horsetails May 31, 2007
I love this plant called horsetail fern, or water horsetail or scouring rush. When I lived in Covington, we rented a house high on a bluff on the Tchefuncte River and there was horsetail growing in a little inlet on the property. Back in the 90s, I used to see it offered at lots of nurseries for sale. I wanted to buy one really bad when I lived in Hammond, but it likes an aquatic environment and I didn’t have a pond.
So, now I have a pond, and I can’t seem to find any horsetail. I’ve actually not had much luck finding aquatic plants except for water lillies. I don’t think my pond is big enough for water lillies, unless there is some kind of dwarf version. I’m looking more for things that stand up. I might put a water lilly in Amy’s pond in Lafayette because it’s wider than mine. I got some long things that look like miniature kelp. You can weight them down on the bottom and they stand up under water, and the fish love to hang out in them. I also got some little water lettuce, but the fish thought they were bug salads and ate them.
I got those two plants at Jefferson Feed and Seed, and that’s all they had. I went to a few places and found out they don’t even carry aquatic plants any more. One place told me that they got rid of their aquatic plants back when West Nile virus was so bad. That’s really a shame because mosquitos don’t breed in re-circulating water and fish would eat the larvae if they did.
I’m curious if anyone knows of a place that sells horsetail, or if anyone has a mess of it and would let me dig up a chunk. Or two.
I got a little depressed about the idea of exotic West Nile virus screwing us out of aquatic plants. I mean, like we haven’t suffered enough. But I have to admit that’s nothing compared with the poor people who sat on the plane next to the horse’s ass who flew all over the globe knowing that he had super-duper pooper-scooper TB. It’s people like that who are going to take the meat out of all our sandwiches one day.
ich founde a newe blogge May 30, 2007
I have always loved The Canterbury Tales, so imagine how excited I was to learn that Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog! After you read a few paragraphs, it gets easy.
bean counters from hell and high water
A woman who works in our office is suing State Farm. Her house didn’t flood, but Hurricane Katrina blew the skylight out of her roof and blew out several windows, allowing water to intrude down into the walls all over the two-story house. She even had water standing in her stove burners. Her neighbor climbed on her roof and put a tarp over the hole when Hurricane Rita came. State Farm, of course, is trying to nickel and dime her to death like a bunch of bean counters from hell.
Have you noticed, by the way, how many commercials are on television now advertising insurance companies and what wonderful people they are? We are fighting hurricane claims for people who were screwed over by every single insurance company that I’ve seen buying expensive ads on TV. This is more evidence for my theory that anything that needs so much advertising to get people to buy it must not be worth a shit.
Today, the defendants came over to take her deposition. We were all getting into it and pepping her up like it was a sports match. It went OK, she didn’t kill anybody, but they did piss her off asking stupid questions like wanting the names of the people she stayed with when she evacuated. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Then, this afternoon, the street flooded again. The office wasn’t shut down this time because I guess they are figuring it might make more sense to keep us there working, invest in a firm canoe and get a gondolier to ferry us back and forth to our cars. I’m bringing my wellingtons down there tomorrow, I did not like the feeling of walking to the car with that crap flowing over my shoes. It had stopped raining for over an hour before I left, but the water never went down.
On Metairie Road, the lane nearest the cemetery was so full of water no one could drive in it, and it didn’t look to be going any where. I came straight home and didn’t venture further down Metairie Road, so I don’t know how high it was there. The stretch on the Orleans side, however, was much more flooded than it was the last time.
what is the world coming to when good ole boys have to follow zoning regulations?
Yeah. What Ashley said.
the weather is here, wish you were beautiful May 29, 2007
I spent the long weekend in Lafayette with my beautiful grandson, who speaks his own brand of English and says what’s on his mind. Last night, he put three little teddy bears on my chest and told me to rub their backs so they could go to sleep. “This guy’s tired. He don’t want no pizza.”
His friend down the street, David, came over between baseball games on Saturday. David went in the back door and Jackson ran to follow him, tripped on the back step and skinned up both knees and the top of his little foot. For the rest of the weekend, when new people dropped by, he would show them the bo-bos and explain, “I was follerin’ Dave.”
Amy’s 20-year-old brother, Daniel, who lives in Franklinton, was there also. Jackson is the only grandchild in their family as well as ours, and Amy’s two brothers are devoted to him. Daniel roughhouses with him in squealing delight, and basically does whatever Jackson says.
Daniel is also a very big, strong young man and he is incredibly good and fast with a shovel. He was game to help me with whatever I wanted, gardening-wise, so I had him dig a fire pit and a pond in their back yard. It looks pretty cool now. The whole operation is turning out to be roughly the shape of Louisiana on the map, with the ginger garden in the Acadiana area, the fire pit in Shreveport and the pond, appropriately enough, in New Orleans. The guy who does their mowing and trimming, Mr. Joe, came today and pronounced his hearty approval.
