When it is nature's arcade with free air conditioning!"Making the simple complex is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." ~ Charles Mingus
During horrific storms a year ago, several of the old stately pines at the Norfolk Botanical Garden were damaged, a couple broken off... the staff was devastated as these had been here since the garden was first formed. Loblolly pines are the favorite nesting sites of the Bald Eagle mating pair that inhabits the garden. What to do? Recycle... refurbish... reuse... make something magical out of misery. And so they did. You remember the Enchanted Forest series of playhouses that were on display last summer? To go with them, the garden decided to fill the now empty space where the trees were lost, with an outdoor arcade of sort.. the old fashioned kind where grandpas and kids could sit and play checkers as grandpa told stories of his childhood. The large trunks were carved into the table with checkerboard. Other trunks were fashioned into chairs and still others were cut and sanded into the checkers. So the lost trees were not really lost at all.. in fact, their new lives only added to the "enchantment" of the Enchanted Forest.
Does this funny fellow remind anyone else of an Ent?
"Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?" ~ Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982
Lovely people who have been long time friends of my parents live on a section of the bay with boat dock and large rocks at the shore. It is an older section of the area with large shade trees and gorgeous yards. The woman is an avid gardener and has wonderful little treasures hidden all over the place. Nyssa's favorite place was the hammock... shade and the cool breezes off the water. These looked like a variety of holly tree.. some can get quite large. I don't know if they were damaged and she simply couldn't bear to cut them down or if they had been trained and pruned specifically for this purpose, but this fellow can't help but catch your eye. Whimsical, humorous... who could help chuckling as he sticks his tongue out at passersby. But wait... trees with tongues??? Or lips or eyes for that matter.....hmm....
"Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats." ~ Woody Allen
I remember now... an Ent... the ancient talking trees in Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. However, I really don't remember them ever looking this happy or mischievous, do you?
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Carmi's Theme ~ Trees
One of the beds in transit... bringing to mind the statement yelled out by many a child in the morning...
"MOM! I can't make up my bed... the 'insert one' (cat/dog/grandma) is on it!" 
"The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late." ~ Charles Caleb Colton
Just a short (turned out longer than I expected) post on this VERY busy day. Mom and Dad have a queen sized sleep number bed that they have had for several years and they said they 'loved' it. I have questioned this because on top of this sleep number bed they have put a protective mattress pad, a three inch memory foam mattress pad, a pillowtop mattress pad and a heated mattress pad. In fact, the thickness of the mattress pads has almost equaled the thickness of the mattress itself. How they could ever feel if the sleep number bed did them any good or not... well, I don't know. The bed frame was a modified full size headboard and footboard.. dark cherry and antique, or at least antique now. We have two such bed frames in the house, one was my grandmother's. Hers was not modified and is still a full size with the original slats and is currently in Stephen's room. These are four poster beds and normally the bottom of the frame and therefore, box springs sit about 12 inches off the floor; but when you add the "Princess and the Pea" set up of sleep number mattress and the myriad pads and foam and such.. their bed is 34 inches above the floor.. almost 3 ft. As each additional pad was added the pockets of the sheets became thicker and Dad started building small platforms to step up on to get into the bed. Currently it takes two levels.. a five inch and a ten inch for Mom to get in and Dad had to make himself a six inch one. They are both 82. This is the most insane arrangement I have ever seen.
Finally, Mom decided she wanted to try the Tempurpedic Ergo Adjustable bed with the memory foam mattress and they have ordered one. It is to be delivered tomorrow and set up.. and I have been trying to arrange help to play musical beds...move the sleep number (sans at least three of the pads) up to Stephen's room and the bed in Stephen's room taken apart and moved to the storage unit on the outside chance Nyssa wants an antique bed for a guest room that was once her great-grandmother's. So, I thought they would bring the bed and then call to arrange a time to set it up but, they are going to set it up at the time of delivery. I am in full scramble mode to get help to get this done... at least all the moving parts, before the delivery.
Oh... and they have already started with the mattress pad obsession for the new bed... I hope to be able to at least limit them to one or at most two for each side of the split king this time.. new bed height is said to be 25 inches from the floor... no steps required. And the headboard and footboard for the new bed? The company assures me that we can just add this around the outside of the bed later... I certainly hope so..
But I must think about it. I must think about it. What is there to do? Oh I can't think about this now! I'll go crazy if I do! I'll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day! *
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*Borrowed and rearranged from Gone With The Wind
Would you want this mailbox next door to you?"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities." ~ Theodore Geisel
Ginny at Let Your Light Shine had a post today of beautiful and unusual mailboxes. It reminded me of this mailbox I ran across several years ago while looking at houses for my brother. This was a high end neighborhood with gorgeous homes, most being out of our league at the time.... and then we stumbled across this fellow. He is a perfectly formed dolphin and cute as dolphins tend to be; but a mailbox? What sort of house has a dolphin mailbox? A large white brick two story house. I just wonder what the neighbors think.
About Earl: We have been under a tropical storm warning for two days. I have spent the time taking down all the birdfeeders so we don't have broken poles and scattered seed everywhere. I moved the container patio plants to places of shelter and tied down the hot tub lid. I emptied the birdbaths and moved them and Stephen took the umbrella off the patio set before he left. Even the wind chimes came down.
