Winds of Change are Blowing

" You don’t need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows."
Somebody Else

Ok, I know I’ve said this before about summer coming, but it’s really here now. A week of temps in the 90s with dry winds that signal only the beginning of the santa ana hot dry fire season. We may not get oil spills or floods, but we get earthquakes and fires.

I haven’t felt all that inspired to work outdoors during the last few mild weeks and months. So, naturally, I spent yesterday afternoon in the back yard, sweating and moving my little wheeled seat/tool cart around the patio to keep it in the shade. I weeded between the paving stones, something I’ve never had to do before.

This summer, I’ve had the patio watered with a timed sprinkler. It hasn’t received enough via my hand watering for the past several years since the automatic sprinklers died. Who knew? And after removing clover, what I think my Mom used to call chick-weed (sp?) and some other ubiquitous weed that grows like ground cover, I carefully put in creeping thyme cuttings dippend in root hormone. Martha in Michigan calls one of the thymes lime - I think because of the color of the foliage - and it has small pink flowers if it gets enough sun. There’s another kind with foliage that is more bluish, and I also put in some of that. I may actually achieve my dream of a sustainable flagstone patio as long as the water holds out long enough for the thyme to establish itself. Once established, I think I can cut back on watering. Time will tell.

I also managed to plant some more in my layered tall pots that I got for $8 and $10 at the lamp store. I think they’re supposed to be ceramic lampshades, but Tech Support Guy drilled holes in the bottom and I’m planting them with what I envision will be a killer succulent arrangement. I won’t post pics until I see how things turn out. The top 4 inches of these 20” and 15” tall planters is full of small holes almost like lace. The pots themselves are very dainty and have already been glued back together. Again. Time will tell.

This has been a rough summer for me physically with more than a fair share of aches and pains.

I spent the last half hour of my outdoor time, sitting in the chairs, meditating on happiness and controlling pain, because of course, I strained my back at the end of the day. Later, after some killer homemade meatloaf with a healthy dose of roasted tomatoes and peppers, I resorted to controlled substances to control my pain. I have a pretty high tolerance for chronic back pain in the cervical spine but I’m not so biblically accustomed to low back pain. But as my crazier relatives often say: It’s getting better.