This morning, Jackson woke up early and came to my room. I asked if everyone else was still asleep. “No, Unka Daniel’s taking a shower.”
I said, “taking a shower? Did he get dirty already?” This was meant to be a joke to Jackson, who gets absolutely caked in dirt and juice and has to be bathed two or three times a day before he can be allowed to visit with company a little while, then go get dirty all over again.
Jackson gave me his serious face. “Unka Daniel p’ayed in the dirt a loooong time, wit his shovel.”
Jackson “helped” in the garden, too, by being right up in the middle of things. I’m not used to working in the garden with a baby around and I kept worrying that I was going to hit him on the toe with a hoe or something. He has his little tools, though, and he wants to help, so we just slowed down the pace of things so he could participate and not get knocked down. After each phase of the project, he wanted to play with it for a while, so we dug the hole for the pond and let him play in the hole for a while. Then we put down the liner and filled it up, so he splashed around in there for a while. He thinks it’s a pool, so I might get the correct filter for them and bring him some goldfish after the water gets established and we finish lining it with rocks. Jackson will love some goldfish and I doubt that he will climb in there with fish, algae and I don’t know what-all in there with him.
Jackson actually has a much better rig-out of gardening equipment than Grandma. My ex-huband gave him a battery-powered John Deere kid-tractor with a trailer. When he drives with just the tractor, he drives great except that he can’t get the hang of stopping before you run into something. When he has the trailer hooked on, however, he drives looking backwards at the trailer and doesn’t watch where he’s going. I don’t think my son likes this kind of Dangerbond-style driving, it probably brings back his repressed memories.
I gave Jackson a little green John Deere wheelbarrow for Christmas, which he calls a “John Deere,” instead of a “wheelbarrow.” I was pulling up some roots and weeds and tossing them into the little wheelbarrow and when he saw me he said, “Grandma! Don’t used my John Deere!”
Sunday night, we watched “The Good Shepherd,” a movie about the genesis of the CIA with Matt Damon and New Orleans’ own Angelina Jolie. It was fascinating, I thought. Matt Damon’s character gave me the willies. One sceen was so harrowing that it made me have a weird dream where the CIA spooks were after me. Much of it revolves around the Skull and Bones club that George W. Bush was a member of. I wonder how much of their rituals and weirdness comes from real experiences. It was directed by Robert DeNiro. The style was kind of an amalgam Francis Ford Coppola in “The Conversation” and Oliver Stone’s JFK.
Laurence and Amy have been working non-stop because he has taken a new job at the Le Triomphe Country Club in Lafayette and she is doing her clinical rotation for her nursing license. She also works her full time job in the home health care field. I can’t imagine how they are doing it, but Jackson seems to be thriving. I love to go down there and help them out when I have the time. The garden is my main home-improvement project, but this weekend I also washed and put away several loads of laundry for them.
This weekend’s obsessive movie-watching selection was “Cars.” I watched it three times and Daniel said he had seen it five times. Amy said, “I do not want to hear anyone whining about how many times they’ve watched “Cars!” She, of course, watches “Cars” every day, sometimes twice.
I drove home late tonight very fast and passed by a lot of blue lights pulling other people over. It has been raining a tremendous amount in Lafayette. It’s been going on for about two weeks, with cloudy skys all day and then a torrential downpour in the afternoon. When I got home, I could tell from the looks of my garden that it had not rained a lick here. I left a slight drip going in the soaker hoses, and the areas near the hoses look beaitiful. All the stuff in pots was drooping.
I was most anxious on my way home about the fish. I went back to the patio to check and they were all still doing their thing. At first, I saw a big magnolia leaf floating with it’s yellow side up. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Poor Beth.” But, no, Beth’s still hanging in.
dangerblond wildlife gardens May 21, 2007
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Originally uploaded by dangerblond.
As of this evening, I still have five seemingly happy inhabitants of my fish pond. They have not eaten any fish food, probably because so many dumb bugs keep diving right into the water and sacrificing themselves. Tonight I turned on the outside lights and the fish thought it was dinner and a show.
I can’t say the same for a little mouse that I saw running around, who later turned up dead inside the house. I haven’t put anything around except for the termite treatment, so that must have done him in.
Today I bribed David and Michael with a six pack to get them to help me haul another load of junk from that place where I’ve been getting old paving stones and bricks. They had already had a couple by the time we went over there, so they were being very funny and calling me a dumpster-diver.
