Month: March 2019

This morning I was able to enjoy one of my special joys, the sparkle, everywhere, after a very heavy frost. Way back, when I first decided to look for joy in my life, and decided to find as much joy as possible from every opportunity, this, the true rainbows of color on sunlit snow, the chance to get a sparkle of pure red from a point across the yard, was the emblem of what I was looking for.  Yesterday it was the intensity of blue of a cloudless winter sky, so deep you could almost see the stars and yet the blue of it alleviating any ponderous sharing of solitary mysteries, the loneliness of physics, instead, rejoicing at the exquisite detailed beauty the ponderousness

The snow is expected to stop midafternoon, we got about 18” out there and I don’t expect much more. It’s not too heavy which is nice, and I am full of gratitude and triumph at freeing my garage door.  I’ve been chipping at the ice and sweeping every last grain of snow away and finally the concrete floor let go of the gasket and the door rolled up, hooray!  

I got the rest of the shoveling done while the flakes were getting very big and the sky was lightening. I noticed last night, actually about 4am, that although it was overcast and snowing I could see throughout the interior of the house.  I do keep a light on in the living room all night and it could be it was reflecting off the snow but from my bed I could see to the opposite side of the house and it was as well-lit as the side with the light.  Then I thought it must be the moon, however the moon is waning and will be completely dark in 2 days so that’s not it.  Dawn is 5:40 so perhaps it was predawn.  I’ll have to see what it looks like tonight at 7pm and later.

I’m grateful for the equinox coming soon.  

I’m grateful the snow falling off the roof didn’t block the exhaust pipe for the furnace and that the roof above it is empty, so no worries until the next snow fall.  Until now it hasn’t been close, but one big snow dump off the roof and it could get blocked.  I tried to dig out from under the end of the pipe but it blows hot air and melts the snow nearby so it’s all ice.  It’s certainly not energy efficient to blow heat out the exhaust, but snow might be the reason for it.  

I’m grateful I seem to be closing in on a computer problem that has plagued me for about a year, several times a day the internet drops me for a few minutes.  It’s very frustrating when I’m trying to do internet banking, for example or other important stuff as well as interrupting me at the most emotionally tense points in movies I stream.  This is a lemons ➛lemonade thing, I’ve been trying to squish this thing to get some juice out for ages.   My internet company finally figured out it was something with iCloud and I finally convinced the Apple people it really is. So I willingly and helplessly­ followed his direction and he, in order to help me get rid of this problem, essentially get rid of the program without having it take everything it ever saw. Bottom line, at least at this point, is that I am now downloading a whole bunch of stuff I seem to have put into iCloud that will stay on my computer and the process is taking so much bandwidth that I am unable to access the internet.  And from the amount left and the speed with which it’s going, it won’t finish until tomorrow, early morning, I hope.  That’s the lemon.  And a bit of anxiety, I have to use the internet for work tomorrow morning by 10AM. But if it finally fixes it all, that will be sweet.

I took some pix I hope to include but I don’t know what capabilities I will have and when.

I’m grateful I thought to be sure I’d have a computer to use at work since I usually use my own which is going to have to stay home until iCloud finishes downloading.  

I’m grateful I have some books downloaded so I can continue reading while I wait for the internet to become available tomorrow.  Also that I can still use Word to write in my journal, even if I can’t save it.  It gives me a good reason to be grateful for the internet when I have it, which is usually.  For some reason email comes through at times, I don’t think I can get pictures through, so I’ll wait and send the two days together with pictures

I’m grateful that this time is given to me and I will use part of it to write to Philip

I’ve been learning things today, very disorganized.  I ran my morning errands, to get the microwave and modem.  The internet is not yet here so I’m using my phone as a hot spot and am being profligate with my data use.  Once the person from Xfinity comes Sat I’ll have Wi-Fi again.

 I’m exhausted.

