Fall Fell ,Winter came, then....

Fall Fell written at the end of fall in 2012, I see that I already published that one.  however, at the end of that winter, before spring sprang, there was about 2 weeks after it was SUPPOSED to spring, and didn't!  Here is what that was like:

Leaf buds frozen on dead branches, yet ice and frost no longer imprison them.
Spring awaits in eerie silence, as if time itself has stopped.
Long gone is the slithering snow, snaking across the highway in the wind.
Yet these buds remain dormant just as they were in early winter, when a mistake by Mother Nature,
Made them emerge at the wrong time.
Will they fail?
Are they all dead after last summer's awful drought?
Branches black, all black, dead as the stillness in the middle of the night.
Where are you spring?  It's like time has stopped.
Yet poised on the brink of something wonderful about to happen.
Are you ever coming again?
There should at least be a hint of green, by now
Where are you?  will you never come again?

Written in my mind while driving to Kira's after steak dinner triple birthday party at Texas Road House Oct. 24. 2015

Oh, wind! Why must you take my jewels away?  Brilliant crimson,, precious gold, blazing Amber!  
Makes me want to weep.                                                                                                                   Indian simmer, no more, given way to cool fresh breezes.
Mere tinges of glowing gems in twilight's rays, before the frost have turned to collideiscopic colors.
Leaves in their full glory fill the curbs along parks, and carpet lawns.
No longer just little yellow leaves from early on, all the colors are falling, some even pink and brown.
No,no!, do not take them down!

the rest Of the lost poems

Back. I really enjoyed having the girls while their folks were taking their annual anniversary trip, getaway. The house is so quiet now they are gone home.  Here is the other poem that I found in the car Tuesday.  I guess it was written after the candycanes were planted and I was just outside my home watching my Golden Retriever play in the snow: :

How my heart gladdens on seeing the rainbow of lights on my little flowerbed pines and the red and white glow of my tall candycanes lighting the walkway up to my front door.
Oh! My child-like joy- how it swells in my heart, like a little kid anticipating Santa soon to come! Snow lines the top of my fence like the last of the whipped cream sprayed from a can.  It coats the tree boughs and the deck rails like Christmas cards of old.
 So much on the grass now, that Goldie frolics and snuffles it like a child at play and it buries the ball that she tries to  retrieve.                                                                                      

found some lost poems... Fall Fell

I just found a poem I had my granddaughter Emily write down for me while I was driving way back in 2006! The little bit of early fall color here in Lafayette I saw on my way to and from an appointment this morning was inspirational, but what I wanted to do was to get out and take photographs with my new cell phone and post them on Facebook, but it was cloudy clammy and rain-misty, so I didn't pull over and do it. Besides, I found out since I bought it, that it didn't come with enough memory. ( I bought a new chip but it won't take that much memory.  Now I have to take it back and get a smaller one to see if it will send my pics to FB with that one, tsk!) Well, anyway , I was just looking for a piece of paper to write my CVS list, while parked outside the store near St. E. central, but then decided to wait to do the shopping after I got home and picked up the really good coupon they sent me. But I found this little notepad in the cubby where I keep ATM bank deposit slips, that was perfect for using to write down my shopping list.  In looking for an unused page., I found it! It never got posted in my blog! In the years since, I have become less intense about the changes brought by the weather here except to grumble a lot when its cold too long or cloudy too long or rainy too long, and this reminded me of the days when I was a freshly transplanted Hoosier. I just loved the changing weather then, sigh....

Falling leaves everywhere as far as my eyes can see!
Like big colored snowflakes, covering the ground, making the tree tops bare from the twirling wind up there.
Herolding winter to come,
except  for the few that dare to cling for dear life round empty bird nests now revealed.

and I found this one too

All is quiet in the pine forest
Except in the quiet evening air, is heard the rustling of fallen leaves over the pine needles.
On the way back home, powdery snow slithers across the street path before me as I drive.
Who would have thought a little blizzard would strike so soon?
I barely got the candy cane lites in the ground before it froze solid! Christmas is in the air...

There is another one but I have to give the girls an afterschool snack now.

