A Birthday Present

Yesss, my precioussss.....  it's my Biirthday presssent, yess it isss....

OK, enough Gollum channeling.  Today is my birthday.  I've decided to call this my "Douglas Adams" year, since I'm turning (of course) 42.

My dear philosopher cooked me *homemade* french onion soup this weekend, and tonight I will feast on shrimp and grits.  (Nota bene: Ladies out there, if you plan to marry, here's my bit of advice.... marry a man who likes to cook!!!!)

But an EVEN MORE EXCITING present was emailed on Monday afternoon... a signed contract on our house in Alabama!  (And there was Much Rejoicing... yaaaaaayyyyy)  Now we're just waiting on the home inspection. Here's another tip - if you're selling a house, do not watch Holmes Inspection on HGTV.  Even though our house is in decent shape, I'm having nightmares about having to redo plumbing and electrical and dig up the foundation and replace the roof and.....  well... you get the idea.  (sigh)

There is even more news on the horizon, too.  You may know that I've been waiting since June for "my library" to be renovated so I can work at the campus on which I was hired to work.  (I'm currently driving 2 hours a day.)  My school just installed an interim president, and last week he sent an email listing the critical projects that needed to be done even before the permanent president is hired this summer.  Number three on his "git 'er done" list?  MY LIBRARY!!!!!!!  And it may be that it is a bigger space than previously anticipated, and yea verily that too is a Good Thing.

So I have lots to be thankful for in this new year, and I'm hoping that my 42nd year is a good one.  And on that note, I'll leave you with a couple of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes:

“We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.”

and

“There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened.”

May the force be with you, my friends!  ::grin::

Ringing in the new year

Happy New Year to my faithful readers (both of you)!

2011 was a good year, by most accounts.  New job, new house, new city, new church.  The philosopher has work for the spring, and while that isn't ideal, it is sufficient for now as we pray for direction in his career.

So, a few photos to sum up the year....

Good friends.

It's always good to spend time with friends, and a delight to have visitors from afar.  Our favorite biologist came for the weekend, and much fun was had by all.

Interesting wildlife.

Our new feeder is visible from our living room, and we have lots of pretty birds come for dinner.  This woodpecker is a new arrival, and we're a bit baffled why he prefers the seeds to the tasty bugs in the trees!

Challenges.

The year was full of challenges, indeed.  But none quite so tricky as this puzzle the biologist and I put together on New Years Day!

Unexpected gifts.

For Christmas my father built us this beautiful mission style tv stand.  He knew I wanted a new one, and he surpassed all expectations when he showed up with this on Christmas Day.

Christmas Bling

This past Saturday we went to Coker Tree Farm and found ourselves a happy Christmas tree.  Yay!  We brought it home, and after a bit of struggle with the stand, we finally got it upright.  The new stand we purchased is much deeper and more narrow than our old one, and for a change the cat can't get her head in it to drink all the water!

This is also the first year we've been able to put our tree in the front living room window so you can see it at night!  The problem, we discovered, is that the light coming in through the window put the whole tree in shadow.  You could see the shape of the tree, and the lights on the tree, but because most of our ornaments weren't shiny, you couldn't see anything else.  So I toddled off to Walmart and bought some bling - pretty gold ornaments and garland to add some shine/reflection.

And.... voila!

(The philosopher was playing with different camera settings - can you tell?  These pics were taken not two minutes apart....)

The Pinhoti Trail: Georgia Edition

A couple of weekends ago the philosopher and I trekked to our beloved Pinhoti trail - this time in Georgia, between Rome and Summerville.  We went to Taylor's Ridge, and parked at the Mack White Gap trailhead.  Unlike many of the other trailheads we've visited, this one required no forest service road nightmares, or muddy bogs, or other things most unfriendly to small compact cars.  Yay!

From the trailhead we headed south towards a side trail that goes to Sloppy Floyd state park.  We didn't *quite* make it that far, but it was still a six mile hike in the back country!

We saw wild turkeys (though we weren't fast enough to get out the camera) and some rather creepy fungi:

Of course this one reminds me of Alice in Wonderland...

Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, `One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.'
`One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself. `Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. 

I could relate to you the adventures we shared when we were three inches tall and descended into the rabbit hole, but I'd bet you wouldn't believe for One Second that we actually nibbled on a wild mushroom.  My husband was a boy scout - he knows better!  ::grin::

There were also some very cheerful late fall flowers, which were quite encouraging after the mushroom encounter!

But the ground did not hold a monopoly on beautiful things - late fall in the Georgia mountains is a gorgeous sight to see.  Who needs New England foliage when we have the Blue Ridge Mountains and Piedmont?