Oh joy, gratitudes galore, I’ve heard the train horn 4 times this evening.  And loud enough to hear clearly.  I feel like I’ve come home.    It’s been a long spell without the sound of trains, not just in Maine, but before that for years in Enfield and Wallingford before that.  Here they color my night and will sing me to sleep. I’ll have to look at a map and see where they are.  I doubt there is a train yard near enough to hear as I did for the first 16 years of my life, with the clang of trains being hooked up, and I can’t feel the rumbles like I did in Wooster Sq. but they will sing through my days and remind me of all I had to start with and all that what went into my first memories. 

Fri morning Too tired last evening to finish, I’m spending the morning waiting for the delivery of a rug.  Any day can bring rain and I don’t want it sitting outside for hours.  I don’t even know if it’s coming today.  I did get a visit from my painter, they will be in on Tues to paint.    

       

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Sat. I’m sitting in the window, watching the Comcast guy hook up the house for WiFi and phone.  They used to have service here, but went to a satellite dish that’s hidden in one of the large camellia bushes.

I have hired Bella Scherneck to stop by the house 3x a week, just to take a look inside and out.

I told her I have friends who might stop by, mostly so she knows she might get checked up on.

I found her on NextDoor Neighborhood, she charges $5 a dog walk and initially told me she’d charge me $10 to stop by 3 times a week.  She then told me her mother advised her to ask $15 which I think is fair, and makes me think she’s unlike to be a hardened criminal.

I’m getting my blog up and running and hopefully will get it open for business soon, although there won’t be much in there you won’t have seen, especially since a lot of what’s below will be there.  

I have some bad news about my “creek,” in actuality it’s a long pond.  According to the previous owner, it used to run merrily along until 5-6 years ago somewhere down stream, there was an avalanche, some of the bank must have subsided, and it no longer flows.  

I called the Greater Oregon City Watershed Council and they are very interested because that means the water is sitting and warming up and, they say, still seeps into the watershed.  I also pointed out to them that the widening water was killing the trees shading the water and they have funding to address that.  They are having a meeting today and may want to come out to investigate.  Apparently, there is a lot of hostility toward the work they do (boy is that way different from sportsman’s Maine) and unless a landowner agrees, they are helpless to address it.  I also pointed out that if the water is indeed stagnant, it was also a mosquito breeding ground.  She said that isn’t really her bailiwick but that I can contact Clackamas County Vector Control (now that sounds like a government agency I wouldn’t want to tangle with!!)  

So I called Vector Control and they will come out and evaluate the situation in April or early May when the mosquito season begins.  They are only interested in establishing that there is a problem before they consider what to do, so they aren’t interested in looking at it if there are no mosquitos around. I assured them that the previous owner said there were lots of them down there.  He did say they weren’t bad up by the house.  We’ll see what that means in a month or so.

Apparently, Vector Control takes mosquito-born diseases very seriously. They spray for mosquitoes and they give out “mosquito fish.”  I don’t remember the proper name for the fish, but they are only for bodies of water that are separate from natural bodies of water, like fountains or water features, because they are non-native fish.  Not for my pond, alas, disconnencted as it is to the rest of the watershed.

Anyway, I’m working on things at this end and finding things I’m afraid I’ll miss, like fiddleheads in the supermarkets and for sale by the side of country roads which I will be looking for soon.

I have a video doorbell that notices movement outside my door even if the bell isn’t rung. It calls me if someone walks past or rings it so I can talk with them. Because the front door faces the driveway, not the street, I can see from the gate to the garage. Today I got a call that someone was walking around and when I got to the video I saw a woman carrying a shopping bag, walking along the driveway from right to left, coming from the shed or the back yard. She closed and latched the gate and I didn’t hear a car drive off, so she may have been a neighbor. I alerted Bella who will look around and check the shed. Although I was able to watch the video, I couldn’t save it, so for another $30/year, I will have the videos captured from the first alert, and recorded and kept for 60 days. I can see that people who live across the street from these things might feel spied on if they have this motion detector, she was walking along the drive and was picked up at least 30 feet away from the camera. I looked at past alarms and the last one was open I set off when I set it up. Seems like it’s pretty quiet there, happily.
I told Bella that if she did find something amiss, she should just ring the doorbell and we can have a video chat.