I also took 35 more tiny Monarch caterpillars to the botanical gardens. The butterfly garden supervisor wanted them to raise for release on September 25th. They will be tagged and released and sent on their way to Mexico. I still have 70 in their chrysalides and another ten to fifteen that are big but still feeding on the last two milkweed plants I have. Both groups are safe and out of the weather.
Of course, the hurricane will bypass us. If we get an inch of rain out of it, I will be glad. So far our highest wind gust was 8 mph.... Nor'Ida last November caused us more trouble than Earl. As of last night, however, I was getting a bit nervous.... those winds were getting closer and closer to shore. I think we are going to dodge another bullet.
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"Beware of people who fall at your feet. They may be reaching for the corner of the rug." ~ Bill Cosby (1937 - )
I have promised pictures of the rugs I bought for the house. Stephen will slowly replace these cheap versions with the real thing eventually. Nyssa said she would take them when he did. Smart girl, already planning on her move to Florida or Oklahoma or wherever, after graduation. This is the formal dining room and a 9 x 12 foot rug. It could have handled a 10 x 13 rug but this will do. When my furniture is ransomed next week, the oak dining set will go here along with my hutch that has glassed in shelves. Mom's set is cherry and very nice but has an Early American style and the shelves of the hutch are open and won't keep her glassware as nice.
This is a close view of the dining room rug with its tans, black and ecru patterns. In addition to my furniture, we will put my grandmothers huge mahogany hutch on one wall. It also has glassed in shelves and Mom keeps a lot of her antique glass in it.
This is the formal living room. The rug here is 10 x 13 feet. My den furniture will go here. It has been so long since I've seen it, I forgot if it was a solid color burgundy with a very tiny beige print or large floral pattern. I think it is solid and hopefully it will go with this. The set includes a sleeper sofa, love seat, easy chair with ottoman and two end tables. There is also a large square coffee table/footrest for the middle. I sold my formal living room furniture when I moved from Mississippi and Mom has a small love seat and one chair of my grandmother's that will go in the sitting area of the master bedroom... their room.
This is the formal living area from the opposite direction and the light is absolutely marvelous! The green area outside is the nature preserve land behind the house... hopefully a bluebird nesting box will go on the fence we have planned. (just waiting the home owners association approval)
Speaking of green and grass....."To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug." ~ Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
I might have agreed with Hellen Keller until this afternoon. I decided it was time for the first "mowing of the lawn"... the wild grass mixed among the sod was growing faster than the grass and I had already carted the mower out there. So, I started in.... the lot doesn't look that big actually and I thought... "how hard can it be?" Do you know how long it has been since I mowed grass? Let's just say that I traded my lawn mower for lawn service in Oklahoma, back in 1989 and I didn't buy one when I moved to Mississippi and for 15 years in Mississippi someone else did my lawn. One year I gave my dad a years worth of lawn service for Father's Day and he liked it so much he kept on. So it has been a long, long, long, long time!"I always thought a yard was three feet, then I started mowing the lawn." ~ C.E. Cowman
It isn't so much the walking and the lawn mower has a front drive pulling mechanism so you don't have to push; it's the vibration in your hands as you hold the lever down to keep the mower going. The fingers go numb and then the hands and then the arms.... a bit like the ascending paralysis of Guillain-Barre Syndrome! Then there is the weed-eater. Weed-eaters and I have a long standing feud. They hate me, I despise them. They love to suddenly throw out ten feet of fishing line at once and then break off and retract the line up inside the mechanism. In Oklahoma I spent two hours trying to weed eat down a flower bed that was no longer than twenty feet. I gave the neighbors quite a show, which culminated in me destroying the monster by beating it to death on the ground. That was the last day I mowed my own lawn..... until today!
Stephen! Do you remember when you said one of the first orders of business was to get a small riding lawn mower for Dad and I said that the lot wasn't that big and it would be unnecessary? Well.... It is entirely possible that I was wrong! I'll let you know if my fingers regain feeling by tomorrow and if my legs are still working.
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Not your usual "danger" sign... but to the boys basketball team...
(Click picture to enlarge) "Live in danger. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher (1844 - 1900)
"You have a cough? Go home tonight, eat a whole box of Ex-Lax - tomorrow you'll be afraid to cough." ~ Pearl Williams
Danger comes in many forms. This brings to mind an incident I heard about at my college, many years ago. The boys basketball team had been irritating the cheerleaders for weeks, playing little pranks on them and generally making life miserable. Someone decided to teach the guys a lesson. Knowing that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach and that teenagers had hollow legs and would eat anything, a cake was baked. It was a very special cake, big with three layers and a deep dark chocolate. The top and sides were lathered with rich chocolate icing and words of encouragement were written on the top. It was left in the boys locker room with a note that read.... "Enjoy". And they did. Within minutes the players had consumed the whole thing.
Of course, they had a long bus ride to a weekend basketball camp the next day. No one ever really knew who baked the big box of Ex-lax into that cake, but you can be sure that there was quite the "volcanic" eruption going on during that bus ride! None of the cheerleaders ever admitted involvement, but the team was careful to treat the them with respect from then on. Just the suspicion seemed to straighten the boys out.... that or the purging constitutionals they all had!
Yes, danger comes in many shapes and sizes.
Submission for Shutterday topic "danger". (end of post)