The trail took us along a ridgeline, and we came across a mountain meadow .  We stepped out from the trees and walked into this clearing.  If the ground hadn't been wet from yesterday's rain, I would have stretched out on the grass in the sun!

So that's our first "real" hiking adventure since we moved to Georgia in the spring.  (State park trails just aren't the same, somehow.)  But I've added a new list to our hiking log, and on those warm winter weekends you may just find us venturing forth to find another trailhead!

Halloween Fun

I'm a crafty kind of person, so of course I love the challenge of carving a halloween pumpkin "old school" style - no template, no pattern, no fancy carving tools.  Just a steak knife (freshly sharpened) and a pencil.

This year I think I created my Favorite Pumpkin Ever.

In the afternoon....

And late at night...

Two weekends' hard labor...

and we finally have ourselves a beautiful new front bed.

Way better than the ... disaster ...

it was when we bought the house.  Yes, that is a multi-level pond (er... "mosquito breeding system") with no pumps.  And pavers are being used for pond stones.  And *retaining wall* blocks are being used for edgers.  Oh, and did you notice all the lovely heat-retaining lava stone?  Yeah.  Ugh.

So we scooped out all the rocks.  We used the pavers as pavers around back, and stacked up the retaining wall blocks for a future raised bed.  And all the other medium river rock we spread out underneath the deck in back, so we could put a chair under there in the shade.  (The lava rock?  We created a drainage area under where the gutter downspout and the AC drip line come out, so it's not mushy and we don't have to mow it!)

Then the bed looked like this:

(Do you notice the appropriate use of retaining wall blocks?)  Ahhh.... Georgia red clay.  So we rented a tiller and chunked up the clay and roots and rocks (well, we raked out the rocks, anyway).  And then we bought a cubic yard of "planter's mix soil amendment".  And tilled the bed again!

To this result:

Talk about a clean slate!

We traveled to east Atlanta to Maple Ridge Nursery and bought a Acer Palmatum "Crimson Queen" - a lace-leaf Japanese maple.  It's a high graft, and so should eventually have a nice umbrella shape to it.  We also added a Camellia sasanqua "Yuletide" and a Gardenia jasmonides "August Beauty" as the foundation shrubs.  And, finally, my grandmother's hostas, ferns, and caladiums have a home too.

I'm also planning to add some Heucheras and some Dinathus in the front, but since they're perennials they can wait until spring. ::whew::
Oh, and did you notice we also added proper edging stones??  We'll eventually extend those around to the bed on the side.  Yes, the side bed is also full of river stones... and red clay and a bunch of sickly teeny-tiny azaleas.  There's also some lovely Coreopsis and a Sweetspire (I think) - but moving all that is a project for another day.  I really need to do some thinking about what will work well on the north side of the house.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit in my living room and relax, and admire my happy plants!

What Do Julie Andrews and Hiking Have in Common?

"Do, a deer, a female deer"
While hiking at Red Top Mountain last weekend, we saw a doe!  Our new camera allows us to take a much better picture of far-away things, but she wasn't *that* far away.  And we didn't even faze her a bit!

"Re, a drop of golden sun"
The trail took us to the banks of the Etowah river, and the sun glistening off the water made a very pretty picture.

"Mi, a name I call myself"
Well, obviously it wasn't just me that went hiking - the philosopher went too.  It was our first Georgia hike, and we had a great time.

"Fa, a long, long way to run"
Five-and-a-half miles, at least.  So not a *long* hike. And really, it was a much easier hike than the Pinhoti.  When I get my "hiking legs" stretched out, we'd like to try a longer run on the Benton-Mackaye Trail up near Ellijay.

"So, a needle pulling thread"
How about, erm, threading a needle?  (Is there some way I can really stretch the metaphor here?)  While on our hike the philosopher's cell phone rang.  That was a surprise in itself - we usually don't have cell phone service when we hiked in Alabama!  He's been trying to thread that "job needle" for a while, looking for a teaching position.  So the phone call?  An offer of two philosophy classes in the spring.  Score!

"La, a note that follows so"
Hm. I don't actually sing when I hike (disturbing the wildlife is a no-no in state parks, you know)!  But we do TALK when we hike.  Most recently it's been about his book project, with subjects like transformation, classical philosophy, contemplation, liberal arts, and Werner Jaeger's Paideia.  Erm... I do a lot of nodding.  And sometimes I get distracted and say things like "Oooh - look at that tiny frog!"  or "MmMMmm - do you smell that?  It must be a sassafras tree!" or "Did you hear that - that was a bird, right?"  But my completely random, distracted interjections keeps the philosopher on his toes, and that's just fine.  ::heh::

"Ti, a drink with jam and bread"
And to top off the afternoon, we had a cold glass of good, old fashioned, southern iced tea when we got home!