came in from the nursery. The same goes for the marigolds I have yet to plant. I was doing a huge landscaping project, installing landscaping fabric, mulching, re-designing the flower bed borders – all when I threw out my lower back. It looks like I am healthy enough to continue, but I have to admit my momentum is gone.

I’d really rather just take a book outside and sit with a glass of iced mint tea. Nonetheless, we aren’t going to have fresh vegetables this summer if I don’t finish my gardening, and soon!

The apples, blueberries, patio tomatoes, blood oranges, navel oranges, and lemons are all doing well. They just need fish emulsion and water. The star fruit tree is dormant. All I really need to do is finish my tomatoes and I can justify grabbing that book and that glass of tea.

Oh, someone just kick me in the rear, please.

Generally, I’m a bath person. That is to say that out of the two different types of bathers in this world (those who prefer showers and those who prefer baths), I am one of those who prefers the bath.

But, who has time? As much as I would love to have a calming soak every night; that is a luxury that went out the window with motherhood. I just don’t have enough time to myself, especially as a single mother; to be sitting is a bathtub while my daughter has the run of the house. And, I don’t feel comfortable doing it after she goes to bed, because her “kid sense” perks up and she usually awakes and comes to crash my party.

So, now I am a shower girl. I can get clean a lot faster that way. I had no idea, though, that I would spend my showers in mortal combat with the shower curtain. If my daughter is not sneaking n the bathroom to push the curtain around to stare at me, then there is that creepy bathroom craft that keeps the curtain whipping around my legs as I try to shave or wash my hair.

What’s up with that? Is there some sort of lay of physics I never learned in high school that dictates that a shower curtain has the law of nature on its side and the given ability to shrink your shower space?

Of course, I could buy a curved shower rod to increase the space, but I’m really just not up to drilling holes in the tile to install the fool thing. I did, however, find a product called the ShowerBow. It attaches easily to your existing shower rod and works to create a little more space in the knee and shoulder regions of the shower stall. Plus, it keeps your curtain from blowing in on you. Rather ingenious, but then then I always have believed that some of the best things in life are simple.

I cannot believe how much bigger and stronger the three remaining mockingbird chicks are now. It has only been a couple days and they have feathers and have lost most of their down.

One of the babies jumped up on a limb of the ficus tree to look around, but he made it back to the nest. Another baby followed suit, but it fell from the nest and the parents are currently pretty busy chasing it around the neighborhood. At my last check, I saw it across the street and two houses down. The mom and dad birds have their hands (wings) full with keeping an eye on the escaped baby and still feeding the two that are still in the nest.

Here is a picture of the first chick to venture out of the nest. He went back in and is sleeping soundly as I write this:

 

Here is one of the parents. The sun was at the wrong angle, so the picture is washed out, but it is sitting right next to my camera:

Apples in Florida are not like the apples that grow in the north. I was born and raised in Virginia, so apples were part of the landscape there. I missed seeing apples blossoms and apple trees once I moved to Florida.

When I was living in Gainesville, I bought some trees that had been cultivated from Israeli varieties – the “Anna” and “Dorsett Golden”. I bought several trees of each, since they need one another for cross pollination.

I never did put them in the ground, because shortly after I bought them, I found out my then husband was probably being transferred back to Tampa. They came back to the Tamp area with us in the move.

Now I have them in very large pots on the back patio and they are doing so well, despite the fact that most people say they need to be further north in the state to do well. At almost all times throughout the year, we have trees in different stages of production. Right now we have some apples with nothing but buds, some with lovely pink blossoms, and some with ripening apples.

I took a photo of some of the apples. They are growing in droves, but they are small – barely 2 inches across. That is just the nature of these particular varieties.

The apples in the pictures are the “Anna” variety, I think. They are green with a red blush, so I am pretty sure that is what they are.

It is astounding to me how much of a difference two days makes in the lives of the Mockingbird babies that in the nest outside my front door.

If you read my previous post about the mockingbirds, you will remember that there were four, but one of the babies slipped out of the nest due to wind tilting the nest. He died as a result. I put on gloves and carefully removed him, buried him, and then noticed that once the dead baby was gone from the nest, the parents resumed feeding the remaining three. I suppose the dead bird in the next had been upsetting them, because they had stopped feeding the chicks.

Anyway, this picture as taken today and you can tell how much more developed the feathers are. Also, instead of just asking to be fed when I came bear the nest, this time the chicks squawked unhappily at me. I’ll have to back off from now on.

It is a blessing to have the birds right outside the front door. This front row seat to God’s springtime nature broadcast is just amazing.

We have a pair of mocking birds that built a nest right outside my front door, in two potted ficus trees that happened to tangle together near their leafy tops. They were such a joy to watch as they built the nest. Somewhere, they found fluffy cotton and old Christmas tinsel. I also laid some cotton batting out for them to use; I was flattered when they took me up on my offering.