I'm so sick of this!

As soon as we get a few warmer days and a bit of welcome sunshine, we start to hope, from signs of birds returning and little buds beginning on the branches, BANG! winter is back in full force again! We just got through another polar air dip, and I was moaning inside.."winter...just go away! A warm spell has just begun again, so finally I feel like writing my blog again. Everytime I would sit down and tell myself to come back here and add another blog, I would just feel so dismal, that I'd turn away from it. I tried getting some rays in a tanning booth at the gym, and of course, I burned within the 10 minutes I'd allowed myself! I can't do my aquacize class, because I broke my toe and part of my foot, so all I could do is soak in their hot tub, so now I can't even do that, unless I want to risk having this burn convert to 2nd degrees all over my backside. I just want to leave this winter place and lounge on a nice warm beach somewhere, anywhere! In a week or so the burn and the toe will be healed, so my daughter and I are heading for Vegas! appropriately, the airline flight is named: "wanna get away!":-).
Whenever I wistfully think about my gardening plans, and look out over my backyard, I see that the pond is still surronded by frozen overflow, and the biggest raised garden plot has a moat arround it. You could ice skate out there! My skin hungers for the sun and my soul hungers for fresh home grown veggies. I am still on Medifast diet and now not losing any weight due to lack of exercise. At the grocery store when I go to buy fresh vegetables I have to look wistfully at the fresh fruit, and I ache for the taste and feel of the first bite and the juice running down my chin. I am getting tired of this diet too. But I have a great support coach on their support site who is helping me now. Ill be careful of the buffets in Vegas, and do a lot of walking there, besides swimming in the great pool at the Golden Nugget. Yesterday, even a ray of sun coming through the window didn't cheer me...I WANT spring! Planning for this escape makes me feel better.

I went to a lecture on vitamin D3 a few weeks ago. Did you know, that in winter we don't even get ANY ultraviolet B rays here? Its the part of sunshine that the skin makes the D3 from. The UV A rays just burn it. And wouldn't you know, the tanning beds use mostly that kind of light. But, its something, as long as one doesn't over do it. Those things can be set for 20 minutes, would you believe? I'd have been toast If I had tried that! Anyway, It is now said that 1,000 IU daily is the minimum amount of D3 that people need. Between April and August, we can get it from the sun if we spend the time outdoors to gather it, but the liver stores it up for only a few months, so when the flu season hits, it is depleted already. Its been discovered that it is actually a hormone and has far wider health benefits than suspected before. (not just for preventing rickets). Cod liver oil has some vitamin D, but to get enough you have to overdose on the vitamin A thats in it, but there isn't enough of it even in fortified foods. It gives us immunity from the viruses in the winter, and it releases neurotransmitters such as serotonin (that lifts mood), it helps us to metabolize calcium and a whole host of benefits are now ascribed to it from the scientific research that has recently been done and revealed. The Ultraviolet B rays break open a ring in a steroid alcohol present in the skin, to form cholecalciferol The liver changes this to the vitamin D circulating in the blood where it goes to the cells and changes to the active form that attaches directly to receptors on the DNA in the cell nucleus. There it controls expression of more than 200 genes and proteins the cells produce. Vitamin D controls cell growth and cell death, and has implications in the growth and death of cancer, and is also the reason that our kids grow in the summertime more than in the winter, especially above a certain latitute, where we in Indiana live. Lack of vitamin D even has implications in cardiovascular disease. 1 gene it influences controls the renin-angiotensin system, which when overactive causes hypertension. Others stifle the immune system mediated infalmmatory response that propagates atherosclerosis and congestive heart failure. I could go on, but I'll just refer you to the web site where the article by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD can be found: LewRockwell.com I got the information, (most of it) from this article. It says that sensible sun exposure should be encouraged, but not maligned. If one avoids sunburn, its benefits far outweigh its detrimental effects. A large body of evidence indicates that sunlight does not cause malignant melanoma. Most melanomas appear on parts of the body seldom exposed to sun. Sun exposure is associated with increased survival from melanoma. The rise in skin cancers parallels the rise in use of sunscreen lotions, which block vitamin D producing rays but not cancer causing Ultraviolet A radiation. Optimal doses of sunlight might, in fact prevent non-melanoma skin cancer. Amazing news, huh? Well, my body always knew it liked sunshine, and now I know the reason why. I sure miss it since I moved away from southern California. It once was thought that too much vitamin D would be toxic, since it is only fat soluable and excess isn't flushed out like vitamin C, but research has shown that doses up to 10.000IU a day for month after month can be taken without adverse effect. I strongly recommend the article to anyone who is still skeptical, and to enjoy the sun, I know I will. TaTaFor Now. I have another blog I wrote on paper earlier but never got here to blog, so I will add it belatedly soon. Its about the weather channel predictions, and snowing and the bitter cold last month. Myrna-still feeling its great to be retired, signing off.