As we were loading down the Exploder, a policeman drove up. I said, “this stuff has been here for a while. I hope it’s OK if I take some for my garden.”
It has really gotten to be a trash-heap. There is grass growing up through the pile of stones, bricks and mortar, and people have begun throwing fast-food trash there. This is a block off Carrollton, right off Palm. The cop had come over to check us out because he thought we might be adding to the pile rather than taking away.
He said, “I would much rather this stuff be in your garden than right here!”
This is one of those things that you just don’t think about until your town is unlucky enough to become an enormous demolition project. With everyone in town ripping out foundations and busting up concrete and masonry, there are quite a few people being irresponsible about it and leaving the stuff on the side of the road. Fortunately, there are quite a few people like me, going around scavenging, but not enough to keep ugly debris piles from turning into garbage piles.
This area that I’m talkling about is in one of the “zones” that have been identified for redevelopment, the one near Xavier. So far, I have seen ugly commercial buildings razed and a lot of people fixing up the plain-jane houses that are still standing in a do-it-yourself fashion. So, basically, that area is starting to resemble the outskirts of Mexico City.
After we hauled my latest load of slag to the patio, Michael, David and I were sitting in the garden drinking beer and a dove landed in the flowerbed. Michael was drunkenly talking in a loud voice, saying things like, “trust me, it takes two to tangle!” I was laughing loudly at him, and suddenly the dove landed and walked right up to us. It checked us out, then walked over to other side of the garden, taking the raccoon’s usual path. I went inside to get my camera, but when I got back it had flown up into the neighbor’s magnolia tree.
I got some pictures of it after it lit on the branch. Don was telling me that there are parrots living in “flocks” in some neighborhoods in New Orleans. I said that I would love for some parrots to move into the neighborhood, and then here comes a dove dropping in for a visit.
time to leave the compound
I had planned to do all kinds of gardening this weekend, but my body didn’t get the memo. The zydeco-guitar-playing lady in Breaux Bridge had dug up several dozen beautiful plants for me and I had them on the back patio for a week, watering them down every morning, saying, “grandma’s gonna put ya’ll in some dirt this weekend, just you wait.”
On Friday after work, I went to Lowe’s and got the young man who works there to load up my car with soil and mulch. I got home and collapsed, all the stuff still sitting in the car. I had called Don and I sounded so pitiful he came over to check on me. I explained that I was in the middle of a gardening emergency, right at the same time I came down with the humvee of head colds. “Oh, god, I don’t have the strength to get these fucking plants into the ground, and they are going to die. Die! Can you bring over some Dr. Pepper?”
“I’ll come over on Sunday and help you.”
Saturday is a hazy, hallucinogenic blur of Day-quil and Dr. Pepper, which I had to somnambulate down to Rite-Aid for. I remember meeting my neighbor’s new Basset Hound, Tallulah, who is really cute, short, and has markings just like our Beagle, Daisy. Their other dog, a standard Poodle which they’ve had for years, is named Natchez. I’m just realizing that those two towns are across the river from each other. All this time, I was thinking, “oh, yeah, the actress, Tallulah Bankhead.”
Meanwhile, I had already signed the papers to adopt five goldfish. I had gone shopping at Jefferson Feed and Seed to get their room ready outside in my new pond. I’ve never kept fish before, so I wanted to get them over here on Sunday and watch them for a whole day so I could see if they were OK.
The guy I adopted them from is a biology student at UNO. They were supposed to be food for his turtle, but they escaped the turtle and now they are so big the turtle won’t eat them. Two, in fact, are bigger than the turtle. One fish is smaller and has a broken fin and isn’t thriving, so he said it will probably die. I haven’t given them names yet, but that one I’m calling “Beth.”
Don came over yesterday and hauled stuff around for me and dug holes, so all the plants are safely in the ground or in pots, soaking wet, mulched, with soaker-hoses installed in the front. We spent a lot of time watching the fishies, and they seemed to be having a good time. I’m still worried about their health, but it was a thrill to go outside this morning and find that no one is floating, not even Beth!
bwa ha ha. *cough* May 19, 2007
A friend called to tell me a joke while I’m laid up sick:
Two southern women went out and got really drunk one night and they couldn’t find a place to pee. Finally, they did it in the cemetery. They didn’t have anything to wipe with, so one used her panties and threw them away. The other one grabbed a sash off a funeral wreath. The next day, one husband called the other on the phone. “I’m telling you, I have never been so disgusted with my wife. She came home last night without her panties.”
The other one said, “well, that’s nothing. My wife came home with a card stuck between her ass-cheeks that said, ‘From the guys at the Fire Dept., We’ll miss you.’”
don’t think!