They laid their eggs and soon thereafter four little babies began tweeting. Mommy and Daddy having been working tirelessly to feed them. And, as the days pass the entire little bird family has become more and more comfortable with our presence. The adult birds no longer take off when we come in and out the front door. And, they no longer squawk at me when I am out working in the flowerbed.

They have even been OK with me taking pictures.

Here are pictures of the four babies yesterday. I agree with my daughter that their open mouths look like exotic flowers.

Last night we had an unusually cold night and very stiff winds. I went out to check the nest this morning and found it very titled. I also found one of the four babies had slipped out and its neck had become caught in between two little branches. It was dead. I felt quite saddened.

Evn more alarming was that the adult birds seemed to be avoiding the next while it had a dead baby in it. So, I put on gloves and got a long stick. I carefully moved around the branches until the baby fell into my hand. The, I dug a hole in one of my flower beds and gave him a little burial.

I wrnt back and did my best to jiggle things around to right the nest. As soon as I was finished, the adults came back and began feeding the remaining three babies

I’m honred to be able to watch all of this so close. And, even though the death of the 4th baby was heart breaking, it gives me a personal look at nature.

I have two booster seats for my five-year-old daughter to use in the car. The one I like best is a Grace TurboBooster and it has a comfy back. But, I left the seat bottom out on the porch one rainy night and by the next hot and muggy afternoon, the seat cover and arm covers had begun to get black mold spots.

I have tried soaking, bleach, and scrubbing with Tide. I have succeeded in fading the color of the car seat, but the mold has refused to withdraw in the least. Since I am allergic to mold, as is my daughter, I decided the covers are a loss.

I called Graco just now and was able to purchase a replacement set cover and the arm covers for $27.95, which includes tax and shipping. That is more than the most of a brand new backless booster. But, alas, I want the booster to have a back and I want it to match the cover for the seat back. So, I felt stuck.

Anyway, all of this is a rambling way to ask if anyone has a miracle tips as to how to remove black mold spots from fabric.

I have been wanting to get around to cleaning out the garage for a long time now. I very long time, in fact. It’s just that I never seem to wake up in the morning and say to myself, “Gee, this is a perfect day to pull everything out of the garage and spend hours sweating as I clean and reorganize!”

So, today fate took care of my motivation for me.

I was outside watering the plants in the front flower gardens when I saw a snake sunning itself underneath one of the shepherd’s hooks that holds some red petunias. I hate snakes. I have a fabulously irrational fear of snakes that makes my hands and feet go numb, I can barely breathe, and I start seeing dark spots in front of my eyes. It is terrible.

So, without my much thought, I aimed the hose at the snake. I have no idea where I thought the snake would go, but it promptly disappeared around the corner. I did not see it cross the driveway, so there was only one place I thought it could have gone – into the garage!

We just had a new garage door installed and it has a rather good seal at the bottom. Nonetheless, I could not figure any other place that snake could have gone. So, with white knuckles and questionable breathing, I set about dragging every single thing out of the garage to find that snake.

I never did find the snake. I suppose it actually slithered off into the yard somewhere and I just did not see its getaway. I did, however, find tons of stuff to throw away. I also loaded the van full of things to bring to a women’s shelter. And, now all of the bins and shelves and boxes in the garage are logically organized into rows. It’s quite nice out there.

And all that, thanks to a snake.

I recently bought a beautiful Gymboree Easter dress from a line they put out several years ago – Garden Party. I got it on eBay for close to nothing. I think the seller had not listed the product line name or something. I was thrilled, since it was one of the dresses I had wanted my daughter to have for a long time.

Garden Party fabric

She wore it the day after her birthday, when we went to Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Epcot. We had been to the Pirate & Princess party the night before and this was a follow-up leisure day on some free Park Hopper passes we got from a friend who works in the park system.

Anyway, close to the end of the day I noticed that Gigi had been carrying her little autograph book that she had made herself close to her chest, school-girl style. The ballpoint ink pen she had been using was in the spiral spine of the book and it had been open all along! Her dress was absolutely covered with with bright blue ballpoint ink marks. Covered.

My initial response was to soak the spots in Tide for day or so and wash the dress. That did not even fade the marks! Finally, I sat down with a Q-Tip and some rubbing alcohol and just gently rubbed at each mark. I noticed the marks were slowly fading, so I soaked the dress in cold water over night and then let the dress dry. I repeated the process three times and finally I had a dress completely free of pen marks!

It was a timely process, but it saved the dress. Ideally, you would put an old towel behind the fabric you are dabbing, so the ink will bleed onto the towel. The dress I was working on, though, was lined with a satin, so the towel was superfluous.