In the Garden

Now that I have potting soil, I decided to buy more plants to put in the pots. While we were at the Home Depot, I saw some lovely mixed containers of petunias, verbena, and coleus. Since I have over half a dozen empty containers sitting around my garden, the last thing I needed was another container, but I wanted to buy a similar mix of plants to place in a big concrete tub in the back. I also wanted to find some more herbs and some Jacobina to replace the ones in the back bed that my husband had removed, thinking they were weeds.

My husband, bless him, has removed at least a ton of plants over the years that needed to be removed. Unfortunately, he has also weeded out my chives, garlic chives, almost all of the plumbago from the side bed, most of the oregano, although it grows back rapidly so it wasn’t a big loss, and the aforementioned Jacobina. Jacobina die back to the ground in winter and in the spring they look like sticks. The sticks were in the exact same spot as the flowering plants of the preceding summer, which should have served as a clue, but let’s let bygones be bygones. 

Yesterday I spent plant shopping, and today I planted several containers. Plants in containers never get mistaken for weeds. Pictures are below. I also bought four Jacobinas. They are going to require digging with a shovel to plant, so I assigned that task to John. It seemed only fair.

I should know better than to put more than one kind of plant in one pot. It always starts out looking pretty, but in the end, there will be only one. This year, my money is on the petunias.

That spot in front of the bear claws is where the Jacobinas grew.

The basil plants look small now, but in a week or two, they will be several feet high.

I never have any luck with geraniums. Say goodbye to this one.

Hibiscus. It has several buds ready to bloom. Hibiscus plants are related to okra.

Every Christmas I buy a live poinsettia for the front porch, and then leave it in its pot in the garden until it dies.This one keeps clinging to life (barely), so I repotted it and moved it to a sunnier location. My mother in law had a neighbor who grew a poinsettia in her yard. It grew up a wall and stayed red all winter. Even though New Orleans is not far from Baton Rouge, it has a slightly different climate for growing things (not to mention much richer soil).

That's spearmint on the right, and rosemary on the left. I'm hoping the spearmint will live long enough for me to use it in a recipe I want to try. The plant growing around the pots is Mexican bush sage.

Puny

This morning my husband wanted to go to the Home Depot to buy some more mulch, so I went along. He also wanted a new pair of ear protectors to use when he works with power tools, so while he looked for those, I browsed the garden section and picked out a few plants for the pots I have in the yard. I bought a hibiscus to put by the side door, a geranium to put on the other side, and two basil plants for the 3 foot high pot in the garden that runs along the driveway. In the past, the size of the pot has tempted me to plant a mix of herbs, but the basil always takes over. Those plants look puny now, but they are going to get big.

Once I got home and weeded out the planters, I realized I needed more potting soil. By that time hubby was busy sanding the tongue on his trailer prior to painting it, in the process trying out the new ear protectors, so I drove myself to Lowe’s, got a buggy, found the potting soil, and tried to lift it into the buggy. “Tried” is the operative word here. They were standard looking 24 quart bags, but they felt like lead. I finally got one into the buggy, at which point a muscular young man browsing next to me offered help with the second bag. I accepted gratefully.

Another muscular young man was at the checkout counter and when I asked for help loading the bags into my car, cheerfully complied. As the second bag went into the trunk, I saw the trunk dip noticeably. “That’s 80 pounds in there,” my helper explained. “Each bag weighs 40 pounds.”

That made me feel a little better, but not much. I used to be able to deadlift 160 pounds for reps, when I was 25 pounds lighter than I am now. Ten years younger, too, but I was deadlifting 60 pounds for reps last year before I broke my foot. That may be part of why I broke my foot, but still, I should be able to lift 40 pounds.

When I got home, I stopped the car in the driveway next to the first pot and tried again. By putting my arms under the bag as far as it would go, and bending my knees as far as they would go, I was able to lift one bag and shift it the three or four feet to the grass next to the pot. So far, so good. I drove around to the carport, and saw hubby putting the wheelbarrow back after having used it to remove a rotting stump. The wheelbarrow! How could I have forgotten it? It was exactly what I needed.

I took a bucket with me back to the first pot. I cut open the bag of soil, shoveled as much as I needed into the first pot, shoveled some more into the bucket to carry over to the second pot, and carried the bag, now down to half its original weight, over to the third pot. After I got everything planted and watered, I moved the wheelbarrow over to the car, lifted the second bag into it, and parked the wheelbarrow next to the trunk while I decided what to do with the bag.

