Hot Diggity Dog

  Seems like I work hard one day, then spend two days recovering. I was up at 7 and it was downright chilly. The phone woke me, not that Bo was unhappy at the prospect of getting an early start to the day. It was my dentist office, reminding me that I have an appointment ...... next week.  I opened the doors for the dogs to make their way to a freshly mown yard to take care of business. I stumbled around getting coffee and then sat in silence to drink it and wait for my head to clear and become fully awake. Didn't happen. I may as well have been drinking sleepy time tea. So, I did what any sane person would do and scooped Fat Eddie up in my arms and went back to bed. Back up at 11:30. Still nice and cool and I should be working on my upper garden, but here I sit drinking a second dose of caffeine. I went to bed early last night but did not get to sleep until around 11. Still, I should not be this foggy. But I am getting older every minute. Inactivity conjures up feelings of gu...

  My gout has gone, but the memory stays! Now my neck is bothering me with arthritis. I am sure digging has nothing to do with it. I seem to be in a race to finish my upper garden. Only two bags of mulch remain.  I spread one today and planted two Crepe Myrtle bushes and another cone flower. This one is orange. I already have white and purple. It is safe to say that there is no particular color scheme. Just lots of color. Yesterday I bought 6 shepherd's hooks that I saw on Marketplace. One is already in place on my little deck with a hummingbird feeder that is visible from the window next to my sewing machine. It is on the high end and hopefully out of reach from the cat population. The cat population continues to grow. A new cat showed up last week. A fluffy grayish one. I am pretty sure it is female. She is not as skinny as Mousy Tongue and I fear she will be adding some babies soon. Hard to tell with all that fur, but her belly is certainly bigger than the other two females...

  With three good nights of rest, everything is beginning to have a ring of normalcy. Well, for me, anyway. I spent the morning outside doing gardening chores. I managed to make a nice sized pile of willowy limbs after I cleared an area of the garden that is adjacent to the deck in the woods up on the embankment. Raining every day has made things grow. Things like weeds and grass. I did notice that the bean plants that have vined upon the fence have beans! The squash is still blooming and dropping. The tiny watermelon I noted a couple of weeks ago never grew, so I leaned down to take a closer look. It was split on one side and completely hollow! A few seeds lingered and about 4 tiny snails had set up housekeeping. Well, I hope they enjoyed my watermelon! Two remain and I have hopes for them. The man with the aching mouth is a lot better, though he would deny that! The practice we went to for oral surgery is a father/son practice. I had the older of the two work on my mouth and I li...

  So, if you read my last post, then you know why I have been absent.  The surgery went well yesterday, and the man is sitting in his recliner fully dosed with antibiotics and pain meds. We had a really awful weekend, so sit back while I weave a tale of woe. Keep in mind that the tooth in question broke in mid-July. At first the pain was bearable, and the man was complaining periodically. Mostly at night when everything gets worse if you happen to be ailing. I think it was Thursday when I noted that his neck was swollen. I told him that his turkey waddle resembled a scrotum with only one testicle. I think he may have been offended, but after looking in a mirror, he agreed that my description was on spot. We laughed and life went on. Sort of ...... Friday his neck was bigger, like the other testicle fell into place and the left side of his face was beginning to swell. Even the inside of his mouth was swollen. No fever and he had just completed a round of antibiotics. I called t...

  My metabolism runs with the speed of a sloth! I fell last week. I think I may have mentioned it here. The cardboard I stepped on was slick from the rain and my right foot slid as I stepped down. I almost wish there was a camera up there, it would make it easier to explain the fall. The foot I stepped down with slipped to one side and the rest of my body fell forward onto my knees and elbows. My right leg was behind me and twisted so that my foot was upside down. As I caught my breath and took a quick assessment of my situation, I unconsciously tried to pull my leg around and had to reach back with my good arm and yank my foot forward. Yes, it hurt, but wasn't unbearable. I was mainly concerned that I could stand and walk. I did not want to call the man with the aching tooth for assistance. He would call 911. Since then my right foot has hurt in various places. Mainly the ankle objects to me standing and walking. But the strangest thing is that the bruises I would have expected th...

