Just what is a Junco? It is a small bird about the size of a sparrow. He is black to dark grey from his beak to his tail. His belly is a pure white as is the underside of his tail feathers. He has arrived from the north because winter has set in there, and he likes warmer climates during the dark months. He will stick around until April or May when it is safe to return to the mountains of Canada to begin breeding. Why he chooses to spend his winters here where the snow and cold is almost as bad as it is in the mountains is a mystery. I use his arrival as notice that our cold season has come with him. I also use his departure or rather his disappearance as warning that Illinois will be getting hot again. He is my weather detector, and I love him.
This morning I spotted my very first Junco of the 2022 winter season, welcome birdie. Officially, winter is still two months away, but the days are much shorter and cooler. His early arrival could be a sign that we will have a very cold and long winter season.
Ever since I completed the House in a House (HIH) project I have been on a mission to do more work around the house. My newly remodeled shop is one. The shop became a repository for all things that became refugees from the remodel job. I couldn’t stand to work in the space because it was crowded, cluttered, and disorganized. Before I could even think about adding the final step of the HIH, which is a drop ceiling, restoring order to my personal workspace became the number one priority. At this point, the shop is 80% converted back to a working space. There is still one wall that needs a cleaning, purging and organization, but it is usable as is.
The final step will be completed once my honey-do list is completed. In my case I am the honey, and all the do’s are mine. One thing that happened during the HIH process was a move-in by my step grandson. He unloaded seven trailer loads of personal belongings into our living space. The entire house was decorated in simplistic modern, now it looks like an antique shop. One piece, an old TV cabinet found a home under my two hanging art-glass plates. The cabinet is a 1950’s Zenith TV console, and looked okay under the plates, but I could’t stand to see the aged finish. Refinishing it became the number one job on my list.
I uncovered a cute little table lamp with touch control in the piles of stuff moved in. It has potential as an accent piece. The trouble was that when I touched it to turn it off and walked away it turned back on. It became another line on the list.
After providing shelving in my shop for all the miscellaneous tools and materials for projects I decided it was time for better organization. I bought a dozen plastic bins that fit nicely on the shelves and sorted all my shit into visible bins; measuring tools are in one, tape and adhesives in another, chisels and sharpening tools in a third, files and rasps in a fourth, and so on. Soon the place developed an appeal for work, I love what I have done.
The sliding glass door in my bathroom was sticky and leaking. I hate cleaning the floor each time I shower, and the thought of not showering as a solution does not appeal to me, so I ordered a set of new wheels to install. They were made in China, and on the surface they looked acceptable. In practice, however, I began to wonder which Chinese MORON eliminated the hex nut on the inside of the wheels? It took me considerable effort to hold the wheel hub stationary while I screwed the axle into place. I’ll remember shoddy Chinese engineering for the remainder of my life. Little things matter and the Chinese lack any common sense toward providing those details to make life easier. Instead of stealing and extorting American engineering they should decide to go the route of Japan who decided to adopt American Quality control processes, and are now world leaders in product quality and reliability.
So, the to-do list is getting shorter, and I have begun a list of actual build projects. My old bird feeder fell apart from decay, and I still like to attract birds to my window, so I will build a new one. The same goes for replacing the four supporting legs of the tower of three bird units that have decayed. The tower became the Leaning Tower of Joe in the yard so, I took it down. I miss the family of wrens who raised a family in middle condo for the past five years. This spring they will have a remodeled home to move into. For such a tiny bird their call is very loud, and I want to enjoy listening to it once again.
Last, but not really the last ever, are two new intarsia projects. Last week I received a 2023 calendar from the Heritage Foundation and the January picture is a Bald Eagle with his wings fully extended and arched, his talons spread open to drop, and latch onto his next meal. I will develop a pattern from this photo and turn it into an almost life size Intarsia work. The previous eagle which I stopped working on when the HIH project began will be scrapped. The second Intarsia piece will be a rendition of cat tails from the fall garden. The colors will be suitable in wood and the outcome should be very natural. All I have to do is to learn how to make paper thin foliage that is twisted and bent naturally.
No one knew I was running in a race until I announced it today. What kind of race was it? It is the race to finish building a house in a house(HIAH), and installing a new kind of floor, against planting a garden. Our spring weather has been cold and rainy thus spurring me to complete the indoor projects. But money, energy, and time ran out, and slowed the progress. In the meantime Spring has sprung, and suddenly we went from 50 degrees with rain to ninety degrees and sun. Things that grow love the hotter situation, unless we are speaking about tulips and daffodils.
The last frost free day is listed as 15 May in the Farmer’s Almanac, and today being Friday the thirteenth means there are still two days to fear planting. Since the temperature has hovered in the low nineties for the past three days I think it is safe to stop worrying about a killing frost. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I’ve hired a flooring contractor to assist me with the floor, and I shopped for materials this week. The construction will continue on the HIAH, but the race was lost, and I had to drop everything to help Lovely with the vegetable garden. When it comes to planting a garden she seems to suffer from ADD. Her focus is pointed only in one direction, “Get’ter Done!”