Then I went to fix lunch, and forgot all about it. Later on, I found my husband had moved the bag of soil to the trailer with the mulch, and put the wheelbarrow away. I thanked him, and said I had trouble moving the bag because it was heavy.

“Yeah, I noticed,” he said. Okay, that makes me feel better, but tomorrow morning, I am getting back together with my dumbbells.

I should be able to lift a puny 40 pounds.

Easter Dinner

When my husband and I first married, we either spent Easter with his mother or she came to our house for Easter. My mother-in-law’s favorite thing to cook for Easter, believe it or not, was rabbit. “You eat the Easter bunny on Easter?” I whispered to my husband the first time I was confronted with this dish. He had never made the connection before.

When we hosted, we usually made leg of lamb, although MIL would also take hubby shopping for rabbit and cook it herself.

For the last decade or so, we’ve been traveling at Easter, since I always had a week and a day off. Thus it was that I found myself last week trying to remember what we usually make for Easter dinner.

Boiled bunny was out. Lamb was a possibility, but I decided what I really wanted was a ham steak. I found a great recipe, too, Country Ham Steak with Glazed Apples. There was just one little problem. My husband does not like to eat ham hot. He only likes it cold.

After 24 years of never cooking ham for dinner, I decided “too bad”. If he didn’t like it, he could fix himself a peanut butter sandwich. With the ham, I planned Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries, summer squash casserole, iceberg lettuce wedges, and crescent rolls. John was put in charge of salad dressing and dessert. 

I didn’t hear any loud screams as I picked out the ham steak at the store, or when I ran the whole menu by him.

From the point of prep work, this turned out to be an easy Sunday/company dinner. I was able to do several things in advance: core and slice the apples (and refrigerate them in lemon water so they wouldn't brown), peel and slice the potatoes, and put the squash casserole together ready for baking.  The potatoes take the longest to cook, and while they were cooking I had time to set the table, assemble the salads, put the rolls on a baking pan, then after I flipped the potatoes, cook the ham and apples. They take about fifteen minutes cook time. I used a mix of cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg on the sweet potatoes. I also only used one teaspoon of salt, not the recommended tablespoon.

With the oven door open, the oven cooled down pretty quickly from the high temperature required by the potatoes to the lower temp needed for the rolls. I cooked the rolls while we ate the salads. If you have two ovens, the rolls and the squash casserole (which I cooked in the microwave) can cook at the same heat in one while the potatoes cook in the other. Or you can just do a stove top vegetable. The ham recipe and the potatoes made a great combo but a variety of vegetables would work.

And there were no peanut butter sandwiches. John ate the ham with no complaints. One might almost say, like a lamb.

Jump

My husband is always dragging me to movies. “Dragging” is probably overstating the case, but I’m not much of a movie goer left to my own devices. Furthermore, my tastes in movies when I do go, are solidly middle brow (does anyone say that any more?), whereas his are all over the map. If it weren’t for my husband, I never would have seen Map of the Human Heart or Amelie. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t have seen Bridesmaids or 21 Jump Street, the film.

I wasn’t expecting to like 21 Jump Street when my husband suggested seeing it, but I asked myself, how bad could it be? Why is it I fail to learn that the answer to that question is generally, “Awful. Horrible. Worse than you think”?

Unlike the television drama series on which it is based, 21 Jump Street purports to be a comedy. The movie starts with us meeting two high school classmates, one a jock named Greg Jenko and the other a geek with braces named Morton Schmidt. We see them first on the day in which Schmidt gets rejected while trying to ask his beautiful neighbor to the prom and  Jenko gets told by his guidance counselor that he can’t go to the prom, despite being elected prom king, due to his poor grades. The next time they meet, they are both at the police academy, where Jenko is having trouble with coursework and Schmidt with athletics. They team up to help each other, graduate and are put on park patrol, where their dreams of making a big bust are spoiled by Jenko forgetting the words to the Miranda warning.

For some reason, this error qualifies them to be assigned to an undercover squad working out of an old church on Jump Street. I’ve always been under the impression that undercover work requires a lot of skill and experience, but this is movie world. Not only are they assigned to an undercover job trying to find the distributor of drugs at a local high school, but they are told to live at Schmidt’s parents house (under assumed names) while doing so. If you think that might make it hard to maintain their cover, you're right.

