Happy birthday to you

Tomorrow our older daughter turns forty. How is this happening? My fortieth birthday clearly pops up with so much clarity that surely only a few years separate mine and hers. In life's scheme of reality, forty years is only a few, a reality that hits with the subtleness of a sledge hammer. The gift is ready, the dinner reservations are made, the spa appointment is scheduled, but the card proved to be the most difficult item to check off the list. At the store I looked at the daughter cards, read some forty year cards, wondered why there were no forty-year-old daughter cards, and finally flipped through a variety of colored envelopes. The search was bittersweet with thoughts of a wonderful young woman who left this earth after only forty years. I know that tomorrow's card doesn't matter at all. The time we have together matters, minute by minute, not the number of the years, because that number will never be enough. Tomorrow we will celebrate tomorrow.

Lake sunset

After cycling through my usual blog sites for lurking, I found no new entries. I've resigned myself to lounging on the lake beach and listening to the late summer sounds of loons, final rounds of ski boats, and whining toddlers resisting bedtime. Dinner settles with a refill of wine, and the rest of the lake sinks into the roll of waves reflecting sunset's orange. So little separates water and sky, their palettes merging.

Nat'l Geo

Warning: live blog!
(found it after boarding plane!)


We are sitting in our hotel room waiting for time to catch the airport shuttle. The NG channel is telling us all about the evolvement of domestic dogs from camp wolves. (I like that spell check turned evolvement into evil men. Can technology make Freudian slips?) By now King Tut has developed hunting dogs bred to run faster and faster. We've already seen lazy wolves following early humans to eat their garbage. Furs worn by cave men look strangely acrylic, but I guess there were not many videos of the real guys. Now we see the fork in the road where dogs become mostly pets or mostly workers. I can relate to this division of paths. Even though I have choices, sometimes I straddle and don't know which one I'm traveling until I hear the crash.

Lesson

I had a long live blog but did not save. Of course it disappeared in a flash of black when I touched a wrong key while intending to scroll for a final editing. I will try to find it later, but let this be a lesson.

Drafts Lost and Found

(I found some drafts on my dashboard and decided to post them.  Wonder if I'm missing the reasons they were stuck in drafts.) 

My blog will no longer allow me to type a post, only a title. That makes no sense. The keyboard comes up but no cursor. Ever. No matter how long I wait.  So I am now typing a note and will email it to my blog where it will go into drafts for publishing later. Why bother, you ask. Because I am sitting in my tube on the banks of the river and know that I can enjoy nature and tech worlds simultaneously if I can just work past the garbage. At least signing in is simpler here than on FB because my iPhone remembers better, and my FB password is so long since the hacker that I can't remember it without my Rolodex.

Here come late tubers, young couple, oops take that back, young man and cougar, each with a dog, standard and mini, her pale gray roots showing where the red ends. Upstream my nephew's son lifts and places rocks to improve a channel for multiplying rapids. This activity substitutes for the weightroom he misses at home as part of his prep for football season. The next school year is right around the corner even though the calendar says June. His grandfather calls to him from the porch, but the physical activity and girls in bikinis distract him. I suspect when the teen appetite kicks in he will have only his hunger for his focus. The next tube has a friend of mine so we chat hello. The girls are with her and describe my family guy as they float nearer. A mom comes next and asks me how old he is. When I tell her his age she says perfect because the girls are a year younger. Little threat, I read between the lines, but downriver they go, never to meet on dry land.

I stopped to email this note to myself for insurance, no point to risk an accidental delete or plunge into the water.  I may be live blogging but must qualify this as delayed live blogging since I send it to drafts on my dashboard. 

If anyone wants an instant update, nephew's son went up to dinner prepared by his grandpa, no floaters in sight this late June evening, summer tanager singing his heart out, new family throwing rocks, sun behind trees, young dad and his daughter crossing to fish, and me sweating/glowing, evening breeze beginning to slide up the river.

Country Peacock

This guy watched me drive by on my way to painting class and then posed for my camera after I backed up on the country road. He was a fun surprise on a drizzly morning. I wonder how he would look in a landscape with bluebonnets. That's a composition I've never seen in a painting. And probably never will. At least not in one of mine. 

(I'm disappointed to have a red "X" instead of the picture, but I will edit later.  I'm determined to find out why the photo doesn't show.)

(Okay, I edited to add the photo, but I'm not happy to have the extra step when I want to do all at the same time on my iPhone.)

Fajita Feast

One of the river businesses hosted a welcoming open house for the Chamber of Commerce and friends. Food feature was a fajita dinner and dessert bar. Their new venue will be the scene of many parties and happy celebrations. I wish I had taken photos of the pool area, but I'm sure I'll go again.

I'm trying the email feature to send photos and drafts directly to my blog.  If you're seeing a picture with this post, then whatever I did worked. 

Sent from my iPhone

Busy Hands

Almost a month since I've blogged, and I have exactly three minutes until I am supposed to walk across the road to leave for an open house. Because I'm using my thumbs to enter text, I can't lift my wine glass to sip. Problem to solve!

A Thursday

(I intended to post this from my iPhone last Thursday but didn't.)

Some blogs I read have entries almost every day. Mine doesn't. Some bloggers have more than one blog. I don't. Thinking. So if anyone wants to read a blog for right this minute, please know that I am sitting on my porch finishing a glass of red wine first begun when our friends were here to share a bottle of rioja. Actually, my glass contains some of the second bottle, a trendy blend. Sigother waits for me to join him for watching Survivor on DVR, but how can I leave the best part of the day.

Down at the river to my left a summer tanager calls, and to my right a canyon wren. Knowing the birds by sound comes in handy when I can't see them, and my hearing improves exponentially as my sight declines. The lushness of spring succeeds in obscuring many of our songbirds but their voices reveal them.

Lavendar skies.

Aunt Ida's Flip-flops

Last week I shopped for shoes in Kerrville and thoroughly enjoyed choosing the skimpiest flip-flops in the store. I couldn't help but think of how much my Aunt Ida would have enjoyed the summer styles I take for granted. In her later years, she was cursed with bad feet misshapen from years of ill-fitting hand-me-down footwear and hard ranch life. Her current shoes were worn enough to have holes of varying shapes and sizes here and there, and the soles were wearing thin.

Aunt Ida was actually my great aunt, sister to my mother’s mother, but she often stepped in as grandmother since she had no children of her own and my actual grandmother died when my mother was only fifteen. One of my childhood summers, I was spending a few days with her and lucky enough to witness the opening of a huge box from Sears, her favorite shopping place (thanks to catalogs) challenged only by Monkey Ward. Included was a pair of sensible black shoes, sturdy cotton hose, a jacket, and some items for Uncle Carl.

Aunt Ida was most interested in the new shoes and quickly tried them on to check the fit. Yep, they would do, and certainly looked better than the ones I had seen her wear all week. After she removed the new pair of shoes, she pulled a knife from her apron pocket and stabbed it into the toe of one of the shoes, sliced off a ribbon of leather, poked another hole on the outside edge, carved out a couple more, and continued in this way with the other shoe. The final result was a strange looking pair suggesting unique sandals but looking vaguely familiar. I glanced over at the old shoes and almost immediately noticed the similarities –- the holes were in the same places for the left shoes and for the right shoes. Of course. Ingenious. Each hole in the new shoes had a purpose: to relieve a sensitive spot on her aging feet.

So, dear Aunt Ida, I bought another pair of flip-flops to honor your memory, and I wish I could give them to you and see the pleased expression on your face. But to get that post between your toes you might have to give up those thick cotton stockings.