fairy dust was falling!

F A I R Y D U S T W A S F A L L I N G !

Tiny, lite cellophane-like flakes twinkling in the sunshine were floating down onto us as we walked to the car with our groceries, through the parking lot at Payless on the West side of town today, at around 3P.M. Yes! I thought so, too. snowing in the sunlight? How fascinating! There was only a thin cloud layer and the sun shown so brightly behind it, that it lit up the little thin pieces of ice, so that they sparkled as it floated down, and even as it covered the crust over yesterday's frozen snow-covered ground. I shouted to the other people in the lot putting their groceries in their cars: "Look! its fairy dust!" and I was smiling and laughing, and so were they! I've never seen anything like it before! How totally incredible! 68, and winter has not ceased to surprise me. When I went out on the deck this morning to fill my dog's heated water dish, the snow crunched under my feet, but it was covered all over with this twinkling stuff. I could only wonder why. Now I know...it must have happened last night too! The Eskimos have so many words for snow, each named for the different types that fall. It s like LOVE, so many kinds, but we only have one word for it. Why is that ? I wonder.

We had a short, relatively warmer spell, briefly up in he 30's a few weeks ago, when I was planning to use my jacuzzi which is out on the back deck. If you remember, I got all poetic about it. When I went out that morning, the water in it was ICE cold! The breaker had been tripped during a snow storm just a few days before. The sky had been lighting up with " heat" lightening, while it was snowing, but I never thought to check to see if the tub was still working. During the intervening time, while the heater wasn't working, it got cold, and was about to form ice in the sub zero cold. I had to work fast and bail out about two bathtubs of water and haul hot water from the sink, 2 1/2 gallon buckets at a time, until I'd gotten about 4 bathtubs of water into it, so the pump would circulate without shutting off the motor within a few seconds after I'd reset it. I was afraid it was going to freeze over totally and ruin the heater and motor and possibly crack the tub shell, if I didn't hurry. I made the mistake of trying the jets while the water was below the pump intake, however. It warmed up to over 40 degrees so that I felt all right about leaving it and going to bed that night. But I woke up at 3 AM, feeling something was wrong. I checked and the pump had stopped and the jets were surging and the tub had lost all of the water that I put in it! I had to carry buckets of hot water to it again and pour it right into the filter intake, then clean the filter. The water was finally high enough and warm enough, that I could be fairly confident that a sudden temperature dip through the rest of the night wouldn't damage it. When I got up the next morning the temp was up to 52 degrees, but about another tub of water had disappeared and the jets were surging again, because it was below the pump intake again. Well, the weather was getting colder and colder. I had my son-in-law come over to help me with the water hauling, because by then I was too exhausted to keep doing it myself. I didn't know yet, That I could get an adapter to run the water from the kitchen sink directly by garden hose, to the jacuzzi. I had just gotten a new hose this past fall and hadn't used it, so it was clean, and we tried to run water directly from the water heater to the jacuzzi. Well, my son-in-law had to release the pressure on the overflow valve to get the water to flow out of the tank through the hose to the jacuzzi. We emptied the dirt out of the bottom of the water heater first, but the overflow pipe started leaking onto the utility room floor, which has no drain. My other son-in-law was consulted, and he told us how to get the leak stopped, and we had to stop filling the jacuzzi from the water heater directly, to get it to stop flooding the utility room floor, because the pipe ends so close to the floor that there is no space to put a pan or bucket under it. We had to fill it by hand again in 5 gallon buckets. I was so tired, I could only fill the buckets for him. Well, son-in-law 2 also told me I could get an adapter so I could connect a hose to the kitchen faucet, but it was Sunday evening by the time son-in-law 1 had gotten here and the hardware stores were already closed!