  The cat population continues to grow here on my mountain. I am beginning to suspect that Garfield may be the father of all the kittens. The adult females seem to dislike him.  There is a duo that came around just yesterday. They look alike, one smaller than the other, like a mini-me situation. These poor skinny cats are so ugly. Just no other way to describe them. They are predominately black with every other fur color there is splotched all over them. All the cats have patches of yellow (the Cat Whisperer calls the color red, but he is wrong) from Garfield. I called the new ones Marble and Mini Marble. The neighbor's cat shows up to eat, as well. She is a nice gray cat with a fluffy tail. Her name is Fluffy (I wouldn't have named her that, she looks like a Penelope to me, but she is not mine). The two females, Marble and Mousey Tongue tried to gang up on Garfield while I was up the embankment trimming tree limbs. The were yowling and hissing at him and would swipe at him wi...

  Watching the news, I learned that fruit trees, especially stone fruit trees are not getting enough sleep time. Seems the dormant period has been too short for the trees to recover all the nutrients necessary to make sweet delicious fruit. Not only that, the amount of peaches has been cut by a third. Maybe that is why peaches are so expensive. Thus far neither of my apple trees have yielded any fruit. I did enjoy eating blueberries right off the bushes this morning. Nine. Nine blueberries and three blackberries was breakfast. Eaten while I was carefully splitting a clump of purple bearded iris and planting them in a new location. I got 17 plants from that clump that was impeding my coneflowers. I have made good progress with filling the small area by the driveway with rock. The man with the toothache shoveled my wagon full three times. He wanted to just dump it in the chosen area. I stopped him and sent him away while I carefully scooped the rock and gently placed it atop my caref...

  I have a friend who names her vehicles. She was into cars and racing. I tend to name animals and sometimes places. I have decided "She Shed" is too generic for one such as myself. Insomnia has its benefits. I have decided to name my shed "Wit's End" since this is where I like to go to clear my mind. There are plenty of feral cats to name here. The cute multicolored kittens may or may not be female, but I have dubbed them Ethel and Lucy. Most of my contemporaries will know I Love Lucy. The mother cat is solid black with just a touch of brown on her flank. I have always wanted a cat named Mousy Tongue. I do realize that this name could apply to male or female and since I know that she is definitely a female, maybe I should go with a definitely female name. But that would make sense. Mousy Tongue is her name. I have found three ticks on me in the past week. I will not be naming them, as they are all dead. I am pretty sure they came from the area up the driveway. ...

  Here I sit with at least an hour and a half of silence! I was asked if I would like to accompany the master of my universe to Walmart, I declined. If I go with him, we will have to stop to eat somewhere and get home in time for me to prepare supper and watch the news. I have things to do. I cannot be galivanting through Walmart buying things we do not want or need. So far, I have prepared the tomatoes picked from my only surviving plant, along with a cucumber I was forced to purchase and some feta cheese. I tossed it in some vinaigrette, and it sits cooling in the fridge. I sliced a bowl of red onions to pickle and did the dishes and cleaned the microwave. Before he left, I was up the drive spreading rock and weeding the gardens. That was after I scraped the bark off the logs and chopped it into mulch and put it around my tender plants. Watering is not an issue. It has rained every day for as long as I can remember. On my way down the drive, I plucked the tall brown stems left by...

  This morning, I got up to let the dogs out like every other morning. It was only 61 degrees outside! The high today was 70 degrees. I dressed accordingly to head to Tennessee for the next adventure involving teeth. While on our trip to wish our son a happy birthday, the driver of the RV broke a tooth. You may recall that is how my adventure began over 2 years ago. I broke a tooth and ended up in Tennessee getting that tooth and the wisdom tooth behind it cut out. I must have enjoyed that so much that I did it again this year. The staff recognizes me. I have endured three surgical procedures in my journey with the oral surgeon. That makes for 5 visits. Three procedures and two consultations. Thousands of $$. I want to ask for a loyalty card. My next visit should be free!! So, my husband and I headed over the familiar road. The ride is scenic, passing the Ocoee River, rapids and lake. The water was gushing over the dam as people on rafts bobbed and tilted in the rapids. I imagine t...

  Finally figured out how to recover my account. Actually, I am not sure what I did, but here we are. New laptop. Seems like it was only a couple of months ago when I had a new laptop. I did not really like it. The keys were hard to see, and I had trouble navigating from site to site. Then it started giving me that blue screen of disaster. Despite my son's efforts, it was still suddenly closing down while I was using it. So, I had a birthday, and my sweet husband bought a new laptop more to my liking. The keys are larger and backlit and easier to use. Next, I will try to download pictures. Maybe not today. Us old folks can only take so much excitement! You may all rest assured that I read your posts and even crafted some witty comments. Some of them even published. Most of them fell by the wayside when the computer decided to cut me off. Taking advantage of not being able to spend too much time on my computer, I got a lot done in my upstairs garden. No more grass to mow up there! A...