At this point I began to feel like I was taking some of the drugs, what with reality and I having parted ways somewhere around the opening credits. I’ll make a long story short. This is a bad movie. Avoid it. Save your money. Or use it to buy lottery tickets.

The only reason I’m writing about the movie at all is that there was one moment that made me sad for the movie it maybe could have been. When they arrive at the high school, Jenko forgets which brother he is supposed to be and gives the principal the wrong name. As a result, he is assigned to an advanced placement chemistry class while Schmidt is assigned to a drama class just as the role of Peter Pan in the class play is being recast. A series of improbable events leads to Schmidt being accepted by the popular crowd (one of whom is the drug dealer) while Jenko is befriended by the geeks who show him the fun side of science (and help him bug the dealer’s phone). At one point, Jenko looks at Schmidt in surprise that their roles have been reversed, as if he realizes that his being the popular kid in high school was as much a matter of luck as it was of who he is. Channing Tatum, who up to this point in the movie had given no indication of acting talent, managed to convey that in one moment with the expression on his face.

Or maybe I was hallucinating. But it’s a shame, because the audience this movie was intended for (I’m guessing middle school boys) probably could use the message that who you are in high school isn't who you are for the rest of your life. I don’t think the movie would have been improved by trying to hit them over the head with it, but possibly if there had been a half dozen or so fewer car chases, explosions, pratfalls, improbable coincidences and cliches, that one moment would have been a lot more effective.

But there weren’t. So if you are over the age of 13, avoid this movie. Go see something else.

To Snopes or Not to Snopes

Yesterday a friend of mine shared a picture on Facebook. It showed a young man with droopy pants and had the caption, “Did you know that sagging pants originated in jail, and the inmates would purposely sag their pants as a sign that they were ‘available’ to other inmates for sex?” For some reason, I found that hard to credit and searched for “sagging pants” on Snopes.com. Sure enough, Snopes declared the rumor false.

While sagging did gain its start in the U.S. prison system, it was not a clothes wearing style authored by imprisoned homosexuals intent upon advertising their interest in casual flings. Sagging pants became the behind-the-bars thing thanks to ill-fitting prison garb: some of those incarcerated were provided with clothing a few sizes too large. That oversizing, coupled with the lack of belts in the big house, led to a great number of jailbirds whose pants are falling off their arses. (Belts are not permitted in most correctional facilities because all too often the lifeless bodies of their inmate owners have been found hanging from them.)

I thought about posting this information and the link as a comment on my friend’s post, but I know I indulge my tendency to be a know-it-all far too often as is. I’m not sure what made me suspect that the caption on the picture was not quite correct. I think it may have been my impression that the issue of prison sex is far more complicated than the caption suggested.

I found myself wondering just how much of the ill-fitting prison garb is due to budgetary constraints and how much is an attempt to humiliate prisoners. If you don’t have any control over how your clothes fit and aren’t even allowed to own a belt, it can be embarrassing. Of course, there may just be the practical aspect: it’s hard to run if your pants are falling down, making escapes difficult. At any rate, I think it’s admirable in a way if the petty humiliation of badly fitting pants became a fashion trend as a show of understanding. 

Now that I’m retired, I’m more insulated than I used to be from the urban legend du jour. One of my former coworkers has a mother who passes along every internet rumor unvetted, and what my coworker got from her promptly got sent to the rest of us. I started out debunking them, but realized one day as four of my coworkers tried to pop popcorn by dialing a certain number with their cell phones that they didn’t care if the tall tales were true or not. They just found them fun. 

With other friends I found that correcting misinformation just got me removed from email lists, without improving their critical thinking skills at all. Not that being removed from those email lists was a bad thing. I still got the important information. It’s just that it gradually sunk in that nobody loves a smart ass.

So I did not correct my friend on the origin of saggy pants. Who knows? Maybe she’s right and Snopes is wrong.

Ah, Internet

This morning, I called a florist in Connecticut from here in Louisiana to send flowers to my niece in New York.

My poor niece broke a bone in her heel and had to have surgery to put in a plate and pins. To add to the fun, when she first went in for surgery, it turned out the implant had been contaminated and couldn't be used, so she had to wait another week for the surgery. 