My job was to spade the freshly spread compost and mix it into the soil, hook up the hose, and attach the sprinkler head. Done!
Next on the bucket-list was a death cleaning project to disassemble Peggy’s wheel-chair ramp. Since she is floating in heaven and the ramp takes up 20% of the patio I took it down. Thank God for lithium batteries and portable drills.
The next challenge will be to complete the HIAH in time for the grandson to move in.
I’m not bragging but I have been married three times. In each case there is a single action that breaks me up. It hasn’t seemed to matter which wife it was but there is always something she has wanted to do which I totally agree she should do. Then, she sweet talks me into getting involved with her. Is this something in the DNA of a woman? It never seems to work tin the other direction. My projects almost always stay my projects and if they don’t it is because I have given it up.
This afternoon, I was on my project to find out which password I use to link my email to Google. Google has so many different divisions and they all require a password. Remembering them all is a problem and to complicate things more. When I finally give up and hit the “forgot my password” button I have to invent a new password. Usually, I record the new one. Lately, that record doesn’t do me any good. Why? It beats the heck out of me, I just can’t figure out which PW is used for a given user name for a given application. Calling for help doesn’t work because the helper always points at someone else.
Getting back to my original thought. Lovely interrupted me with a question, “where do I plant these seeds?” “You are the farmer” I reply, “find a suitable spot and plant them.” That was not a smart answer. I wound up leaving my desk and my project to assist with her project. The two of us went into the yard, seeds in hand, to spread the joy. She had three packages of flower seeds. One for full sun, (6 hours), two for medium sun, (4 hrs). None of the sun requirements matched the locations she desired. We toured the yard and and I pointed at a spot. Then I pulled the seed pack that would work in that location from her hand, “But, that’s not where I want to see these flowers.” She points to where she can visualize the plants in bloom.
“That is a the shadiest spot in the yard and doesn’t receive any sunlight until 4:30 each afternoon.”
“So where can we plant this flower?” I show her another spot and finally she relents, but it borders on minimum sun. “This plant will flower in 2.5 months in this spot.”
“Okay,” she says. By this time, I started to get agitated and take the spade from her hand and start digging. The spot is over-run with wild strawberry and has to be cleared, I dig and pull roots from China with my bare hand. She comments, “you are using your bare hand to dig up the dirt?”
“You are the only farmer I know who wears rubber gloves to plant seed,” I reply.
Going to seed pack-two we go through the same process, These seeds will take 200 days to bloom. I figure if we are lucky, I’ll see the flower on the same day I am cleaning the yard for winter. That happened last year when I planted morning glories in my favorite spot. The first flower bloomed three days before the first frost. That happened to be the third packet of seeds to plant, so I chopped up the ground and spread the seeds around the base of the trellis and prayed for success. I told her to sprinkle the three areas with some water, and went in for lunch.
It is funny, how her projects always take this route.
A few days ago I posted a bit about the coming of spring. In it, I mentioned that the Junco, a bird from up north, left to go home. This morning as I looked out on the yard I spotted a Junco hopping around under the feeder picking up sunflower seeds. Damn, I exclaimed to myself. He made me a liar.
What I suspect is that the Juncos are migrating south to north, and this guy is late. Probably because he winters further south. It doesn’t matter except I wrote a bald faced lie in my last post. I don’t like to lie, telling lies is reserved for politicians on the stump, or defending their shoddy records. Politi-speak has evolved into something that is widely accepted even though we all know it is wrong. So then, why do we continue to vote for the people that live to tell untruths? A great example of this type of talk was displayed during the last election cycle when then candidate Biden stood before the country and said he would eliminate COVID. We all knew that was BS, but the Trump haters were so anxious to get rid of someone who knew how to run the country that they accepted that lie and many more.
Just as we all know that state run elections are running over with fraud, but the chiefs in charge continue to accept the lies told by state attorney generals who certify results. As long as those who oversee the election run by the laws in their state they cannot see the real fraud going on because they followed the law to the letter.
Another common form of lying, that is publicized, is when a politician makes a statement based on his knowledge of the facts at hand, and newly uncovered facts come up. On the basis of the new facts the old statements are now false, therefore the subject is telling a lie.
I wonder if America will ever get any of this stuff straightened out to correct the system. Until then, I have to rely on my own judgement of what is, and what isn’t a lie. Reading opposing viewpoints makes things worse because because often a lie is challenged with another lie. I tend to believe the people I want to believe in, and anyone else is a liar. I don’t think I’m alone on that point. In the meantime, I’ll try to correct my own lies with fresh news based on new facts about the migratory habits of my bird residents. Or, are they residents if they only stay here for the winter? That poses another question, just where does a migratory bird call home? Since he commutes between places one or the other must take precedence. I guess I’ll just go sit on my rock and strike a Rodin pose whilst pondering the issue.