I sort of slogged through yesterday at work because I could feel myself getting sick. One thing I like about this line of work that I have chosen so late in my life is that I can do it no matter what. There are certain rules and restraints and it’s best not to get too creative. I only get too creative when I think too much, not when I don’t think enough. I am continually reminded of when I was happily employed as the studio assistant to one of New Orleans’ greatest artists in the 1980s. I helped him implement his graphic designs. I had to take things back and forth to the clients and one place I visited was the Joan Vass boutique. One of the employees there had posted a caricature of a woman in big sunglasses and a hat shaking her finger and saying, “Don’t Think!” Lady, I’m trying my best.
Mark Folse, I’m sorry I can’t blame New Orleans’ air for my being sick. It is sickening to think what might be in our air, but whatever it is, I think I’m immune. The blame lies with the world’s cutest biological weapon of mass destruction, my grandson. Forget flood water and mold. He goes to a daycare three or four days a week, where he picks up all kinds of colorful south-Louisiana expressions and every germ and virus known to man. I happen to know that this early exposure to germs will toughen up his constitution for when he goes to real school, but it doesn’t change the fact that he keeps his parents sniffling and coughing all the time.
His nose was running the whole time I was there last weekend, and I also saw him drop food on the floor, then pick it up and eat it. It didn’t stop me from constantly trying to grab him and kiss him. I knew I was receiving the dark gift of rhinovirus every time, but what can I say, I’m a sucker for love. Some people are worth it. Since they’ve been living in Lafayette, I been getting a cold about every other time I see him, approximately four days later. You can’t do anything about a cold except wait for it to go away, so I’m trying to look at the upside - I don’t feel like eating anything or drinking anything except Emergen-C.
I had a sweaty fever-dream last night that went on forever and featured a cast of thousands. Don had been over, so I guess that made me dream about a big black-tie fundraising party where Don was running around doing this and that, making it happen. I was wandering around talking to people who were mostly from the past, but the subject we were talking about was New Orleans as it is now.
I found myself talking to an old friend of mine who died suddenly in 1999, Eliott Keener. Elliot and I worked together on a couple of plays and he was Vic when I was Nat’ly in “The Vic ‘n Nat’ly Show,” which ran for about six months at the Audubon Zoo. We also made the show into a musical comedy, but it sucked, so it opened and closed quickly. Eliott was notable for his incredible talent and also the fact that he weighed over 300 lbs. So, here he was in this dream, slightly over-weight, but fit and looking good. He was outside the place where this big event was happening, standing by his car, which was some kind of Porsche or something.
I was talking with him and all of a sudden a cop was ticketing his car. Elliot calmly said, “I believe I am legally parked, officer. What is the problem?” Now, the real Elliot would have been joking this guy out of the ticket, offering him free tickets to the Rose Dinner Theater, involving the cop in his latest get-rich-quick scheme.
The cop got all snarly (with Elliot!) and started telling us that this area only recently allowed parking, but he didn’t like it, so he was going to use Elliot as an example to discourage others from parking there.
I became outraged and started giving the cop chapter and verse about how he can’t make his own rules, but Elliot pulled on my arm and said, “don’t cause trouble with this guy or he might make trouble for you.” At that point, I realized I was dressed in a long evening gown and high heels.
To me this was like a Blanche du Bois dream, where I was decrying the hateful, primitive situation we are in and the way the authorities have used the catastrophes of Katrina and 9-11 to just make up their own rules. Elliot, this person who is gone now but who was incredibly talented and who I completely trusted on stage, was playing mediator, trying to get me to reconcile myself to a place between where I think we should be and how it really is. He probably did that for me many times in rehearsal, which is a process of adapting your vision for a play to the vision and abilities of the other people collaborating with you, in order to create a cohesive whole.
I woke up thinking, I miss Elliot. I wonder what he would think about all this? His old house didn’t flood. Of course, he might be living in L.A. by now, with his own show on Fox. I thought for the first time in a long while that I miss acting. I wonder if I’m too old to play Blanche du Bois? It might be interesting for a change for Mitch to pull Blanche under the bare light bulb and have the audience see a woman with real wrinkles under all the make-up!
i’d sooner a boll weevil than a woolly-booger May 18, 2007
Ya’ll, we made the double-tongued dictionary! Has anyone ever heard this expression used? I’ve certainly seen a lot of examples.
woolly-booger n. (also woolly-bugger) 1. (colloquial) the larval-stage insect known as the woolly worm or woolly bear; a fishing fly that resembles such an insect. 2. (in the American Southwest, slang) an extraordinary example of a thing. 3. (in Oklahoma and Louisiana, slang) provisions intended to be overlooked in legislation.
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