My five and a half faithful readers will remember how whiny I was about a less involved broken foot of my own last summer, even though I got to spend some of my recovery time touring the British Isles and the Appalachians, so I understand what she is going through. Hence the flowers. Usually when I send people flowers, I use 1-800-Flowers, and they do a decent job, but I wanted something really special.

That’s where Glimpse of Gaia comes in. At the time of the decision in  Ahlquist vs. Cranston, I became aware of Glimpse of Gaia as the florist willing to deliver a bouquet to Jessica Ahlquist when local florists wouldn’t. They do beautiful work. Since I “liked” their page on Facebook, I followed the conversation in which they revealed that they belong to a network of florists around the country who make similar artistic arrangements. That’s how I wound up calling a florist in Connecticut from here in Louisiana to send flowers to my niece in New York. (The third bouquet under “Deliveries” is what I was aiming for.) It wasn’t cheap, but as I said, I understand how she feels right now.

I even got a call back to tell me that the florist in New York asked if they could delay delivery until tomorrow, when they are getting a fresh shipment of flowers that they can use. Sounds good to me.

It’s hard sometimes for me to look back and remember how life was before the internet. When I was growing up, FTD (Florists Telegraph Delivery, later Florist Transworld Delivery) was considered high tech. (Of course, we didn’t have the phrase “high tech”). To know what your flowers were going to look like, you’d need to look at a catalog at a participating florist’s shop or look at the ads in TV Guide or Parade that preceded major holidays. 

My niece, on the other hand, has had the internet available to her all her adult life, especially as her dad, my older brother, is a techno-geek who always has the first gadget the minute it rolls off the assembly line. This is not the same older brother who worked on the LEM; he, oddly enough, is pretty much a Luddite who has never set up the voicemail on his cell phone. My son got his first modem, a 2400 baud model that nevertheless was his connection to a local computer user group, from his uncle. Neal spent that summer playing a Trivial Pursuit game online, which meant that he spent a lot of time running down the hall to ask me, “How do you spell ______?” I told friends that if I had ordered my son to spend all summer practicing his spelling, he would have reported me to Child Protective Services.

My niece’s daughter, my great niece, has never known a time without high speed internet access. As far as she is concerned, pre-internet days and the time of the dinosaurs are roughly coeval. My great niece got an iPad last Christmas and uses it to take pictures of her and her friends, edit them with various filters, and post them on Facebook. I think she also uses her iPad to practice her spelling, at least I hope so. She needs to as badly as her cousin did.

I hope the flowers cheer my niece up. I suspect she needs it. I hope my great niece takes a picture and posts it, unedited, so I can see how they turned out.

Ah, internet.

Update, 4/7: My niece is thrilled with the bouquet. My brother took a picture of it, and while it is nothing like what I expected, it is lush and unusual. I'm amazed at how well the tulips and roses match.

Dying of Embarrassment

A few weeks back, while recounting the tale of my spectacular typo in an post on misspelling foreign words, I consoled myself, “No one dies of embarrassment.” Yesterday, an incident at a luncheon reminded me that yes, under certain circumstances you actually can.

I was at a UMW lunch, and our speaker had just finished the bulk of her talk and remarked that since she sells Mary Kay cosmetics, the person who had invited her asked that she also talk for a few minutes about skin care. Suddenly there was a minor stampede to the back of the room. The speaker looked a bit chagrined, until it was announced that one of our members was choking. Another member who was a nurse got up to help, and very shortly we got the news that it was okay, the person was speaking and breathing normally.

Later I spoke for a bit with R, the woman who had been choking. She said that she felt very embarrassed by all the fuss and that she had been trying to head quietly to the restroom so as not to cause a scene.

“People die that way!” I told her, as C, our nurse, stood by and nodded. “There is no reason for you to be embarrassed. We’re just happy that you are all right.”

If you are choking, the last thing that should be on your mind is embarrassment. I mean that in the sense of you shouldn’t even be entertaining the idea that you can be embarrassed by a medical emergency. I don’t mean that the last thought you ever have before you pass out quietly where no one can see you and help should be “It would be so embarrassing to make a fuss.” People aren’t going to care if you create a stir by needing to have the Heimlich maneuver performed on you, but they are going to care if you die. So, yeah, make a fuss. Attract attention. Then put both hands to your throat in the universal signal of choking. Better yet, learn to perform the Heimlich maneuver on yourself (and others).

Don’t die of embarrassment.

(There's a history of the Heimlich maneuver here.)