12 Oakdale

  A miniature cool front must have slipped through, because night temperatures now in the mid to high-60s and the daytime cool enough to leave our doors open and the AC off. I am considering a screen for the front door. With cooler weather, I am able to work longer in the garden without exhaustion. I have weeded most of the front beds, putting down more newspaper and pine straw. In the back, on the north garden, I’ve cut back the maypop passion vine, finding several passion fruit on it, to uncover the roses, sugar berry, and non-native blue porter weed. I’m removing more of the last to have room to add native shrubs.  I’ve found 3 sweet potatoes from the vines I started, with probably more waiting for me to dig up. Very reinforcing.The white potato plants disappeared under the weeds while we traveled this summer. I wonder if they will resprout next year. They are on their own, because, if I do try more potatoes, it will be in a basket with hay, thus no digging. The corn, Silve...

Peg, Betsy, and I went to Venice Beach for sister time and to hunt sharks teeth. Success on both fronts. Our base was the Venice Beach Villas, a non-beachfront old Florida-style motel on Venice Avenue, within walking distance of the beach, restaurants, and shops. Initially, I was disappointed not to be right on the beach, but I changed my mind. Owner Craig provided bikes (which we never got around to using), scoops and sieves to sort sand from treasure, beach chairs, and lots of towels. Perfect. The Gulf was calm and warm. We spent hours sitting in the water, just at the shore’s edge, looking for teeth. To find really big ones, we probably had to snorkel along the backwater riverbank, but mangroves do not appeal to us. Two young women said they’d found more than 200, but we weren’t as diligent. Oldsters stopped by and reminisced about finding teeth while just walking the beach. Since these teeth are from prehistoric sharks, I think there are just as many as there were 30 or 40 years ag...

Poor Patten. Wednesday, he had a bad stomach ache and the usually accompanying GI distress. As he says, he gets E. coli a couple of times a year, so not unexpected. By 4:00 AM Thursday morning, he was in such pain, he went to Broward Health’s emergency room. Cat scan and the doctor confirmed nothing to see, so they gave him a drug to stop his vomiting and avoid dehydration. He wasn’t any better and still in a lot of pain all Thursday. Friday, he went to Plantation General, where his appendicitis was diagnosed, and he was scheduled for an appendectomy, which happened about 9:00 PM. All night, he was still in agony whenever his pain med wore off, about every 4 hours. When the surgeon saw him mid-morning Saturday, the doctor realized no one had made Patten get up and pee. When he did, the pain went away. I guess the nurses thought Patten would just go to the bathroom on his own, and he was either knocked out or in terrible pain, so he laid in bed.  All this reinforced my plan to be su...

 I’ve had trouble sleeping the last couple of nights, which is very unusual for me. My normal state is that I can sleep anywhere through anything. This is a good trait, because with Grant snoring like a jet, perhaps a F35 fighter, on one side of me, and Annie doing little kitty purrs on the other, I’d never get any sleep if the noises bothered me. I know when I can’t sleep, there is something going on in my brain that keeps me awake and listening to my bedmates. At first, I blamed it on jet lag, since we’d just visited Spaulding and Molly in Salt Lake City for 6 days, but then I realized that was the wrong way for time change. I was just awake, thinking about all the work I want to do in the yard and house. Weeding, planting more vegetables, needing to decide which vegetables to plant where, how I want the safe installed, whether or not to buy more shelving for the garage, etc. Not obsessing, just excited about what’s on my plate. While we were in Utah, sleeping was not a problem. ...