Monday morning I called Blue Diamond Spa, where I had bought my jacuzzi, but they said they couldn't get there until Wednesday! Then, when the spa company called back later Monday to tell me, that for and extra $150.00, they could consider it an emergency and change their appointments around and be there the same day, I had already gone to Ace Hardware and gotten the faucet attachment, and filled the jacuzzi back up with hot water, and this time it wasn't surging anymore, and I had been able to turn on the jets, which were finally just working fine, it wasn't emptying itself anymore and the temp was up to 90 degrees. I told them that they had lost an opportunity to make some money, because I'd been able to fix it myself, Ha! It was a very humbling experience, however. I'd been so smug, thinking that I was going to thumb my nose at 'ol man winter, while soaking my bod in my hot tub on the deck! by the time it had heated up to 104 degrees, it had gotten a whole lot colder outside, and I was afraid my feet would stick to the snow around the tub if I tried to get into it. And I still needed to correct the chemicals and vacuum out the dissolved particles but didn't have what I needed. Since then I got a new filter, a hot tub hand vacuum, got the water tested and bought test strips. I could get in, but it was so cold by then, I thought I'd just wait a few. I finally figured out that I can put down newspapers on the cold snow around the tub when I am ready to get in, but now I've decided to recondition the water and vacuum out the iron and calcium particles that precipitated out of the hard water that I put back into the tub, first. I don't know how soon I'll get to use it.

Since the great jacuzzi debacle, when the weather got really brutal out there. We went out to eat at TGIF, ( my daughter's my niece and me), and I was going to swim and soak in the jacuzzi at my gym, before meeting them. It was so cold, that they had left the cover on THEIR pool and jacuzzi and wasn't letting anyone into the spa to use it. by 6:30PM, it was already minus 6 degrees, that day. Last week temperatures were getting as low as minus 16 degrees at night and were we having minus 0 days. Wellll, I just decided to walk in the mall for exercise at that point, LOL. I'm not really the Polar Bear Club type, LOL. Its now back up in the teens and twenties, so..... maybe I'll soak after tomorrow, if it doesn't get into the minus zero's again.... At least we had a few rays of natural sunshine coming into he sunroom windows and I could sunbathe on my lounge chair, surrounded by my tropical plants. See the scan ----->

Post Script: Hey! the weather has warmed up o the balmy 30's from that low of minus 16, one night. Some of the snow actually melted today and there was lots of sunshine. Soon I will venture back out to soak in my jacuzzi again. Believe it or not, all that work will have been worth it...I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

And A New Year Began....

We all enjoyed a nice steak cooked to order in my kitchen New Year's day, finally. We celebrated the night before with the children tooted horns and ratcheted the noise makers, on the front porch whilst throwing confetti all over the place, to Kira's chargrin! ( we sheepishly cleaned as much of it up as we could at the end of the evening), A bit of the bubbly topped it of for Carol and I, then Kira's family and I settled down for a nice game of Phase 10, after the jubiblation, but Carol went home to see the Near Year in with hubby, Rob. We saw the new great ball falling in Times Square before we ran outside to ring it in with the girls. No Carols were sung at my home on New Years day, all were tired from the late night before, but my trusty electric piano, played itself to my content. Anyway, Christmas had been over for a week. I still can't bear to take down the outdoor lights, and the singing penguins almost made it back into the box, but I had to take it out again and play it for a few more weeks. I'm taking down the Xmas decorations slowly but surely it will all get done. I started my Medifast diet as planned, and have lost over 8 pounds already! Well my pork loin is finished cooking, and I'm hungry and need to go so I'll have time to jump into the jacuzzi. Maybe I'll think of what I was going to write about by tomorrow, so tune in, folks, I may have more to say then.